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Acknowledgments for the use of copyright essays are
due and are hereby cordially tendered to:

Messrs. Chatto and Windus and Messrs. G. H. Doran
Co. for "On Journal -jWriters" from Enjoying Life by
W. N. P. Barbellion; to Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Messrs.
J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for Carlyle's French Revolution;
to the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell and Messrs. J. M.
Dent and Sons Ltd. for " A Rogue's Memoirs " and " Book-
Buying" from Collected Essays and Addresses; to Messrs.
J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for Abraham Lincoln by Vis-
count Bryce; to Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Messrs. J. M.
Dent and Sons Ltd. for Matthew Arnold) to Mr. James
Douglas and Messrs. Cassell and Co. Ltd. for "In the
Reading Room" from Adventures in London; to Mr. A. G.
Gardiner and Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for
"On Boswell and His Miracle" from Pebbles on the Shore;
to Mr. Edmund Gosse, Messrs. W. Heinemann Ltd. and
Messrs. Chas. Scribner's Sons for "A Volume of Old
Plays" and "Gerard's Herbal" from Gossip in a Library;
to Mr. Louis Golding for "Aries," reprinted from To-Day;
to Mrs. G. M. P. Welby Everard, executrix of Mr. Maurice
Hewlett and the • Oxford University Press for " The
Early Quakers" and "Wind in the Downs" from Extem-
porary Essays; to Mr. Robert Lynd, Messrs. Grant
Richards Ltd. and Messrs. Chas. Scribner's Sons for
"The Pleasures of Ignorance" from the volume bearing
this title; to Mr. H. J. Massingham for "The Golden Age"

5

6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

from The Challenge', to Messrs. Burns, Oates and Wash-
bourne Ltd. for "The Cloud" from The Colour of Life by
the late Mrs. Meynell; to Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.
for "The Folly of Education" and "Street Organs" from
The Day Before Yesterday by Richard Middleton; to Mr.
J. Middleton Murry, Messrs. W. Collins Sons and Co.
Ltd. and Messrs. E. P. Dutton and Co. for "A Neglected
Heroine of Shakespeare" from Countries of the Mind) to
Mr. John Masefield and Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons
Ltd. for Pilgrim Fathers', to Mr. H. C Minchin and Messrs.
J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for "A Lodge in the Forest"
and "Over the Fells to Caldbeck" from Talks and Traits;
to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. for "The Art of
Packing" from The Day -Book of Claudius Clear by the late
Sir W. Robertson Nicoll ; to Mr. Edwin Pugh for " Old and
New London" from The City of the World; to Mr. Cecil
Roberts for " II Pulcinella " from To-Day ; to the Executors
of the Rev. Canon Dixon Scott for "Winter, that Rough
Nurse," from A Number of Things; to Messrs. Duckworth
and Co. for "An Autumn House" from Roseacre Papers
by Edward Thomas; to Mr. Ernest Rhys and Messrs.
J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. for A Rare Traveller; to Mr.
J. Lewis May for "The Old School" from To-Day; and
to Mr. Holbrook Jackson for "The Art of Holiday" and
" Peterpantheism " from Southward Ho !

CONTENTS

On Journal-Writers .

Carlyle's "French Revolution"

A Rogue's Memoirs

Book-Buying .

Abraham Lincoln

Matthew Arnold's Essays .

In the Reading Room

On Boswell and his Miracle

A Volume of Old Plays

Gerard's Herbal

Arles .

The Art of Holiday .

Peterpantheism

The Early Quakers .

Wind in the Downs .

The Pleasures of Ignorance

Cloud .

The Folly of Education

Street- Organs .

A Golden Age .

The Pilgrim Fathers .

The Old School

A Lodge in the Forest

Over the Fells to Caldbeck

Old and New . .

7

PAGE

W. N. P. Barbellion

9

Hilaire Belloc

20

Augustine Birr ell

37

Augustine Birr ell

48

Viscount Bryce

53

G. K. Chesterton

65

James Douglas

72

A. G. Gardiner

77

Edmund Gosse

82

Edmund Gosse

89

Louis Golding

96

Holbrook Jackson

101

Holbrook Jackson

112

Maurice Hewlett

117

Maurice Hewlett

122

Robert Lynd

126

Alice Meynell

132

Richard Middleton

138

Richard Middleton

143

H. J. Massingham

148

John Mase field

155

J. Lewis May

166

H. C. Minchin

171

H. C. Minchin

176

Edwin Pugh

183

8 CONTENTS

PAGE

II Pulcinella .... Cecil Roberts 200
Winter, that Rough Nurse . Canon Dixon Scott 207
An Autumn House . . . Edward Thomas 215
A Rare Traveller: W.H.Hudson Ernest Rhys 224
A Neglected Heroine of Shake-
speare . . , . /. Middleton Murry 235
The Art of Packing . . . W . Robertson Nicoll 251

ON JOURNAL-WRITERS

W. N. P. Barbellion:
Enjoying Life, and other Literary Remains l

A journal is an incondite miscellany, written from
day to day, recording the writer's life and addressed
either to some particular person, as in Swift's Journal
to Stella or as in Eugenie de Guerin's Journal inscribed
if not directly addressed to her beloved brother Maurice,
or else implicitly or explicitly dedicated to some ab-
straction or ideal confidant — in Fanny Burney's diary
explicitly to " Nobody," in Maurice de Guerin's Journal
to " Mon Cahier," in others to the " Reader," to " Pos-
terity," " Kind Friend," and so forth.

The devotee in this petite chapelle of literature should
beware of shams: drunken Barnabee's Journal — that
curious and scandalous book published in 1638 — is
rhymed in Latin verse (accompanied by an English
verse translation) describing the author's " pub crawl-
ings " up and down the country; Defoe's Journal of
the Plague Year is certainly an incondite miscellany,
but not written from day to day, and not even broken
up into chapters; Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous
Man is a short story in diary form.

In all their infinite variety, real journals possess this

1 Published in America by George H. Doran Co.
*A 9

io MODERN ESSAYS

much in common: they are one and all an irresistible
overflow of the writer's life, whether it be a life of
adventure, or a life of thought, or a life of the soul.
To be sure, if a man be sailing the Amazon, climbing
Chimborazo, or travelling to the South Pole, it is most
obvious and natural for him to keep a diary. Hence we
have Darwin's Journal of the Voyage of the " Beagle "
and Captain Scott's diary of his immortal expedition.
He would indeed be dull of soul who, on encountering
strange or unprecedented experiences, felt no desire
to write them down. Meeting with great events or
great personages startles even the inarticulate into
eloquent speech, and the innumerable journals written
by soldiers and others, and sometimes published,
especially in France 1 during the Great War, show how
the fingers of the most unlikely persons do tingle for a
pen to describe each day all they see and do and suffer.
It is interesting to observe in passing that a similar
crop of journals appeared one hundred years ago round
about the time of the French Revolution: those of
Madame de Stael's circle — Benjamin Constant's and
Sismondi's, for example, in France, and in England
the journals of Lady Holland, Crabb Robinson, Madame
d'Arblay. Many of these, however, were habitual journal-
writers, who had been already posting up their diaries
before the storm broke, producing in no sense journaux
par occasion, as all war diaries are and almost all itiner-
aries. Gray's Journal of his Lakeland Tour and Bos-
well's Journal of a Trip to the Hebrides are two famous
literary journals of travel that readily occur to the mind.
The instinct of the true journal-writer is more
1 See, for example, the Diary of a Dead Officer, by Arthur
Gneme West; the Diary of a French Private : War Imprison-
ment, by Gaston Riou — the author, however, being a journalist
with marked literary gifts. — Ed.

W. N. P. BARBELLION n

profound. To every man his own life is of great interest.
But to all inveterate self-chroniclers of whatever rank,
in whatever situation or condition of life, their own
existence seems so insistently marvellous that at the
close of each day, being incontinent, they must needs
pour out their sense of wonder into a manuscript book.
Let him be only a clerk with spectacles and eternally
pushing the pen, yet his journal shall reveal with what
rare gusto he pursues his clerical existence. Though
he rarely quits his office, life for him is full of delightful
hazards and surprises. He will ride his high stool as
if astride a caracoling Arab, and at night, having arrived
steaming at the inn — even though it be but a bed-
sitting room over a tallow-chandler's shop — writes out
with an unwearying pen the history of each day's
adventures, thus: "Lunched with Brown. Later
played a game of ' pills ' with old Bumpus, and to-night
went to see A Little Bit of Fluff."

But Mr. Secretary Pepys is, of course, our great
exemplar. " Old Peepy," as Edward FitzGerald called
him, was eager to see every new thing, and every-
thing was " pretty to see." The most commonplace
affairs had a significance, while a real event became
portentous. He rolled each day upon his tongue with
the relish of an epicure, and scarce a day passed but his
magpie's covetous eye caught some bright and novel
object for conveyance to that wonderful larder — the
Diary. It is amusing to construct an imaginary picture
of him — with all seriousness and heads bent together
over the book — participating in the perplexity of that
other wonderful child, Marjorie Fleming, who affirmed
in her diary of confessions that " the most devilish
thing is eight times eight, and seven times seven is
what nature itself can't endure."

12 MODERN ESSAYS

With Marie Bashkirtseff it was something more than
a gusto for life. Life was a passion and a fever that
presently overwhelmed her. " When I think of what
I shall be when I am twenty," she wrote as a child after
looking long in the mirror, " I smack my lips ! " And
later, when Fate, like a ring of steel, was slowly
closing in on her: " I don't curse life; on the contrary,
I find it all good — would you believe it, I find it all good,
even my tears and sufferings? I like to cry, I like to
be in despair, I like to be sad and miserable, and I love
life in spite of all." Even the languorous Amiel in
the course of his amazing pages here and there bubbles
up into ecstasy — and Amiel was a Professor of Moral
Philosophy, and a dull one at that.

In the course of every diary will be found entries
testifying to the author's pleasure in re-reading his
past. This is a curiously constant feature — see, e.g.,
Tolstoi's Diary, March 20th, 1852. The diarist is a
sentimentalist in love with his past, however painful
or unprofitable it may have been. Better than any
man he knows how that silent artist, the memory,
working in the depths, ceaselessly fashions our perhaps
dreary or commonplace existence, until the sea one
day casts up its beautiful shells, and we are delighted
and surprised to find our lives have been so beautiful.
Of Pepys, Stevenson remarked that neither Hazlitt nor
Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past
— " it clung about his heart like an evergreen." So,
in dressing-gown and slippers, before the night fire,
your sentimentalist, with finger in the book, like a genie
conjures up the days gone by. He and his past keep
house together; it is an almost tangible presence, with
every feature of which he is familiar — indeed, is it not
a row of precious volumes on a shelf, and an article

W. N. P. BARBELLION 13

of furniture in his room? Of an evening poignant
memories pull at the strings of his heart and ring the
bells, and the whole room is vibrant. Let us not intrude
further for very decency's sake.

" I have left this book locked up for the past fort-
night/' writes Eugenie de Guerin. " How many things
in this gap that will be recorded nowhere, not even here !"
And Fanny Burney: "There seems to me something
very unsatisfactory in passing year after year without
even a memorandum of what you did, etc." To the
ego-loving diarist, to take no note of the flight of the
present and to forget the past seems like a personal
disloyalty to himself: it is an infamous defection to
forget or neglect that ever-increasing collection of past
selves — those dear dead gentlemen who one after another
have tenanted the temple of this flesh and handed on
the torch. His journal of self-chronicling he regards as
a mausoleum, where with reverent hands he year by
year embalms the long dynasty of his person as it
descends. To which end he is for ever harvesting his
consciousness, anxious to conserve every moment of
his existence, every relic of his passage through the
world. He counts every kiss and every heart-beat, he
collects all the hours of his life and hoards them up with
a miserly hand and a connoisseur's taste. You will
find his walls hung with mementos, and his escritoire
packed with old letters — and probably each annual
volume of his journal bound in leather and stored in a
fireproof safe. The diarist is a great conservator. As
Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) said: " One's thoughts "
(and he might have added one's days) " fly so fast it's
no use trying to put salt on their tails." Hence came

14 MODERN ESSAYS

Butler's Notebook, and the journals of such reflective
writers as Emerson and Thoreau, and of such methodi-
cally-minded men as Evelyn and John Wesley.

Mr. Julius West has given a lively picture of the De
Goncourts moving in literary France of the last century,
" always with notebook in hand, at any rate metaphori-
cally, anxious not to allow a single trait to escape them
— ever on the alert, if not anxious to botanise on their
mother's grave, at any rate perfectly willing to fasten
upon the confidences of the living as well as of the
dead, to capture the flying word, to take the evidences
of the unforgiving minute," — with what results all
readers of their colossal journal know.

It is indeed astonishing what a hold the diary habit
gains on man. Even as an event or conversation is
taking place he will have it mentally trimmed and
prepared for its exact position in the daily record, or
his observations arranged in a mnemonic list lest they
escape his recollection against the evening. Life becomes
an accessory to the journal instead of vice versa — just so
much raw material to be caught, polished, and preserved.
The consciousness of the habitual diarist develops a
chronic irritability and instantly flicks off into his MS.
book every tiniest impression, just as a horse shivers off
the flies by means of that extensive muscle underneath
the skin which anatomists have named the pannicalus
camosus. " Congreve's nasty wine has given me the
heartburn," Swift records in that extraordinary fan-
tasia of tenderness and politics — the Journal to Stella.
Then there was Patrick's bird intended for Madam
Dinglibus, Mrs. Walls of immortal memory, Goody
Stoyte and all the gossip. The merest bagatelle was

W. N. P. BARBELLION 15

worth its record. Eugenie de Guerin owned with what
delight she described the smallest trifles, such as the
little book-lice she observed crawling in the leaves of
a volume or on her writing-table. "I do not know
their names," she tells us, " but we are acquaintances."
One would say that it was a real pain to her to see any
of her precious experiences slip out of the net for ever
like beautiful scaly fish. "... to describe the inci-
dents of one hour " (she is voicing the despair
expressed by so many journal-writers) "would require
an eternity."

Journal-writing, where it is chiefly the impulse for
self-expression or self-revelation, is not infrequently
fostered by uncongenial or unsympathetic surroundings
or by incurable misfortune. So beset, the diarist,
timid and eager as a child, flees into the tower of his
soul and raises the drawbridge, as Francis Thompson
said of the young Shelley.

For a journal can be used as a " grief-cheating device,
a mode of escape and withdrawal." It is like the brown
eyes of some faithful hound who bears and suffers all
and j^et regards his master as supreme. It is a perpetual
flattery, an inexhaustible cruse of oil for the sore and
sometimes swollen ego. To keep a diary is to make a
secret liaison of the firmest and most sentimental kind;
the writer can fling off all restraint and all the trappings
which are necessarily worn to front the antagonism
of the world. It is a monstrous self-indulgence wherein
he remembers his friends and he remembers his enemies
— with candour; he remembers his own griefs and
grievances; screened from the public view in the
security of his own room he can — and it must be

16 MODERN ESSAYS

confessed he occasionally does — gaze at himself as
before a mirror, remembering, Malvolio-like, who praised
his yellow garters.

The famous Journal Intime, which ran to 17,000 folio
pages of MS. and consumed countless hours of its
author's life, was written by a man who realised that
he had been " systematically and deliberately iso-
lated " — " premature despair and deepest discourage-
ment have been my constant portion." Marie Bash-
kirtseff also was driven into the subterranean existence
of journal-writer by the hard facts of her short life,
towards the end of it living more and more within its
pages, and thus in the end wringing out of a stubborn
destiny her indefeasible claims to recognition. " I do
not know why writing has become a necessity to me,"
muses the tragic sister of Maurice de Guerin — himself a
tragedy and a journal-writer. " Who understands this
overflowing of my soul, this need to reveal itself before
God, before someone? "

In reading subjectively-written diaries one constantly
comes across the expression of this same desire for
self-revelation and self-surrender. Incredible as it
appears to the ordinary secretive human being, this very
common kind of diarist longs to give himself away,
to communicate himself to some other person in toto;
with pathetic gesture the passionate creature offers
himself up for scrutiny, sick of his own secret self,
anxious to be swallowed up in somebody else's total
comprehension.

" On dit," wrote Maurice de Guerin under date March
23rd, 1834, " qu'au jugement dernier le secret des
consciences sera revele a tout l'univers: je voudrais

W. N. P. BARBELLION 17

qu'il en fut ainsi de moi des aujourd'hui et que la vue
de mon ame fut ouverte a tous venants."

Such journals are in nowise comparable with the
confessions of religious journals — among saintly women
always a favourite mode of unburdening themselves —
pale crepuscular souls fluttering through pages of self-
disparagement by the aid of the lamp and a copious
inkhorn, never intended for public view. " Whenever
the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before
the sovereign Judge with this book in my hand and
loudly proclaim, ' Thus have I acted, these were my
thoughts, such was 1/ " This memorable opening to
Rousseau's Confessions, which shocked John Morley for
its " dreadful exaltation," is the typical brag in most
journals of confession. With defiant pride of personality
Marie Bashkirtseff, in her marvellous volume of self-
portraiture, constantly emphasises for her readers that
she conceals nothing; " I not only say all the time what
I think, but I never contemplate hiding for an instant
what might make me appear ridiculous or prove to my
disadvantage. For the rest I think myself too admirable
for censure."

Passionate egotism knows no shame. Everything —
however scandalous — goes down in a self-revelation
beside which the little disclosures of essayists like Mon-
taigne, Lamb, De Quincey sink to the level of dull
propriety. Voltaire said of Rousseau that he wouldn't
mind being hanged if they stuck his name on the gibbet.
I suppose to the average man Raskolnikoff in Crime
and Punishment, moving to his confession with the
inevitableness almost of an animal tropism, is easier
to understand than, say, Strindberg, the author of that
terrible book, The Confessions of a Fool, or even Pepys,
whose diary of peccadilloes and little vanities was

18 MODERN ESSAYS

certainly written down in cypher, but only to conceal
them from his wife.

The introspective diarist is almost a type by himself,
distinguished by his psychological insight and cold
scientific analysis of himself. Of these Amiel stands
easily at the head. " For a psychologist," he writes
in the Journal Intime, "it is extremely interesting to
be readily and directly conscious of the complications
of one's own organism and the play of its several parts.
... A feeling like this makes personal existence a
perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only
seeing the world around me, I analyse myself. In-
stead of being single, all of a piece, I become legion,
multitude, a whirlwind — a very cosmos." Amiel's self-
consciousness was an enormous lens and, like other
microscopists, he found worlds within worlds, and as
much complexity and finish in small as in great.

The passion of the introspecter is for truth of self.
He should be full of curiosity about himself and quiet
self-raillery, delighting to trip himself up in some little
vanity, to track down some carefully secreted motive,
to quizz and watch himself live with horrible vigilance
and complete self-detachment. He must be his own
detective and footpad, his own eavesdropper, and his
own stupid Boswell. His books should be La Roche-
foucauld and La Bruyere, and one of his favourite
occupations to measure himself alongside other men.
Marie Bashkirtseff thought she was like Jules Valles,
of whom she had read in Zola. " But," she adds the
next instant, " we look so stupid when we appraise
ourselves like that." It was the same agile self-con-
sciousness which discovered to her while weeping before

W. N. P. BARBELLION 19

a mirror the right expression for her Magdalen, who
should look " not at the sepulchre but at nothing at all."
Amiel, too, gathered hints for self-elucidation, especially
in the eternal self-chroniclings of Maine de Biran, in whose
diary he thought to see himself reflected, though he
also found differences which cheered and consoled him.

Yet this way madness lies. For too complete a
divorce from self provokes self-antipathy, too great a
preoccupation with self leads to self-sickness, and, by
the strangest paradox, egotism to self-annihilation.

20 MODERN ESSAYS

CARLYLE'S "FRENCH REVOLUTION"

Hilaire Belloc : Introductory Essay to " Everyman "
Edition.

The position of Carlyle in English Literature will neces-
sarily be twofold, for he chose to add to his general survey
of thought the particular task of the historian.

The number of men who have chosen the field of
letters in general, and who have added to it in any
important degree the department of History, is very
small. Dickens cannot be said to have done it seriously
in his little history, nor Thackeray in his Essay on the
Georges, and if we consider the literature of other
nations the same holds good.

Conversely, though the historian properly so called
who has dipped into general letters is common enough,
yet there have been very few historians, whether in
England, France or Germany, who did not profess
to stand upon their history rather than upon their
other work.

Two men, however, have particularly chosen to com-
bine the functions of philosopher and of historian, and
to express their philosophy in many works as serious and
as profound as their historical writings ; these two men
are Taine and Carlyle.

It must be clearly recognised in any approach to an
appreciation of their position, that a man who so attempts
the double function stands under a sharper light than
can any other sort of writer. And that for this reason:
that the work of the historian is justly recognised by

HILAIRE BELLOC 21

men to be one of supreme importance, and to be one
that, while it requires literary power for its fulfilment,
requires also twenty other qualities as rarely possessed
or as difficult of attainment. It is of supreme impor-
tance, because upon a just presentation of the past
depends all our concrete judgment of the present.
History is the object-lesson of politics, and unless history
is presented to us truly, it had better not be presented
to us at all; upon history is based our judgment of men
so far as long experience can inform it, and if the picture
is false, rather than receive it we had better be left
to our instinct and to the little circle of exact knowledge
conveyed to us by our own experience.

It is, therefore, principally as an historian that Car-
lyle in England (as Taine in France) will be judged.
His position as a writer is secure ; his wisdom in entering
the field of history is one upon which debate can still
be fruitful, and criticism of value.

What motive was it which moved such men, and
Carlyle especially, to enter that field? It was the great
expansion of historical knowledge which coincided with
the moment when his own powers were at the fullest,
coupled with the fact that all the reaction which Carlyle
himself represented could find its best arguments in
the domain of human actions.

If a thesis has to be maintained which purports to
be " practical," and to chastise the tendency to abstrac-
tion, that thesis is best maintained by a continual
appeal to fact. The vague and generous ideals of the
young are combated in this way by the old, and it is
generally true that anyone who quarrels with a deduc-
tive and ideal system bases his quarrel upon direct,
concrete, and personal experience. History is but such
experience enlarged.

22 MODERN ESSAYS

It is remarkable that with so incisive and so rebellious
a mind Carlyle should have fallen so easily, where
history was concerned, into the general current of his
generation. Indeed, the further we are separated in
time from the men of that generation, the more shall
we wonder that such doubtful and ill-supported theories
should have obtained not only an universal recognition,
but a sort of " passive obedience " from the men who
filled what is called the " Victorian Era " in literature.
For example — the whole of that group was rilled with
" Teutonians." To study the " Teutonic Race," as it
was called — that is, to study North Germany, and to
confirm the cousinship between the English and the
North German peoples — was nearly all the task of
history. There went with this a strong appetite for
the romantic in history as in every other department of
letters. Violent action, characters in high light and in
deep shadow were compelled to appear in chronicles as
much as in novels ; in rhetoric as in poetry, and indeed
throughout the whole literary effort of the time. To
both these tendencies Carlyle easily succumbed.

It might be advanced that he was not a disciple but
an originator, and that but for him neither would the
English of the middle nineteenth century have developed
that passion of theirs for things German, nor would the
picturesque, vivid and romantic history which Green,
Freeman, and even Kinglake wrote have come into
existence. It is certain that but for Carlyle the double
current would not have become so strong as it did
become. It is equally certain that but for him the
two influences of admiration for the German and the
romantic would hardly have coalesced. Yet it is true
that he did not originate either the one tendency or the
other; the one proceeded from the natural religious

HILAIRE BELLOC 23

sympathy between all Protestant peoples; the other,
upon the contrary, from the maturing of French in-
fluence upon England, and that enormously increasing
power which the Revolution bequeathed to the Latins,
and which is only now beginning to bear fruit.

The romantic movement began not with Byron or
with Wordsworth, but with Rousseau; the natural
alliance of the Protestant peoples began not with
Waterloo, but with that treaty between Austria and
France in the middle of the eighteenth century, which
is perhaps the greatest turning-point in the story of
European relations.

It must also be remembered that in England there
were separate causes all making both for the Teutonic
sentiment and for the romantic. England had never
possessed a continuous classical tradition. What Milton
had begun and Dryden continued withered long before
the first of them had been dead a hundred years. In
England, again, the romantic spirit had received no
chastisement from the facts of war. England alone of
European nations had not suffered invasion, dynastic
change or serious internal disorder, and it is in peace
and in leisure that the romantic illusion flourishes
best. England was passing also through a period of
abnormal expansion; all her energies were strained to
the utmost; there was a vast growth everywhere. As
for the German influence, a German dynasty, German
allies, the momentary eclipse of the Italian spirit
throughout Europe, and the crude beginnings of philology
all helped to foster it and to maintain it. %

All this is passing to-day; much of it has already
passed. The theories of race based on Max Miiller's
researches are doubted; they have certainly failed
at the test. The rudimentary anthropology of our

24 MODERN ESSAYS

grandfathers has been corrected by innumerable experi-
ments and by a vastly extended research. Catholicism
has organised a full defensive system, and has proceeded
from that to carry the war into Africa, and though we
have not had in England itself an experience of disaster,
yet the pleasing and somewhat virile illusions of
romanticism have been so bled out of Europe in general
that we ourselves can hardly maintain them.

In a word, we are in a position to look steadily back
at the whole historical work of Carlyle and to judge it,
as yet, without undue lack of sympathy, but already
with sufficient detachment. We are able to present to
ourselves and to answer without passion (and with a
considerable certainty) the great question which must
be asked of all historians, Did he make dead men live
again? There are many who call up phantoms, and
many who can present the corpse of the past; there
are few who can cause it to rise and act before you with
its own body and its own soul. To what extent was he
of these few?

In order to answer that question the very first thing
to be done is to consider the defects which have been
noted in his writings.

It has been said (we will see in a moment with how
much or how little justice) that Carlyle could not
sympathise with things separate from the conditions
of his own birth. He was a peasant and a Calvinist,
and it is maintained that to things of which the peasant
or the Calvinist are incapable he had no avenue of
approach, and therefore that he had no understanding
of them.

If that be so, his book upon the French Revolution
must be the very best test which we could apply to his
powers, for the French Revolution was essentially the

HILAIRE BELLOC 25

work of leisured men, of highly trained intelligences,
and of men whom the process of academic education
had removed as far as possible from the peasant-life
of Europe. Again, it was distinctly the product of a
Catholic nation — of a nation, that is, with a contempt
of fatalism, an adherence to abstract dogmas, and a
military hatred of mere force and of the religions
of fear.

It is secondly objected to Carlyle that he could not
justly deal with history on account of a constant pre-
occupation of his: the desire to excite the emotions of
his readers.

It has been thirdly objected to him that in the particu-
lar case of the French Revolution he could not properly
delineate the French character, because he had a most
imperfect acquaintance with the language of France, and
no acquaintance whatever with its people.

Added to these criticisms, another of some weight
has often been heard. It is the criticism which all can
make against the few historians of modern times: the
accusation of inaccuracy.

Now if Carlyle's work be examined upon such lines,
it is not difficult to conclude that the main part of the
charge against him is false.

Every man is something; if he is not a Calvinist he
is a Catholic, an Agnostic or a Mohammedan; if he is
not a peasant, he is a shopkeeper or a noble or a soldier.
Every man that writes history must therefore have
an initial difficulty in comprehending some, and prob-
ably most of the characters he sets out to portray.
The measure of his power is not to be found in the
extent of this difficulty, but in his success in overcoming
it. For instance, the best monograph on Robert Burns
has been written by a quiet, wealthy man, a foreigner,

26 MODERN ESSAYS

and a Picard at that, writing in Paris and in the French
tongue; and success of that sort, precisely because it
has overcome so much initial difficulty, is the prime
success of the historian. So with Carlyle. It is not
astonishing that he should have written the Frederick,
it is astonishing that he should have written the Revo-
lution] and our admiration for the effort and for its
result increases with every new thing we learn about
Carlyle, and with eveiy new difficulty which we discover
to have lain in his way.

A particular instance of this will emphasise my
contention. It had been truly remarked of Carlyle as
of Dickens, that there was never a single gentleman in
his books. The French Revolution was crammed with
gentlemen; very few indeed of the actors in it were
of another social rank than that which is called in
England by the name of " the gentry." Consider,
then, .Carlyle's portrait of Mirabeau ; he certainly makes
him something too much of an actor, and something
too little of an artist. The inherited dignity of bearing,
the firmness of gesture, and the regard for proportion
which mark his rank are not present in these pages.
But read this passage, and ask yourself whether it
has ever been excelled by any writer but Michelet.

" Towards such work, in such manner, marches he,
this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure,
with black Samson locks under the slouch-hat, he steps
along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not
be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with
smoke. And now it has got air; it will burn its whole
substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill
all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of
that smouldering, with foul fire-damp and vapour
enough; — and like a burning mountain he blazes

HILAIRE BELLOC 27

heaven-high; and for twenty- three resplendent months
pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all that
is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed
Europe; — and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass
on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the greatest of
them all: in the whole National Deputies, in the whole
Nation, there is none like and none second to thee."

The words are theatrical. " Whole national depu-
ties " is simply bad English. The " thou " and the
" thee " are grotesque — but the touch is true.

What I mean is this, that if you had known Mirabeau
yourself and had read this passage long after his death,
you would have said, " Good lord! how vivid! " long
before you had begun to criticise this or that slip in
the appreciation. You would in that portrait of
Mirabeau have had called up before you Mirabeau as
you had known him. So powerful is the modelling that
its failure to give the refinement of the original would
have lain lightly upon your mind, as you were filled
with a recollection of his force. Carlyle would seem to
you to have put a living spirit again into the body of
the man, and that living spirit would have been the
spirit that you had known.

So it is almost universally where he has to draw the
portrait of a man.

Whether the second of the Lameths knew English
(I believe he did), or whether in his old age he ever
read this book (he had ample time to do it, for he sur-
vived its publication by seventeen years), whether he
was even acquainted with the name of Carlyle — I do
not know; but I am certain that he, who had known
Mirabeau, did, if ever he read this passage, stand
startled at a resurrection from the dead.

There are exceptions. It is no just appreciation of

28 MODERN ESSAYS

Carlyle's work to ignore them; on the contrary, these
exceptions help us even better than his successes to
appreciate the quality of his genius. These exceptions
are even numerous. They are to be discovered wherever
a character of some complexity and, if I may so express
myself, of " varying grain," is presented to Carlyle's
deep and rapid carving, where the man he is dealing
with is not of one stuff throughout.

Two very excellent examples of such failures are his
pictures of the King and of Robespierre. In both the
delineation is a task of very considerable difficulty;
both had characters highly complex and to some extent
self-contradictory; both escape from the power of a
pen which was creative, but incapable of analysis.

Louis XVI. was not a weak lump of a man. He never
upon any single occasion — and he lived through greater
dangers than any modern ruler has lived — showed a sign
of fear. He fought for his principles to the very end;
he conscientiously deliberated every act of importance
which he undertook, and that is a rare and convincing
sort of strength. Louis XVI. came of a stock nervous
to the point of disease. He would have grown up
(under most circumstances) shy, thin, perhaps con-
sumptive, and even more terrified than was his grand-
father of intercourse with statesmen and soldiers. He
would probably have died young. The extreme care
spent upon him by doctors, a careful and continually
ordered diet, perpetual exercise in the open air, all these
artifices bestowed upon him before he was twenty a
sort of fictitious health. He grew up robust, somnolent,
of a large appetite, and with all his nervous weakness
run to lethargy. Here was a man who could not be
jotted down in a few deep strokes of the graver, nor to be
seen clearly in high lights and shadows. Here was a

HILAIRE BELLOC 29

man who could not by any manipulation be made into
a dramatic figure; therefore, to put it bluntly, Carlyle
dismisses him.

Robespierre was descended from a long line of squires,
probably Irish. He was eloquent, pedantic, enthusiastic,
cold, of excellent breeding, of a convinced faith, readily
angered against persons, passionately loved, of a value-
less judgment in dealing with masses of men, and often
at fault with individuals. Here, again, is a character
which cannot by any possibility serve the purposes of
melodrama ; he was not a monster or a coward, nor even
a great ideal figure, as Hamel would regard him. You
cannot deal with Robespierre unless you deal with the
complexity of his position and of his mind. You must
analyse the phenomenon closely, and you must put him
in a separate place right aside from the furious and
simple passions by which he was surrounded but from
which he lived apart. Carlyle was either unable to
do this or did not know that he had to do it ; the result
is that his Robespierre has no resemblance either to the
original or to any possible man. He is of wax.1

But these, I repeat, are exceptions, and the very
causes which make Louis and Robespierre escape him
are proofs of the driving energy which lay behind his
mind. The very fact that he cannot work in some
material enhances the extraordinary power with which
he moulded all other material that fell to his hand.

When it is objected that Carlyle could not deal justly
with history on account of his preoccupation of exciting

1 For instance, the famous epithet " Sea-green " is based on
one phrase of Madame de StaeTs misread. What Madame de
Stael said was that the prominent veins in Robespierre's fore-
head showed greenish-blue against his fair and somewhat pale
skin. But his complexion was healthy, and his expression, if
anything, winning.

30 MODERN ESSAYS

the emotions, we are on firmer ground. We are dealing
here with his art rather than with his history, and we
are dealing with the great vice to which art such as
his is tempted.

In very early youth a man capable by his style of
violently arousing the emotions of his readers, of striking
time and again the spring which moves us like a phrase
of music, may forget himself, and may merely over-
indulge his power. He will fall into such an excess as
it were unconsciouly. But as his life proceeds, as his
style is criticised and acquires public recognition, he
cannot but become conscious of his art ; he will tend to
repeat certain tricks of it, and he cannot but depend
too much upon those tricks to secure him a perpetuity
of success and save him the fatigue of creation. He suffers
the temptation which falls in another sphere to the
orator (for both are rhetoricians), and he intends to
yield to that temptation; to force the note. From
this fault Carlyle's style after his thirtieth year un-
doubtedly suffers. As he grew older his straining for
the vivid got worse and worse like Swinburne's allitera-
tions, Browning's obscurity, Wordsworth's " common
phrases," or Gladstone's trick of a verbose confusion.
Such temptations come only to the great, and it behoves
us to be very careful how we charge them with their
faults, for we must remember how hardly any great
man has escaped them, and how, to lesser men, the
temptation itself is impossible. Nevertheless, it is true
that the temptation, as it was presented to Carlyle, was
only too successful. His art is spoilt by a perpetual
tautening of the bow.

I will here quote two passages which should sup-
port my contention: the first, as I think, spontaneous;
the second false.

HILAIRE BELLOC 31

The first is near the opening of the seventh chapter
of Book IV. in Part III., and begins the trial of the
Queen; it is as follows:

" There are few Printed things one meets with of
such tragic, almost ghastly, significance as those bald
pages of the Bulletin du Tribunal Revolutionnaire,
which bear Title Trial of the Widow Capet. Dim, dim,
as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of
Dis! Plutonic Judges, Plutonic Tinville; encircled,
nine times, with Styx and Lethe, with Fire-Phlegethon
and Cocytus named of Lamentation! The very wit-
nesses summoned are like Ghosts ... they themselves
are all hovering over death and doom. ..."

Consider the qualities of these lines. They open with
a simple phrase. The phrase, the consideration of his
subject, excite him at once to dithyramb. The rhythm
is natural and open. The very vowels of the syllables
are consonant to horror, the cadence rises to the
wail of the word " Lamentation." Its consonants
possess the regular though not excessive alliteration
of poetical English. It falls and ends like a gong
sounding the word " Doom."

Turn now to the second, and see whether these
same qualities are not here purposely and forcibly
struck upon the metal of his writing rather than ap-
pearing as something inherent to the quality of that
writing itself.

" One other thing, or rather other things, we will
mention; and no more: The Blonde Perukes; the
Tannery at Meudon. Great talk is of these Perruques
Blondes : O Reader, they are made from the heads
of guillotined Women! The locks of a Duchess, etc.,
etc." . . ., and so forth to the end of the chapter,

32 MODERN ESSAYS

twenty lines more: "Alas! then, is man's civilisation
only a wrapping through which the savage of him ..."
and so on.

This is bad. It is all forced. The perpetual " we "
of his emphatic manner is introduced to no great purpose.
He is writing rapidly. He intended to " mention "
one thing — he thinks of a second (both are false) and
is too hasty to remould the sentence. He adds " no
more," to hide his error and make it pompous. Each
phrase is affected. Why "Great talk is"? Why
"O reader"? Why the excessive commonplace and
well-worn tags of the last sentence picked out in an
unusual order? It was because he felt his own in-
terest flagging and his pen at fault that he had deliberate
recourse to tinsel of this kind.

So much then for the chief fault which can justly be
discovered in this great and enduring work. It is
easier to take up again the task of defence. I will allude
in particular to the charge of inaccuracy, and say at
once that Carlyle is without question one of the most
accurate historians that ever put pen to paper.

He writes in that method which of all others most
compels a man to errors in matters of detail. Fugue:
a very vivid presentment: the making of one's subject
move before one; the giving of its characters a life of
their own such as we give to the characters of fiction
— all these high efforts in an historian are direct causes
of minute inaccuracy. The extent to which Carlyle
escaped that inaccuracy is positively astounding. It
has latterly been my business to comment upon one
of the latest editions of his work which has been pro-
duced with voluminous footnotes at Oxford. Here
there was no excuse at all for inaccuracy. The book
was dull, pedantic, and badly put together. It was a

HILAIRE BELLOC 33

purely mechanical piece of work, and all the editor
had to do was to verify every reference he made and to
see that the spelling and the dates were correct.

Yet I have found in this edition at least five errors
to one of Carlyle's.

Here is a curious and instructive instance. In speak-
ing of Napoleon's rank before Toulon, Carlyle calls him
a major at a moment when he may have held that rank
or may have been colonel: it is a point not yet decided,
and perhaps never to be decided. The records are
imperfect: the time was a hurried and muddled one.
Napoleon was certainly in a higher than a battery
command, but not yet a general officer. The Oxford
edition elaborately corrects Carlyle and makes Napoleon
a captain!

It cannot be too often repeated by those who have
the honour of English historical science at heart that
we have in Carlyle not only in his Frederick — where
everyone conceded it — but here in the Revolution an
admirable instance of care and of correction. Michelet
is perhaps a greater man, and certainly a greater his-
torian, but in accuracy Carlyle is his superior. Mignet's
little book alone perhaps of the early authorities falls
into less errors, while in the midst of modern research
Aulard is perhaps the only worker who would have a
right to contrast his painstaking with that of the English
writer. Taine is nowhere; but then Taine was not
even trying to tell the truth, and that makes a vast
difference where accuracy is concerned.

It is again true of Carlyle that he had but an imperfect
acquaintance with the French language, and hardly any
acquaintance with the French character. It remains
true that by some sort of miracle he accomplished
successfully the task he had set himself. It is some-

B

34 MODERN ESSAYS

what as though Victor Hugo had managed to write
not a great play (which he did write), but a thorough
history of Oliver Cromwell.

Thus Carlyle comprehended one chief factor of the
Revolution: the mob. Alone of all European peoples,
the French are able to organise themselves from below
in large masses, and Paris, which wrought the Revolution,
can do it better than the rest of France. A French
mob can march in column without a leader, and a
Parisian mob can not only march in column, but in
a rough fashion deploy when the column debouches
upon some open space. It is almost incredible, but
it is true.

Now of all the writers of his time Carlyle was, one
would have thought, the least able to understand this.
He could see nothing in acephalous mankind. It was
the whole of his philosophy that men cannot so organise
themselves, that they need leaders and strong men,
and all the rest of it. Yet so thoroughly has he got
inside his subject, so vitally has he raised it up and made
it move of its own life, that in his book you see the French
mob doing precisely what he would have told you, had
you asked him, no mob could do. When he describes
them you see them doing what as a fact they did, and
moving in a fashion which, as a fact, was their own.
When he stops to comment upon them, as he does from
time to time, he is often wrong, but when the descrip-
tion begins he becomes right again by a pure instinct for
visualising, and for making men act in harmony and in
concert in his book.

His inacquaintance with the French character does
certainly make him misunderstand the battles. Where
he is at his best in his other works, there he is at his
worst in the Revolution. His fighting is all wrong.

HILAIRE BELLOC 35

Everybody knows for instance that Bonaparte lost one
of his guns in Vendemiaire, there was no " whiff of grape
shot," and what is worse, he does not present the great
battles of '93 and '94 in their true perspective. He
does not show the victories " Pursuing the Terror like
furies," and throughout the work the armies which
are the meaning and the guidance of the Revolution
come in as it were by accident and give no clue.

But there is another point where his ignorance of the
French people and his peculiar ignorance of their
religion might have led him far more astray, and where
he is triumphantly successful; and that is in his por-
traiture of French violence, and of French ferocity. He
had not in his life seen anything violent or ferocious.
It was sheer creative power which enabled him to pro-
ject upon his screen the actualities of which he had read,
and there is perhaps no other English writer who has
done it; so alien is violence to our national character
and so utterly removed is it from our national experience.

The energy of the Revolution, one might conclude,
found in the depths of this man who had never been
near the sound of arms or the vision of an insurgent
populace, something congenial: some ancient strength
in the Scotch inherited from mediaeval freedom arose
in him and answered the French appeal. It did for
him what the story of Napoleon did for Victor Hugo:
it " blew the creative gale " — " le souffle createur."

Here is the peculiar merit of this book, and here is
what may preserve it even when taste has so changed
that its rhetoric shall have become tedious and that a
classical reaction shall have rendered repulsive the
anarchic outbursts of its prose. He was inspired. The
enormity of the action moved him as the Marseillaise can
still move the young conscripts upon the march when

36

MODERN ESSAYS

they hear it from a distant place and go forward to the
call of it. The Revolution filled him as he proceeded,
and was, in a sense, co-author with him of the shock,
the flames, and the roar, the innumerable feet, and the
songs which together build up what we read achieved
in these volumes.

O*"*'**

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 37

A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS
Augustine Birrell: Essays and A ddresses (1884)

One is often tempted by the devil to forswear the study
of history altogether as the pursuit of the Unknowable.
" How is it possible," he whispers in our ear, as we
stand gloomily regarding the portly calf -bound volumes
without which no gentleman's library is complete,
" how is it possible to suppose that you have there,
on your shelves, the actual facts of history — a true
record of what men, dead long ago, felt and thought? "
Yet, if we have not, I for one, though of a literary turn,
would sooner spend my leisure playing skittles with
boors than in reading sonorous lies in stout volumes.

It is not so much [wilily insinuates the Tempter] that
these renowned authors lack knowledge. Their habit of
giving an occasional reference (though the verification of
these is usually left to the malignancy of a rival and less
popular historian) argues at least some reading. No;
what is wanting is ignorance, carefully acquired and
studiously maintained. This is no paradox. To carry the
truisms, theories, laws, language of to-day, along with
you in your historical pursuits, is to turn the muse of
history upside down — a most disrespectful proceeding — and
yet to ignore them — to forget all about them — to hang them
up with your hat and coat in the hall, to remain there
whilst you sit in the library composing your immortal
work, which is so happily to combine all that is best in
Gibbon and Macaulay — a sneerless Gibbon and an impartial
Macaulay — is a task which, if it be not impossible is, at
all events, of huge difficulty.

Another blemish in English historical work has been

38 MODERN ESSAYS

noticed by the Rev. Charles Kingsley, and may therefore
be referred to by me without offence. Your standard
historians, having no unnatural regard for their most
indefatigable readers, the wives and daughters of England,
feel it incumbent upon them to pass over, as unfit for
dainty ears and dulcet tones, facts, and rumours of facts,
which none the less often determined events by stirring
the strong feelings of your ancestors, whose conduct,
unless explained by this light, must remain enigmatical.

When to these anachronisms of thought and omissions
of fact you have added the dishonesty of the partisan
historian and the false glamour of the picturesque one,
you will be so good as to proceed to find the present value
of history!

Thus far the Enemy of Mankind:

An admirable lady orator is reported lately to have
" brought down " Exeter Hall by observing, "in a
low but penetrating voice," that the Devil was a very
stupid person. It is true that Ben Jonson is on the side
of the lady, but I am far too orthodox to entertain any
such opinion; and though I have, in this instance of
history, so far resisted him as to have refrained from
sending my standard historians to the auction mart —
where, indeed, with the almost single exception of Mr.
Grote's History of Greece (the octavo edition in twelve
volumes), prices rule so low as to make cartage a con-
sideration— I have still of late found myself turning off
the turnpike of history to loiter down the primrose
paths of men's memoirs of themselves and their times.

Here at least, so we argue, we are comparatively
safe. Anachronisms of thought are impossible; omis-
sions out of regard for female posterity unlikely, and as
for party spirit, if found, it forms part of what lawyers
call the res gestce, and has therefore a value of its own.
Against the perils of the picturesque who will insure us ?

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 39

But when we have said all this, and, sick of prosing,
would begin reading, the number of really readable
memoirs is soon found to be but few. This is, indeed,
unfortunate; for it launches us off on another prose-
journey by provoking the question, What makes
memoirs interesting?

Is it necessary that they should be the record of a
noble character ? Certainly not. We remember Pepys,
who — well, never mind what he does. We call to
mind Cellini; he runs behind a fellow-creature, and
with " admirable address " sticks a dagger in the nape
of his neck, and long afterwards records the fact, almost
with reverence, in his life's story. Can anything be
more revolting than some portions of the revelation
Benjamin Franklin was pleased to make of himself in
writing? And what about Rousseau? Yet, when we
have pleaded guilty for these men, a modern Savon-
arola, who had persuaded us to make a bonfire of their
works, would do well to keep a sharp look-out, lest at
the last moment we should be found substituting Pear-
son on the Creed for Pepys, Coleridge's Friend for Cellini,
John Foster's Essays for Franklin, and Roget's Bridge-
water Treatise for Rousseau.

Neither will it do to suppose that the interest of a
memoir depends on its writer having been concerned in
great affairs, or lived in stirring times. The dullest
memoirs written even in English, and not excepting
those maimed records of life known as " religious
biography," are the work of men of the " attache "
order, who, having been mixed up in events which the
newspapers of the day chronicled as " Important
Intelligence," were not unnaturally led to cherish the
belief that people would like to have from their pens
full, true and particular accounts of all that then

40 MODERN ESSAYS

happened, or, as they, if moderns, would probably
prefer to say, transpired. But the World, whatever
an over-bold Exeter Hall may say of her old associate
the Devil, is not a stupid person, and declines to be
taken in twice; and turning a deaf ear to the most
painstaking and trustworthy accounts of deceased
Cabinets and silenced Conferences, goes journeying
along her broad way, chuckling over some old joke in
Boswell, and reading with fresh delight the all-about-
nothing letters of Cowper and Lamb.

How then does a man — be he good or bad — big or
little — a philosopher or a fribble — St. Paul or Horace
Walpole — make his memoirs interesting?

To say that the one thing needful is individuality
is not quite enough. To be an individual is the in-
evitable, and in most cases the unenviable, lot of every
child of Adam. Each one of us has, like a tin soldier,
a stand of his own. To have an individuality is no
sort of distinction, but to be able to make it felt in
writing is not only distinction but under favouring
circumstances immortality.

Have we not all some correspondents, though probably
but few, from whom we never receive a letter without
feeling sure that we shall find inside the envelope
something written that will make us either glow with
the warmth or shiver with the cold of our correspon-
dent's life? But how many other people are to be
found, good, honest people too, who no sooner take
pen in hand than they stamp unreality on every word
they write. It is a hard fate, but they cannot escape
it. They may be as literal as the late Earl Stanhope,
as painstaking as Bishop Stubbs, as much in earnest
as the Prime Minister — their lives may be noble, their
aims high, but no sooner do they seek to narrate to us

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 41

their story, than we find it is not to be. To hearken
to them is past praying for. We turn from them as
from a guest who has outstayed his welcome. Their
writing wearies, irritates, disgusts.

Here then, at last, we have the two classes of memoir
writers — those who manage to make themselves felt,
and those who do not. Of the latter, a very little
is a great deal too much — of the former we can never
have enough.

What a liar was Benvenuto Cellini ! — who can believe
a word he says? To hang a dog on his oath would
be a judicial murder. Yet when we lay down his
Memoirs and let our thoughts travel back to those far-
off days he tells us of, there we see him standing, in
bold relief, against the black sky of the past, the very
man he was. Not more surely did he, with that rare
skill of his, stamp the image of Clement VII. on the
papal currency than he did the impress of his own
singular personality upon every word he spoke and
every sentence he wrote.

We ought, of course, to hate him, but do we? A
murderer he has written himself down. A liar he stands
self-convicted of being. Were anyone in the nether
world bold enough to call him thief, it may be doubted
whether Rhadamanthus would award him the damages
for which we may be certain he would loudly clamour.
Why do we not hate him? Listen to him:

Upon my uttering these words, there was a general outcry,
the noblemen affirming that I promised too much. But one
of them, who was a great philosopher, said in my favour,
" From the admirable symmetry of shape and happy physi-
ognomy of this young man, I venture to engage that he
will perform all he promises, and more." The Pope replied,
""I am of the same opinion "; then calling Trajano, his

42 MODERN ESSAYS

gentleman of the bed-chamber, he ordered him to fetch
me five hundred ducats.

And so it always ended; suspicions, aroused most
reasonably, allayed most unreasonably, and then —
ducats. He deserved hanging, but he died in his bed.
He wrote his own memoirs after a fashion that ought
to have brought posthumous justice upon him, and
made them a literary gibbet, on which he should swing,
a creaking horror, for all time ; but nothing of the sort
has happened. The rascal is so symmetrical, and his
physiognomy, as it gleams upon us through the centuries,
so happy, that we cannot withhold our ducats, though
we may accompany the gift with a shower of abuse.

This only proves the profundity of an observation
made by Mr. Bagehot — a man who carried away into
the next world more originality of thought than is
now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm.
Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary reputation of
the late Francis Horner and the trifling cost he was
put to in supporting it, Mr. Bagehot said that it proved
the advantage of " keeping an atmosphere."

The common air of heaven sharpens men's judgments.
Poor Horner, but for that kept atmosphere of his,
always surrounding him, would have been bluntly
asked, " What he had done since he was breeched,"
and in reply he could only have uttered something about
the currency. As for our especial rogue Cellini, the
question would probably have assumed this shape:
Rascal, name the crime you have not committed,
and account for the omission."

But these awkward questions are not put to the
lucky people who keep their own atmospheres. The
critics, before they can get at them, have to step out
of the everyday air, where only achievements count

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 43

and the Decalogue still goes for something, into the kept
atmosphere, which they have no sooner breathed than
they begin to see things differently, and to measure the
object thus surrounded with a tape of its own manu-
facture. Horner — poor, ugly, a man neither of words
nor deeds — becomes one of our great men; a nation
mourns his loss and erects his statue in the Abbey.
Mr. Bagehot gives several instances of the same kind,
but he does not mention Cellini, who is, however, in his
own way, an admirable example.

You open his book — a Pharisee of the Pharisees.
Lying indeed! Why, you hate prevarication. As for
murder, your friends know you too well to mention
the subject in your hearing, except in immediate con-
nection with capital punishment. You are, of course,
willing to make some allowance for Cellini's time and
place — the first half of the sixteenth century and Italy.
" Yes," you remark, " Cellini shall have strict justice
at my hands." So you say as you settle yourself in
your chair and begin to read. We seem to hear the
rascal laughing in his grave. His spirit breathes upon you
from his book — peeps at you roguishly as you turn the
pages. His atmosphere surrounds you ; you smile when
you ought to frown, chuckle when you should groan,
and — 0 final triumph! — laugh aloud when, if you
had a rag of principle left, you would fling the book
into the fire. Your poor moral sense turns away
with a sigh, and patiently awaits the conclusion of
the second volume.

How cautiously does he begin, how gently does he
win your ear by his seductive piety ! I quote from Mr.
Roscoe's translation:

It is a duty incumbent on upright and credible men of
all ranks, who have performed anything noble or praise-

44 MODERN ESSAYS

worthy, to record, in their own writing, the events of then-
lives, yet they should not commence this honourable
task before they have passed their fortieth year. Such,
at least, is my opinion, now that I have completed my
fifty-eighth year, and am settled in Florence, where,
considering the numerous ills that constantly attend
human life, I perceive that I have never before been so free
from vexations and calamities, or possessed of so great a
share of content and health as at this period. Looking
back on some delightful and happy events of my life, and
on many misfortunes so truly overwhelming that the
appalling retrospect makes me wonder how I have reached
this age in vigour and prosperity, through God's goodness,
I have resolved to publish an account of my life; and . . .
I must, in commencing my narrative, satisfy the public
on some few points to which its curiosity is usually directed ;
the first of which is to ascertain whether a man is descended
from a virtuous and ancient family. ... I shall therefore
now proceed to inform the reader how it pleased God
that I should come into the world.

So you read on page i ; what you read on page 191
is this:

Just after sunset, about eight o'clock, as this musqueteer
stood at his door with his sword in his hand, when he had
done supper, I with great address came close up to him
with a long dagger, and gave him a violent back-handed
stroke, which I aimed at his neck. He instantly turned
round, and the blow, falling directly upon his left shoulder,
broke the whole bone of it; upon which he dropped his
sword, quite overcome by the pain, and took to his heels.
I pursued, and in four steps came up with him, when,
raising the dagger over his head, which he lowered down,
I hit him exactly upon the nape of the neck. The weapon
penetrated so deep that, though I made a great effort to
recover it again, I found it impossible.

So much for murder. Now for manslaughter, or
rather Cellini's notion of manslaughter.

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 45

Pompeo entered an apothecary's shop at the corner of
the Chiavica, about some business, and stayed there for
some time. I was told he had boasted of having bullied
me, but it turned out a fatal adventure to him. Just as I
arrived at that quarter he was coming out of the shop,
and his bravoes, having made an opening, formed a circle
round him. I thereupon clapped my hand to a sharp
dagger, and having forced my way through the file of
ruffians, laid hold of him by the throat, so quickly and with
such presence of mind, that there was not one of his friends
could defend him. I pulled him towards me to give him
a blow in front, but he turned his face about through
excess of terror, so that I wounded him exactly under the
ear; and upon repeating my blow he fell down dead. It
had never been my intention to kill him, but blows are not
always under command.

We must all feel that it would never have done to
have begun with these passages, but long before the
191st page has been reached Cellini has retreated into
his own atmosphere, and the scales of Justice have been
hopelessly tampered with.

That such a man as this encountered suffering in
the course of his life should be matter for satisfaction
to every well-regulated mind; but, somehow or another,
you find yourself pitying the fellow as he narrates the
hardships he endured in the Castle of S. Angelo. He
is so symmetrical a rascal! Just hear him! listen to
what he says well on in the second volume, after the
little incidents already quoted:

Having at length recovered my strength and vigour,
after I had composed myself and resumed my cheerfulness
of mind, I continued to read my Bible, and so accustomed
my eyes to that darkness, that though I was at first able
to read only an hour and a half, I could at length read
three hours. I then reflected on the wonderful power
of the Almighty upon the hearts of simple men, who had

46 MODERN ESSAYS

carried their enthusiasm so far as to believe firmly that
God would indulge them in all they wished for; and I
promised myself the assistance of the Most High, as well
through His mercy as on account of my innocence. Thus
turning constantly to the Supreme Being, sometimes in
prayer, sometimes in silent meditation on the divine good-
ness, I was totally engrossed by these heavenly reflections,
and came to take such delight in pious meditations that I
no longer thought of past misfortunes. On the contrary,
I was all day long singing psalms and many other composi-
tions of mine, in which I celebrated and praised the Deity.

Thus torn from their context, these passages may
seem to supply the best possible falsification of the
previous statement that Cellini told the truth about
himself. Judged by these passages alone, he may
appear a hypocrite of an unusually odious description.
But it is only necessary to read his book to dispel that
notion. He tells lies about other people; he repeats
long conversations, sounding his own praises, during
which, as his own narrative shows, he was not present;
he exaggerates his own exploits, his sufferings — even,
it may be, his crimes; but when we lay down his
book, we feel we are saying good-bye to a man
whom we know.

He has introduced himself to us, and though doubtless
we prefer saints to sinners, we may be forgiven for
liking the company of a live rogue better than that of
the lay-figures and empty clock-cases labelled with
distinguished names, who arc to be found doing duty
for men in the works of our standard historians. What
would we not give to know Julius Caesar one half as well
as we know this outrageous rascal? The saints of
the earth, too, how shadowy they are ! Which of them
do we really know? Excepting one or two ancient and
modern Quietists, there is hardly one amongst the

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 47

whole number who being dead yet speaketh. Their
memoirs far too often only reveal to us a hazy something,
certainly not recognisable as a man. This is generally
the fault of their editors, who, though men themselves,
confine their editorial duties to going up and down the
diaries and papers of the departed saint, and obliterat-
ing all human touches. This they do for the " better
prevention of scandals"; and one cannot deny that
they attain their end, though they pay dearly for it.

I shall never forget the start I gave when, on reading
some old book about India, I came across an after-
dinner jest of Henry Martyn's. The thought of Henry
Martyn laughing over the walnuts and the wine was
almost, as Robert Browning's unknown painter says,
"too wildly dear"; and to this day I cannot help
thinking that there must be a mistake somewhere.

To return to Cellini, and to conclude. On laying
down his Memoirs, let us be careful to recall our banished
moral sense, "and make peace with her, by passing a
final judgment on this desperate sinner, which perhaps,
after all, we cannot do better than by employing language
of his own concerning a monk, a fellow-prisoner of his,
who never, so far as appears, murdered anybody, but
of whom Cellini none the less felt himself entitled
to say:

I admired his shining qualities, but his odious vices I
freely censured and held in abhorrence.

48 MODERN ESSAYS

BOOK-BUYING
Augustine Birrell: Essays and Addresses ,

The most distinguished of living Englishmen, who, great
as he is in many directions, is perhaps inherently more
a man of letters than anything else, has been overheard
mournfully to declare that there were more booksellers'
shops in his native town sixty years ago when he was a
boy in it, than are to-day to be found within its bound-
aries. And yet the place, " all unabashed," now boasts
its bookless self a city!

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-
hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible
man puts himself out about new books. When a new
book is published, read an old one, was the advice of
a sound though surly critic. It is one of the boasts
of letters to have glorified the term " second-hand,"
which other crafts have " soiled to all ignoble use."
But why it has been able to do this is obvious. All the
best books are necessarily second-hand. The writers
of to-day need not grumble. Let them " bide a wee."
If their books are worth anything they too one day
will be second-hand. If their books are not worth any-
thing there are ancient trades still in full operation
amongst us — the pastrycooks and the trunkmakers —
who must have paper.

But is there any substance in the plaint that nobody
now buys books, meaning thereby second-hand books ?
The late Mark Pattison, who had 16,000 volumes, and
whose lightest word has therefore weight, once stated

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 49

that he had been informed, and verily believed, that
there were men of his own University of Oxford who,
being in uncontrolled possession of annual incomes of
not less than £500, thought they were doing the thing
handsomely if they expended £50 a year upon their
libraries. But we are not bound to believe this unless
we like. There was a touch of morosity about the late
Rector of Lincoln which led him to take gloomy views
of men, particularly Oxford men.

No doubt arguments a priori may readily be found
to support the contention that the habit of book-
buying is on the decline. I confess to knowing one or
two men, not Oxford men either, but Cambridge men
(and the passion of Cambridge for literature is a byword) ,
who, on the plea of being pressed with business, or
because they were going to a funeral, have passed a
bookshop in a strange town without so much as stepping
inside " just to see whether the fellow had anything."
But painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any
damaging inference we might feel disposed to draw
from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists.
Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of
the present year, and your pessimism is washed away
by the tears which unrestrainedly flow as you see what
bonnes fortunes you have lost. A young book-buyer
might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan
his youth after comparing old catalogues with new.

Nothing but American competition, grumble some
old stagers.

Well! why not? This new battle for the books
is a free fight, not a private one, and Columbia has
" joined in." Lower prices are not to be looked for.
The book-buyer of 1900 will be glad to buy at to-day's
prices. I take pleasure in thinking he wili not be able

50 MODERN ESSAYS

to do so. Good finds grow scarcer and scarcer. True
it is that but a few short weeks ago I picked up (such
is the happy phrase, most apt to describe what was
indeed a " street casualty ") a copy of the original
edition of Endymion (Keats' poem— O subscriber to
Mudie's! — not Lord Beaconsfield's novel) for the easy
equivalent of half-a-crown — but then that was one of
my lucky days. The enormous increase of booksellers'
catalogues and their wide circulation amongst the trade
has already produced a hateful uniformity of prices.
Go where you will it is all the same to the odd sixpence.
Time was when you could map out the country for
yourself with some hopefulness of plunder. There
were districts where the Elizabethan dramatists were
but slenderly protected. A raid into the " bonnie
North Countrie " sent you home again cheered with
chap-books and weighted with old pamphlets of curious
interest; whilst the West of England seldom failed to
yield a crop of novels. I remember getting a complete
set of the Bronte books in the original issues at Torquay,
I may say, for nothing. Those days are over. Your
country bookseller is, in fact, more likely, such tales
does he hear of London auctions, and such catalogues
does he receive by every post, to exaggerate the value
of his wares than to part with them pleasantly, and as
a country bookseller should, " just to clear my shelves,
you know, and give me a bit of room." The only
compensation for this is the catalogues themselves.
You get them, at least, for nothing, and it cannot be
denied that they make mighty pretty reading.

These high prices tell their own tale, and force
upon us the conviction that there never were so
many private libraries in course of growth as there
are to-day.

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL 51

Libraries are not made; they grow. Your first two
thousand volumes present no difficulty, and cost aston-
ishingly little money. Given £400 and five years, and
an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without
undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste,
surround himself with this number of books, all in his
own language, and thenceforward have at least one
place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
But pride is still out of the question. To be proud of
having two thousand books would be absurd. You
might as well be proud of having two top-coats. After
your first two thousand difficulty begins, but until you
have ten thousand volumes the less you say about your
library the better. Then you may begin to speak.

It is no doubt a pleasant thing to have a library left
you. The present writer will disclaim no such legacy,
but hereby undertakes to accept it, however dusty.
But, good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to
collect one. Each volume then, however lightly a
stranger's eye may roam from shelf to shelf, has its
own individuality, a history of its own. You remember
where you got it, and how much you gave for it; and
your word may safely be taken for the first of these
facts, but not for the second.

The man who has a library of his own collection is
able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified
in believing in his own existence. No other man but he
would have made precisely such a combination as his.
Had he been in any single respect different from what
he is, his library, as it exists, never would have existed.
Therefore, surely he may exclaim, as in the gloaming
he contemplates the backs of his loved ones, "They
are mine, and I am theirs."

But the eternal note of sadness will find its way even

52 MODERN ESSAYS

through the keyhole of a library. You turn some
familiar page, of Shakespeare it may be, and his "in-
finite variety," his "multitudinous mind," suggests
some new thought, and as you are wondering over it,
you think of Lycidas, your friend, and promise yourself
the pleasure of having his opinion of your discovery
the very next time when by the fire you two "help
waste a sullen day." Or it is, perhaps, some quainter,
tenderer fancy that engages your solitary attention,
something in Sir Philip Sidney or Henry Vaughan, and
then you turn to look for Phyllis, ever the best inter-
preter of love, human or divine. Alas ! the printed page
grows hazy beneath a filmy eye as you suddenly re-
member that Lycidas is dead — "dead ere his prime,"
— and that the pale cheek of Phyllis will never again be
relumined by the white light of her pure enthusiasm.
And then you fall to thinking of the inevitable, and
perhaps, in your present mood, not unwelcome hour,
when the "ancient peace" of your old friends will .be
disturbed, when rude hands will dislodge them from their
accustomed nooks and break up their goodly company.

Death bursts amongst them like a shell,
And strews them over half the town.

They will form new combinations, lighten other men's
toil, and soothe another's sorrow. Fool that I was to
call anything minel

VISCOUNT BRYCE 53

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

James Bryce: Introduction to Speeches and
Letters of Abraham Lincoln, 1832-1865

No man since Washington has become to Americans
so familiar or so beloved a figure as Abraham Lincoln.
He is to them the representative and typical American,
the man who best embodies the political ideals of the
nation. He is typical in the fact that he sprang from
the masses of the people, that he remained through his
whole career a man of the people, that his chief desire
was to be in accord with the beliefs and wishes of the
people, that he never failed to trust in the people and
to rely on their support. Every native American knows
his life and his speeches. His anecdotes and witticisms
have passed into the thought and the conversation
of the whole nation as those of no other statesman
have done.

He belongs, however, not only to the United States,
but to the whole of civilised mankind. It is no exag-
geration to say that he has, within the last thirty years,
grown to be a conspicuous figure in the history of the
modern world. Without him, the course of events, not
only in the western hemisphere but in Europe also,
would have been different, for he was called to guide
at the greatest crisis of its fate a State already mighty,
and now far more mighty than in his days, and the
guidance he gave has affected the march of events ever
since. A life and a character such as his ought to be
known to and comprehended by Europeans as well as

54 MODERN ESSAYS

by Americans. Among Europeans, it is especially
Englishmen who ought to appreciate him and under-
stand the significance of his life, for he came of an
English stock, he spoke the English tongue, his action
told upon the progress of events and the' shaping of
opinion in all British communities everywhere more than
it has done upon any other nation outside America itself.
This collection of Lincoln's speeches seeks to make
him known by his words as readers of history know
him by his deeds. In popularly-governed countries the
great statesman is almost of necessity an orator, though
his eminence as a speaker may be no true measure
either of his momentary power or of his permanent
fame, for wisdom, courage and tact bear little direct
relation to the gift for speech. But whether that gift
be present in greater or in lesser degree, the character
and ideas of a statesman are best studied through his
own words. This is particularly true of Lincoln, because
he was not what may be called a professional orator.
There have been famous orators whose speeches we may
read for the beauty of their language or for the wealth
of ideas they contain, with comparatively little regard
to the circumstances of time and place that led to
their being delivered. Lincoln is not one of these.
His speeches need to be studied in close relation to the
occasions which called them forth. They are not philo-
sophical lucubrations or brilliant displays of rhetoric.
They are a part of his life. They are the expression of
his convictions, and derive no small part of their weight
and dignity from the fact that they deal with grave
and urgent questions, and express the spirit in which
he approached those questions. Few great characters
stand out so clearly revealed by their words, whether
spoken or written, as he does.

VISCOUNT BRYCE 55

Accordingly Lincoln's discourses are not like those of
nearly all the men whose eloquence has won them fame.
When we think of such men as Pericles, Demosthenes,
iEschines, Cicero, Hortensius, Burke, Sheridan, Erskine,
Canning, Webster, Gladstone, Bright, Massillon, Ver-
gniaud, Castelar, we think of exuberance of ideas or of
phrases, of a command of appropriate similes or meta-
phors, of the gifts of invention and of exposition, of
imaginative flights, or outbursts of passion fit to stir
and rouse an audience to like passion. We think of the
orator as gifted with a powerful or finely-modulated
voice, an imposing presence, a graceful delivery. Or
if — remembering that Lincoln was by profession a
lawyer and practised until he became President of the
United States — we think of the special gifts which
mark the forensic orator, we should expect to find a
man full of ingenuity and subtlety, one dexterous in
handling his case in such wise as to please and capture
the judge or the jury whom he addresses, one skilled in
those rhetorical devices and strokes of art which can be
used, when need be, to engage the listener's feelings and
distract his mind from the real merits of the issue.

Of all this kind of talent there was in Lincoln but
little. He was not an artful pleader; indeed, it was said
of him that he could argue well only those cases in the
justice of which he personally believed, and was unable
to make the worse appear the better reason. For most
of the qualities which the world admires in Cicero or
in Burke we should look in vain in Lincoln's speeches.
They are not fine pieces of exquisite diction, fit to be
declaimed as school exercises or set before students as
models of composition.

What, then, are their merits ? and why do they deserve
to be valued and remembered? How comes it that a

56 MODERN ESSAYS

man of first-rate powers was deficient in qualities apper-
taining to his own profession which men less remarkable
have possessed?

To answer this question, let us first ask what were
the preparation and training Abraham Lincoln had for
oratory, whether political or forensic.

Born in rude and abject poverty, he had never any
education, except what he gave himself, till he was
approaching manhood. Not even books wherewith to
inform and train his mind were within his reach. No
school, no university, no legal faculty had any part
in training his powers. When he became a lawyer and
a politician, the years most favourable to continuous
study had already passed, and the opportunities he
found for reading were very scanty. He knew but few
authors in general literature, though he knew those few
thoroughly. He taught himself a little mathematics,
but he could read no language save his own, and can
have had only the faintest acquaintance with European
history or with any branch of philosophy.

The want of regular education was not made up for
by the persons among whom his lot was cast. Till he
was a grown man, he never moved in any society from
which he could learn those things with which the mind
of an orator or a statesman ought to be stored. Even
after he had gained some legal practice, there was for
many years no one for him to mix with except the
petty practitioners of a petty town, men nearly all of
whom knew little more than he did himself.

Schools gave him nothing, and society gave him
nothing. But he had a powerful intellect and a resolute
will. Isolation fostered not only self-reliance but the
habit of reflection, and, indeed, of prolonged and intense
reflection. He made all that he knew a part of himself.

VISCOUNT BRYCE 57

He thought everything out for himself. His convictions
were his own — clear and coherent. He was not positive
or opinionated, and he did not deny that at certain
moments he pondered and hesitated long before he
decided on his course. But though he could keep a
policy in suspense, waiting for events to guide him, he
did not waver. He paused and reconsidered, but it
was never his way either to go back upon a decision
once made, or to waste time in vain regrets that all he
expected had not been attained. He took advice readily,
and left many things to his ministers; but he did not
lean upon his advisers. Without vanity or ostentation,
he was always independent, self-contained, prepared to
take full responsibility for his acts.

That he was keenly observant of all that passed under
his eyes, that his mind played freely round everything it
touched, we know from the accounts of his talk, which
first made him famous in the town and neighbourhood
where he lived. His humour, and his memory for
anecdotes which he could bring out to good purpose
at the right moment, are qualities which Europe deems
distinctively American, but no great man of action
in the nineteenth century, even in America, possessed
them in the same measure. Seldom has so acute a
power of observation been found united to so abundant
a power of sympathy.

These remarks may seem to belong to a study of his
character rather than of his speeches, yet they are not
irrelevant, because the interest of his speeches lies in
their revelation of his character. Let us, however,
return to the speeches and to the letters, some of
which, given in this volume, are scarcely less note-
worthy than are the speeches.

What are the distinctive merits of these speeches and

58 MODERN ESSAYS

letters? There is less humour in them than his reputa-
tion as a humorist would have led us to expect. They
are serious, grave, practical. We feei that the man
does not care to play over the surface of the subject,
or to use it as a way of displaying his cleverness. He
is trying to get right down to the very foundation of
the matter and tell us what his real thoughts about it
are. In this respect he sometimes reminds us of Bis-
marck's speeches, which, in their rude, broken, forth-
darting way, always go straight to their destined aim;
always hit the nail on the head. So too, in their effort
to grapple with fundamental facts, Lincoln's bear a
sort of likeness to Cromwell's speeches, though Crom-
well has far less power of utterance, and always seems
to be wrestling with the difficulty of finding language
to convey to others what is plain, true and weighty to
himself. This difficulty makes the great Protector,
though we can usually see what he is driving at, fre-
quently confused and obscure. Lincoln, however, is
always clear. Simplicit}', directness and breadth are
the notes of his thought. Aptness, clearness, and again
simplicity, are the notes of his diction. The American
speakers of his generation, like most of those of the pre-
ceding generation, but unlike those of that earlier genera-
tion to which Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Marshall
and Maddison belonged, were generally infected by a
floridity which made them a byword in Europe. Even
men of brilliant talent, such as Edward Everett, were
by no means free from this straining after effect by
highly-coloured phrases and theatrical effects. Such
faults have to-day virtually vanished from the United
States, largely from a change in public taste, to which
perhaps the example set by Lincoln himself may have
contributed. In the forties and fifties florid rhetoric

VISCOUNT BRYCE 59

was rampant, especially in the West and South, where
taste was less polished than in the older States. That
Lincoln escaped it is a striking mark of his independence
as well as of his greatness. There is no superfluous
ornament in his orations, nothing tawdry, nothing
otiose. For the most part, he addresses the reason of
his hearers, and credits them with desiring to have
none but solid arguments laid before them. When he
does appeal to emotion, he does it quietly, perhaps
even solemnly. The note struck is always a high note.
The impressiveness of the appeal comes not from fervid
vehemence of language, but from the sincerity of his
own convictions. Sometimes one can see that through
its whole course the argument is suffused by the speaker's
feeling, and when the time comes for the feeling to be
directly expressed, it glows not with fitful flashes, but
with the steady heat of an intense and strenuous soul.
The impression which most of the speeches leave on
the reader is that their matter has been carefully thought
over even when the words have not been learnt by
heart. But there is an anecdote that on one occasion,
early in his career, Lincoln went to a public meeting not
in the least intending to speak, but presently being
called for by the audience, rose in obedience to the
call, and delivered a long address so ardent and thrilling
that the reporters dropped their pencils and, absorbed
in watching him, forgot to take down what he said. It
has also been stated, on good authority, that on his
way in the railroad cars to the dedication of the monu-
ment on the field of Gettysburg, he turned to a Penn-
sylvanian gentleman who was sitting beside him and
remarked, "I suppose I shall be expected to say some-
thing this afternoon; lend me a pencil and a bit of
paper," and that he thereupon jotted down the notes

6o MODERN ESSAYS

of a speech which has become the best known and
best remembered of all his utterances, so that some of
its words and sentences have passed into the minds of
all educated men everywhere.

That famous Gettysburg speech is the best example
one could desire of the characteristic quality of Lincoln's
eloquence. It is a short speech. It is wonderfully terse
in expression. It is quiet, so quiet that at the moment
it did not make upon the audience, an audience wrought
up by a long and highly-decorated harangue from one
of the prominent orators of the day, an impression at
all commensurate to that which it began to make as
soon as it was read over America and Europe. There
is in it not a touch of what we call rhetoric, or of any
striving after effect. Alike in thought and in language
it is simple, plain, direct. But it states certain truths
and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so forcible,
that one feels as if those truths could have been con-
veyed in no other words, and as if this deliverance of
them were made for all time. Words so simple and so
strong could have come only from one who had medi-
tated so long upon the primal facts of American history
and popular government that the truths those facts
taught him had become like the truths of mathematics
in their clearness, their breadth, and their precision.

The speeches on Slavery read strange to us now, when
slavery as a living system has been dead for forty years,
dead and buried hell deep under the detestation of
mankind. It is hard for those whose memory does not
go back to 1865 to realise that down till then it was
not only a terrible fact, but was defended — defended
by many otherwise good men, defended not only by
pseudo-scientific anthropologists as being in the order
of nature, but by ministers of the Gospel, out of the

VISCOUNT BRYCE 61

sacred Scriptures, as part of the ordinances of God.
Lincoln's position, the position of one who had to
induce slave-owning fellow-citizens to listen to him and
admit persuasion into their heated and prejudiced
minds, did not allow him to denounce it with horror,
as we can all so easily do to-day. But though his lan-
guage is calm and restrained, he never condescends to
palter with slavery. He shows its innate evils and
dangers with unanswerable force. The speech on the
Dred Scott decision is a lucid, close and cogent piece
of reasoning which, in its wide view of Constitutional
issues, sometimes reminds one of Webster — sometimes
even of Burke, though it does not equal the former in
weight nor the latter in splendour of diction.

Among the letters, perhaps the most impressive is
that written to Mrs. Bixley, the mother of five sons
who had died fighting for the Union in the armies of
the North. It is short, and it deals with a theme on
which hundreds of letters are written daily. But I do
not know where the nobility of self-sacrifice for a great
cause, and of the consolation which the thought of a
sacrifice so made should bring, is set forth with such
simple and pathetic beauty. Deep must be the fountains
from which there issues so pure a stream.

The career of Lincoln is often held up to ambitious
young Americans as an example to show what a man
may achieve by his native strength, with no advantages
of birth or environment or education. In this there
is nothing improper, nothing fanciful. The moral is
one which may well be drawn, and in which those on
whose early life Fortune has not smiled may find
encouragement. But the example is, after all, no great
encouragement to ordinary men, for Lincoln was an
extraordinary man.

62 MODERN ESSAYS

He triumphed over the adverse conditions of his
early years because Nature had bestowed on him high
and rare powers. Superficial observers who saw his
homely aspect and plain manners, and noted that his
fellow-townsmen, when asked why they so trusted him,
answered that it was for his common-sense, failed to
see that his common-sense was a part of his genius.
What is common-sense but the power of seeing the
fundamentals of any practical question, and of dis-
engaging them from the accidental and transient features
that may overlie these fundamentals — the power, to use
a familiar expression, of getting down to bed-rock ? One
part of this power is the faculty for perceiving what the
average man will think and can be induced to do. This
is what keeps the superior mind in touch with the
ordinary mind, and this is perhaps why the name of
"common-sense" is used, because the superior mind
seems in its power of comprehending others to be itself
a part of the general sense of the community. All men
of high practical capacity have this power. It is the
first condition of success. But in men who have received
a philosophical or literary education there is a tendency
to embellish, for purposes of persuasion, or perhaps for
their own gratification, the language in which they
recommend their conclusions, or to state those con-
clusions in the light of large general principles, a ten-
dency which may, unless carefully watched, carry them
too high above the heads of the crowd. Lincoln, never
having had such an education, spoke to the people as
one of themselves. He seemed to be saying not only
what each felt, but expressing the feeling just as each
would have expressed it. In reality, he was quite as
much above his neighbours in insight as was the polished
orator or writer, but the plain directness of his language

VISCOUNT BRYCE 63

seemed to keep him on their level. His strength lay less
in the form and vesture of the thought than in the
thought itself, in the large, simple, practical view which
he took of the position. And thus, to repeat what has
been said already, the sterling merit of these speeches
of his, that which made them effective when they were
delivered and makes them worth reading to-day, is to
be found in the justness of his conclusions and their
fitness to the circumstances of the time. When he rose
into higher air, when his words were clothed with state-
liness and solemnity, it was the force of his conviction
and the emotion that thrilled through his utterance,
that printed the words deep upon the minds and drove
them home to the hearts of the people.

What is a great man? Common speech, which after
all must be our guide to the sense of the terms which
the world uses, gives this name to many sorts of men.
How far greatness lies in the power and range of the
intellect, how far in the strength of the will, how far in
elevation of view and aim and purpose, — this is a
question too large to be debated here. But of Abraham
Lincoln it may be truly said that in his greatness all
three elements were present. He had not the brilliance,
either in thought or word or act, that dazzles, nor the
restless activity that occasionally pushes to the front
even persons with gifts not of the first order. He was
a patient, thoughtful, melancholy man, whose intelli-
gence, working sometimes slowly but always steadily
and surely, was capacious enough to embrace, and
vigorous enough to master, the incomparably difficult
facts and problems he was called to deal with. His
executive talent showed itself not in sudden and start-
ling strokes, but in the calm serenity with which
he formed his judgments and laid his plans, in the

64 MODERN ESSAYS

undismayed firmness with which he adhered to them in
the face of popular clamour, of conflicting counsels
from his advisers, sometimes, even, of what others
deemed all but hopeless failure. These were the qualities
needed in one who had to pilot the Republic through
the heaviest storm that had ever broken upon it. But
the mainspring of his power, and the truest evidence
of his greatness, lay in the nobility of his aims, in the
fervour of his conviction, in the stainless rectitude
which guided his action and won for him the confidence
of the people. Without these things neither the vigour
of his intellect nor the firmness of his will could
have availed.

There is a vulgar saying that all great men are un-
scrupulous. Of him it may rather be said that the
note of greatness we feel in his thinking and his speech
and his conduct had its source in the loftiness and
purity of his character. Lincoln's is one of the careers
that refute this imputation on human nature.

G. K. CHESTERTON 65

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S ESSAYS

G. K. Chesterton : Introduction to Matthew
Arnold's Essays

Our actual obligations to Matthew Arnold are almost
beyond expression. His very faults reformed us. The
chief of his services may perhaps be stated thus, that
he discovered (for the modern English) the purely
intellectual importance of humility. He had none of
that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and
good men. But he had a cold humility which he had
discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence.
To see things clearly, he said, you must "get yourself
out of the way." The weakness of pride lies after all
in this: that oneself is a window. It can be a coloured
window, if you will; but the more thickly you lay on
the colours the less of a window it will be. The two
things to be done with a window are to wash it and
then forget it. So the truly pious have always said
the two things to do personally are to cleanse and
to forget oneself.

Matthew Arnold found the window of the English
soul opaque with its own purple. The Englishman had
painted his own image on the pane so gorgeously that
it was practically a dead panel; it had no opening on
the world without. He could not see the most obvious
and enormous objects outside his own door. The
Englishman could not see (for instance) that the French
Revolution was a far-reaching, fundamental and most

66 MODERN ESSAYS

practical and successful change in the whole structure
of Europe. He really thought that it was a bloody
and futile episode, in weak imitation of an English
General Election. The Englishman could not see that
the Catholic Church was (at the very least) an immense
and enduring Latin civilisation, linking us to the lost
civilisations of the Mediterranean. He really thought
it was a sort of sect. The Englishman could not see that
the Franco-Prussian war was the entrance of a new and
menacing military age, a terror to England and to all.
He really thought it was a little lesson to Louis Napoleon
for not reading the Times. The most enormous catas-
trophe was only some kind of symbolic compliment to
England. If the sun fell from Heaven it only showed
how wise England was in not having much sunshine.
If the waters were turned to blood it was only an adver-
tisement for Bass's Ale or Fry's Cocoa. Such was the
weak pride of the English then. One cannot say that
is wholly undiscoverable now.

But Arnold made war on it. One excellent point
which he made in many places was to this effect: that
those very foreign tributes to England which English-
men quoted as showing their own merit were examples
of the particular foreign merit which we did not share.
Frenchmen bragged about France and Germans about
Germany, doubtless; but they retained just enough of
an impartial interest in the mere truth itself to remark
upon the more outstanding and obvious of the superiori-
ties of England. Arnold justly complained that when
a Frenchman wrote about English political liberty we
always thought it a tribute simply to English political
liberty. We never thought of it as a tribute to French
philosophical liberty. Examples of this are still rele-
vant. A Frenchman wrote some time ago a book

G. K. CHESTERTON 67

called A quoi tient la super write des Anglo-Saxons?
What Englishman dare write a book called " What
causes the Superiority of Frenchmen " ? But this lucid
abnegation is a power. When a Frenchman calls a
book " What is the Superiority of Englishmen? " we
ought to point to that book and say: "This is the
superiority of Frenchmen."

This humility, as I say, was with Arnold a mental
need. He was not naturally a humble man; he might
even be called a supercilious one. But he was driven
to preaching humility merely as a thing to clear the head.
He found the virtue which was just then being flung in
the mire as fit only for nuns and slaves: and he saw
that it was essential to philosophers. The most unpracti-
cal merit of ancient piety became the most practical
merit of modern investigation. I repeat, he did not
understand that headlong and happy humility which
belongs to the more beautiful souls of the simpler ages.
He did not appreciate the force (nor perhaps the humour)
of St. Francis of Assisi when he called his own body
" my brother the donkey." That is to say, he did not
realise a certain feeling deep in all mystics in the face
of the dual destiny. He did not realise their feeling
(full both of fear and laughter) that the body is an
animal and a very comic animal. Matthew Arnold
could never have felt any part of himself to be purely
comic — not even his singular whiskers. He would
never, like Father Juniper, have " played see-saw to
abase himself." In a word, he had little sympathy
with the old ecstasies of self-effacement. But for this
very reason it is all the more important that his main
work was an attempt to preach some kind of self-
effacement even to his own self-assertive age. He realised
that the saints had even understated the case for humility.

68 MODERN ESSAYS

They had always said that without humility we should
never see the better world to come. He realised that
without humility we could not even see this world.

Nevertheless, as I have said, a certain tincture of pride
was natural to him, and prevented him from appreciat-
ing some things of great human value. It prevented
him for instance from having an adequate degree of
popular sympathy. He had (what is so rare in England)
the sense of the state as one thing, consisting of all its
citizens, the Senatus Populusque Romanus. But he had
not the feeling of familiarity with the loves and hungers
of the common man, which is the essence of the egali-
tarian sentiment. He was a republican, but he was not
a democrat. He contemptuously dismissed the wage-
earning, beer-drinking, ordinary labourers of England
as "merely populace." They are not populace; they
are merely mankind. If you do not like them you do
not like mankind. And when all the rdle of Arnold's
real glories has been told, there always does remain
a kind of hovering doubt as to whether he did like
mankind.

But of course the key of Arnold's in most matters is
that he deliberately conceived himself to be a corrective.
He prided himself not upon telling the truth but upon
telling the unpopular half-truth. He blamed his contem-
poraries, Carlyle for instance, not for telling falsehoods,
but simply for telling popular truths. And certainly in the
case of Carlyle and others he was more or less right.
Carlyle professed to be a Jeremiah and even a misan-
thrope. But he was really a demagogue and, in one
sense, even a flatterer. He was entirely sincere as all
good demagogues are ; he merely shared all the peculiar
vanities and many of the peculiar illusions of the people
to whom he spoke. He told Englishmen that they

G. K. CHESTERTON 69

were Teutons, that they were Vikings, that they were
practical politicians — all the things they like to be told
they are, all the things that they are not. He told
them, indeed, with a dark reproachfulness, that their
strengths were lying neglected or inert. Still he reminded
them of their strengths; and they liked him. But they
did not like Arnold, who placidly reminded them of
their weaknesses.

Arnold suffered, however, from thus consenting merely
to correct; from thus consenting to tell the half-truth
that was neglected. He reached at times a fanaticism
that was all the more extraordinary because it was a
fanaticism of moderation, an intemperance of temperance.
This may be seen, I think, in the admirable argument
for classical supremacy to which so much of this selection
is devoted. He saw and very rightly asserted that the
fault of the Mid- Victorian English was that they did
not seem to have any sense of definite excellence.
Nothing could be better than the way in which he
points out in the very important essay on " The Func-
tion of Criticism at the Present Time " that the French
admit into intellectual problems the same principle of
clearly stated and generally admitted dogmas which
all of us in our daily lives admit into moral problems.
The French, as he puts it in a good summarising phrase,
have a conscience in literary matters. Upon the opposite
English evil he poured perpetual satire. That any man
who had money enough to start a paper could start a
paper and say it was as good as the Athenceum', that
anyone who had money enough to run a school could
run a school and say it was as good as Winchester;
these marks of the English anarchy he continually
denounced. But he hardly sufficiently noticed that if
this English extreme of a vulgar and indiscriminate

70 MODERN ESSAYS

acceptance be most certainly an extreme and something
of a madness, it is equally true that his own celebration
of excellence when carried past a certain point might
become a very considerable madness also; indeed has
become such a madness in some of the artistic epochs
of the world. It is true that a man is in some danger
of becoming a lunatic if he builds a stucco house and
says it is as fine as the Parthenon. But surely a man
is equally near to a lunatic if he refuses to live in any
house except the Parthenon. A frantic hunger for
all kinds of inappropriate food may be a mark of a
lunatic; but it is also the mark of a lunatic to be
fastidious about food.

One of the immense benefits conferred on us bjr
Matthew Arnold lay in the fact that he recalled to us
the vital fact that we are Europeans. He had a con-
sciousness of Europe much fuller and firmer than that
of any of the great men of his epoch. For instance,
he admired the Germans as Carlyle admired the Germans ;
perhaps he admired the Germans too much as Carlyle
admired the Germans too much. But he was not
deluded by any separatist follies about the superiority
of a Teutonic race. If he admired the Germans it was
for being European, signally and splendidly European.
He did not, like Carlyle, admire the Germans for being
German. Like Carlyle he relied much on the sagacity
of Goethe. But the sagacity of Goethe upon which
he relied was not a rugged or cloudy sagacity, the
German element in Goethe. It was the Greek element
in Goethe ; a lucid and equalised sagacity, a moderation
and a calm such as Carlyle could not have admired,
nay, could not even have imagined. Arnold did indeed
wish, as every sane European wishes, that the nations
that make up Europe should continue to be individual;

G. K. CHESTERTON 71

that the contributions from the nations should be
national. But he did wish that the contributions should
be contributions, parts, that is, of a common cause
and unity, the cause and unity of European civilisation.
He desired that Germany should be great, so as to make
Europe great. He would not have desired that Germany
should grow great so as to make Europe small. Any-
thing, however big and formidable, which tended to
divide us from the common culture of our continent
he would have regarded as a crotchet. Puritanism he
regarded at bottom as only an enormous crotchet.
The Anglo-Saxon race most certainly he would have
regarded as an enormous crotchet.

In this respect it is curious to notice how English
public opinion has within our own time contrived to
swing from one position to the contrary position with-
out her touching that central position which Arnold
loved. He found the English people in a mood which
seemed to him unreal and un-European, but this mood
was one of smug Radical mediocrity, contemptuous of
arts and aims of high policy and of national honour.
Ten years after his death the English people were
waving Union Jacks and shouting for " La Revanche."
Yet though they had passed thus rapidly from extreme
anti-militarism to extreme militarism they had never
touched on the truth that Arnold had to tell. Whether
as anti-militarists or as militarists, they were alike
ignorant of the actualities of our Aryan civilisation.
They have passed from tameness to violence with-
out touching strength. Whenever they really touch
strength they will (with their wonderful English strength)
do a number of things. One of the things may be to
save the world. Another of the things will certainly
be to thank Matthew Arnold.

72 MODERN ESSAYS

IN THE READING ROOM
James Douglas: Adventures in London.

Your cockney likes noise. I am sure he would go mad
if there were silence in London for the space of half-
an-hour. He would feel that the foundations of the
earth had given way, and that the bottom of the
universe had dropped out.

Have you observed that a sudden silence produces the
sensation of falling through space? Thus Satan must
have felt during those nine days while he was executing
the finest backfall ever seen on any stage. It is now,
unhappily, impossible to arrange for a nine days' drop,
but you can procure the equivalent silence. Therefore,
I prescribe for all sound-wounded persons a sojourn in
the Reading Room.

In that noiseless mausoleum they may enjoy a perfect
rest cure without money and without price. It is a
securer retreat than any sanitarium. Its cloistral
peace is more impermeable than any club. The
Athenaeum compared to it is a gabble-den, and White's
a choral hell. It is a more inviolate sanctuary than a
Trappist Monastery. It is serener than the crypt of
St. Paul's.

Its inmates live in a vow of silence. It is a crime
even to whisper and a sin to sigh. The orchestral
cough that ravages the church and the theatre here
is hushed, and your ears are not lacerated by the rustle
of newspapers and the crackle of silken skirts. The

J. DOUGLAS 73

human voice is not heard under this crystal dome.
Here the pen is wool-shod and the nose seldom becomes
a trumpet on which fiends blow soul-desolating strains.
A fig for your nursing-homes! Give me the Reading
Room Cure!

But noise is not the only plague from which the
Reading Room provides a means of escape. It is a
sure refuge against fresh air. London is a city of
draughts. Its houses are caves of Boreas. Its theatres
are conclaves of the four winds. Its churches are
swept by icy gales. Its " Tubes " are fit only for men
of stone. Through them rush a perpetual tornado,
a continuous typhoon. To travel in them is like being
a pea in a pea-shooter. You are blown to your des-
tination. The pier at Brighton is stuffy compared to
these subterranean resorts. The bitter blast congeals
you at all angles. It hacks and hews your shivering
body like the Maiden, that mediaeval instrument of
torture which clasped the victim with enveloping knives,
cutting him into little pieces before he could gasp.
To such a pass has the insane passion for fresh air
brought us.

But, thank heaven! there is one place in London
where there is no fresh air. Thank heaven for the nobly
conservative Trustees of the British Museum. They
have kept the Reading Room free from the pestilence
that is making London unfit to live in. Thanks to
their stern conservative principles, one can be as cosy
as a mummy in an airtight sarcophagus, as comfortable
as a corpse in a healthy old vault. Why should the
dead monopolise all the privileges ? It puts a premium
upon suicide, for the thought of the draughtless coffin
makes one fall in love with snug and airless death. It
is as well that the Reading Room helps us to endure

74 MODERN ESSAYS

the windy world. No fault can be found with the foul-
ness of the air. It is richly laden with those germs of
which science desires to rob us. I love bacteria, and
microbes are my closest friends. I abhor the lonely
solitude of a sanitary atmosphere. It would be as
bleak as the ether. Filtered air and filtered water are
both abominable. For me the full-bodied vintage of
the Thames, the fruity nectar of the Lea, and the germ-
congested air of the Reading Room.

Of late I see with boding terror dim signs of revolu-
tion in the Reading Room. The hoof of reform is
vaguely seen in the sallow light I love. Leather tags
have been attached to the back of the sedate volumes
of the vastest catalogue in the world. A gross indig-
nity! I blush when I pull out a volume as if I were
pulling on a boot. And there is a villainous air of
newness about the whole place. Some fierce charwoman
has lately been let loose. The old pens and the ink
bottles have been swept away from the catalogue
desks, and no longer can they rest lovingly upon the
splashes and splotches of ink. A horrible tidiness
infests the Reading Room. The slips on which you
write your application are no longer strewn on the
desks. They are kept, like the lodgment forms in
a bank, in bilious oak boxes.

I know how this ferocious charwoman will end. She
will let in the fresh air. She will evict my beloved
microbes. Already I hear the pneumatic tubes that will
hurl books at your heads like bricks the moment you
ask for them. All the dear delays, the fond procras-
tinations, the dignified circumlocutions will be rudely
abolished. The large indolence of our beehive will be
destroyed. We shall be compelled to hustle like the
Chicago frog. You know the story. A Boston frog

J. DOUGLAS 75

and a Chicago frog fell into a basin of cream. The
Boston frog resigned himself to a lingering death.
The Chicago frog bade him hustle. He declined to
hustle. The Chicago frog hustled, and in the morning
they found the Chicago frog dead, and the Boston frog
sitting on a pat of butter. Now, I will hustle outside
the Reading Room, but not in it. Therefore, let the
charwoman pause, for many valueless lives will be lost
if she blights us with fresh air and pneumonia.

I like to figure the Reading Room as the Labyrinth
of Literature. In it weird men and weird women
wander, each following a separate lure. Its geometrical
aisles and alleys exhale an ironic symbolism. In the
central circle sit the minions of the Minotaur who feed
on human ambition. Round them in concentric eddies
are the catalogue desks. The letters of the alphabet
preside over the silent session of clues. It is a long
walk from A to Z. I often make a mental obeisance to
the Roman alphabet whose twenty-six potentates loom
here like gods. Consider their empire. Out of their
permutations and combinations are made the millions
of books that line those walls and all the invisible
galleries and catacombs behind them. Almighty
alphabet! Yet, I, man, invented it casually in my
leisure hours. Am I not wonderful?

Behold me, in various guises, sitting at my numbered
desk. Rows on rows of me, hunched in all sorts of
attitudes, garbed in all kinds of clothes, absorbed in
all varieties of industry, bees in the biggest beehive on
earth. Here my bald head glows like ivory under the
beams of the electric lamp. There I am a dreaming
girl, my warm youth and fresh grace mocking the
printed dead. Now I am a grizzled grandmother,
spectacled, wrinkled, rheumy -eyed. Now I am a

76

MODERN ESSAYS

serious boy with smooth cheek and careless curls. Are
these shadows real? They glide languidly to and fro
like the drowsy fish that moon behind the muddy glass
of an aquarium. They are inhumanly unaware of each
other. They are unconscious of each other's absurdity.
The Reading Room is rich in eccentric characters,
mostly parasites. I have seen Micawber there and Dick
Swiveller, Mr. Dick and Sylvestre Bonnard. Many of
these strange beings are slaves of habit. They sit on
the same seat day after day, year after year. Samuel
Butler once complained bitterly because he could not
get Frost's Lives of the Early Christians. He had been
wont to lay his papers on it, and its loss paralysed him.
Many of those barnacles would die if they were dis-
lodged. They are adhesive habits. Rarely do you see
famous men in this sepulchre. It is the haunt of
dry-as-dusts, hacks, compilers, and vampers. Yet it is
a pathetic tomb. If we could catalogue the hopes and
despairs that have come and gone through those
ever-swinging doors we should have a microcosm of life,
a dusty sunbeam peopled with those motes of irony,
the ghosts of the living and the phantoms of the dead.

A. G. GARDINER 77

ON BOSWELL AND HIS MIRACLE
A. G. Gardiner : Pebbles on the Shore

As I passed along Great Queen Street the other evening
I saw that Boswell's house, so long threatened, is at
last falling a victim to the house-breaker. The fact is
one of the by-products of the war. While the Huns
are abroad in Belgium the Vandals are busy at home.
You may see them at work on every hand. The few
precious remains we have of the past are vanishing
like snows before the south wind.

In the Strand there is a great heap of rubbish where,
when the war began, stood two fine old houses of
Charles II. 's London. Their 'disappearance would, in
normal times, have set all the Press in revolt. But
they have gone without a murmur, so preoccupied are
we with more urgent matters. And so with the Eliza-
bethan houses in Cloth Fair. They have been demol-
ished without a word of protest. And what devastation
is afoot in Lincoln's Inn among those fine reposeful
dwellings, hardly one of which is without some historic
or literary interest!

In the midst of all this vandalism it was too much
perhaps to hope that Boswell's house would escape.
Bozzy was not an Englishman ; his residence in London
was casual, and, what is more to the point, he has only
a reflected greatness. Macaulay's judgment of him is
now felt to be too harsh, but even his warmest advocate
must admit that his picture of himself is not engaging.
He was gross in his habits, full of little malevolences

78 MODERN ESSAYS

(observe the spitefulness of his references to Gold-
smith), and his worship of Johnson was abject to the
point of nausea.

He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and
treasured the dirt that came from the great man's
heavy boots. No insult levelled at him was too out-
rageous to be recorded with pride. " You were drunk
last night, you dog," says Johnson to him one morning
during the tour in the Hebrides, and down goes the
remark as if he had received the most gracious of good
mornings. " Have you no better manners? " says
Johnson on another occasion. " There is your want."
And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub
together with his apologies. And so when he has been
expressing his emotions on hearing music. " Sir," said
Johnson, " I should never hear it if it made me such
a fool."

Once indeed he rebelled. It was when they were
dining with a company at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. John-
son attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that he
kept away from him for a week. His story of the
reconciliation is one of the most delightful things in
that astonishing book.

" After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of
the room and we were by ourselves, he drew his chair
near to mine and said, in a tone of conciliatory courtesy :
' Well, how have you done ? ' Boswell : ' Sir, you have
made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we
were last at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. You know, my
dear sir, no man has a greater respect or affection for
you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to

serve you. Now to treat me so ' He insisted that

I had interrupted him, which I assured him was not
the case; and proceeded, ' But why treat me so before

A. G. GARDINER 79

people who neither love you nor me? ' Johnson:
' Well, I am sorry for it: I'll make it up to you in twenty
different ways, as you please.' Boswell: ' I said to-day
to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me
sometimes, I don't care how often or how high he tosses
me when only friends are present, for then I fall upon
soft ground; but I do not like falling upon stones, which
is the case when enemies are present. I think this
is a pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: ' Sir, it is one
of the happiest I ever have heard.' "

Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff
and Bardolph, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?
Indeed, Bardolph's immortal " Would I were with him
wheresoe'er he be, whether in heaven or in hell," is in
the very spirit of Boswell's devotion to his hero.

It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled
him to work the miracle. His lack of self-respect and
humour, his childish egotism, his love of gossip, his
naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much
to the making of his immortal book as his industry,
his wonderful verbal memory, and his doglike fidelity.
I have said that his greatness is only reflected. But
that is hardly just. It might even be more true to
say that Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell.
Wliat of him would remain to-day but for the man who
took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by licking
the boot that kicked him? Who now reads London,
or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or The Rambler}
I once read Rasselas, and found it pompous and dull.
And I have read The Lives of the Poets, and though they
are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly
poor criticism, and the essay on Milton is, in some
respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came out
of Grub Street.

80 MODERN ESSAYS

But The Li/el What in all the world of books is
there like it ? I have been reading it off and on for more
than thirty years, and still find it inexhaustible. It
ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems
to be a record of my own experiences. I have dined
so often with Johnson at the Mitre and Sir Joshua's
and Langton's and the rest that I know him far better
than the shadows I meet in daily life. I seem to have
been present when he was talking to the King, and when
Goldsmith sulked because he had not shared the honour;
when he met Wilkes, and when he insulted Sir Joshua
and for once got silenced; when he " downed " Robert-
son, and when, for want of a lodging, he and Savage
walked all night round St. James's Square, full of high
spirits and patriotism, inveighing against the Minister
and resolving that " they would stand by their country."

And at the end of it all I feel very much like Mr.
Birrell, who, when asked what he would do when the
Government went out of office, replied, " I shall retire
to the country, and really read Boswell." Not " finish
Boswell," you observe. No one could ever finish
Boswell. No one would ever want to finish Boswell.
Like a sensible man he will just go on reading him
and reading him, and reading him until the light fails
and there is no more reading to be done.

What an achievement for this uncouth Scotch lawyer
to have accomplished! He knew he had done a great
thing; but even he did not know how great a thing.
Had he known he might have answered as proudly as
Dryden answered when some one said to him that his
Ode to St. Cecilia was the finest that had ever been
written. " Or ever will be," said the poet. Dryden's
ode has been eclipsed more than once since it was
written ; but Boswell 's book has never been approached.

A. G. GARDINER

81

It is not only the best thing of its sort in literature:
there is nothing with which one can compare it.

Boswell's house is falling to dust. No matter! His
memorial will last as long as the English speech is
spoken and as long as men love the immortal things of
which it is the vehicle.

82 MODERN ESSAYS

A VOLUME OF OLD PLAYS

Edmund Gosse : Gossip in a Library

In his Ballad of the Book-Hunter, Andrew Lang des-
cribes how, in breeches baggy at the knees, the biblio-
phile hunts in all weathers:

No dismal stall escapes his eye;

He turns o'er tomes of low degrees;
There soiled romanticists may lie.

Or Restoration comedies.

That speaks straight to my heart ; for of all my weaknesses
the weakest is that weakness of mine for Restoration
plays. From 1660 down to 1710 nothing in dramatic
form comes amiss, and I have great schemes, like the
boards on which people play the game of solitaire, in
which space is left for every drama needed to make
this portion of my library complete. It is scarcely
literature, I confess; it is a sport, a long game which
I shall probably be still playing at, with three mouldy
old tragedies and one opera yet needed to complete
my set, when the Reaper comes to carry me where there
is no amassing nor collecting. It would hardly be
credited how much pleasure I have drained out of these
dramas since I began to collect them judiciously in my
still callow youth. I admit only first editions ; but that
is not so rigorous as it sounds, since at least half of the
poor old things never went into a second.

As long as it is Congreve and Dryden and Otway, of
course it is literature, and of a very high order; even

EDMUND GOSSE 83

Shadwell and Mrs. Behn and Southerne are literature;
Settle and Ravenscroft may pass as legitimate literary
curiosity. But there are depths below this where there
is no excuse but sheer collectaneomania. Plays by
people who never got into any schedule of English
letters that ever was planned, dramatic nonentities,
stage innocents massacred in their cradles, if only they
were published in quarto I find room for them. I am
not quite so pleased to get these anonymities, I must
confess, as I am to get a clean, tall editio princeps of
The Orphan or of Love for Love. But I neither reject
nor despise them ; each of them counts one ; each serves
to fill a place on my solitaire board, each hurries on
that dreadful possible time coming when my collection
shall be complete, and I shall have nothing to do but
break my collecting rod and bury it fathoms deep.

A volume has just come in which happens to have
nothing in it but those forgotten plays, whose very
names are unknown to the historians of literature.
First comes The Roman Empress by William Joyner,
printed in 1671. Joyner was an Oxford man, a fellow
of Magdalen College. The little that has been recorded
about him makes one wish to know more. He became
persuaded of the truth of the Catholic faith, and made
a voluntary resignation of his Oxford fellowship. He
had to do something, and so he wrote this tragedy,
which he dedicated to Sir Charles Sedley, the poet, and
got acted at the Theatre Royal. The cast contains
two good actors' names, Mohun and Kynaston, and it
seems that it enjoyed a considerable success. But
doubtless the stage was too rough a field for the gentle
Oxford scholar. He retired into a sequestered country
village, where he lingered on till 1706, when he was
nearly ninety. But joyner was none of the worst of

84 MODERN ESSAYS

poets. Here is a fragment of The Roman Empress,
which is by no means despicably versed:

O thou bright, glorious morning,
Thou Oriental spring-time of the day,
Who with thy mixed vermilion colours paintest
The sky, these hills and plains ! thou dost return
In thy accustom'd manner, but with thee
Shall ne'er return my wonted happiness.

Through his Roman tragedy there runs a pensive
vein of sadness, as though the poet were thinking less
of his Aurelia and his Valentius than of the lost common-
room and the arcades of Magdalen to be no more
revisited.

Our next play is a worse one, but much more pre-
tentious. It is the Usurper, of 1668, the first of four
dramas published by the Hon. Edward Howard, one of
Dry den's aristocratic brothers-in-law. Edward Howard
is memorable for a couplet constantly quoted from his
epic poem of The British Princes:

A vest as admired Vortiger had on,

Which from a naked Pict his grandsire won.

Poor Howard has received the laughter of generations
for representing Vortiger's grandsire as thus having
stripped one who was bare already. But this is the
wickedness of some ancient wag, perhaps of Dryden
himself, who loved to laugh at his brother-in-law. At
all events, the first (and, I suppose, only) edition of
The British Princes is before me at this moment, and
the second of these lines certainly runs:

Which from this island's foes his grandsire won.

Thus do the critics, leaping one after another, like so
many sheep, follow the same wrong track, in this case
for a couple of centuries. The Usurper is a tragedy, in

EDMUND GOSSE 85

which a Parasite, "a most perfidious villain," plays a
mysterious part. He is led off to be hanged at last,
much to the reader's satisfaction who murmurs, in the
words of R. L. Stevenson: "There's an end of that."

But though the Usurper is dull, we reach a lower
depth and muddier lees of wit in the Carnival, a comedy
by Major Thomas Porter, of 1664. It is odd, however,
that the very worst production, if it be more than two
hundred years old, is sure to contain some little thing
interesting to a modern student. The Carnival has one
such peculiarity. Whenever any of the characters is
left alone on the stage, he begins to soliloquise in the
stanza of Gray's Churchyard Elegy. This is a very
quaint innovation, and one which possibly occurred to
brave Major Porter in one of the marches and counter-
marches of the Civil War.

But the man who perseveres is always rewarded, and
the fourth play in our volume really repays us for
pushing on so far. Here is a piece of wild and ghostly
poetry that is well worth digging out of the Duke of
Newcastle's Humorous Lovers:

At curfew-time, and at the dead of night,

I will appear, thy conscious soul to fright,

Make signs, and beckon thee my ghost to follow

To sadder groves, and churchyards, where we'll hollo

To darker caves and solitary woods,

To fatal whirlpools and consuming floods;

I'll tempt thee to pass by the unlucky ewe,

Blasted with cursed droppings of mildew;

Under an oak, that ne'er bore leaf, my moans

Shall there be told thee by the mandrake's groans ;

The winds shall sighing tell thy cruelty,

And how thy want of love did murder me ;

And when the cock shall crow, and day grow near,

Then in a flash of fire I'll disappear.

But I cannot persuade myself that his Grace of

86 MODERN ESSAYS

Newcastle wrote those lines himself. Published in 1677,
they were as much of a portent as a man in trunk hose
and a slashed doublet. The Duke had died a month
or two before the play was published; he had grown
to be, in extreme old age, the most venerable figure of
the Restoration, and it is possible that the Humorous
Lovers may have been a relic of his Jacobean youth.
He might very well have written it, so old was he, in
Shakespeare's lifetime. But the Duke of Newcastle
was never a very skilful poet, and it is known that he
paid James Shirley to help him with his plays. I feel
convinced that if all men had their own, the invocation
I have just quoted would fly back into the works of
Shirley, and so, no doubt, would the following quaintest
bit of conceited fancy. It is part of a fantastical feast
which Boldman promises to the Widow of his heart:

The twinkling stars shall to our wish
Make a grand salad in a dish ;
Snow for our sugar shall not fail,
Fine candied ice, comfits of hail;
For oranges, gilt clouds we'll squeeze ;
The Milky Way we'll turn to cheese;
Sunbeams we'll catch, shall stand in place
Of hotter ginger, nutmegs, mace;
Sun-setting clouds for roses sweet.
And violet skies strewed for our feet ;
The spheres shall for our music play,
While spirits dance the time away.

This is extravagant enough, but surely very picturesque.
I seem to see the supper-room of some Elizabethan
castle after an elaborate royal masque. The Duchess,
who has been dancing, richly attired in sky-coloured
silk, with gilt wings on her shoulders, is attended to
the refreshments by the florid Duke, personating the
river Thamesis, with a robe of cloth of silver around

EDMUND GOSSE 87

him. It seems the sort of thing a poet so habited might
be expected to say between a galliard and a coranto.

At first sight we seem to have reached a really good
rhetorical play when we arrive at Bancroft's tragedy of
Sertorius, published in 1679, and so it would be if
Dryden and Lee had never written. But its seeming
excellence is greatly lessened when we recollect that
All for Love and Mithridates, two great poems which
are almost good plays, appeared in 1678, and inspired
our poor imitative Bancroft. Sertorius is written in
smooth and well-sustained blank verse, which is, how-
ever, nowhere quite good enough to be quoted. I suspect
that John Bancroft was a very interesting man. He Was
a surgeon, and his practice lay particularly in the
theatrical and literary world. He acquired, it is said,
from his patients "a passion for the Muses," and an
inclination to follow in the steps of those whom he
cured or killed. The dramatist Ravenscroft wrote an
epilogue to Sertorius, in which he says that

Our poet to learned critics does submit,
But scorns those little vermin of the pit,
Who noise and nonsense vent instead of wit,

and no doubt Bancroft had aims more professional than
those of the professional playwrights themselves. He
wrote three plays, and lived until 1696. One fancies
the discreet and fervent poet-surgeon, laden with his
secrets and his confidences. Why did he not write
memoirs, and tell us what it was that drove Nat Lee
mad, and how Otway really died, and what Dryden' s
habits were? Why did he not purvey magnificent
indiscretions whispered under the great periwig of
Wycherley, or repeat that splendid story about Ether-
edge and my Lord Mulgrave? Alas! we would have

88 MODERN ESSAYS

given a wilderness of Sertoriuses for such a series
of memoirs.

The volume of plays is not exhausted. Here is
Weston's Amazon Queen, of 1667, written in pompous
rhymed heroics; here is The Fortune Hunters, a comedy
of 1689, the only play of that brave fellow, James
Carlile, who, being brought up an actor, preferred "to
be rather than to personate a hero," and died in gallant
tight for William of Orange, at the battle of Aughrim.
Here is Mr. Anthony, a comedy written by the Right
Honourable the Earl of Orrery, and printed in 1690, a
piece never republished among the Earl's works, and
therefore of some special interest. But I am sure my
reader is exhausted, even if the volume is not, and I
spare him any further examination of these obscure
dramas, lest he should say, as Peter Pindar did of
Dr. Johnson, that I

Set wheels on wheels in motion — such a clatter I
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Bid ocean labour with tremendous roar
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore.

I will close, therefore, with one suggestion to the special
student of comparative literature — namely, that it is
sometimes in the minor writings of an age, where
the bias of personal genius is not strongly felt, that
the general phenomena of the time are most clearly
observed. The Amazon Queen is in rhymed verse, be-
cause in 1667 tnis was the fashionable form for dramatic
poetry ; Sertorius is in regular and somewhat restrained
blank verse, because in 1679 the fashion had once more
chopped round. What in Dryden or Otway might be
the force of originality may be safely taken as the drift
of the age in these imitative and floating nonentities.

EDMUND GOSSE 89

GERARD'S HERBAL

Edmund Gosse : Gossip in a Library

The Herbail or General Historie of Plantes. Gathered by
John Gerarde, of London, Master in Chirvrgerie. Very much
enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson, citizen and apothe-
cary e of London. London, printed by Adam I slip, Joice Norton,
and Richard Whitakers. Anno 1633.

The proverb says that a door must be either open or
shut. The bibliophile is apt to think that a book should
be either little or big. For my own part, I become
more and more attached to "dumpy twelves"; but
that does not preclude a certain discreet fondness for
folios. If a man collects books, his library ought to
contain a Herbal; and if he has but room for one,
that should be the best. The luxurious and sufficient
thing, I think, is to possess what booksellers call " the
right edition of Gerard"; that is to say, the volume
described at the head of this paper. There is no hand-
somer book to be found, none more stately or imposing,
than this magnificent folio of sixteen hundred pages,
with its close, elaborate letterpress, its innumerable
plates, and John Payne's fine frontispiece in compart-
ments, with Theophrastus and Dioscorides facing one
another, and the author below them, holding in his
right hand the new-found treasure of the potato plant.
This edition of 1633 is the nna* development of what
had been a slow growth. The sixteenth century wit-
nessed a great revival, almost a creation of the science

90 MODERN ESSAYS

of botany. People began to translate the great Materia
Medica of the Greek physician, Dioscorides of Anazarba,
and to comment upon it. The Germans were the first
to append woodcuts to their botanical descriptions, and
it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, who has the credit of
being the originator of such figures. In 1554 there was
published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus
Dodonseus, body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian
II., who wrote in Dutch. An English translation of this,
brought out in 1578 by Henry Lyte, was the earliest
important Herbal in our language. Five years later,
in 1583, a certain Dr. Priest translated all the botanical
works of Dodonseus, with much greater fulness than
Lyte had done, and this volume was the germ of
Gerard's far more famous production. John Gerard
was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who came up to
London, and practised there as a surgeon.

According to his editor and continuator, Thomas
Johnson, who speaks of Gerard with startling freedom,
this excellent man was by no means well equipped for
the task of compiling a great Herbal. He knew so
little Latin, according to this too candid friend, that
he imagined Leonard Fuchsius, who was a German
contemporary of his own, to be one of the ancients.
But Johnson is a little too zealous in magnifying his
own office. He brings a worse accusation against
Gerard, if I understand him rightly to charge him with
using Dr. Priest's manuscript collections after his death,
without giving that physician the credit of his labours.
When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had been
dead twenty-six years. In any case it seems certain
that Gerard's original Herbal, which, beyond question,
surpassed all its predecessors when it was printed in
folio in 1597, was built upon the ground-work of

EDMUND GOSSE 91

Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. Nearly forty years
later, Thomas Johnson, himself a celebrated botanist,
took up the book, and spared no pains to re-issue it in
perfect form. The result is the great volume before us,
an elephant among books, the noblest of all the English
Herbals. Johnson was seventy- two years of age when he
got this gigantic work off his hands, and he lived eleven
years longer to enjoy his legitimate success.

The great charm of this book at the present time
consists in the copious woodcuts. Of these there are
more than two thousand, each a. careful and original
study from the plant itself. In the course of two cen-
turies and a half, with all the advance in appliances,
we have not improved a whit on the original artist of
Gerard's and Johnson's time. The drawings are all in
strong outline, with very little attempt at shading, but
the characteristics of each plant are given with a truth
and a simplicity which are almost Japanese. In no case
is this more extraordinary than in that of orchids, or
"satyrions," as they were called in the days of the old
herbalist. Here, in a succession of little figures, each
not more than six inches high, the peculiarity of every
portion of a full-grown flowering specimen of each
species is given with absolute perfection, without being
slurred over on the one hand, or exaggerated on the
other. For instance, the little variety called "ladies'
tresses " (Spiranthes) , which throws a spiral head of pale
green blossom out of dry pastures, appears here with
small bells hanging on a twisted stem, as accurately as
the best photograph could give it, although the process
of woodcutting, as then practised in England, was very
rude, and although almost all other English illustrations
of the period are rough and inartistic. It is plain that
in every instance the botanist himself drew the form,

92 MODERN ESSAYS

with which he was already intelligently familiar, on the
block, with the living plant lying at his side.

The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letter-
press is methodical in the extreme. He begins by
describing his plant, then gives its habitat, then dis-
cusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medical
account of its nature and virtues. It is, of course, to
be expected that we should find the fine old names of
plants enshrined in Gerard's pages. For instance, he
gives to the deadly nightshade the name, which now
only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the "dwale."
As an instance of his style, I may quote a passage from
what he has to say about the virtues, or rather vices,
of this plant:

Banish it from your gardens and the use of it also,
being a plant so furious and deadly; for it bringeth such
as have eaten thereof into a dead sleep wherein many
have died, as hath been often seen and proved by experience
both in England and elsewhere. But to give you an ex-
ample hereof it shall not be amiss. It came to pass that
three boys of Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the
pleasant and beautiful fruit hereof, two whereof died in
less than eight hours after they had eaten of them. The
third child had a quantity of honey and water mixed to-
gether given him to drink, causing him to vomit often.
God blessed this means, and the child recovered. Banish,
therefore, these pernicious plants out of your gardens,
and all places near to your houses where children do resort.

Gerard has continually to stop his description that
he may repeat to his readers some anecdote which he
remembers. Now it is how "Master Cartwright, a
gentleman of Gray's Inn, who was grievously wounded
into the lungs," was cured with the herb called "Sara-
cen's Compound," "and that, by God's permission, in
short space." Now it is to tell us that he has found

EDMUND GOSSE 93

yellow archangel growing under a sequestered hedge:
"on the left hand as you go from the village of Hamp-
stead, near London, to the church," or that "this
amiable and pleasant kind of primrose" (a sort of
oxlip) was first brought to light by Mr. Hesketh, "a
diligent searcher after simples," in a Yorkshire wood.
While the groundlings were crowding to see new plays
by Shirley and Massinger, the editor of this volume was
examining fresh varieties of auricula in "the gardens of
Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie." It is wonderful how
modern the latter statement sounds, and how ancient
the former. But the garden seems the one spot on earth
where history does not assert itself, and, no doubt,
when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of Rome, there
were florists counting the petals of rival roses at
Paestum as peacefully and conscientiously as any
gardeners of to-day.

The herbalist and his editor write from personal
experience, and this gives them a great advantage in
dealing with superstitions. If there was anything which
people were certain about in the early part of the
seventeenth century, it was that the mandrake only
grew under a gallows, where the dead body of a man
had fallen to pieces, and that when it was dug up it
gave a great shriek, which was fatal to the nearest
living thing. Gerard contemptuously rejects all these
and other tales as "old wives' dreams." He and his
servants have often digged up mandrakes, and are not
only still alive, but listened in vain for the dreadful
scream. It might be supposed that such a statement,
from so eminent an authority, would settle the point,
but we find Sir Thomas Browne, in the next generation,
battling these identical popular errors in the pages of
his Pseifdodoxia Epidemica. In the like manner, Gerard's

94 MODERN ESSAYS

botanical evidence seems to have been of no use in
persuading the public that mistletoe was not generated
out of birdlime dropped by thrushes into the boughs of
trees, or that its berries were not desperately poisonous.
To observe and state the truth is not enough. The
ears of those to whom it is proclaimed must be ready
to accept it.

Our good herbalist, however, cannot get through his
sixteen hundred accurate and solemn pages without one
slip. After accompanying him dutifully so far, we
double up with uncontrollable laughter on p. 1587,
for here begins the chapter which treats "of the Goose
Tree, Barnacle Tree, or the Tree bearing Geese." But
even here the habit of genuine observation clings to
him. The picture represents a group of stalked bar-
nacles— those shrimps fixed by their antennae, which
modern science, I believe, calls Lepas anafifera; by the
side of these stands a little goose, and the suggestion
of course is that the latter has slipped out of the
former, although the draughtsman has been far too
conscientious to represent the occurrence. Yet the
letterpress is confident that in the north parts of Scot-
land there are trees on which grow white shells, which
ripen, and then, opening, drop little living geese into
the waves below. Gerard himself avers that from
Guernsey and Jersey he brought home with him to
London shells, like limpets, containing little featheiy
objects, "which, no doubt, were the fowls called Bar-
nacles." It is almost needless to say that these objects
really were the plumose and flexible cirri which the
barnacles throw out to catch their food with, and which
lie, like a tiny feather-brush, just within the valves of
the shell when the creature is dead. Gerard was plainly
unable to refuse credence to the mass of evidence which

EDMUND GOSSE 95

presented itself to him on this subject, yet he closes
with a hint that this seems rather a "fabulous breed"
of geese.

With the Barnacle Goose Tree the Herbal proper
closes in these quaint words:

And thus having, through God's assistance, discoursed
somewhat at large of grasses, herbs, shrubs, trees and
mosses, and certain excrescences of the earth, with other
things moe, incident to the history thereof, we conclude
and end our present volume with this wonder of England.
For the which God's name be ever honoured and praised.

And so, at last, the Goose Tree receives the highest
sanction.

96 MODERN ESSAYS

ARLES
Louis Golding: To-Day

Arles is a place only of echoes. There are no sub-
stantial sounds in that old city by the Rhone. For the
women buy loaves of bread in their shadowy hidden
shops like witches bartering dreams, and the wise little
children play with marbles like old men in the woods
of Faery playing with men's souls. There is never
silence in Aries, and never loud sound — only echoes.
Even the broad Rhdne that sweeps through the meadows
■of Aries has not the voice of a living man's river, but
has only recollections — ladies of the French chivalry
who walked among the willows with passionate knights ;
helmeted Romans clanking down the quay-side to barges
terrorful with slaves; and even — when the evening is
as still as ever the evening shall be in Aries — recollec-
tions of those broad-browed Greeks with their wonderful
adorable gods, who had pushed up from Massilia by
the sea.

Arthur Symons has said of Aries that it is an autumn
city. It is a city of neither spring nor autumn, but of
the season that never was on sea or land. The first
buds on the hedgerows before they burst into flower
are already heavy with memories. And the snow that
falls elsewhere in the Midi is snow, but it is not snow
in Aries. It is the virgin garment of St. Trophime, or
a funeral toga over a dead Roman city.

I stood one day in the market-place outside the Roman
Theatre. Above a brasserie smothered in the foliage of

LOUIS GOLDING 97

a fig-tree rose the two surviving columns of the theatre.
A man in a pair of threadbare trousers and a faded red
shirt, and with naked feet, stood aimlessly in front of
a little table. A crowd drifted aimlessly round him,
and I aimlessly joined the rest. "Une harpe des dieux,"
he was saying, and his voice was like the wind in a
rifted chimney, "que j'ai trouvee moi-meme dans les
arenes. Deux sous, l'harpe avec le secret! " A penny
for the harp of the gods, and with it the secret! The
great things in life are of little price, and the greatest are
of no price at all. So I bought the harp " avec le secret."
It was of hollowed clay with the stops cut at mysterious
intervals. Then the vendor of secrets taught us the
high music, and the sound was the echo of Aries — the
echo of Roman splendour triumphant, Roman splendour
waning in the barbarian twilight; the echo of proces-
sional choristers in cathedrals deserted centuries ago.
I went down to the river that afternoon and played
amongst the flowerless irises. I caught something of
the magic that the blue-trousered wizard had evoked,
fluting in the square. Weeks later in Normandy I took
out the harp, but my song was tuneless and cracked.
Weeks passed again, and I took out the harp in a stuffy
room in an English town. The harp had not a single
note. It wheezed like an old man in a draught. The
secret that Aries had taught me was down in Aries
among the irises and the echoes.

Near the broken baths of an emperor, by the river-
side, there is a nameless and desecrated ruin. It is a
church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so beau-
tiful even in its unconsidered decay that it is hardly
conceivable how men could have builded it. So ex-
quisite is its workmanship, and so superhuman its design,
that, they tell me, men dared not worship here, burdened

98 MODERN ESSAYS

with all the big and little sins they carried about and
would not abandon. There was a sense of the Presence
here so immediate and absorbing that men dared not
assist at the Mass, so overwhelmingly did they feel that
the actual Incarnation had taken place. Even the
priests felt their protestations hypocritical at the third
fateful ringing of the bell, and their faith like a weak
marsh-light in the blaze that surrounded the altar. So
men buMed another church with richer endowments,
and the priests followed. And men went by the old
church with averted head, and priests hurried away,
fearful of sounds and gleams. Nowadays there are
horses' stables in the south aisle of the church, and
behind the mullions of the windows there are cheap
boards to keep out the sky, and there is a refuse-heap
inside the west porch. Here, as the darkness gathered,
I spent the last evening the gods gave me in Aries. On
the tumbled fragments of the arches lay the dust of
hundreds of years. Outside, the gulls were flying in
great curves down the sunset river to the sea. A late
bird was singing sleepily in the elms by the water.
But within no bird was singing, only the rustle of
invisible, immaterial wings. When a shaft of sunset
came through the crevices, it staggered in as if already
weary with antiquity. Dusk deepened.

The bird in the elms sang no longer. The Mystery
gathered round me almost as closely as the mantle of
Death. My head was falling between my hands, when
suddenly the night became vibrant around, a firm tread
clanging over the stones. I cried loudly, "Who are
you?" And a French soldier, tall and straight and
like a tree, strode to me through the dusk. "I am the
Heir of Battles," he said, "and I am the Builder."
Even in the darkness I could see the flashing of his

LOUIS GOLDING 99

eyes. "You are English," he said, "and what do you
here?" "Poilu, you are speaking strangely," I replied,
"but we are friends, you and I, and I will answer. I am
here because the dead empires are more to me than the
living empires; because the sorrows suffered in wars a
thousand years ago grieve me more than my friends'
sorrows and my own in the wars of to-day. I am here,
in this city, because of the strong beauty of Rome and
the fervid beauty of the Middle Age, which are dead
and entombed here. And I am here in this splendid
and insulted shrine because Beauty was on the earth
once and has passed hence for ever!"

The poilu laughed loud into the high shadowy vault.

"Little Englishman," he said, "listen to the Dream
of the Builder which is a thousandfold stronger than
the iron guns, and swifter than the blazing shells, and
kindred to the immortal stars. You grieve because of
the passing of the arenas and the marble theatres and
the Gothic cathedrals. Exult now with me in a new
Architecture, stupendous and resplendent, proud con-
sort to the morning sun. For the Builders shall sweep
away utterly the miserable fragments of Verdun and
Arras and Ypres into the marshes of the sea. In that
country devastated and seamed with war, the corn
shall wave again in the wind, and the fruit-trees be
heavy with fruit.

"Among the orchards and the singing rivers shall I,
the Heir of Battles, and with me the other Builders
and Dreamers, build such cities as the great world has
not known — and the world shall say, 'Lo! greater far
than Babylon, even more marvellous than Athens ! ' As
the new cities rise in Flanders and Picardy they shall
forget Rome and the Middle Age like the birds who
forget their last year's lovers.

ioo MODERN ESSAYS

"Listen! When the shells were loudest over No-
man's-land, we have heard the call to the new Build-
ing strongest and sweetest. When we burrowed deepest
into the mine-galleries, and our eyes were thick with
grime, the Star blazed most fiercely.

"The colonnades of the new Architecture shall be
spacious beyond man's surmising. Innumerable towers
shall dazzle the dawn. Out of our agony shall we build
the greatest city, and out of the love wherewith we
have loved each other in the cesspools at midnight.

"The bodies of our lovers shall be blended with the
bricks, and our blood shall suffuse the mortar.

"Out of our bodies and blood an incomparable Beauty
shall prevail."

There was silence a moment. Then, "Come," he said,
suddenly gripping my arm, "in here it is only Death."

As we stumbled out into the night, an owl hooted
somewhere from the heart of the ruins.

HOLBROOK JACKSON 101

THE ART OF HOLIDAY

Holbrook Jackson : Southward Ho !
and Other Essays

It matters very little where you go, or when you go;
it matters little what you do. The thing itself matters;
and that thing is holiday — the break from the mono-
tony of routine and the discipline of earning a living.
To get away, to be free for a brief spell, to feel that you
have not to get up at the appointed hour, to know that
you can linger over your breakfast, to realise that the
usual business train will depart without you, to look
upon new scenes and strange faces, to breathe fresh
air, to hear different sounds, to do different things, or
better still, to do nothing at all — that is holiday. Fix
upon a place, no matter what place, anywhere; put a
few things into a bag, the fewer the better, and go.
The change, I repeat, is the thing; scenery or amuse-
ments hardly count in this great business, for unless a
man carry all the beauty of the world in his own mind,
and all the joy of life in his own heart, he will not find
them elsewhere. I have small sympathy with those
wide-eyed enthusiasts who babble about spirit of place.
Unless we carry the spirit of place within us as a part
of our personal kit, we shall not find it elsewhere. We
are joy and sorrow, and the world about us but material
for their expression.

I doubt whether there are any sound rules for holiday-
making, save that one which I have called change ; and

102 MODERN ESSAYS

that after all is not arbitrary — it is fundamental. A
holiday is no holiday unless you have change. The
health of the human mind is stimulated by change of
scene just as change of air is a tonic for the body.
Change is good physic for all social pursuits; without
it we get stale, and to get stale is to lose caste, to
become inferior. More than half the pleasure we have in
contemplating a holiday is, I believe, born of the instinct
of change. But change is not merely the transference
of oneself and one's family from one place to another.
Far too many people court disappointment by that
interpretation every year. To go away with your family
is, in a great many instances, nothing but an elaborate
contrivance for staying at home. I know nothing more
depressing, with the possible exception of a debate in
the House of Commons, than the sight of so many
family groups at the seaside during the holiday season
who are obviously bored past murmuring. These well-
intentioned people are suffering from social starvation.
They have change of air, change of scene, and change
of some habits, but possessing all these and lacking
change of society, they lack everything that makes for
a successful holiday. Family life is an invaluable and
delightful thing, and deservedly one of our most treasured
institutions; for that very reason I am always being
startled into surprise because we do not take much
more care of it. One of the easiest ways of taking care
of it is to break it up occasionally, and the best time
for that operation would seem to be the annual holiday.
But far from recognising this, the majority of people
prefer to translate their family, personalities, habits,
and associations to a holiday resort. Such proceed-
ing can only be successful by accident, for the simple
reason that the family does not leave home, it takes

HOLBROOK JACKSON 103

home away with it. Which is a direct violation of the
fundamental law of change.

But change, though important, is not inclusive.
There are other and more subtle ingredients for a real
holiday. These, however, vary with the individual,
and provided that you have the necessary facilities it
matters little what you do so long, of course, as you do
what you like. Generally speaking, and if you are
wise, you will leave things to chance. To map out a
holiday, with times and places all catalogued and
certified, with a list of things to see and how to see them,
does, I know, please many people, but all such elaborate
methods are dangerously akin to routine, and routine
is useful only to those who cannot do without it. I
once knew a man who was taking a holiday on the
Yorkshire moors. He would walk about all day in an
old suit of clothes, occasionally resting on the grey old
stone walls of the wolds, or lolling in the heather,
smoking an old pipe, talking to any chance acquaint-
ance, and when hungry he would call at a wayside inn
and refresh himself before once again taking up the
great business of loafing. But one day he had an
experience which ever afterwards he looked back at with
a thrill of delight. Loafing down a moorside one morn-
ing, he came across a gang of navvies digging a big
hole in the earth. He watched them for awhile, then,
fascinated by the swing and rhythm of their labour,
he jumped into the hole, and, after a few words of
explanation, borrowed a shovel and a pick and spent
the rest of the day in manual labour, resting at midday
with the navvies, and eating their rough-and-ready
food. Then he sauntered to his inn, dog-tired, but as
happy as a god. That man got more out of his holidays
than any man I have known. But he never made any

104 MODERN ESSAYS

fuss about it; indeed, he never called his holidays by
that name. He used just to throw a few things into
an old battered rucksack and disappear. He never
used a map or itinerary of any sort; he simply dis-
appeared, reappearing again in due course feeling and
looking aggressively happy and insolently healthy.

The success of a holiday is, perhaps, largely a matter
of temperament. Some people can be happy anywhere,
others nowhere. And after you have philosophised to
your heart's content, and read all the advertisements
for the guidance of the holiday-maker, you feel that
your work is in vain. There is really no sound pocket
wisdom for the art of holiday, for every would-be
holiday-maker is a separate problem, and in the final
resort he must be his own guide, philosopher, and friend.
One might suggest, as I have done, that for holiday he
should do what he wants to do, but even that is only a
piece of half wisdom, for which of us knows precisely
what he wants to do ! Most of us have devoted so much
of our time to doing what others expect us to do that
we have lost the faculty of pleasing ourselves. It was
Mark Twain, I think, who said, with that hidden wis-
dom which was always a part of his humour, that there
was only one better way of spending a holiday than
lying under a tree with a book, namely, to lie under a
tree without a book. I think the hint a very good one;
but I generally find that most people follow it instinc-
tively. How many times has one promised oneself
much holiday reading, and how many times has that
promise been unfulfilled ? I have often dreamt of a really
bookish holiday, a holiday, as it were, in a library,
but I know I shall never have the courage to take such a
holiday. Few people read books on a holiday, unless it
rains, for if you are interested in the life about you

HOLBROOK JACKSON 105

books are superfluous, and if you are bored you
cannot abide them.

Perhaps modern life is becoming too rapid for over-
much dalliance with books, and it becomes increasingly
more difficult for bookish persons to catch up with the
lost reading of yesterday. Still, it is good to have
dreams, and the dream of a holiday in a library is a
very pleasant one. We realise something of it, I fancy,
when we drop into our kit-bags a few friendly books,
books that have stood the test of time and the sterner
tests of familiarity — the Religio Medici, The Golden
Treasury, the Essays of Elia, the Greek Anthology, the
Compleat Angler — holiday books all, because they
promote reflection in a gentle and intimate way. And
even if we never look at the insides of them, it is as
consoling to know they are there as it is to know
that you have propitiated iEsculapius by providing
yourself with simple prophylactics against indigestion
and chill.

There is a certain piety in this time-worn promise
of a bit of reading next holiday, and one does actually
select one's portable library with becoming reverence,
even if that part of the outfit sees the least service
during the vacation. At the same time I do not under-
estimate the value of the good resolution which lies
behind this empty and innocent little piety; on the
contrary, empty pieties and good resolutions are part
of the natural equipment of every proper man. They
were never meant to be performed or fulfilled, but in
the scheme of things they serve their purpose. It
is good to walk on a sea beach during the month of
August if only to observe the triumphant defeat of
good resolutions under the shade of the cliffs or the
awnings of the camp chairs. There you will see dozens

*D

106 MODERN ESSAYS

of fathers and mothers of families with printed matter
before them, sometimes actually resting on their faces,
and all bathed in what the poet Young has called " calm
Nature's sweet restorer — gentle sleep." When I see
these happy people thus employed I know their holiday
is doing them good, and I know that literature, neglected,
though not despised, has aided and abetted the kindly
gods of health.

Thus does experience support my suggestion that
holiday is artless rather than artful, using both words
literally as all honest writers should. But as I write
I feel the prospective opposition of possible readers
whose faith is firmly based in some cunningly arranged
plan of campaign. Now I like to believe that I am
neither cynical nor pessimistic, yet I can see quite
plainly, as in a kind of mental cinematograph, the coast-
wise towns of the British Islands in gala dress and
thronged with strangers upon whom the natives smile
a smile of welcome not entirely free of self-interest.
The strangers, or rather " visitors," to give them their
proper title, are the familiar British folk of the inland
towns and cities on vacation; they are clad less severely
than when they are at home : men assume light flannels,
bright lounge coats and crushed or flapping hats, and
there seems to be a conspiracy against the waistcoat;
women are dressed less carefully and more comfortably
than you might think possible. But mere apparel does
not give you a full insight into the character of this
holiday crowd; to get that you must observe its habits.
From such an observation you will learn that all these
people are practising a kind of traditional optimism:
they are enjoying themselves according to certain
settled principles — laboriously doing nothing, or fran-
tically doing something — though which is which it is

HOLBROOK JACKSON 107

not easy to discover: lounging on the sands ; swimming,
or just bobbing about in the water; riding on donkeys
or in char-a-bancs; getting backache in a rowing boat,
or seasick in a yawl; promenading along the front or
discussing nautical matters with expectorating and
portly longshoremen (who have " never been upon the
sea") on the jetty; listening to minstrels or pierrots
and perhaps joining in the choruses (and, if you are of
the fair sex, falling a little in love with the baritone
or tenor, according to taste); being jolted on switch-
back railways, or by the German band on the front
— or on (or is it off ?) the joy-wheel. Such are the aids
to optimism in my vision of the seaside at holiday
time, and I must confess to a certain amusement at
it all. To the unsympathetic looker-on this annual
business of joy-hunting seems preposterous; he finds
some little difficulty in convincing himself that the
holiday folk at the seaside during August are having a
good time.

Not many things are certain in our haphazard world,
but there is at least one thing about which there is
little doubt, that is that those who seek happiness miss
it, and those who discuss it, lack it. Therefore, I am
always inclined to be suspicious of the ways of pleasure-
seekers and happiness - mongers. Not that I would
have people other than happy — if that is their desire.
My suspicion is born of the conviction that both pleasure-
seeking and happiness-mongering are futile attempts
to discover and supply the undiscoverable. Happi-
ness, like art, happens ; it has neither formulae, nor rules,
nor systems ; it droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven
upon just and unjust alike, and no man can say he has
it because of his virtues, for verily, he may be flouted
to his face by the sinner over the way who is happier

108 MODERN ESSAYS

than he. It has, furthermore, been rumoured that man
was made to mourn, and although Rumour was ever a
jade, there is much evidence that she has truth on her
side for once. But if it be true, as seemingly it is,
knowledge of the fact would only intimidate the coward ;
the brave man is he who is happy in spite of fate. At
the same time it must be conceded that there is a
subtle joy even in sorrow; melancholy is not necessarily
the opposite of happiness, it may be a part of it. One
may even enjoy it, without taking one's pleasure sadly,
as we say. Indeed, if there is any truth in Keats's
thought that " in the very temple of delight veiled
Melancholy hath her sovran shrine," the converse also
may be true.

Sad folk must certainly gloat upon some secret
treasure of joy, which is a sealed document to the
merely happy, or they would not be so contented. I
believe Mrs. Gummidge knew a deeper joy in life — lone,
lorn, and sad though she was — than ever Mark Tapley
imagined in his most preposterously and irritatingly
happy moments. But of the two, I prefer Mrs. Gum-
midge ; she at least was under no illusions about making
other people happy or even of attempting the pursuit
of happiness for herself. She was content to feel
lonesome, and in the attainment of that state attaining
also to bliss as a sort of by-product. As to that un-
deserving immortal Mark Tapley — I think we may look
upon him as an amiable fraud, an illusion of the big
heart of Charles Dickens. Your pertinacious optimist
is a very sorry dog, and I am inclined to shun him as
one shuns those sick souls who are forever cracking
jokes (" comic fellows, funny men, and clowns in private
life," as Sir W. S. Gilbert put it). But I do not deny
the value of optimism nor the necessity of pleasure.

HOLBROOK JACKSON 109

Optimism is one of the most powerful of human weapons
against fate; it is almost as invincible as indifference.
And, incidentally, it is the fundamental principle of
society, for unless we believed that the majority of
people, perhaps all people, were somehow and some-
where good and capable of joy, the thing we call society
could not last for a week. Optimism is faith — faith
in oneself, faith in one's fellows and faith in the world:
and faith is the motive force of life. But you can never
say that you have happiness any more than you can
say you are going to have it ; 3^ou either have it or have
it not. It is only when it has fled that you discuss
it. It is just as absurd for a man to say he is. going to
be happy, as it is for a man to say that he is going to
be himself. Both promises are abstractions, nothing
more, and to strive to become an abstraction is to court
destruction.

So it is that I am just a little doubtful about the
motley array of paraphernalia at the annual seaside
wedding of work of play. It is obvious that some people
get some fun out of these things. But the test of the
sort of fun obtainable at a popular pleasure resort,
one that really goes into the business on a grand scale,
sajr Blackpool or Coney Island, may be realised in the
development of the pleasure machine. Simple games
and healthy exercises have long since ceased to satisfy
the holiday crowd, with the result that the pursuit of
pleasure has become a pursuit of novel sensation.
Enterprising merchants of delight have risen to the
occasion first by inventing swings and roundabouts,
then artificial toboggan slides and switchback railways ;
from these the progress to water-chutes, big wheels, and
high towers has been easy. But the demand for ex-
hilaration is by no means appeased, so fresh ingenuity

no MODERN ESSAYS

has to be put forth in the interest of pleasure-seekers
whose one desire seems to be giddiness and delirium.
Avernus wheels are brought into being, and the pleasure-
mongers, setting their monstrous brains to work, con-
ceive wiggle-woggles and flip-flaps and topsy-turvies,
and, save the mark, joy- wheels! This last might well
be the climax and symbol of pleasure follies. You sit
on a slightly convex revolving platform, flush with the
floor, and you hold on to its smooth surface, like a
beetle or a gecko, until the increasing rapidity of the
revolutions hurls you off; "you" is, of course, plural,
for the joy-wheel is a social machine, and you traffic
with it in groups, scrimmaging somewhat to get the
centre place, which by the laws of physics is most
secure. You are thrown off singly and in knots,
shrieking and laughing hysterically and fearfully, as
many times as you like for threepence or sixpence,
according to whether it is at Margate or Earl's Court.
To such a pass as this has the search for the elixir of
pleasure brought us.

Therefore — but is there a therefore? Is it not in
point of fact an absurd pass for any species to have
got itself into — and outside sane argument? Let us
agree, then, reader, you and I, that when all is said
and done, the best of all holidays is the holiday that
comes upon you unawares. The time of the year
matters little, the place not at all; persons may have
something to do with it, but it is just as likely they
may have nothing to do with it. You do not know
precisely how it comes about, and you do not care;
perhaps even you may not know it has come about at
all until you look backwards after it is over, and you
know it cannot be repeated: holidays don't repeat
themselves. It may be that you have gone somewhere

HOLBROOK JACKSON in

on business, missed the train back, and found yourself
wandering idly amid green fields or in a sleepy village
with inviting inns and a grey old church. It may be
that you have suddenly, for no obvious reason, thrown
down your tools and fled, for some still less ottvious
reason, to a near or remote place. You may have
spent half the time in a railway train, or you may
have gone no farther afield than your own favourite
subterranean cafe. But the experience has been dis-
tinguishable from your average daily experience; it
has had about it a quiet cheerfulness, a holy calm, and
if you feel that it has been worth the trouble, you have
achieved holiday. Perhaps, then, there is no art of
holiday — holidays just occur. Shall we agree on that,
we two?

H2 MODERN ESSAYS

PETERPANTHEISM

Holbrook Jackson: Southward Ho!
and Other Essays

What ill turn in the trend of evolution gave man
the aspiration to grow up? It must have been an
evil chance, for the secret desire of all is for eternal
youth. No one surely who had his will of life would
dream of growing up, and yet we all not only do it,
but succeed in persuading ourselves that we like doing it.

We have even gone so far as to wean the imagi-
nations of children from their rightful heritage and
make them wish to become big, like father, or good, like
mother. These ambitions are now commonplaces of
childish imagination. But in spite of it all, the evidence
is still against growing up. The purpose of the child
is to live, to feel the mysterious presence of life in
every limb, and in so far as he does this he is happy.
But the purpose of the adult has become a febrile
pursuit of the symbols of life. Real life fills him with
dread, and success in his endeavour is his undoing.

Age is a tragedy; and the elderly person strives
heroically to make the best of it by covering his retreat
with pathetic attempts at superiority and wisdom,
little arrogances and vanities which at bottom deceive
nobody, not even himself. For well he knows, as he
casts wistful glances at the pranks of childhood, that
in spite of his imposing cry of " Eureka! " he has
found nothing. What profit has a man if he gain the

HOLBROOK JACKSON 113

whole world but lose his own youth? Perhaps, indeed,
it would be more becoming in those who have grown
up to admit the fact with fitting lamentation and
humility, and, instead of flaunting their age with pomp
and circumstance, cover their bodies with sackcloth
and put ashes in their hair.

The great difficulty, however, is that men persist,
in spite of bitter experience, in looking upon growing
up as a worthy thing. Women are their superiors in
this respect. Intuitively they know that age is a
cul-de-sac, that it leads not even to heaven, for to get
there one has to become as a little child. This, probably,
is why most women disown the passing years.

Still even they grow up; indeed, are not women
always a little older than men? Both nature and
society seem to have conspired to make them so. But
that is no excuse. Human beings ought not to be
content to remain the slaves of either. Surely it is
by the constant flouting of such authorities that new
variations of life are attained. Neither gods nor
millenniums are the outcome of passivity. Therefore,
gentlewomen, put by your subterfuges about age, for
you have been found out; we know you to be older
than we men are, and our immemorial desire is that you
should be younger.

Few serious attempts to restore the Golden Age have
been made in modern times, but one of the greatest
of these is that of Sir James M. Barrie. Peter Pan is
more than a Christmas pantomime ; it is a contribution
to religious drama. It is a mystery play, giving sig-
nificance to the childlike spirit of the universe. Peter
Pan is a symbol of eternity, of that complete, un-
changeable spirit of the world which is superior to the
illusion of growing up: that dim vision which has set

H4 MODERN ESSAYS

bounds to the imagination of humanity ever since the
elderly person usurped the throne of the child. Peter
Pan reminds us again that the world has no final use
for grown-up things, that cities and civilisations pa
away, that monuments and institutions crumble into
dust, that weeds are conquering the Coliseum, and that
the life of the immemorial Sphinx is but a matter of
time. Peter Pan is the emblem of the mystery of
vitality, the thing that is always growing, but never
grown.

He came among us some years ago, when our faith
in the child had nearly gone. But even to-day we shall
see that there is no place for little children in the average
home, and that when a place is provided for them it is
provided because they are a nuisance and a burden to
the grown-ups. It might as well be admitted that
children irritate us; and this means that we are no longer
capable of entering into their kingdom. We revenge
ourselves by teaching them all sorts of worthless know-
ledge. But we teach them nothing so worthless as
this facile art of growing up. That is the final and
unforgivable act of our hopelessly bewildered lives.
We make our peace with the children by moulding them
to our own image: perhaps, one of these days, for all
things are possible, we shall become wise enough to
permit the children to return the compliment.

The desire to make them as we are is the fatal desire
of a lost cause. It means that communications with
the child-world have been cut off, which is only another
way of saying that we have abandoned our alliance
with the main tendency of life. We have ceased to
grow. We have, in fact, grown up, and are fit only for
life's scrap-heap.

We talk of evolution ; but half of the idea of evolution

HOLBROOK JACKSON 115

is illusion, and the other half the assertion of the child-
spirit. It is the child-spirit building castles in the air.
And our talk of that little sister of evolution, progress,
is not any more helpful; for progress is generally
nothing more than a vain endeavour to put the clock
forward. The only really vital thing in life is the
unconscious abandonment of young things — the spirit
of play. And if we think for a moment we shall see
that it is play, or the contemplation of play, that gives
us most joy. We never tire of watching the play of
children or of young animals. That is sane and healthy;
there are no better things to watch. Our approval
links us with the living world again, just as our love of
children does. That is why our delight in young life
is always tinged with melancholy. Whilst we approve
and love the ways of the young we unconsciously con-
demn our elderliness. We realise that the most superb
adult is a dismal failure beside a child making mud
pies or a kitten chasing its tail. But we rarely admit
it; when there is a chance of our going so far we
become frightened, and, shaking ourselves, we murmur
something about sentimentality, and speedily commence
growing old again, thereby displaying our impotence
and our ignorance.

The sign that we have accomplished our ignoble aim,
and grown up, is that we no longer have the impulse
to play. We go about our business in colourless gar-
ments and surroundings, buying and selling and ruling
with revolting solemnity. The last glimmering of the
spark of play is seen in our shamelessly hiring people
to play for us. We hire footballers and cricketers to
play games for us, jockeys to ride for us, singers to sing
for us, dancers to dance for us, and even pugilists and
soldiers to fight for us.

n6 MODERN ESSAYS

Those who have become as little children will want
to do all these things for themselves. They will no
more desire to play by proxy than they will desire to
live by proxy. Art has been described as the expression
of man's joy in his work, and joyful work is the kind
of work practised by those who have the courage to be
young. It is fundamentally play, and no other kind
of work really matters. We have some remote idea of
this when we utter the commonplace that success
depends largely upon one's doing the work one likes
to do. It is also pretty generally recognised that there
is no joy in what is merely laborious. Beyond all men
the artist knows this: not because his work is easy,
but because he is happy in his work. It is a wonderful
game. " I pray God every day," said Corot, " that He
will keep me a child; that is to say, that He will enable
me to see and draw with the eye of a child." And
France heard him sing as he painted. The childhood
of the world was in that song and in its results.

Children are unconscious artists in living. How to
reach this happy state is another matter; precise
rules cannot be given, because there are none. Perhaps
there is no direct way to the Golden Age, and even if
there were, few of us would recognise it. However,
there is at least one useful rule — that is, never to look
upon the Golden Age as past. For the rest, we might
follow Peter Pan, and refuse to grow up.

MAURICE HEWLETT 117

THE EARLY QUAKERS
Maurice Hewlett : Extemporary Essays

Quality, which in such an art as painting is a thing
infallibly recognised yet hard to be denned, is resident
in all expressions of the spirit of man. In letters we may
call it style, and in religion, rather disagreeably, unction.
One would certainly seek, and might easily find, a less
greasy term for that unmistakable, inexpressible some-
thing which seems to thrill in the words, which causes
the sentences to dilate, open and shut (as it were) like
the embers of a wood-fire when they are used by a man
" in the Spirit," as it is written, " on the Lord's day."
One reads what appears to be the too familiar account
of conviction of sin, conversion, certitude of truth and
what not. The well-known symptoms are there, the
well-worn locutions lap them round. Yet a difference
is discernible; there is a bloom, a dewiness, a — what?
Infinite as are the variations in the characters and
persons of men, so are those of sincere writing. Such
things are worth finding out.

The Society of Friends has lately put forward what
it calls the First Part of its Book of Discipline — Christian
Life, Faith and Thought (Friends' Bookshop, Bishops-
gate), which is nothing less than a stream of testimony
to the root of Quakerism, an anthology of its religious
conversation from the seventeenth century onwards.
It is closed only by the cover, for the stream is still
flowing, and apparently with a strong tide. In this
little book it is possible, I think, to detect with some

n8 MODERN ESSAYS

precision the quality of a faith which is as distinct from
others as the practice of its adherents has always held
them separate among Christians. Conversation, and
the certainty of it, proceed, as I have said, upon familiar
lines; but in the result — and that is the first thing to
note about it — in the result it turns to serenity rather
than disturbance, to joy and not to savagery, to a still
ecstasy, if such a state can be. Zeal does not eat up
the Quakers, but glows within them, steadily and
mildly radiant.

George Fox himself strikes that note:

As I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate
preachers also, and those called the most experienced
people. For I saw there was none among them all that
could speak to my condition. And when all my hope in
them and in all men was gone, so that I had nothing
outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then,
oh then, I heard a voice which said, " There is one, even
Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition," and, when
I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. . . . Thus, when
God doth work, who shall let it? And this I knew
experimentally.

That joy never left him, in whatever tribulations he
was afterwards involved. Presently, as he says, " I
saw all the world could do me no good; if I had had
a king's diet, palace and attendance, all would have
been as nothing: for nothing gave me comfort but the
Lord by His Power." The serenity which fills his
diary as with fragrance impelled him to charitable
judgment, but at the same time as it fired his words
taught how to be frugal of them. The fewness and
fullness of his words, William Penn said, struck all his
hearers; and yet — "The most awful, living, reverent
frame I .ever beheld, I must say, was his in prayer.'*

MAURICE HEWLETT 119

He died as he had lived:

Divers Friends came to visit him in illness, unto some of
whom he said: " All is well; the seed of God reigns over
all, and over Death itself."

That is how to die — if you can.

What they had, Seed of God, or whatever — if I may
put it so — was like a comfortable balance at the bank
which tempted neither to profusion nor parsimony, but
put the owner at peace with all the world. There would
be no inclination to foppery in such a man: there was
none in them. " The bent and stress of their ministry,"
Penn says, " was ... a leaving off in religion the
superfluous and reducing the ceremonious and formal
part, and pressing earnestly the substantial, the neces-
sary and profitable." One of the superfluities of life,
as they found out early in the day, was blood-shed-
ding. William Dewsbury, a Yorkshiremen, bore witness
to that:

I joined that little remnant which said they fought for
the Gospel, but I found no rest to my soul among them.
And the word of the Lord came unto me and said, " Put
up thy sword into thy scabbard; if my kingdom were of
this world, then would my children fight " — which word
enlightened my heart and discovered the mystery of
iniquity, and that the Kingdom of Christ was within, and
was spiritual, and my weapons against them must be
spiritual, the power of God.

Yet, as he said, he " never since played the coward,"
spending the greater part of his life cheerfully in prison.
In New England they hanged for Quakerism, and many
women suffered that death.

" Except ye become as little children." That they
could do. There again is part of the Quaker quality —
simplicity of reception of truth, simplicity of reaction

120 MODERN ESSAYS

to it. Margaret Fell of Swarthmore was the wife of
a Judge of Assize, visited in her husband's absence on
circuit by George Fox. That was in 1652. In " Ulver-
ston Steeplehouse," in her presence, Fox stood up and
asked leave to speak. It was given him. He opened
the Scriptures and said:

" What had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they
came to the Spirit that gave them forth ? You will say,
Christ saith this, and the Apostles say this; but what
canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light, and what
thou speakest, is it inwardly from God ? " This opened
me (says Margaret), so that it cut me to the heart; and
then I saw clearly that we were all wrong. So I sat me
down in my pew again and cried bitterly. And I cried
in my spirit to the Lord, We are all thieves, we are all thieves.
We have taken the Scriptures in words and know nothing
of them ourselves.

A hundred years later that same divine childishness
shows forth in another form, that of beautiful naive
speech. Thomas Story (obiit 1742) goes to the Friends'
meeting at Broughton in Cumberland. Someone
spoke, " yet I took not much notice of it . . . my
concern was much rather to know whether they were a
people gathered under a sense of the enjoyment of
the presence of God in their meetings. . . . And the
Lord answered my desire according to the integrity
of my heart.

"For not long after I had sat down among them,
that heavenly and watery cloud overshadowing my mind
brake into a sweet abounding shower of celestial rain, and
the greatest part of the meeting was broken together,
dissolved and comforted in the same divine and holy
presence and influence of the true, holy, and heavenly
Lord, which was divers times repeated before the

MAURICE HEWLETT 121

meeting ended." That is very beautiful ; but Story was
a poet. Observe the rhythm of this:

I was silent before the Lord, as a child not yet weaned ;

He put words in my mouth ;

And I sang forth his praise with an audible voice.

I called unto my God out of the great deep ;

He put on bowels of mercy, and had compassion on me ;

Because his love was infinite,

And his power without measure.

He called for my life, and I offered it at his footstool;
But he gave it to me as a prey,
With unspeakable additions.

There is more of that grave and measured descant,
but its quality is in what I quote. It was in all those
men and women. William Dent, another Yorkshire-
man, must not be left out. He was a countryman.
" His Quaker garb was spotlessly neat. His face
spoke of indwelling light and peace with all mankind.
When words came they were few and weighty." They
certainly were.

It is told how he would drive fourteen miles to a Friends'
meeting to worship. On one occasion he rose, and said,
" God is love," and then sat down again. It is believed
no listener forgot that sermon.

He should not. It was the whole thing in essence.
It was all they knew, and all that they needed to know.

122 MODERN ESSAYS

WIND IN THE DOWNS
Maurice Hewlett: Extemporary Essays

The Avon Valley is handsomely a fortnight ahead of
mine, as I have proved over and over again, but from
what I saw to-day I should suppose that the Wylye
ran through a warmer soil than any other of the Five
Rivers. I saw a tree just outside Wilton covered with
golden knops on the point of breaking — and that in a
wind which made my heart feel like doing the same
thing. I dare swear that in Lord Pembroke's park there
will be several in full leaf. Avon will not provide such
a sight yet awhile; and Ebble not for three weeks.
You get in this country of ridge and hollow something
approaching the sharp contrasts the South of France
will give you — something approaching them, and yet,
of course, if I can be understood, nothing like them.
I remember driving from Le Puy to Pont Saint-Esprit
— May the season. Le Puy had been hot enough for
anyone; May weather intensified by the crater in
which the town cowers and the tufa on which it roasts.
From there, and from May, we climbed into March and
fields of daffodil; from March into as bleak a February
as you could dread in the Jura, and snow over all the
waste; from that, down a mountain slide, into the
valley of the Ardeche, where the hedgerows were full
of dusty roses, and the peasants making hay. You
won't do that in South Wilts, but you may have the
Chalke Valley with its trees naked and sere, and the
slopes of its hills white with winter bents, and over

MAURICE HEWLETT 123

the plain come down into Wilton to find magnolias in
flower and house fronts smothered in Forsythia. Ours
is the snuggest valley but poorest soil of any of the
five, and our river, being the smallest, has not thrown
up a broad bed of silt on either bank in which trees can
grow tall and feel running water about their roots.

When our Mistral began to blow, which was ten days
ago, I went up the drove immediately behind my house,
and could hardly find a sign of a cowslip. I did find
the leaves of one, but there were no more on a ledge
which will be thick with them by and by. No wheat-
ears to be seen, and no March hares in their amorous
transports. The grass was as harsh as wire, the moss,
disintegrated by the rain and dried by the wind, stood
away from the earth like the ribs of a rotten ship. To
come presently upon a little cloud of dog-violets was to
be moved, as the Ancient Mariner was, by "a spring of
love." Having blessed them unaware, I did it again,
very conscious of the act of worship. Beyond that,
further up the hill, one might have been in mid-winter.
I struggled to the Race Plain, where the wind, straight
from Nova Zembla, cut through my clothes like a knife.
As usual, I encountered a little scattered fleet of gypsies,
tacking into the jaws of it; a sorry nag straining at a
cart full of poles and miscellaneous junk; women and
young girls encumbered with babies in their shawls,
barefoot children padding about on their white heels,
and one smooth secret-faced man, lord of the tattered
seraglio, himself well clothed and unhampered. The
women were too distressed even to look their usual
petitions. I think they felt the wind rattling their bones
together. But the sultan hailed me, and we conversed
for a few moments behind a furze bush. They were
from Sherborne, going to the Forest, into what he called

124 MODERN ESSAYS

"summer quarters." "They will be glad of them, some
of your ladies," I said, and he gave me a sharp look.
"They are all right," he said. "They'll have to wait,
like the best of us." He accepted a fill of his pipe, lit
it, turned it downwards, nodded, plunged his hands,
and went leisurely after his belongings. Myself, I went
huddling home to a wood fire, feeling that he had the
better of me in many ways. For one thing, he kept
half a dozen women in order — which I could not do
even if I would; for another, he did not allow the
mere wind to interfere with his good pleasure, his lordly
ease of mind. I admire, while I cannot esteem, gypsies.
Their ways are not our ways.

The Race Plain is their highway from the West to
their headquarters in the New Forest, as once it was
ours to London. Nearly every furze clump all its length
has the lewside blackened by the ruins of a fire. Night
or day you will meet them coming or going, or pass a
group of them snuggling or sleeping by a driftwood
fire. Very rarely they come to beg or hawk clothes-
pegs in the village, but mostly they keep to their green
road. Great poachers, of course; but beyond a few
stray fowls we don't hear of much thieving. It is strange
how little they mix, even now, with our people; not
strange, therefore, that we know so little of them.
That mystery is occasionally the begetter of romance.
I said somewhere, confirming Borrow, that their girls
scorn our young men, and am sure it is true of the
main of them. Yet there are half-breeds among them,
plainly; and such generalisations cannot be quite true.
I heard of a case only the other day, where some green-
eyed waif of theirs cast her spells upon a farm-lad,
bewitched and bemused him until, for love of her, he
was led into bad courses. He used to meet her at night,

MAURICE HEWLETT 125

and their shelter in bad weather was a deserted barn
in the hillside, a place locally known as Rats' Castle.
From such association he was led on and on, left his
home, threw up his work, and hid with her in the
hollows of the hills. His people thought he had gone
for a soldier, and made no more than perfunctory
search. Then by and by things began to be missed —
hens and their eggs, bread out of bakers' carts, milk
out of dairies, even clothing from the washing-lines.
And then, one fine night, Rats' Castle was discovered
to be ablaze. The lad was taken and confessed to
everything, but the girl was not found. I hope he got
over his heartbreak during his term at Devizes, which
he served alone. He exonerated her from all blame,
took everything on his shoulders; and as he was found
near the burning barn, and she not seen there, there
was no evidence against her, though plenty of suspicion.
He would not, perhaps could not, name her, but she
was well known to the police, and has since been seen
at fairs or in the market. She was pointed out to me
in Sarum one Tuesday — quite young, with hair lighter
than her tan, with narrowed, sidelong eyes, in a faded
red blouse and black skirt. She stood motionless, biting
a corner of her apron between her very white teeth —
half vicious, half wild-cat. Then I was told the story,
and was much moved to think of what never did,
and in the nature of things, or of boy, never could have
come out at the inquiry: any hint, namely, of the
wild stress of passion, the lure of the romantic, or of
what answers to it, which drew the devoted simpleton
to forsake father and mother, industry and honesty,
and to cleave to this belle dame sans merci, to thieve
for her, and to take all the penalty. That is what
he did: and he was not the first.

126 MODERN ESSAYS

THE PLEASURES OF IGNORANCE
Robert Lynd : The Pleasures of Ignorance x

It is impossible to take a walk in the country with an
average townsman — especially, perhaps, in April or
May — without being amazed at the vast continent of
his ignorance. It is impossible to take a walk in the
country oneself without being amazed at the vast
continent of one's own ignorance. Thousands of men
and women live and die without knowing the difference
between a beech and an elm, between the song of a
thrush and the song of a blackbird. Probably in a
modern city the man who can distinguish between a
thrush's and a blackbird's song is the exception. It is
not that we have not seen the birds. It is simply that
we have not noticed them. We have been surrounded
by birds all our lives, yet so feeble is our observation
that many of us could not tell whether or not the chaffinch
sings, or the colour of the cuckoo. We argue like small
boys as to whether the cuckoo always sings as he flies
or sometimes in the branches of a tree — whether Chap-
man drew on his fancy or his knowledge of nature in
the lines:

When in the oak's green arms the cuckoo sings,
And first delights men in the lovely springs.

This ignorance, however, is not altogether miserable.
Out of it we get the constant pleasure of discovery.
Every fact of nature comes to us each spring, if only
we are sufficiently ignorant, with the dew still on it. If

1 Published in America by Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons.

ROBERT LYND 127

we have lived half a lifetime without having ever even
seen a cuckoo, and know it only as a wandering voice,
we are all the more delighted at the spectacle of its run-
away flight as it hurries from wood to wood, conscious
of its crimes, and at the way in which it halts hawk-
like in the wind, its long tail quivering, before it dares
descend on a hillside of fir-trees where avenging pre-
sences may lurk. It would be absurd to pretend that
the naturalist does not also find pleasure in observing
the life of the birds, but his is a steady pleasure, almost
a sober and plodding occupation, compared to the
morning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for
the first time, and, behold, the world is made new.

And as to that, the happiness even of the naturalist
depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which
still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He
may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books,
but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed
each bright particular Atith his eyes. He wishes with
his own eyes to see the female cuckoo — rare spectacle!
— as she lays her egg on the ground and takes it in her
bill to the nest in which it is destined to breed infanti-
cide. He would sit day after day with a field-glass
against his eyes in order personally to endorse or refute
the evidence suggesting that the cuckoo does lay on
the ground and not in a nest. And if he is so far
fortunate as to discover this most secretive of birds in
the very act of laying, there still remain for him other
fields to conquer in a multitude of such disputed ques-
tions as whether the cuckoo's egg is always of the same
colour as the other eggs in the nest in which she abandons
it. Assuredly (the men of science have no reason as
yet to weep over their lost ignorance. If they seem to
know everything, it is only because you and I know

128 MODERN ESSAYS

almost nothing. There will always be a fortune of
ignorance waiting for them under every fact they turn
up. They will never know what song the Sirens sang
to Ulysses any more than Sir Thomas Browne did.

If I have called in the cuckoo to illustrate the
ordinary man's ignorance, it is not because I can speak
with authority on that bird. It is simply because,
passing the spring in a parish that seemed to have been
invaded by all the cuckoos of Africa, I realised how
exceedingly little I, or anybody else I met, knew about
them. But your and my ignorance is not confined to
cuckoos. It dabbles in all created things, from the
sun and moon down to the names of the flowers. I once
heard a clever lady asking whether the new moon al-
ways appears on the same day of the week. She added
that perhaps it is better not to know, because, if one
does not know when or in what part of the sky to
expect it, its appearance is always a pleasant surprise.
I fancy, however, the new moon always comes as a
surprise even to those who are familiar with her time-
tables. And it is the same with the coming in of
spring and the waves of the flowers. We are not the
less delighted to find an early primrose because we are
sufficiently learned in the services of the year to look
for it in March or April rather than in October. We
know, again, that the blossom precedes and not succeeds
the fruit of the apple-tree, but this does not lessen our
amazement at the beautiful holiday of a May orchard.

At the same time there is perhaps a special pleasure
in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every
spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost
forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a
memory that he could always read an old book as though
he had never read it before. I have myself a capri-

ROBERT LYND 129

cious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself
and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work
of new authors and had come wet from the press, so
much of them fades between one reading and another.
There are occasions on which a memory of this kind is
an affliction, especially if one has a passion for accuracy.
But this is only when life has an object beyond enter-
tainment. In respect of mere luxury, it may be
doubted whether there is not as much to be said for
a bad memory as for a good one. With a bad memory
one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights
all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable,
will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession
of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without
leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns. But the
sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap
in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little
enough behind.

And if we can forget books, it is as easy to forget
the months and what they showed us when once they
are gone. Just for the moment I tell myself that I
know May like the multiplication table and could pass
an examination on its flowers, their appearance and their
order. To-day I can affirm confidently that the butter-
cup has five petals. (Or is it six? I knew for certain
last week.) But next year I shall probably have
forgotten my arithmetic, and may have to learn once
more not to confuse the buttercup with the celandine.
Once more I shall see the world as a garden through the
eyes of a stranger, my breath taken away with surprise
by the painted fields. I shall find myself wondering
whether it is science or ignorance which affirms that
the swift (that black exaggeration of the swallow and
yet a kinsman of the humming-bird) never settles even

E

130 MODERN ESSAYS

on a nest, but disappears at night into the heights of
the air. I shall learn with fresh astonishment that it
is the male, and not the female, cuckoo that sings. I
may have to learn again not to call the campion a wild
geranium, and to re-discover whether the ash comes
early or late in the etiquette of the trees. A contem-
porary English novelist was once asked by a foreigner
what was the most important crop in England. He
answered without a moment's hesitation: " Rye."
Ignorance so complete as this seems to me to be touched
with magnificence; but the ignorance even of illiterate
persons is enormous. The average man who uses a
telephone could not explain how a telephone works.
He takes for granted the telephone, the railway train,
the linotype, the aeroplane, as our grandfathers took
for granted the miracles of the Gospels. He neither
questions nor understands them. It is as though each
of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle
of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded
by most men as a gewgaw. Still we are constantly in
reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at
intervals and speculate. We revel in speculations about
anything at all — about life after death or about such
questions as that which is said to have puzzled Aristotle,
" why sneezing from noon to midnight was good, but
from night to noon unlucky." One of the greatest
joys known to man is to take such a flight into ignorance
in search of knowledge. The great pleasure of ignorance
is, after all, the pleasure of asking questions. The man
who has lost this pleasure or exchanged it for the
pleasure of dogma, which is the pleasure of answering,
is already beginning to stiffen. One envies so inquisi-
tive a man as Jowett, who sat down to the study of
physiology in his sixties. Most of us have lost the sense

ROBERT LYND 131

of our ignorance long before that age. We even become
vain of our squirrel's hoard of knowledge and regard
increasing age itself as a school of omniscience. We
forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because
he was omniscient but because he realised at the age
of seventy that he still knew nothing.

132 MODERN ESSAYS

CLOUD

Alice Me ynell : The Colour of Life, and Other Essays
on Things Seen and Heard

During a part of the year London does not see the
clouds. Not to see the clear sky might seem her chief
loss, but that is shared by the rest of England, and is,
besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear
sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London.
You may go for a week or two at a time, even though
you hold your head up as you walk, and even though
you have windows that really open, and yet you shall
see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of
a form.

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled
with a doubled glass towards the sky when you open
them towards the street. They are, therefore, a sure
sign that for all the years when no other windows were
used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky,
or even knew so much as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss
than the world knows. Terrestrial scenery is much,
but it is not all. Men go in search of it ; but the celestial
scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the
world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows
no bonds. The terrestrial scenery — the tourist's — is a
prisoner compared with this. The tourist's scenery
moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden,
with earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its
own graves. And for its changes it depends upon the

ALICE MEYNELL 133

mobility of the skies. The mere green flushing of its
sap makes only the least of its varieties ; for the greater
it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and
autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape
compared with the shadows of a cloud.

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on
earth appear or fade according to its passage; they
wear so simply, from head to foot, the luminous grey
or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their
own local colour and their own local season are lost
and cease, effaced before the all-important mood of
the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of
its winds. It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays
in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes
the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate
revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes
the foreground shine.

Everyone knows the manifest work of the cloud
when it descends and partakes in the landscape ob-
viously, lies half-way across the mountain slope, stoops
to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of
the view by the rough method of standing in front of it.
But its greatest things are done from its own place,
aloft. Thence does it distribute the sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and
valleys more mysteries than a poet conceals, but, like
him, not by interception. Thence it writes out and
cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils
of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and
yet making dark, it sheds deep colour upon the
forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the hills,
all the country is divided between grave blue and
graver sunlight.

134 MODERN ESSAYS

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work
upon the world. Its own beauty is unaltered when it
has no earthly beauty to improve. It is always great:
above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-
works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white
houses — the painted surfaces that have been devised as
the only things able to vulgarise light, as they catch
it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate
gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in
Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it
towers above some little landscape of rather paltry
interest — a conventional river heavy with water, gardens
with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies; and
thick trees, impervious to the light, touched, as the
novelists always have it, with "autumn tints." High
over these rises, in the enormous scale of the scenery of
clouds, what no man expected — an heroic sky. Few of
the things that were ever done upon earth are great
enough to be done under such a heaven. It was surely
designed for other days. It is for an epic world. Your
eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the
distances of earth to these, and what are the distances
of the clear and cloudless sky? The very horizons of
the landscape are near, for the round world dips so
soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are
unmeasured — you rest upon nothing until you come
to a star, and the star itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight
goes farther, with conscious flight, than it could ever
have journeyed otherwise. Man would not have known
distance veritably without the clouds. There are
mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those
of the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so

ALICE MEYNELL 135

far off, are not overpowering by disproportion, like
some futile building fatuously made too big for the
human measure. The cloud in its majestic place com-
poses with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or
stray in the futile building, while the cloud is no mansion
for man, and out of reach of his limitations.

The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely
by keeping the custody of his rays, but by becoming
the counsellor of his temper. The cloud veils an angry
sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenly
bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for
a background. Or when anger had but threatened, the
cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope. It makes peace,
constantly, just before sunset.

It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their
colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind
days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from
behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and
come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a
frolic and haphazard sky.

All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and
stands composed about it. As the clouds marshalled
the earthly mountains, so the clouds in turn are now
ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are
swept at once by a single ray, warmed with a single
colour. Promontory after league-long promontory of a
stiller Mediterranean in the sky is called out of mist
and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very
great, but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents
sudden with light.

All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring
him this scenery. It is only in London, for part of the
autumn and part of the winter, that the unnatural
smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many

136 MODERN ESSAYS

a day no London eye can see the horizon, or the first
threat of the cloud like a man's hand. There never
was a great painter who had not exquisite horizons, and
if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a
great thing.

He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high
in air he loses its shape. A cloud-lover is not content
to see a snowy and rosy head piling into the top of the
heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.
The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design —
whether it lies so that you can look along the immense
horizontal distances of its floor, or whether it rears so
upright a pillar that you look up its mountain steeps in
the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain
that stands, with you, on the earth.

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness ; neverthe-
less, it is not merely the guardian of the sun's rays and
their director. It is the sun's treasurer; it holds the
light that the world has lost. We talk of sunshine and
moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, whicl^ is yet one
of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is
one of the most majestic of all secondary lights. If
the reflecting moon is the bride, this is the friend of
the bridegroom.

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is
the most beautiful of all. It has spaces of a grey for
which there is no name, and no other cloud looks over
at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. The
shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across
the sky with so influential a flight that no ship going
out to sea can be better worth watching. The dullest
thing, perhaps, in the London streets is that people
take their rain there without knowing anything of the
cloud that drops it. It is merely rain, and means wet-

ALICE MEYNELL

137

ness. The shower-cloud there has limits of time, but
no limits of form, and no history whatever. It has
not come from the clear edge of the plain to the south,
and will not shoulder anon the hill to the north. The
rain, for this city, hardly comes or goes; it does but
begin and stop. No one looks after it on the path of
its retreat.

*&***»

138 MODERN ESSAYS

THE FOLLY OF EDUCATION
Richard Middleton : The Day Before Yesterday

Of all the intellectual exercises with which we solace
the idle hours that we devote to thought, none is more
engaging and at the same time perplexing than that
of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the age
in which we live. Naturally the difficulty lies, not in
lack of materials on which to base an impression —
indeed, we are embarrassed by the quantity of evidence
that accumulates to our hand — but in the fact that it
is hard to see things in true perspective when they are
very near to the observer. The yet unborn historians
of the present era will doubtless lack much of our
knowledge; but they will be able to unravel in the
quietude of their studies the tangled threads and
stubborn knots that writhe beneath our fingers with the
perpetual changeableness and uneasy animation of
life itself. But if it is impossible to write dispassionately
of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades,
and musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of
the wallpaper of the room in which we write, it is always
open to the student of life to fall back on impressionism.
The form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a loaded
phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen
and honeyed words. And the brutal method is apt to
prove the more efficacious, as with that frail sex that
kisses, so I am told, the masculine hand that grants the
accolade of femininity in that blessed state of bruiser
and bruised that is Nature's highest conception of the

RICHARD MIDDLETON 139

relationship of the two sexes. While science greets the
corpse with incomprehensible formulae and the con-
scientious artist gropes for his note-book of epithets
to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty nose
with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the
dog is dead indeed.

We are all born impressionists, and it takes the
education of years to eradicate the gift from our natures.
Many people never lose the habit of regarding life in
this queer straightforward fashion, and go to their
graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and
the sky is blue in dogged opposition to the scientists,
didactic dramatists, eminent divines, philosophers,
aesthetic poets, and human beings born blind. Some of
these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe
that impressionism means just the converse of the
sense in which I am using the word ; that, for instance,
the fact that grass is green comes to us from indirect
sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive
it to be red or blue. But while we believe our impression
to be our own, we know that this theory has reached
us indirectly, so we can well afford to ignore it. Others,
again, will have it that impressions are not to be trusted ;
and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing
to comprehend the philosophic basis on which this
doubt is founded, are only too willing to accept a theory
that relieves them in some way of responsibility for
their own individual actions. As a matter of fact,
telling a man to mistrust his impressions is like bidding
a mariner despise his compass. If our senses lie to us,
we must live, perforce, in a world of lies.

But as I hinted above, the young are wont to rely
on their impressions from the moment when a baby
first parts its lips in howling criticism of life. Children

140 MODERN ESSAYS

have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until
the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories
of perjured eyes and lying ears, and the unhappy fate
of the unwise babes who trusted them. What is a
child to do? Usually it accepts the new theory of its
own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but
it accepts it nevertheless. It begins to rely on the
experience of older human beings, as if the miracle of
its own life were no more than the toneless repetition of
other lives that have been before it. Wonder passes
from its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when
the little fingers are made to follow certain predestined
lines, instead of tracing the fancies of the moon. The
child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons.
It learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the
love of its mother from books. In course of time its
senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can,
in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is
reached the education of the individual is completed,
and all civilisation's requirements are satisfied.

I have described an extreme case, and the judicious
reader will realise that the process is rarely completed
in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. But
sooner or later most men and women come to believe
in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous
treatment of the young. I can conceive that an age
will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses
we commit in the name of education; will regard
us who force children to do their lessons against their
will, very much in the way in which we regard the slave-
owners of the past, only with added indignation that
our tyranny is imposed on the children's minds, and not
on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers
who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a

RICHARD MIDDLETON 141

moment on what it is that we have to teach the next
generation, with what manner of wisdom we chain the
children's imaginations and brand their minds. We teach
them in the first place to express themselves in sounds
that shall be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is
necessary, though I should like to doubt it. Further,
we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading
and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate.

In Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought
there was anything worth reading would teach itself
to read, as many children have done before it, and in
the same way the rarer child who desired to express
itself on paper would teach itself to write. That any
useful purpose is served by the general possession of
this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation cannot
rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday
newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls
of churches.

Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs
the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls
beautiful places by ugly names ; history, which chronicles
inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears
of those who would be better employed in discovering
the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which
encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite ;
botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of
flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate
unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called
arts and sciences, which, when examined without preju-
dice, will be found to have for their purpose the standard-
isation and ultimate belittlement of life.

In Utopia, the average human being would not know
how to read or write, would have no knowledge of the
past, and would know no more about life and the world

142 MODERN ESSAYS

in general than he had derived from his own impres-
sions. The sum of those impressions would be the
measure of his wisdom, and I think that the chances
are that he would be a good deal less ignorant than he
is now, when his head is full of confused ideas borrowed
from other men and only half-comprehended. I think
that our system of education is bad, because it challenges
the right of the individual to think constructively for
himself. In rustic families, where the father and
mother never learn to read, and the children have had
the advantages of " scholarship," the illiterate genera-
tion will always be found to have more intelligence
than their educated descendants. The children were
learning French and arithmetic when they should have
been learning life.

And, after all, this is the only kind of education
that counts. We all know that a man's knowledge of
Latin or the use of the globes does not affect his good-
fellowship, or his happiness, or even the welfare of the
State as a whole. What is important is, that he should
have passed through certain experiences, felt certain
emotions, and dreamed certain dreams, that give his
personality the stamp of a definite individual existence.
Tomlinson, the book-made man, with his secondhand
virtues and secondhand sins, is of no use to any one.
Yet while we all realise this, we still continue to have a
gentle, unreasoning faith in academic education; we
still hold that a man should temper his own impressions
with the experience of others.

RICHARD MIDDLETON 143

STREET-ORGANS
Richard Middleton : The Day Before Yesterday

It is very true, as Mr. Chesterton must have remarked
somewhere, that the cult of simplicity is one of the most
complex inventions of civilisation. To eat nuts in a
meadow when you can eat a beefsteak in a restaurant
is neither simple nor primitive; it is merely perverse,
in the same way that the art of Gaugin is perverse. A
shepherd-boy piping to his flock in Arcady and a poet
playing the penny whistle in a Soho garret may make
the same kind of noise; but whereas the shepherd-boy
knows no better, the poet has to pretend that he knows
no better. So I reject scornfully the support of those
amateurs who profess to like street-organs because they
are the direct descendants of the itinerant ballad-
singers of the romantic past; or because they represent
the simple musical tastes of the majority to-day. I
refuse to believe that in appreciating the sound of the
complex modern instruments dragged across London by
Cockneys disguised as Italians the soul of the primitive
man who lurks in some dim oubliette of everybody's
consciousness is in any way comforted. I should
imagine that that poor prisoner, if civilisation's cruelty
has not deprived him of the faculty of hearing, is best
pleased by such barbaric music as the howling of the
wind or the sound of railway-engines suffering in the
night; and indeed everyone must have noticed that
sometimes certain sounds unmusical in themselves can
arouse the same emotions as the greatest music.

144 MODERN ESSAYS

But it is not on this score that street-organs escape
our condemnation ; their music has certain defects that
even distance cannot diminish, and they invariably give
us the impression of a man speaking through his nose
in a high-pitched voice, without ever pausing to take
breath. If, in spite of this, we have a kindness for them,
it is because of their association with the gladdest
moments of childhood. To the adult ear they bring
only desolation and distraction, but to the children
the organ-man, with his curly black hair and his glitter-
ing earrings, seems to be trailing clouds of glory. For
them the barrel-organ combines the merits of Wagner,
Beethoven, Strauss, and Debussy, and Orpheus would
have to imitate its eloquent strains on his lute if he
wished to captivate the hearts of London children.

When I was a child the piano-organ and that terrible
variant that reproduces the characteristic stutter of
the mandoline with deadly fidelity were hardly dreamed
•of, but the ordinary barrel-organ and the prehistoric
liurdy-gurdy, whose quavering notes suggested senile
decay, satisfied our natural craving for melody. It is
true that they did not make so much noise as the modern
instruments, but in revenge they were almost invariably
accompanied by a monkey in a little red coat or a
performing bear. I always had a secret desire to turn
the handle of the organ myself; and when — too late
in life to enjoy the full savour of the feat — I persuaded
a wandering musician to let me make the experiment,
I was surprised to find that it is not so easy as it looks
to turn the handle without jerking it, and that the arm
of the amateur is weary long before the repertoire of
the organ is exhausted. It is told of Mascagni that he
once taught an organ-man how to play his notorious
Intermezzo to the fullest effect; but I fancv that in

RICHARD MIDDLETON 145

professional circles the story would be discredited, for
the arm of the practised musician acquires by force of
habit a uniform rate of revolution, and in endeavouring
to modify that rate he would lose all control over his
instrument.

Personally, I do not like hearing excerpts from Italian
opera on the street-organs, because that is not the kind
of music that children can dance to, and it is, after all,
in supplying an orchestra for the ballroom of the street
that they best justify their existence. The spectacle
of little ragged children dancing to the music of the organ
is the prettiest and merriest and saddest thing in the
world. In France and Belgium they waltz ; in England
they have invented a curious compound of the reel,
the gavotte, and the Cakewalk. The best dancers in
London are always little Jewesses, and it is worth any-
body's while to go to Whitechapel at midday to see
Miriam dancing on the cobbles of Stoney Lane. There
is not, as I once thought, a thwarted enchanter shut
up inside the street-organs who cries out when the
handle turns in the small of his back. But why is it
that I feel instinctively that magicians have drooping
moustaches and insinuating smiles, if it is not that my
mind as a child founded its conceptions of magicians
on itinerant musicians? And they weave powerful
spells, strong enough to make these poor little atomies
forget their birthright of want and foot it like princesses.
Children approach their amusements with a gravity
beside which the work of a man's life seems deplorably
flippant. A baby toddling round a bandstand is a far
more impressive* sight than a grown man circum-
navigating the world, and children do not smile when
they dance — all the laughter is in their feet.

When from time to time " brain- workers " write to

146 MODERN ESSAYS

the newspapers to suggest that street musicians should
be suppressed I feel that the hour has almost come to
start a movement in favour of Votes for Children. It
is disgraceful, ladies and gentlemen, that this important
section of the community, on whom the whole future
of the nation depends, should have no voice in the
forming of the nation's laws! This question of street-
organs cannot be solved by banishing them to the
slums without depriving many children of a legitimate
pleasure. For, sub rosa, the children of Park Lane —
if there are any children in Park Lane — and even the
children of " brain- workers," appreciate the music of
street-organs quite as much as their humble contem-
poraries. While father buries his head under the sofa
cushions and composes furious letters to the Times in
that stuffy hermitage, little noses are pressed against
the window-pane, little hands applaud, and little feet
beat time on the nursery floor upstairs. This is one
of those situations where it is permissible to sym-
pathise with all parties, and unless father can achieve
an almost inhuman spirit of tolerance I see no satis-
factory solution.

For children must have music ; they must have tunes
to think to and laugh to, and live to. Funeral marches
to the grave are all very well for the elderly and dis-
illusioned, but youth must tread a more lively measure.
And this music should come like the sunshine in winter,
surprisingly, at no fixed hour, as though it were a natural
consequence of life. One of the gladdest things about
the organ-man in our childhood was the unexpected-
ness of his coming. Life would be dragging a little
in schoolroom circles, when suddenly we would hear
the organ clearing its throat as it were; we would all
run to the window to wave our hands to the smiling

RICHARD MIDDLETON 147

musician, and shout affectionate messages to his intelli-
gent monkey, who caught our pennies in his little pointed
cap. In those days we had all made up our minds that
when we grew up we would have an organ and a monkey
of our own. I think it is rather a pity that with age we
forget these lofty resolutions of our childhood. I have
formed a conception of the ideal street-organist that
would only be fulfilled by some one who had realised
the romance of that calling in their youth.

How often, when the children have been happiest and
the dance has been at its gayest, I have seen the organ-
man fold music's wings and move on to another pitch
in search of pennies! I should like to think that it is
a revolt against this degraded commercialism that
inspires the protests of the critics of street music. The
itinerant musician who believed in art for art's sake
would never move on so long as he had an appreciative
audience ; and sometimes, though I am afraid this would
be the last straw to the " brain-workers," he would
arrive at two o'clock in the morning, and the children,
roused from their sleep, would hear Pan piping to his
moonlit flocks, and would believe that they were still
in the pleasant country of dreams.

148 MODERN ESSAYS

A GOLDEN AGE
H. J. Massingham

On the slopes and wide plateau of Mendip hedgerows are
largely replaced by walls of limestone, which run down
from the wildest uplands where, with the barrows and
the ancient trackways, they are the only clues to the
existence of man, down into the villages and towns of the
valleys. The same stone wall on which the blackbird
swings up his tail among the red valerian in the cathedral
close serves as a parapet for the wheatear to look five miles
away into the cluster of warm roofs and towers below
him. How odd, when I had wandered by these walls, to
think that our wall-tradition is of Pyramus shut off
from Thisbe, of seclusion and exclusion, and when the
last too violently resents the first, of arms. For here
are miles and miles of wilding gardens, where all
the garrisons are flowers and under their colours stand
displayed. Down from hill to vale the sweet militia
pours, and the very beaus and misses of Arcadian
gardens proper in the villages and towns plot a truancy
with birds and winds, cast off gentility and join the rout.

But the regiments of MarvelTs day carry other
associations than do ours, and the flowers of Mendip walls
remind me of military marches no more than those
of garden society, once run away, betray their former
state. They revert; they shake off their discipline for
good and all, and once on the wall among bedfellows,
liverworts, mosses and lichens, of an eccentric new-old

H. J. MASSINGHAM 149

world, the plant-griffins and unicorns of the dimmed
cryptogamous order, they go travelling along the ancient
track of their own childhood, of what they were before
man civilised them and made them the accomplished
young persons they were. Then a queer thing happened,
for on their way back they came plumb upon the Golden
Age. There with the cryptogams that met them from
the other end of time and with the wild flowers journey-
ing a different route into the same country, there they
stayed and made a new and constant Society of the
Plants, a federation based on a common home, and
conditions different from those prevailing in garden,
copse, hedgerow and pasture.

"Plough thou the rock until it bear," and Ploughman
Weather with its team of frost and rain had been the
first to take its share over the calcareous limestone.
Then man took a hand again and where the wall was
crumbling, mortared it from above with clods of turf.
Dust collected into the fissures and crannies, the mosses
and lichens decayed and laid down a thin vegetable
humus, and then the flowers called in winds and birds
and field-mice to sow their seeds on stony ground. Such
was the literature of the new Society of Plants, its Book
of Genesis in duodecimo. So was the new continent
formed, discovered and inhabited, an Atlantis of the
plants to which they sailed and flew in myriads, until
the rock in the fairer regions was blotted out with their
numbers, as our towns have blotted out the green earth.
This was Exodus and Numbers. And in the jumping
off from earth to their narrow eminences and in the
settlement, something was left behind; a grossness,
part of the compounding of the clay, fell away from
them and shrank them to a little measure. It was
a magical lightening and release and they swung

150 MODERN ESSAYS

on tiptoe from their rootlets as though every moment
they would be off and grapple their fibres to the
winds, as though in every flower of earth resides
its own spirit, in its own shape and form, and this
volatile essence it was which had materialised upon the
tops and in the crevices of the limestone walls. Except
where the walls ran through a town, there was little
change of species between the higher and the lower
ground. The change was down the scale of diminutive-
ness, and as the wall left the shades and mounted
towards the open winds and sunlight, so did a plant
upon it contract its leaves and blossoms, attenuate
its stem and become so mignon that an elf could
barely hide behind it. Here then was the Book of
Judges. Those that survived in the struggle for a foot-
hold were not they who shouted the loudest as in tropical
forests and the modern cities of men, but who spoke
best in a still small voice. The Stock Exchange clamour
of the jungle, the rank upthrusting and the strangle-
hold, the deadly exhalations as from the bloody sweat
of plants that fought and panted and trampled one
another to reach the light, there was no such mad
battlefield of forces upon the walls of Mendip, the
fairyland perched up on its walls of stone, where
the first were the last and the last first.

With what diplomacy, what nicety of artifice had
they all insinuated themselves into their places and
for their tiny gleams of beauty drawn their so modest
wages! The crosswort, a kinsman of the madders
and the bedstraws, draped shy coronets of greenish-
yellow flowers upon the crosses of its four-leaved
whorls, barely half their length. The stonecrops kept
their own leafy cellars for the water-supply and their
white, pink and yellow flowers close at home beside

H. J. MASSINGHAM 151

them, while the rue-leaved saxifrage clothed itself in
down to check evaporation, threw out into the air
long slender pedicels to cup the dew and sunlight and
topped them for the flies with single heads of minute
white flowers, like the upright bells of the meadow
saxifrage in miniature. The ivy-leaved toadflax usually
chooses the side of the wall, pushes its sly laughing
flowers of lilac and yellow and sometimes pure white
out of the folds of its full, tapestried leafage all the
I year round and makes a hanging for the wall in sheltered
places that hides it over. It is no aggressive plant
like the dandelion; its mastership is by the harmony
of all its parts and by a yielding adaptation to the
contours of the wall. It is not even a wiry plant,
for the undersides of the lobed, plumpy leaves are
purplish and the same "slow stain" just runs into the
stems, so that it has an appearance not of frailty
but of softness with the delicate texture of a woman's
arm unused to toil and showing the veining through
the velvety flesh. Linaria repens has used a craftsmanly
power in its sense of proportion and the adjustment
of the leaves to seize and transform the light, none
obscuring their neighbours, and so make a home
of the wall's harsh surface. So each plant set itself
not so much to elbow its fellow out of their equal
heritage of the heavens, but to share a common bless-
ing on a breath of moisture and a crumb of soil. Each
of these floral animulae, flown out of the plant kingdom
and settled on the walls, turned over the small
change of its economics and devised its livelihood in
ways as diffident and as fastidious as was the dwarf
habit of its foliage and flowers.

On the walls of the lower slopes, in deep lanes where
the canopy of leaves overhead let down a trickle of

152 MODERN ESSAYS

manna which the sun cannot eat all away, the crypto-
gamous family, once giants and now gnomes, had climbed
out of a manless past. They too had squeezed through
the needle's eye to qualify for their new microcosm,
and fronds that once merely rustled when a dinosaur
brushed through them sank upon the coping under the
weight of the humble-bee. The bulbous buttercup and
Jack-run- the-hedge beside them were now more rude than
they, and heartsease and herb-robert, dwarfs of them-
selves, were tough and candid little beings beside their
phantasmal grace. Their past was a dream so far
away that all its hot reality was chilled. A haunted
vegetation indeed, an Arcadia of the elves, who may
well sing cool pastorals under the fronds of the spleen-
wort in a voice as thin as the rays of the moon.
By what magic art does the tiny spleenwort, the com-
monest of all the ferns on Mendip walls and the most
delicate, support its segments with a cargo of spores
like minute furred caterpillars behind them — when
there is no stalk ? You seek and find that there is one
after all, a black hair as out of a fairy horse's mane
and invisible at a longer view. Less aerial but more
pixylike are the fronds of the ceterach with scaly
undersides of golden-brown to protect the spores,
as though a tiger moth, the transport of elf-land,
had rubbed off its scales upon them. The unassuming
wall-rue, another Asplenium, pokes out two inches of
densely tufted and clipped rosettes from the cracks;
the tapering polypody unclenches its childish fingers
into the world on the tops, and the varnished leaves of
the young hart's-tongue, that outgrace the Solutrean
lance-points of which they perhaps rather than the
laurel-leaf were the model, droop their streamers from
the stony sills. And mosses with vermilion flowers and

H. J. MASSINGHAM 153

seeds like fairy honesty small one down into a world
yet daintier than this.

If one kneels down and sees the etching of this unique
flora upon the blue sky, gripping the stones with bird-
kin claws and insect tentacles and waving a design so
finely cut upon it, one is drawn by very choiceness and
particularity of the plants into distinctions. Myosotis, by
its slender stems and downy leaves, takes well to hardy
Lilliput and splits into changing, field and early forget-
me-not, each a subtly individual variation on the
myosotis theme. The field diminishes its stems but
still tosses its blue lights in freedom; the changing
clasps the wall with a tuft of radical leaves and lifts a
stiff little turret of stem and erect leaflets a finger's
length in height, with the little princesses first in yellow
then in blue, as they grow old, upon it ; while the early
forget-me-not arranges its foliage about a nest of the
minutest sapphires. So microscopic are they that the
yellow rocket, no colossus among the crucifers, but
sizeable, arches a single blossom like a sun above them.
Each group of plants stresses its diversities upon the
wall, and what the species sacrifice to size in common
they pick up again in a more individual differentiation.
Each species must brace itself to this a brighter world,
and in so doing, in casting off some of its fleshier habili-
ments, becomes itself more truly. Thus the crane's-bills
and the veronicas went each its own sharp way, and the
smaller it grew the further it had gone along it. What
could be said of such a universe of flowers when even
the groundsel grew as Diirer might have drawn it?

" Mention but the v/ord divinity," wrote Samuel
Butler, " and our sense of the divine is clouded." What
a crowd of deserters had climbed upon Mendip walls
and sunned themselves in the golden weather! They

154 MODERN ESSAYS

had got to a common bedrock, an exiguous pilgrim's
ration of bread and water was much the same for all,
and together they had to solve how to draw the bounty
and bide the pelting of the elements. And except in
the warmth of the villages, they had all solved the
matter in the same way, by going small and living small.
But as you walked along the wall and the lines of this
federation of the plants upon it, more or less at peace
with one another and accepting all the limitations of
their pilgrimage, you could not but marvel at the in-
finite multiformity and variety of habit. These still
small voices, yes, they all contributed to the same
anthology, but in rhythms and collocations of words
how different! And as I walked, the curse of generali-
ties, those monsters and chimeras by which we are all
cursed, seemed to drop from me, and, gladdened and
refreshed by the darling modesty, the fairylike strange-
ness and particularity of this little world, it was as
though I too had climbed upon the wall and sunned
myself in a Golden Age.

JOHN MASEFIELD 155

THE PILGRIM FATHERS

John Masefield :

Introduction to Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers

The Brownist emigration, known to Americans as the
" Sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers," was a little part of
a great movement towards independence of judgment in
spiritual affairs. The great movement began in the
latter half of the sixteenth century in many parts of
England. The little part of it which concerns us began
in the early years of the seventeenth century in the
country about the borders of the three counties of
Nottingham, Lincoln and York. The Separatists were
members of the lower and middle classes, who accepted
the ruling of the Church of England in articles of faith,
but refused her judgment in points of discipline. They
held (in opposition to the Church) that the priesthood
is not a distinct order, but an office temporarily conferred
by the vote of the congregation.

Their attitude and action have been thus described by
one of their number: " They entered into covenant to
walk with God and one with another, in the enjoyment
of the Ordinances of God, according to the Primitive Pattern
in the Word of God. But finding by experience they could
not peaceably enjoy their own liberty in their Native
Country, without offence to others that were differently
minded, they took up thoughts of removing."

One party of them, under Pastor John Smyth,
■ ' removed " from Gainsborough, in Lincolnshire, to

156 MODERN ESSAYS

Amsterdam in the year 1606. Another party organised
in that year in the district of Scrooby, in Nottingham-
shire, about ten miles west from Gainsborough, began
to make itself obnoxious to the country authorities.
This second party contained two prominent men, William
Brewster, the chief layman, and John Robinson, one
of the two ministers.

The members of the party were accustomed to meet
together " to worship God in their own manner."
Church discipline, which forbade their meetings, im-
posed a persecution upon them. Religious persecution
that endeavours to drive a flock along a path is success-
ful, as a rule, only with the sheep. It makes the goats
unruly. The persecution failed to bend the brethren,
but it gave them enough annoyance to make them wish
to leave the country. The leaders among them planned
an exodus to Holland. In the autumn of 1607 a large
party tried to escape to Holland from the port of Boston,
in Lincolnshire. At that time it was not lawful for a
person to leave the country without licence. A large
party could not hope to get away without the conniv-
ance of a ship's captain. The snip's captain to whom
this escaping party appealed accepted the bribe, then,
fearing the consequences of his action, or hoping to
obtain a reward, betrayed his passengers to the authori-
ties. The members of the party were sentenced to a
month in gaol; their goods were confiscated. Later in
the year, another party was stopped while trying to
escape from Great Grimsby. Many women and children
were taken and imprisoned.

The prisoners in country gaols were then supported
out of the rates. The keeping of large numbers of
people in prison, in idleness, proved to be a great burden
upon the rates of the towns where they were gaoled.

JOHN MASEFIELD 157

The authorities who felt the burden soon became
anxious to get rid of their prisoners. They released
them and connived at their leaving the country. By
August 1608, the whole party was safely in Amsterdam.

During the next few months, after some contention
with the party from Gainsborough, a hundred of the
Scrooby party obtained leave to go to Leyden, where
they settled down to the manufacture of woollen goods.
They were joined from time to time by other Separatists
from England. In a few years their communion num-
bered some three hundred souls, among whom were
Edward Winslow, John Carver, and Miles Standish.

In the year 1617, these exiles began to realise that
Holland, though a seasonable refuge, could not be their
abiding-place. The children were growing up. The
parents did not wish to send them to Dutch schools,
because the Dutch children were of bad behaviour.
The parents feared that the children, if sent to school
in Holland, would receive evil communications and lose
something of their nationality. No one is so proud of
his nationality as the exile. The fear that the colony
might become a part of the Dutch population caused
the leaders to think of travelling elsewhere. Guiana,
the first place suggested, was rejected as unsuitable,
because it was supposed to contain gold. Gold, or the
prospect of finding gold, would be a temptation, if not
a curse, to weak membe*rs of the community. There
was also the prospect of danger from the Spaniards.
Virginia, the next place suggested, was considered un-
safe. The English were there. It was doubtful whether
the English would allow in their midst a large com-
munity the members of which held unauthorised reli-
gious opinions. No other place offered such advantages
as Virginia. The settlers there were Englishmen and

158 MODERN ESSAYS

Protestants. It was decided that members of the com-
munity should go to London to ask leave of the Virginia
Company. In September 1617, two of the Separatists
(John Carver and Robert Cushman) laid before the
Virginia Company in London a declaration in seven
articles. This declaration was designed to show that
the Separatists would not be rebellious nor dangerous
colonists. It stated that they assented to the doctrines
of the Church of England and acknowledged the King's
authority. The Virginia Company, accepting the declara-
tion, was inclined to welcome the party as colonists;
but a fear, suggested by the bishops, that they in-
tended for Virginia, "to make a free popular state
there," caused delay. The patent was not granted till
the 9th/io,th of June, 1619.

When the patent had been obtained more delay was
caused by the difficulty of obtaining money for the
equipment of the expedition. The London merchants
saw little prospect of rich returns. They were slow to
invest in an undertaking so hazardous. It was one
thing to subscribe money "for the glory of Christ and
the advancement of the beaver trade," another to equip
a large party of religious enthusiasts for an experimental
settling in a savage country. John Robinson, wearying
of the delays, tried to persuade the Dutch to encourage
the party to settle in the New Netherlands. His request
led to nothing. Early in i620, Thomas Weston, a
London merchant, suggested that the settlement should
be made in Northern Virginia. About seventy other
merchants offered to subscribe. The business began to
go forward. A Common Stock was formed. Ten pound
shares in this Stock could be taken up either by money
or byjgoods. John Carver went to Southampton to
engage a ship. Robert Cushman, acting for the brethren,

JOHN MASEFIELD 159

drew up an agreement with the merchant adventurers,
or, as we should call them, the speculators. He agreed
that all the labour of the colonists should be for the
common benefit, and that, after seven years, the
results of the labours (houses, tilled land and goods)
should be divided equally between the planters and
the adventurers.

Although some seventy merchants subscribed money,
the Common Stock was not big enough to send all the
brethren to America. The majority had to stay in
Holland. Those who chose, or were chosen, to go, left
Leyden for Delft Haven, where they went aboard the
ship Speedwell, of 60 tons, which had been bought and
equipped in Holland. On or about the ioth/20th of
July, 1620, the Speedwell sailed for Southampton.

At Southampton, the emigrants found waiting for
them the ship Mayflower, of 180 tons. She was a
London ship, chartered for the occasion. In her were
other emigrants, some of them labourers, some of them
Separatists eager to leave England. With them was
the chief adventurer, Mr. Thomas Weston, who had
come to ask the leaders of the party to sign the contract
approved by Cushman. As the leaders did not like the
terms of the contract they refused to sign it. There
was an angry dispute. In the end Mr. Weston went back
to London, with the contract not signed.

It had been agreed that he was to advance them
another sum of money before the ships set sail. As the
contract was not signed, the pilgrims had to manage
without this money. Without it, they found it difficult
to pay the charges of the ships and crews. They were
forced to sell sixty pounds' worth of provisions to
obtain money for the discharge of these claims. In
those days, and, indeed, until within the memory of

i6o MODERN ESSAYS

men now living, passengers across the Atlantic lived
upon supplies of food laid in and prepared by them-
selves. The Western passage was seldom made in less
than two months. The pilgrims could not hope for
any fresh supply of food before the next year's harvest
in the New World. A considerable lessening of their
stock of provisions might well lead to the ruin of
the settlement.

About the 5th/i5th of August the two ships put to
sea in company, carrying in all about 120 emigrants.
After eight days, the captain of the Speedwell com-
plained that his ship had sprung a leak. The expedition
put back into Dartmouth to refit. On setting sail again,
the ships beat a hundred leagues to the west of the
Land's End, when they were forced, by stress of weather,
to put back into Plymouth. The captain of the Speed-
well declared that his ship was too much battered to
keep the seas. Though the man was lying in order to
escape from the fulfilment of his charter, his word was
taken. The Speedwell was abandoned, the pilgrims in
her were bidden to come aboard the Mayflower to take
the places of some who could endure no more. About
twenty of the pilgrims left the expedition at Plymouth.
They were discouraged by the hardship and sea-sick-
ness, two doctors which never fail to teach the unfit
that though many are called to the life of pioneers, very
few are chosen. Among those who left the expedition at
Plymouth was Robert Cushman.

On Wednesday, the 6th/i6th September, the expedi-
tion left Plymouth for a third attempt. In the existing
records little is said about the voyage; but it must
have been a strange and terrible adventure to most of
the party. The ship was very small, and crowded with
people. Counting the crew, she must have held nearly

JOHN MASEFIELD 161

a hundred and fifty people, in a space too narrow for
the comfort of half that number. The passengers were
stowed in the between decks, a sort of low, narrow
room under the spar deck, lit in fine weather by the
openings of hatchways and gun-ports, and in bad
weather, when these were closed, by lanterns. They
lived, ate, slept, and were seasick in that narrow space.
A woman bore a child, a man died there. They were
packed so tightly, among all their belongings and
stores, that they could have had no privacy. The
ventilation was bad, even in fine weather. In bad
weather, when the hatches were battened down, there
was none. In bad weather the pilgrims lived in a fog
through which they could see the water on the deck
washing from side to side, as the ship rolled, carrying
their pans and clothes with it. They could only lie, and
groan, and pray, in stink and misery, while the water
from ill-caulked seams dripped on them from above. In
one of the storms during the passage the Mayflower
broke her mainbeam. Luckily one of her passengers
had a jackscrew, by means of which the damage was
made good. But the accident added the very present
fear of death to the other miseries of the passage.

The Mayflower made the land on the gth/icjth Novem-
ber, after a passage in which the chief events were the
storm, birth and death above mentioned. On coming
towards shore the landfall was seen to be the strange
curving crook of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The pilgrims'
patent was for a settlement in Virginia, far to wind-
ward in the south. There was no settlement of white
people at Cape Cod. As they had made the land so
far to the north, the pilgrims thought that their best
plan would be to beat down to the Hudson River and
look for a place near the Dutch settlement in what is

F

162 MODERN ESSAYS

now New York. The crew of the ship refused to do
this. Winter was coming on. They were not disposed
to beat down a dangerous coast, to a doubtful welcome,
in the teeth of the November gales. They told the
pilgrims that they must go ashore where they could.
Men were sent ashore to examine the land. On the
nth November, the pilgrims met together "to covenant
and combine themselves together into a civil body
politic." The whole party numbered 102, of which
73 were male and 29 female. More than half of the
number had come from Ley den. The covenant was
signed by forty -one men, seven of whom were
labourers. John Carver was selected the first governor
of the community.

During the next few weeks, parties of the pilgrims
searched for a good site for the settlement. On the
22nd of December the site was found in the grounds
adjoining what is now Plymouth Harbour. The May-
flower was brought into the harbour, and on Monday,
25th December, the first house was begun. By the
middle of January most of the pilgrims were ashore.

It is said that their first winter in the New World
was mild. It was certainly very terrible to them. Want
of fresh food, the harshness of the change of climate,
the exposure and labour in the building of the town,
and the intense cold of even a mild New England winter,
were more than they could endure. Nearly half of them
were dead within six months. Among the dead was the
governor, John Carver, who died shortly after his re-
election to office. His place was taken by William
Bradford. In the early spring of 1621, an Indian called
Samoset came to the pilgrims. He told them that the
place where they had settled was called Patuxet, and
that the Indians had deserted those parts owing to an

JOHN MASEFIELD 163

outbreak of the plague. The Mayflower, sailing back
to England in April, carried with her a tale of great
mortality and the prospect of possible pestilence when
the hot weather came.

The summer proved fine, and the harvest good. In
November, by which time less than fifty of the original
settlers remained alive, Robert Cushman arrived among
them, in the ship Fortune, with thirty-five recruits (ten
of them women). He also brought a patent (granted
by the President and Council of New England), allow-
ing to each settler a hundred acres of land and the
power to make laws and govern. In December 1621, in
a letter sent home in the ship Fortune, the settlement
was first called New Plymouth.

The after history of the settlement may be indicated
briefly. It is a story of the slow but noble triumph of
all that is finest in the English temper. By honest
industry and by that justice which, until the last two
generations, usually marked and ennobled our dealings
with native tribes, the settlement prospered. The pil-
grims honestly paid the Indians for the lands acquired
from them. In 1623, they were able to stop an Indian
war, which had been provoked by some intemperate
colonists sent out by Thomas Weston to a place twenty
miles to the north of New Plymouth.

In 1624, the London merchants sent out one John
Lyford, to be clergyman to the community. He was
sent home for trying to set up the ritual of the Church
of England. Another clergyman, who was sent to them
four years later, went mad.

In 1626, many of the London adventurers were
bought out. They surrendered their shares for the
sum of eighteen hundred pounds, payable in nine yearly
instalments. Eight leading planters and four principal

164 MODERN ESSAYS

merchants in London undertook to make the first six
payments in return for the monopoly of the foreign
trade. In the reorganisation of the company the most
prosperous men of the community were made stock-
holders. They were allotted one share for each member
of their families. Each head of a family was granted
an extra acre of land, and a title to his house. The
cattle, being still few in number, were allotted among
groups of families. Few laws were made, though
the men sometimes met in General Court to discuss
public business.

In 1630, when the second charter arrived, the colony
numbered three hundred souls. After that time, its
growth was slow, steady, and not very eventful, till
the disastrous Indian war of 1676. In 1691 it was
merged in the bigger "civil body politic" of Boston.

Emigration nowadays is seldom an act of religious
protest, still more seldom an endeavour to found a more
perfect human state. Man emigrates now to obtain
greater personal opportunity, or in tacit confession of
incompetence. When he emigrates in protest, it is
in aesthetic protest. The migration is to some place
of natural beauty, in which the creation of works
of art may proceed under conditions pleasing to
their creators.

A generation fond of pleasure, disinclined towards
serious thought, and shrinking from hardship, even if
it may be swiftly reached, will find it difficult to imagine
the temper, courage and manliness of the emigrants who
made the first Christian settlement of New England.
For a man to give up all things and fare forth into
savagery, in order to escape from the responsibilities
of life, in order, that is, to serve the devil, "whose
feet are bound by civilisation," is common. Giving up

JOHN MASEFIELD 165

all things in order to serve God is a sternness for which
prosperity has unfitted us.

Some regard the settling of New Plymouth as the
sowing of the seed from which the crop of Modern
America has grown. The vulgarity of others has changed
the wood of the Mayflower into a forest of famity trees.
For all the Mayflower's sailing there is, perhaps, little
existing in modern England or America "according to
the Primitive Pattern in the Word of God." It would
be healthful could either country see herself through
the eyes of those pioneers, or see the pioneers as they
were. The pilgrims leave no impression of personality
on the mind. They were not "remarkable." Not one of
them had compelling personal genius, or marked talent
for the work in hand. They were plain men of moderate
abilities, who, giving up all things, went to live in the
wilds, at unknown cost to themselves, in order to
preserve to their children a life in the soul.

166 MODERN ESSAYS

THE OLD SCHOOL
J. Lewis May: To-Day

Nos, ubi decidimus,

Quo pater jEneas, Tullus dives et Ancus

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

I was happy at school; but I did not know that I was
happy. I did not know how happy I had been until
the night of the leaving-supper. Then something knocked
at my heart — something like the knocking at the gate
in Macbeth. It was as the coming-in of the real, tangible
world, after a dream. Only in this case, as I now realised,
it had been a very pleasant dream. The men who had
tried so hard, albeit so unsuccessfully, to instil some
rudiments of knowledge into my wool-gathering brain
seemed, even then, like figures in some diverting phan-
tasmagoria; and now, as I look back upon them, they
appear to me more shadowy, but more winning than
before. But no, let me correct that. There are one or
two who are not winning, one or two who inspired me
with fear in those days, but who now merely strike me
as quaint, irascible, comic beings who acquired curious
antics by reason, I suppose, of their being shut off
from intercourse with men and women of the world.

But S was not one of those exceptions. He was

entirely amiable. I see him now in his suit of dark blue
broadcloth, which fitted his corpulent person like a
sheath, forming a pleasant contrast with the red-gold
fringe of silky hair that adorned the base of his dome-
like cranium. There was never a crease, never a speck

J. LEWIS MAY 167

of dust on that immaculate coat. S was remark-
able, above all, for the striking conformation of his
stomach part. As I have said, he was corpulent. But
his abdomen was not curvilinear; it was rectilinear and
precipitous, and over the precipice, swaying in the air,

hung a prodigious bunch of gold seals. S 's ostensible

duties were to initiate us into the mysteries of mathe-
matics, but this he had long since abandoned as a
hopeless task. The morning he used to spend circumam-
bulating the schoolroom, crooning to himself, under his
breath, an antique lullaby — peradventure the song with
which his mother had been wont to sing him to sleep.
This, of course, is only conjecture. Certain, however, it
is that, in the afternoons, he did sleep, and his nose
was not seldom vocal. He did not, it is true, succeed
in instilling into our unwilling minds the secrets of the
binomial theorem or of those other strange mysteries
the very names of which I never rightly knew, much
less could repeat at this time of day. But I learned
from him things more valuable than were ever contained
within the covers of a Todhunter or a Hamblin Smith.
From him I learned the virtue of resignation, from him
I learned the seductive charm of idleness and the value
of that most priceless gift of the gods, the gift of sleep.

S has long since crossed his last lullaby and sleeps

now, without rocking, in the bosom of the Great Mother.
Peace be to his manes and peace to thine, little pom-
pous, pedantic and amazingly erudite D . I hated

thee once, but all that is long ago. And yet you might
have done me, and nearly did, an irreparable injury. I
might have gone through life with as deep and dull and
uncomprehending a hatred of Horace and Virgil and the
rest of them as that which I conceived for those sacred
writers under thy learned — but oh, how unimaginative !

168 MODERN ESSAYS

— ferule. And yet, for all thy learning, what a simpleton
thou wast! Tis because in some ways thou resemblest
a little child that I comfort myself with the hope that
thy harshness has been forgiven thee and that all is
well with thee now. If only thou hadst not said, in
accordance with that precious rule of thine, "down a
place," when a boy dropped a pencil or whispered to
his neighbour when his time came to stand up and
construe, if only thou hadst perceived that the real
reason of his delinquency was to avoid his turn, what
abysmal depths of ignorance thou wouldst have sounded,
what criminal lack of preparation thou wouldst have
laid bare.

Would that I could portray the attenuated C

who taught chemistry, or tried to teach it, but who
was for ever telling his class, in a voice that sounded
weary and faint from the altitude at which it was
uttered: "Boys, you don't work, you don't work!" It
was a declaration of sinister accuracy. Would that I
could bring before you, in his habit as he lived, old

G S , the Alsatian, of the vast and pendulous

paunch, like a feather bed, into which, as he shambled
along the dim corridors, mischievous urchins would
hurl themselves with the velocity of a bolt from a
catapult. Withdrawing themselves from the soft en-
veloping folds, they would apologise with mock pro-
fuseness to the breathless and infuriated old fellow
who, at last, so often did these "accidents" occur,
adopted a lateral or crab-like mode of progression. And

then again there was Dr. D n, whose ability to

maintain order amongst the gentle little lambs who
formed his flock was in inverse ratio to his learning,
which was accounted stupendous. You suffered grievous
trials and have earned that silence and repose for which

J. LEWIS MAY 169

you yearned so deeply but which, here on earth, were
never yours. In whatever regions you now dwell, I
hope no unseemly little ruffians murmur in an under-
tone: "confusedly dispersed," like the magic music in

The Tempest: "D n, D n, D n, you're a

damned funny man."

And can I forget P , whose mien was so majestic,

who always moved as to the measure of some celestial
music inaudible to coarser ears ? With what grim delight
he enjoyed the awe with which he inspired us. Imposing
was his long grey beard, redoubtable the cavernous
rumblings of his voice, but most terrible of all was his
eye, that eye with its superabundance of white, that
baleful eye that never seemed to shut, nor ever looked
in the same direction as its fellow; so that, sometimes,
when deeming yourself well out of his sight of vision,
you hastily thrust into your mouth a surreptitious
brandy ball, you would start with dismay to find that
distorted orb fixed on you with a venomous stare.

How can I do justice, O beloved phantom, to thee,
H.E.W. ? How can I find words, not indeed to praise
— that were impertinent, but simply to record your
courtesy, your urbanity, your almost feminine gracious-
ness! To you it is I owe such fondness for letters as
I now possess. You it was who revealed to me the
beauties that lie hidden in those signs imprinted on
the sample page of knowledge and which, but for you,
"would have remained, for me at least, ever meaningless
and dull. When we were reading with you, the past and
the present seemed to answer and interpret one another
after the manner of majestic antiphons. Was it Milton
or Wordsworth we were studying — the great voices
of classical antiquity would awaken again and resound
anew in the verse of the modern poet. With you I

170 MODERN ESSAYS

descended into the underworld with iEneas and Sibyl.
With you I sailed over the wine-dark sea, and beheld
the graceful shores and shining promontories of Hellas.
You never made a scholar of me. That had been beyond
even your powers; but you implanted in me a love of
letters which has been for me an unfailing source of
solace and delight. Like the old gardener of Tarentum,
you tilled with patience and with ardour and with love
the most unpromising soil and made it bring forth some
modest fruit where before had been but weeds and
tares. With love and reverence I salute thee, sweet and
gracious soul. . . . But enough — I hear the old beadle
clanging his bell in the playground. The twilight is
falling, the lamps are lit in the street, the fallen leaves
rustle drearily on the gravel, it is time to be gone.

Ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.

Farewell, my masters, the night is coming, little
kids, cut away home!

H. C. MINCHIN 171

A LODGE IN THE FOREST
Harry Christopher Minchin: Talks & Traits

" If you can tear yourself away from town," wrote the
satirist, nearly two thousand years ago, " you may get
a little house and garden in the country for what a
garret's rent is here. You may hoe the ground and grow
a feast for a hundred vegetarians. 'Tis something, where-
soever one dwells, to be master of the run of even a
single lizard." The sentiment is still applicable and is
shared by many. So, too, allowing for the changes of
date and clime, the remark about expense holds good.
That is to say, in the country your money buys you more.

But in our days it is not usually a question of being
able " to tear oneself away." Hosts of people who
would prefer a country life are kept from it by economic
reasons. You may know them by the careful tending
of their tiny garden, if they are lucky enough to possess
one, by their gay window-box, or even by a struggling
plant upon their table. Our big towns are, of course,
too big. To Cobbett London was a " huge wen."
What would he term it now? Old Babylon, London's
prototype, was more methodical in its provision of
open spaces than ourselves. Our civilisation has been
at fault, as we are well aware.

Garden cities and suburbs are both excellent things
in themselves, and will satisfy the aims and wants of
thousands. But the real lover of country life, whose
cradle, in Matthew Arnold's phrase,

Was breathed on by the rural Pan,
will avoid them, because to him the loneliness of the

172 MODERN ESSAYS

country is one of its most compelling appeals. A common
love of solitude links ancient hermits and modern
recluses; but whereas the hermit cared nothing for the
scenery amid which he dwelt — from which indeed, as
from human intercourse, he desired to be a thing apart
— the recluse, in general, cares for it a great deal. O
strange diversity of man's thought! That the beauty
of inanimate nature should be in the eyes of one a snare
of evil, in another's the raiment of Almighty Power!

Such a recluse, then, lately had his dwelling in a
certain forest in the Midlands. And yet I wrong him
by the term, if it be taken to include anything cowardly
or selfish — and must there not be a dash of both quali-
ties in one who rigorously severs himself from his kind ?
— for he was neither. He was a worker, and his work
lay among men; it brought him, moreover, into frequent
though shrinking contact with the sordid side of life,
with mean motives and low aims. Circumstance and,
it must be admitted, an imperfect resistance to it, had
set an intellect which would have adorned the Bench
to work upon the disputes of mediocre people in a
manufacturing town. These he never really learnt to
regard with professional indifference, or, at least, to
turn the key upon them when his work was over. In-
stead, they fostered the tendencies to analysis and
melancholy which with mental gifts of a high order
were his inheritance at birth. He found no real relief
from them in general society, as many do. It was a
happy thing for him when he was able to combine
with private practice a post which made him free of
old muniment rooms, and brought him into contact with
the members of a Cathedral Chapter. But in such
company, though he could enjoy it, he could not rest;
probably, he thought, because it took so much for

H. C. MINCHIN 173

granted. His craving for solitude, when work was over,
grew more imperative. His mind, constrained by long
training to grapple with legal problems, reacted from
them most readily to the speculative regions where it
loved to dwell. He determined to build himself a
retreat, where the hours stolen from business could be
at least his own.

That was how the Lodge in the Forest came to be.
Six miles separate the town from the Forest's border.
How eagerly and how often did rapid wheels bear him
over those miles when his house was building — how
constantly and with what unfailing satisfaction when
it was built! As you ride the meadows assume more
and more a woodland character. Presently, at a sharp
turn, you take a rough road between stone walls, and
in another hundred yards perceive that on either hand
is genuine forest. Half a mile further the foliage gives
place to pasture. In the background are the ruins of
a Priory, with an old farmhouse in keeping; these left
behind, you reach, in a little, the philosopher's retreat.

It is remote, save for the farm's touch of pastoral,
from signs of human life. It is built of the dark vol-
canic stone native to the district, which indeed, rising
starkly in masses from the live turf, masses that the
beechen branches only half conceal, gives the Forest an
air of severity, even, when the sky is dark, of gloom.
You surmise that this feature, reflected somewhat in
his dwelling, was not wholly out of keeping with our
solitary's humour. But if the house was a little severe
of aspect, not so the garden. For therein, besides in
his folios and his meditations, lay its owner's chiefest
pleasure. In a few years he had made a rock garden
which won local fame, though more people knew it
by repute than by inspection. How memorable and

174 ■ MODERN ESSAYS

]onged-for was the day when, with the advancing
season, he could reach it before darkness fell.

In this refuge from his careful world he passed many
an hour of quiet and renewing solitude. There among
his flowers he seemed to overhear the harmonies of
nature, too often blurred or drowned, for him at least,
amid human activities. His wistfulness was here
forgotten in enjoyment, his agitation stilled. A spell of
such seclusion fitted him for human intercourse once more.

His hermitage possessed what those of old lacked, a
chamber for a friend ; and happy he who was bidden to
occupy it. For this reserved and sequestered being had
yet a genius for friendship. The winning of his regard
was not quick or easy ; but he who won it never lost it.
Friendship, a word often, in our hurried age, too lightly
used, was to him of sacred import. It carried with it
responsibilities as well as pleasures. But, admitted to
the Lodge in the Forest, it was of the pleasures only
that one thought. For the host in him, responding to
his friend's presence, bade all darker thoughts avaunt,
and for that time serenity possessed his soul. While
daylight lasted the garden held one; new varieties had
to be explained, new blossoms praised. Then came the
meal, in the Lodge's one living-room — a long, low room,
with deep-set hearth, the home of his most cherished
volumes and engravings — a simple meal, but fastidi-
ously served. Then talk of old days and of new theories,
of ancient ideals and present needs, accompanied by
much tobacco; for as the smoke ascended the clearer
and the rarer grew the atmosphere of his mind. Or
he would take down a book and read aloud ; something
speculative, but, for choice, with a sting in it, provo-
cative; such, for instance, as Bagehot's wonderful
essay on the several kinds of poetry. How that essay,

H. C. MINCHIN 175

with ensuing talk upon it, kept us from our beds!
Even as we, with others, came forth of old from a college
sitting-room to rising sun and piping birds, in davs so
distant yet so vivid. That is the flower of friendship,
surely, to know one's heart uplifted and one's mind
clarified by such converse — and to know that one's
friends, also, are in like happy case. These are the hours
of which one says, in after life, would there had been
more like them, or would that I had prized them even
more! At such moments the recluse's perplexities and
questionings fell from him, while confidence, and even
joyousness, usurped their place. Gone, for the time
being, was that mental poise remarked in him by one
who was his intimate, the poise as of a man stretching
out his arms in the void for something that lay beyond
— tendentemque manus ripce ulterioris amove.

One may sharpen one's wits equally well, it is possible,
with a new acquaintance, and yet only chill or fatigue
oneself in the process. One may prove in hearty
agreement with him, may find interests, even enthu-
siasms, in common. Is not this, we ask ourselves at
such a moment, the old, the remembered fire, that
warmed us through and through? Ah no, it is but the
sudden blaze of thorns, which dies down as suddenly,
towards which we stretch cold hands in vain. The
companionship which such a friend as ours could give
is and must be the growth of years, the outcome of
common tastes, of shared griefs and pleasures. It is
come by in no facile manner. Alas, that as years go
on so much of the best that we have known becomes a
memory! Yet in the minds of two or three who may
read this retrospect, the old, true warmth may haply be
revived — even though the Lodge in the Forest has passed
to alien ownership, and will never see its master more.

176 , MODERN ESSAYS

OVER THE FELLS TO CALDBECK

(in the vein of rhapsody)

Harry Christopher Minchin: Talks and Traits

It is a fair cool morning of early autumn, as I come to
a first halt upon my pilgrimage to Caldbeck. Surely no
traveller could do otherwise, unless he were as pressed
for time as those three gallopers from Ghent; for I
stand upon the Terrace Road, between Applethwaite
and Millbeck, for which Southey — how often did his
patient footsteps tread it! — affirmed that there is
obtained the finest prospect of Derwentwater and its
mountain warders. Below is stretched the fertile vale
of Keswick, from the singing Greta to the verge of
Bassenthwaite ; beyond it that exceeding lovely lake
of Derwentwater — comparison with her sister meres
shall be avoided — backed by Borrowdale, dreaming
sombrely among its clouds. Eastward, across the steep
fells which edge the water, the mighty shoulders of
Helvellyn seem to challenge Skiddaw to a wrestle for
pre-eminence; to the west is that amazing series of
heights which Coleridge likened to a giant's encampment.
May we not vary his metaphor and identify them not
with the tents but with their owners, and exclaim with
Browning :

The hills like giants at a hunting lay ?

The comparison is at any rate appropriate to-day, since

H. C. MINCHIN 177

it is the memory of the mighty hunter, John Peel —
what else? — that is drawing me to Caldbeck.

It is not true, of course, that " he lived at Troutbeck
once on a day." That line was added by a later hand.
Had Troutbeck (the Cumbrian one) been his home, a
pilgrimage to John Peel's country had been easy, and
the pilgrims more numerous, for Troutbeck is on the
railway. But the village of Caldbeck, near which he
was born, lived and died, is seven and a half miles from
a station, and that station Wigton, which is not likely
to be reached by any wanderer in the Lake District.
That is why my bicycle must carry me over the seventeen
miles which separate the famous huntsman's last resting-
place from Keswick. I tear myself away from the
Terrace, and speed onwards. As far as Bassenthwaite
it is easy going. Resisting the temptation of a signpost
which invites me to follow a rather doubtful and very
narrow roadway to " Uldale — The Dash — Caldbeck "
(The Dash turns out to be a brook, or beck), I leave the
Carlisle road a mile further, at the Castle Inn, where
hounds often meet, and begin over a roughish surface
to climb a slope of uncompromising steepness. There
is no help for it, for a shoulder of Skiddaw has to be
traversed. The summit at last — and a disappointing
view! Before me stretch rolling hills, mapped out for
tillage, crying aloud, as such a region always does, for
hedgerow timber to vary the monotony. On the right,
however, is open moorland, and thither my direction
lies. Down a long descent I go, for several miles, until
I reach Uldale. Oh the sequestered village on the moor !
Its loneliness makes one realise, in a flash, what to the
Bronte sisters life at Haworth may have been ! Another
steep climb, no sign of cultivation now, only the moor-
land and the sheep, its denizens. At Uldale they have

178 MODERN ESSAYS

told me to push on "reet ower t' top"; but ere that is
reached I am glad to meet a dalesman, leading a horse
to be shod. I am near the summit, he says, and shall
have " a fine roon down to Cal'beck, two an a half
miles, aboot." It proves to be four! No matter, one
could hardly have a more exhilarating run. The long
road stretches before me like a white ribbon straying
over a green dress. Very occasionally an isolated farm
is passed; one, sheltered by a few oaks and beeches,
particularly takes my fancy; but between the dales-
man and Whelpo, an outlying hamlet of Caldbeck, I
do not see a living soul. Whelpo, by the way; it is
a likely name in a hunting country! Yonder is a sleepy
little cottage ; there, surely,

'Twas the sound of his horn woke me from my bed !

On I go, and the rush of the air in my ears, the murmur
of the beck, and my own thoughts all set themselves to
the same tune. Exultantly, and as if mastered by
some external impulse, I break out into the famous song:

D'ye ken John Peel, with his coat so gay,
D'ye ken John Peel at the break o' the day,
D'ye ken John Peel when he's far, far away,
With his hounds and his horn in the morning ?

But here is Whelpo, and I must be silent. The first
thing that catches my eye is a poster making known the
Jubilee of the local " tent " of the Independent Order
of Rechabites. I cannot pause to inquire of the
antiquity of the Order, but in any case I surmise that
John Peel was not a member of it. In a few moments
I am in Caldbeck churchyard, and in a different mood.

I find his grave readily. The grass that leads to it is
slightly trodden, in token of the visits of other pilgrims.

H. C. MINCHIN 179

The headstone is a large oblong, carved at the upper
corners. No inscription could be simpler. "In memory
of John Peel, of Ruthwaite, who died in 1854, aged 78:
of his wife — who survived him a few years and almost
equalled his age; and of three sons, of whom one died
in infancy, one at twenty-seven, one, in 1887, at the
age of ninety." No other words; but symbolical re-
minders of what John Peel was — sculptured there a
brace of horns confront us, encircled with a brace of
hunting-crops, together with the recumbent figure of a
hound. That last is, perhaps, the happiest touch. For
it seems to show us what tradition asserts and what I
must believe, that John Peel had that understanding of
his hounds which the true huntsman ought to have;
that he was no mere Tony Lumpkin of the nineteenth
century, but a complete sportsman, and therefore
merciful to beast as well as to man ; one, moreover, to
whom the poetry of sport appealed, as well as its excite-
ment, who loved the wild fellside for its wild beauty,
as well as for its foxes. Look at his portrait (it hangs in
the museum at Keswick) and the notion may not seem
too fanciful. Note the wistful grey eyes, the drooping
lips that yet are haunted by a lurking smile; a "man
of humorous-melancholy mark": indeed, something
more than a mere fox-chaser. How one regrets that,
as it seems, he never encountered any of the poetic
giants, his contemporaries, who lived the other side of
Skiddaw! What would not Wordsworth have made of
him, had he caught him in some happy mood and
circumstance, the Wordsworth who loved to penetrate
below the surface of his rugged dalesmen ! What, have
I forgotten then that Wordsworth bade us never mix
our pleasures "with sorrow to the meanest thing that
feels"? No: but I remember also that poets can be

i8o MODERN ESSAYS

as inconsistent as the rest of mankind, and that he has
celebrated, in a manner as vivid as pathetic, the "run-
ning huntsman merry " of " the sweet shire of Cardigan,"
old Simon Lee.

Perhaps I need to be fortified by my idealised con-
ception of John Peel. As I leave the churchyard, I see
an old inhabitant seated at his doorway. Let not the
reader think I have invented this person for convenience;
if he goes to Caldbeck on a fine afternoon, he will
probably find him sunning himself, as I did. And
inquiry as to the way to Troutbeck gets us into con-
versation, and I find the old fellow something of
an iconoclast.

" Ye've been looking at John Peel's monument ? Aye,
there's many doos. Might I remember him? Well, I
were two years old when he died, so if I saw him I
dinna mind it But I mind his son, that lived to
a great age; a steady man he was, and attended to
his farming." —

"The father was a farmer, too?" —

"Oh aye, but wonderful fond of hunting. The
farmers hereaboots were vera well-off in them days,
and never groodged time nor money to sport. But let
me tell ye this, that but for the song that Graves made
on him, he wouldn't be remembered now! He'd be
forgotten, as folks be when they get there " — this with
a jerk of his hand towards the churchyard.

Yes, thought I, and Achilles might be forgotten but
for Homer, but I contented myself with remarking
that at any rate he must have been an out-of-the-way
good huntsman.

"A good huntsman? Oh aye, na doot, but a better
drinker! A heavy drinker, just as Robbie Burns was,
as I said to a Scotchman the other day, who cam' to

H. C. MINCHIN 181

see John's grave. Oh, but he was fair angry wi' me,
the Scotchman!"

"At any rate," I urged, not liking this insistence on
the frailties of the great departed, "he lived to a good
old age, and perpetual soaking isn't conducive to that.
I dare say he was too fond of a glass at times, but most
people were in those days."

"True enough," said the old fellow, "and there was
no harm in him, ye know. He never injured ony man.
Aye, I mind the story of a trick they put upon him once.
There was a tame fox at the ' Sun,' the inn he was most
fond of, an' one day some of his freens took t' fox to a
spinney they knew he meant to draw; and, sure enough,
the hounds put 'en up — Ruby, Ranter, and the rest —
and he ran to earth, as ye might say, in the public, an'
there were two or three o' John Peel's cronies laughing
at him, an' aw. . . . Where was Ruthwaite, ye ask?
Aboot five miles from this, towards the Dash; ye must
ha' seen the hoose as ye passed." — Ah, I shall always
think it was that farm I noticed — " And the hoose where
he was born, too, 'tis near it. I should know, for I have
lived here all my life. Well, 'tis a bonny place, Cal'beck "
— and so, indeed, it is, nestling cosily amid its trees in
a hollow of the moors — "and quiet : ah, a bit too quiet ! "

" You need ' the sound of his horn,' " I said, and so
departed. But all along the fellside to Mungrisdale,
where the air is full of the pleasant smell of peat, where
tiny church and stark school-house look at one another
across the narrow street ; all along the broader road that
leads to Threlkeld, and so along the slopes of Blencathra
to Keswick, the same song was in my ears; the song
that is sung all the world over, wherever the men of our
race do congregate; the song that fascinates hundreds
who have hardly seen a fox, much less hunted one;

182 MODERN ESSAYS

the song which I persist in believing could never have
been written had not its subject in some way towered
above his fellows; the song that, with its haunting
refrain of "far, far away," takes us back both to bygone
times and our own earlier memories; at one moment
gladdening the heart, at the next awakening the sigh,
the tear it may be, for so much that in actual fact and
in each man's own experience is gone beyond recall.

EDWIN PUGH 183

OLD AND NEW

Edwin Pugh: City of the World

It might almost be said that there are as many different
Londons as there are people in it, since every one views
it with different eyes and from a different standpoint
. . . except, of course, the Cockney, who (tradition says)
never sees it at all. And the Cockney . . . ? You
see, he is as used to it as he is to the firmamental hosts.
To him its mutations are as much a matter of course
as the varying tints and changing cloud-shapes of the
sky. According to his critics the average Cockney . . .
but then we have settled, long ago, that there is no such
monster in existence as the average Cockney! But if
there were one average Cockney left he might retort
this, I think: The things with which we are most
familiar are always the hardest to talk about. The
things we know best — the things we cherish and believe
in — our most intimate hopes and fears and doubts —
the emotions we hold most sacred — the strongest
passions that actuate us — none of these things can we
translate quite adequately into words. There is an
undiscovered language. How, then, is the average
Cockney to tell the inquiring tourist what London is
like? He could as easily describe his boots or his
mother. But if it be indeed true that the Cockney
does not know London, in the guide-book sense, he can
feel it in his bones, and he has perhaps a finer and keener

184 MODERN ESSAYS

appreciation of its manifold phases than is ever to be
compassed, even after the most diligent research and
close study, by any other than a Cockney. Saint Paul's,
Westminster Abbey, the Monument, the Tower of Lon-
don, and a score other similar historic landmarks, he
knows only from the outside, and yet knows as inti-
mately as the farmer knows the surface of the soil he
tills. When the Cockney is rushed through the streets
of his native city by some country cousin and has
London expounded to him, it is as if he were shown some
foreign translation of the Lord's Prayer, or some other
stereotyped form of words equally familiar in its original
form. To learn that for the first time the coolest place
in London on a hot summers day is technically known
as the Crypt, or that the Bloody Gate has bloody
associations in history, is for him to suffer the same kind
of shock that assails you or me when we are shown the
counterpart of our own skeleton in some scientific
museum. In effect this vast conglomeration of temples
and castles, monuments and memorials, which is summed
up in the guide-books as London, and which is the only
London that outsiders care to know, is no more like
London, as the Cockney knows London, than the holy
mystery of his body and soul is like that grinning horror
in the glass case. Thus it is that there are huge districts
of London, mighty hinterlands, wholly unexplored by
the Cockney who happens not to dwell in or near them,
and that he repudiates altogether. These foreign ele-
ments offend him as foreign elements in his food or
drink offend him. He feels very strongly that they have
no right to be there, and since he cannot do away with
them, refuses to assimilate them, ignores them. He is
content to know that London is big enough and strong
and healthy enough to absorb all these alien adulterants

EDWIN PUGH 185

without being materially affected by their presence
in his body politic. At any rate he is not conscious of
any change either in London or in himself, even when
he is shown that London is very different from his
conception of it, and that his complacent acceptance
of himself as a typical Londoner is based on the illu-
sions of ignorance. In his own words, the London
that he knows is good enough for him, and he reckons
that he is good enough for the London that he knows.

So, if we would snatch one more fleeting glimpse of
esoteric London before saying good-bye to this roaring
city of the World, the time has obviously come for us
to part from the Cockney, at least for awhile.

II

Come then with me, eastward. The poor Cockney
would assuredly not consent to follow us hither. For
this is the haunt of the Heathen Chinee — not the suave,
polished Chinese gentleman and diplomat of Portland
Place, but the raw unannealed Oriental.

For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain
the Heathen Chinee is still as peculiar to-day — though
he may wear a slop suit of cheap reach-me-downs and
tie up his pigtail in a tight coil and hide it under a
sixpenny-halfpenny cloth cap — as he was in those roaring
times when he euchred Bill Nye and his partner. The
ways he trod then lay upon the sunny slopes of Cali-
fornia, and his trail was blazed with the aces that he
strewed like leaves on the strand. His tricks were
vain in the sense that they could be rendered abortive
by prompt resort to crude, violent methods of exposure.
But since that time he has added the smug Pharisaism of

186 MODERN ESSAYS

the West to his native stock-in-trade of old-age cun-
ning; he has learned in suffering to eschew the tactics
which Bret Harte sang in song and so held up to
immortal ridicule.

For rogues, all the world over, dread nothing so much
as ridicule; and Chinese rogues most of all. They
cherish their dignity as old maids cherish mementoes
of their girlhood. To us they do not seem dignified,
but abjectly servile and cringing. When the London
police — to whom they are pretty well all "known" in
the invidious sense — insist on going over their premises,
they salaam and drop their eyelids meekly, and are most
becomingly humble and complaisant. They indulge in
elaborate ceremonial and long-winded, flowery compli-
ments, and use every other subtle means in their power
to hamper and delay their unwelcome visitors on the
threshold or in the public shop, whilst their confeder-
ates, working swiftly and noiselessly behind the scenes,
are busily putting a better complexion on the traffic of
the house than it usually wears.

Their dignity at such times — or at any other time —
does not assume the guise of a haughty bearing or
express itself in an assumption of immutable self-respect.
No. It is enshrined in their hearts and is gilded
and warmed and kept alive by their measureless con-
tempt for Occidental stupidity. They would as soon
think of insisting on it in the presence of those rude,
brusque officers as of flaunting a priceless jewel in a
den of thieves.

In England the Yellow Peril does not seem to touch
us very nearly as yet. From time to time we read
that the Chinese invasion of our ports is growing daily
more and more threatening ; and we are mildly anxious
that Something — that indefinite Something in which

EDWIN PUGH 187

we repose so much confidence, and in the thought of
which there is such ready surcease from worry — should
be done to hold this vague evil in check in the moment
that it appears to gain ground. But what we do not
faintly realise is that the Chinese invasion began many
years ago ; that there is a Chinatown in London as well
as in New York and San Francisco; that the vices of
opium-smoking and bhang and hashish chewing — with
their horrific consequences of madness and murder —
together with other nameless vices that we never
mention, but which are not so unfamiliar to our private
understanding, are even now practised daily in the
dockside neighbourhoods of our unwieldy metropolis.

The Chinese crimp thrives and flourishes, despite
the strenuous competition of Strangers' Homes and Mis-
sion Houses, which, however, do very much to stultify
his horrible proclivities. The crimp himself is often a
man of some education. In his own country he would
belong to that limited social circle which may be said to
correspond to our own predominant Middle Class. He
preys not only on his own fellow-countrymen, but on
whomsoever else he can beguile into his clutches. You
will find under his roof men of many races and shades of
colour, from dusky Zanzibars to lemon-tinted Lascars.
Occasionally you will find a white man — or rather,
a man who was once white, but who has rapidly sunk
to the level of the lowest type of Asiatic, alike as to his
morals and the hue of bis filthy hide.

The majority of those lodging-houses, be they kept
by crimps or by acceptably honest men, have shops on
the ground floor. Some of these shops are open and
display strange wares, the nature and use of which no
Europeans may discover. The name of the proprietor
is painted above the shop-front — and usually on a big

188 MODERN ESSAYS

lamp pendant over the pavement besides — in English
characters and repeated in Chinese. But most of the
shops are closed and shuttered, as if the houses to which
they belong were empty. If, however, you linger in
their vicinity for awhile you will see soft-footed, stealthily
stepping Orientals glide in and out of the doors, which
are not locked, or even latched, but open at a push.
Within these walls, in the dismantled shop, you will
find a number of silent men sitting in the semi-darkness,
enjoying their kaif, which is Eastern for dolce far niente.

They loll and sprawl on low couches and divans, or
sit cross-legged on the floor, some chewing betel or
bhang or hashish, others supine and blissfully uncon-
scious in the throes of an opium-dream. The air is
thick and heavy and faintly sweet with the odour of
pungent essences, which nevertheless cannot quite
subdue the sour smell of perspiring flesh. But all is
seemly and quiet enough, however unpleasant the general
effect may be to the various senses. And, indeed, it
must not be hastily supposed that any save a very
small minority of these establishments are otherwise
than well-conducted — well-conducted, that is, to the
extent that no open turbulence or disorder seems to
take place in them.

All the same, most terrible happenings do take place
in them sometimes. For one of the effects of the
drug which these Orientals are perpetually absorbing
into their systems is sudden insanity — not shrieking,
raving, struggling insanity, but a cold, malignant,
homicidal fury. The victim literally sees red. Every-
thing and everybody appears to his distorted vision
to be smeared with scarlet; and his frenzy takes the
diabolical form of a lust after human blood. He burns
to add more of that vivid colour to his surroundings,

EDWIN PUGH 189

with the result that he will, if not restrained, whip out
a knife and run amok among his fellow-lodgers. By
certain signs, however, his companions are as a rule
able to tell when his paroxysm is coming upon him,
and he is reduced to a helpless state by force. But
whatever the outcome of his maniacal transport, it
almost always leaves the stricken wretch for ever
afterward bereft of his reason.

And there are several other forms of insanity which
fructify in these dens. Many of them are such every-
day occurrences that they excite but little attention
among those used to them; but though they are not
so terrible in their manifestations as the madness of the
bhang or hashish eater, they are hardly less dangerous.
It would be impossible to mention all of them, but in
one of the most common the victim imagines that he
is surrounded by jinns or evil spirits, which are fighting
for his soul, and he is impelled to try and destroy them,
preferably by fire, and to this end starts a conflagration.

But these immediate violent tragedies are perhaps
the least of the evils which follow inevitably in the wake
of the Chinese and their mongrel allies wherever they go.
Even in the lodging-houses which are open to inspec-
tion the sleeping accommodation and the sanitary
safeguards fall far below any decent civilised standard.
And what the official eye is permitted to see does not
by any means represent the normal condition of things.
The average coolie, for instance, has not the least
objection to sleeping two or three, or even four, in a
bed; but it is open to doubt if the fact that this sort
of thing goes on habitually in many of these loathly
caravanserai is known to the proper authorities.

And even now nothing has been said of the card-
playing, gaming, hocussing and terrorising, the thievery

190 MODERN ESSAYS

and swindling, and — worst of all ! the orgies of flagrant,
unbridled immorality, which are the commonplaces of
these viscous centres of depravity and plague. All
these matters are hard to discover and abolish, even
though the Yellow Peril be comparatively insignifi-
cant at present, and is moreover being fought by several
excellent societies for the protection, salvation, and
reclamation of the Oriental within our gates. But
what that peril might become if, when more and more
Chinese invade our ports, they are permitted to make
their peculiar and incredibly nasty arrangements for
squatting at the commercial portals of our country, is a
possibility that hardly bears dispassionate consideration.

Ill

All this foul neighbourhood is known as Limehouse.
And Limehouse, in the East End of London, is the place
where East meets West, as we have seen, but never to
intermingle. It is a region of narrow streets, the plan
of which rather suggests a school-boy's attempt to
draw parallel lines without the aid of a ruler. Brackish
odours of the river at low tide offend the nostrils. Tall
mastheads, rocking above the housetops, smack of
vast ocean spaces in a way that no rolling liner off the
wind- bitten Irish coast can ever hope to rival. Thus
contrast will work in the poorest material and still
prove herself an artist.

Here the wayfarer may rub shoulders with the people
— men for the most part, but women and children
too — of every race and clime and shade of colour:
olive, yellow, brown, and black : Siamese, Malays, Japs,

EDWIN PUGH 191

Chinks, Persians, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Cingalese,
Hindoos. A mere bald catalogue of the types to be
encountered in this immediate neighbourhood would
be tedious.

Observe that this street is also full of shops — not
an extraordinary circumstance in itself, of course;
but the majority of these shops are closed night and
day, as the Chinese shops are. The shutters are never
taken down, but always barred against the light; and
all along the upper edge of the lintels hang black, dusty
festoons of cobwebs, testifying to the length of time
that has elapsed since they were put up.

Through the misty pale blue twilight of late after-
noon a man of a jaundiced complexion comes gliding
swiftly, a peculiar, furtive, slinking litheness character-
ising his movements as he half runs, half shambles over
the uneven stones. His garments form a queer com-
promise between the European and Asiatic fashion of
dress. He wears baggy seamen's breeches, a shapeless
sort of jumper open in front to display a sweater that
was originally red and white, and a richly beaded tar-
boosh. His feet are bare save for a pair of straw-
woven slippers, lacking heels or any trace of uppers
beyond one small toe-piece, into which his big toe is
stuck, the other toes being naked to the view. How
he contrives to keep his footwear on is only one more
minor mystery added to the many in which the Oriental
is steeped from the prehensile sole of his foot to the
crown of his shaven polished skull.

Suddenly this outlandish figure crosses the road at
an oblique angle, thrusts his shoulder against one of the
shuttered, secret-looking shops, and disappears within.

The door that has opened so readily to the Oriental
opens just as readily to the push of my own hand; and

192 MODERN ESSAYS

we are at once plunged into a murkier twilight than
that which prevails outside.

The semi-darkness is slightly tempered by a few
slanting lances of light that stream in through diamond-
shaped holes high up in the shutters. At first they
serve only to accentuate the ulterior gloom of our
surroundings by pricking out here and there a spot of
brightness. But presently, as our eyes grow more used
to the sharp transition from pale blue to umber twilight,
we find that we are confronted by a living reproduction
of one of the wicked magicians of fable.

He is a tall man, wearing a faded white turban blotched
and smeared with brown stains as if the stuff had been
scorched, but otherwise arrayed in conventional English
garb; frock-coat, grey trousers, boots, and a linen
shirt. The mystery of this man's true nationality is
impenetrable. He has a thick, black beard, and long,
narrow eyes of the hue of a drowsy lion, set in a bloodless,
livid face. His lips are a vivid red, and greasily moist
with the juice of the betel or areca. Lust and cruelty
and greed are in his face, and a hint of latent ferocity
that all his cringing suavity cannot quite mask. He
speaks, in answer to our polite inquiries, in a rapid
jargon in which some English words, curiously mis-
pronounced, recur frequently; and then he withdraws
his evil presence and vanishes into the all-enveloping
half -darkness which enshrouds us.

The atmosphere is stale and fetid. By comparison,
the brackish savour of the air in the waterside byways
is fragrant as the first breath of spring.

By this time we are able to make out, more or less
clearly, some details of the apartment in which we
stand. The shop and the parlour behind the shop
have been converted into one large room. It is such

EDWIN PUGH 193

a room as you will not find in any other quarter of
London. Ranged about the walls are beds and gaudy
divans, on which men lie supine, or crouch huddled up,
or sprawl limply, in every conceivable attitude of slack
abandonment. There must be between thirty and forty
men within these four walls, and not one of them shows
us a kindly face. Their faces are of the type that
haunt one in a dyspeptic nightmare; for, one and all,
they seem to be as mere settings to the eyes. Some of
them are not uncomely, or would not be uncomely if
the eyes were not so unflinching in their regard. And
all the eyes are dark; they seem black in this half-
light, though we know, of course, that there is no such
thing in nature as an absolutely black iris. Returning
their intent, steadfast gaze, we seem to peer into
deep wells — assuredly not wells of Jxuth, however — at
the bottom of which gleams a bead of moisture.

There are Chinamen in flowing robes among the
crowd; and Lascars in dull brick-red turbans; and
Japs, in coarse serge suits, jaunty and dapper; and
scowling Malays, each with his hidden, murderous creese
ready to his hand. It is a Malay who has just preceded
us into this noisome lair. He sits on his heels before
us now, upon the bare boards.

And surveying the scene, with its effect of pur-
blindness, it comes home to us — as with a clutch of
fingers at the throat — how all this heterogeneous collec-
tion of mortals has drifted together to this sordid
London lodging, coming out of a world of romance and
adventure and magic to plunge into a world of matter-
of-fact. Or, more probably, our matter-of-fact civilisa-
tion may seem to these aliens as a heaven — or a hell —
of weird enchantments, and their own far distant homes
as the very prose of existence.

194 MODERN ESSAYS

Still, in either case, it is inexplicable how these men
can endure this self-taught squalor and gloom who
were born to all the dazzling colour and gay idle life
of the tropics. They have come from fairy realms of
feathery foliage and naming flowers, where bright-hued
birds flit among the starry blossoms in the purple shadows
of lime and palm, and brilliant flying things flash like
jewels on the broad green leaves of the low-growing
tree-ferns, or stud the gloom under the olives and myrtles
as with glittering points of fire. They have come from
a land where the languorous scent of frangipani and wild
stephanotis, blended with a thousand lesser perfumes not
less sweet, seem wondrously attuned to the endless,
melancholy splash of sea-waves on a silver strand.

But perhaps this is only an untravelled Cockney's
vulgarly conceived impression of the resplendent East;
and their natural and inbred taste in environments
may merely take the form of another kind of squalor
and filth and vice, after all. At least they seem to take
kindly enough to these frowsy delights, and are appa-
rently content and even happy in their still, silent way.

Sickened and dazed, and a little afraid, too, the
immobility of these Orientals and the unfaltering
scrutiny of their unfathomable eyes having rather got
on our nerves, we go out again into the darkening
street where the gas-jets flicker, pale and ghastly, in
the freshening breeze; and London, at its worst and
most sordid, seems a genial, homely place after our
brief experience of this Arabian night.

EDWIN PUGH 195

IV

The river lies before us. Let us take a boat and pull
back to the London that we know.

This River Thames is the real main highway of
London. Of the Thames it might quite truly be said,
moreover, that though perhaps it has undergone more
changes during the last thirty or forty years than any
other outstanding feature of London, it has at the same
time preserved most of its old characteristics. The
two great Embankments — from Blackfriars to West-
minster on the left bank, and from Westminster to
Vauxhall on the right bank — which were begun in
1864 and 1866 respectively, as well as sundry other
stretches of stone breakwater that have since been
constructed at various points in place of the former
low banks, have radically altered the aspect of the river
along certain of its reaches. Yet what remains of the
old Thames, especially between Southwark and Wool-
wich on the south side and Blackfriars Bridge and
Blackwall on the north side, is essentially the same as
it was fifty years ago.

Now as then, despite the Thames police, there are
all manner of water-thieves and freebooters. There
are still, for example, tier-rangers — gentlemen who
silently drop along the tiers of shipping in The Pool by
night and, having ascertained that the watch is asleep,
climb on deck and help themselves to anything portable
and valuable, even descending into the cabins sometimes
and purloining money and jewellery whilst their owners
are snoring. There are still lumpers — labourers who
assist in the unloading of vessels to an utterly unsus-
pected extent, carrying off their spoils in fathomless

196 MODERN ESSAYS

pockets artfully contrived in the linings of their clothes ;
these also smuggle goods ashore for the crew.

There are still truckers — smugglers on a more ambitious
scale, whose business is to land more considerable parcels
of goods than the lumpers can manage ; and dredgermen,
who under pretence of dredging up coals and suchlike
from the bed of the river hang about barges and other
undecked craft and when they see an opportunity
throw overboard any article they can lay their hands
on in order to slyly dredge it up again when the vessel
is gone.

And there are numberless other special-pleading
practitioners who, among other malpractices, especially
affect that of cutting boats loose from their moorings
and then salving them.

But certainly these brigands are being rapidly
exterminated; and that strange, amphibious, slow-
moving tribe of men who, even a few short years ago,
seemed to be able to make a living by staring at the
water and occasionally spitting into it, has almost
entirely disappeared.

Yet still that queer, romantic atmosphere survives,
dissipating but slowly. There are still the gleaming
mud-flats at low tide and the ruinous, rat-infested old
wharves and waste spaces, clustered with a miscellaneous
Utter of decaying lumber, whereon stand crazy sheds
that a boy would give the rest of his life to play pirates
in for one delirious afternoon. Until quite recently,
before the London County Council got properly to grips
with its stupendous task of reconstructing the capital,
there were many waterside districts that were as so
many Alsatian cities of refuge for the criminal in
danger of his liberty or life.

On the brighter side there are still some penny steam-

EDWIN PUGH 197

boats; whilst the sea-going pleasure - steamers have
increased in size and in gaudy magnificence beyond all
possible foreknowledge of our fathers. And yet these
latter vessels are essentially the same as they were in
the days when Dickens described the voyage of the
Tuggses to Ramsgate. . . .

It is still the same beloved, abhorred, horrible and
fascinating Thames.

And the Temple is the same. We haul in our boat
at the Temple Pier, and with reverent tread enter that
most quaint and charming of all ancient fastnesses
in London.

For among all the many quiet and secluded back-
waters of human traffic in this City of the World, those
best known and best loved, and most favoured of the
poets, who have drawn their inspiration from the inex-
haustible fount of London, have been invariably the
Inns of Courts. And especially has their fancy delighted
to play about the Temple. . . . The cloistral, gracious
Temple, which still remains in all its outstanding features
the same as it has always been.

Possibly the vista from the lower end of Middle
Temple Lane has gained something in seemliness and
beauty over what it has lost, in a sort of picturesque
squalor down by the riverside. For where the high
shining piles and gnarled balks of timber lifted their
craggy contours above the turbid surface of the stream,
or stood starkly on the iridescent mud-flats, gnawed into
holes by the ravening teeth of the greedy tide, bent
and warped by its ceaseless ebb and flow, coated

198 MODERN ESSAYS

with the lichenous, rank rime of a myriad delicate neutral
tints by monotonous years of storm, shine, heat,
frost and damp, trailing sodden ropes frayed into
a semblance of tulse and tangle, and festooned with
chains and rings and bolts of a brilliant rusty red
seemed to distil drops of blood into the sunrays . . .
where these things fretted the prospect into ever-
shifting patterns as they rocked and swayed before the
wind, mingling their fantastic tracery with the leisurely
heavy-sailed barges and gliding small craft, and at
night or through an autumn haze got themselves in-
extricably mixed up with the shadowy human figures
on the quays, or in the grinding boats at the precipitous
stairs and slipways, where all this confusion reigned,
there is now a decent ordered boundary of stone
buttress and symmetrical railing beyond a placid ex-
panse of shaven lawn, sharply dividing the stately old
traditions of the stately old inns from the busy modern-
ised Embankment with its humming trams and its
intermittent buzz and whirr and hoot and jangle of
motors, blended with the still persistent clop-clop-clop
of horses' hoofs.

But upon these signs of inevitable change you can
quite easily turn your back, and so behold the Temple
even now as Dickens himself beheld it.

Wherein, then, lies the difference between the Temple
of that day and this?

Then it was hand in glove, or rather cheek by jowl,
with all the romance of adventure as well as with all
the sin and misery of the waterside existence. Between
the grim grey walls of the outer courts and the slimy
higgledy-piggledy of the Thames foreshore lay close-
packed congeries of dark alleys and black arches,
sloping abruptly and by way of many unexpected kinks

EDWIN PUGH 199

and twists to the slippery causeways where lurked
nocturnal birds of prey — a loathly, body-snatching
crew. The Temple was cut off then from first-hand
contact with the facts of life and death, as it is now;
but with this difference — that it then enjoyed a volun-
tary seclusion, and had only to step across its borders
to taste and see the raw crudities of poverty and crime.
Now its seclusion has been made inviolate, and its
denizens must boldly cross the Rubicon of the Strand
to escape from its rare atmosphere of academic calm
and studious peace.

And yet, for all its parchment aspect, it still remains
an oasis in the desert of streets, as it was then, and
testifies to the truth of countless poets' conceptions in
regard to its delightful possibilities, by virtue of the
lovers who continue to follow in the footsteps of those
fair figments of a dream and to make their happiness
upon its ancient mossy flags.

200 MODERN ESSAYS

IL PULCINELLA
Cecil Roberts: To-Day

We were tired when we reached Stresa in the crimson
flush of the August evening. The blue of Lago di
Maggiore had taken on a darker tone, and there was
night on the slopes of snow-covered Monte Leone,
which looked down from ice-bound fields to the summer
luxuriance of the Borromean Islands. We had just
returned from the ascent of Monte Mattarone, one of
those comfortable mountains which reward one not only
with a grand expanse of famous ranges, but also with
a feeling of achievement. Dinner by the lake shore of
Stresa, in the Italian twilight, with the soft lapping of the
lake water and the distant guitar of an itinerant musi-
cian, seemed a fitting close to such a day of wonders.
With gratitude, therefore, we found a small hotel
garden, the music sufficiently distant, the menu attrac-
tive— perfect that night, I remember, and the wine —
but whenever did Asti fail to grace the board? And
on this evening the waiter also suited the mise-en-scene.
He had the black curly hair of a faun, with horns hidden
somewhere, and there was almost what might be called
the sylvan grace to his lithe young body. He seemed
the familiar of things that lived in woods and mountain
recesses. Anything might have happened with him
there. He filled the little lanterned garden with an
air of incredible romance. Once when he stood peering
over into the darkness down where the half-dozen
boats fretted on the margin, we hardly drew breath;

CECIL ROBERTS 201

now might old Triton blow his wreathed horn, and the
whole of us suffer a like-change in something.

There ! What was it ? My companion looked up. He
had heard it and turned in the direction of the sound
along the plane - tree - sheltered promenade where a
dozen semi-naked children, belonging to the boatmen,
scampered in the dusk. It was a familiar though un-
familiar sound, remotely connected with childhood. It
permeated the purple atmosphere and that strange
pantomime scenery of blue waters, crimson mountains
and rose-flushed islands with a plaintive invitation. A
moment later we saw the cause. Preceded by a rabble
of lovely Italian children — being sunbrown they never
look dirty — under the arch of the plantains, marched a
tiny boy of some six years. He was dressed in faded
red tights, that hung loosely on his thin little legs.
His face was painted white, which made his smile
ghastly in the twilight, and as he walked he tapped on
a small drum slung across his thigh. Behind him, thus
heralded, walked his lord and master, as great a con-
trast as human nature can present. He was a power-
fully built Italian dressed as Pantaloon. His massive
face peered over an enormous ruffle, and the strength
of his physique could not be hidden by the voluminous
colour-patched trousers that ballooned from his ankles
to his thighs. To heighten the contrast, he played
gravely on a long trombone. After them came a follow-
ing of urchins shouting and crying shrilly with excite-
ment. Suddenly, just as we became aware of it, and
had turned in our seats, the procession stopped. A
stillness fell over the crowd while the Italian played a
long trombone solo in the gathering darkness. They
were strolling musicians, perhaps acrobats, but no!
for, the solo finished, Pantaloon began a long speech.

202 MODERN ESSAYS

Distance and dialect defeated us. Perhaps it was an
appeal for money? Repeatedly we heard the word
" Trattoria." Experience, a continuous thirst and a
taste of Chiante, had taught us the meaning of " Trat-
toria." These were the players, or some of them, and
there was to be a performance at an inn. The speech
ended, there was a profound bow, born, we felt, of
centuries of tradition. The little boy beat the drum,
the trombone again sounded, the procession moved off
into the darkness.

"My friend," I said, "we have heard the veritable
Prologue to / Pagliacci — Good ladies and gentlemen,
a moment I pray you, I am the Prologue." But my
friend was too excited to answer. The dinner was spoiled,
the ice-cooled Asti could not hold him. We must see
the players.

Hastily departing we tried to catch the procession,
but darkness and a strange village of villainous-looking
streets defeated us. Our only clue would be the noise
of the drum sounded in a "Trattoria. " Twice we traversed
the town, peered in at every trattoria doorway upon
strange scenes where dark men ate garlic and curly-
headed children rolled on the floor amid hens, dogs and
cats. Then luck rewarded us. A small gathering at
the entrance to a long passage attracted our attention.
From the far end came a babel of voices, children's
mostly, amid a blaze of coloured lanterns. We entered,
traversed the long corridor, and emerged on a scene
that was not of this century. It was an inn yard,
roofed in from the velvet night with a great vine that
clambered along the trellis-work overhead. The thick-
ness of the vine was such that no starshine penetrated,
while amid it hung a few shaded electric lights (from
a water-power source), which shone upon bunches of

CECIL ROBERTS 203

lovely green grapes. The inn windows opened on to
one side of this yard, their green shutters thrown back;
in the open spaces were silhouettes of men, bare-
throated and black-hatted, drinking red wine. The inn
yard itself was crowded with small cross benches, just,
perhaps, as in the pit of an Elizabethan theatre. On
these benches sat about a hundred small Italian children,
all chattering excitedly. I found myself wishing that
I had the artist's gift of hasty portraiture. The children
of Italy are the stuff of which great masterpieces are
made; here were the infants of a hundred famous
Madonnas. They sat there, half-naked, lovely-limbed,
bronzed, with heads of black, flowing curls, dark
lustrous eyes, red lips, and even white teeth. Their
intense excitement heralded something wonderful and
unusual, and the excitement passed to the fathers and
mothers seated behind, drinking wine at small tables.

No, these were not the players, but something as
venerable, the origin of many players, perhaps. This
was II Pulcinella, the real traditional II Pulcinella
from which was descended our own poor English travesty
of Punch and Judy, the emasculated version which had
found its way to England in the reign of Queen Anne
to remain here for the delight of generations of children
and elders. But just as we in England may not know
the flavour of the peach plucked ripe from overhead, so
may we not know the real Punch and Judy. We had
stepped suddenly out of the night into the fifteenth
century. The front of the Punch and Judy show was
hand-painted, its drop scene being of a futuristic design,
for all its age. On the tiny platform where the drama
was to be enacted, burned two ancient brass oil lamps.
They must have lighted these festivities for many
generations. Quietly we made our way to an obscure

204 MODERN ESSAYS

comer, conscious of being a very modern note in the
whole scale of colour and romance. Humbly we sat
in the shadow and asked for a flask of wine. At that
moment a bell tinkled behind the curtain and the
voice we had heard under the plantains began a long
chant while the audience listened intently. It was
probably the Prologue, in rhyme, maybe, the same
Prologue recited by long-dead generations of showmen,
inheritors of a great tradition. The chant ended, the
curtain rose, revealing a hand-painted background of a
street down which Dante might have walked. Then
up came Punch, to be hailed with shrieks of joy by those
children. Through one hour we sat entranced. Not
a word of that carefully enunciated dialogue could we
follow; the whir, the drollery, all passed by us, but we
watched it reflected in the faces of those enthralled
children, their faces puckered with laughter or wrinkled
with commiseration.

When the curtain fell, ten chimed from the campanile,
but somehow we felt this could not be the end. From
his obscurity the showman came out, still in motley, and
taking a guitar, his face illumined by the oil flares, he
sang to us a ballad. It was very tender, and there were
tears in the dark long-lashed eyes of the maidens. This
ended, with ceremonious bows he toured the audience,
hat in hand, reaping a generous harvest, with many
" gracias." Then he disappeared, the bell tinkled, the
chatter was suddenly stilled and the drama proceeded.
It was the full, unexpurgated story of Punch and Judy.
Maybe it had many current and local allusions; we
knew not, but there were many characters unknown to
our English version. The stage was crowded with a
succession of puppets cleverly manipulated. There was
the peasant and the king, the priest and the ugly

CECIL ROBERTS 205

daughter, the stammerer and the soldier, the lawyer
and the judge. There were tremendous duels with
staffs, such fast furious duels and beatings that the
audience rose to its feet and cried: "Brava! Brava! "
and the children on the edge clambered up the vine
trellis to get a better view of the agitated spectators.
Eleven struck, again the curtain fell. This time we
had no ballad, but the pale-faced little boy in red tights
came forth. A short speech announced his tricks.
He was a jongleur, and, held aloft in the hands of a
brawny Italian, the thin little fellow, fearfully, we
thought, performed his contortions, and smiled feebly
at the applause. We were not unhappy when this
was over and the curtain rose on the final act, more
breathless, with Punch extricating himself from cease-
less complications. It was a quarter past twelve when
the curtain fell finally, and not a tired face showed in
that appreciative audience.

Leaving the inn, the chattering crowd, we passed
down the narrow street, under the high shuttered
windows and flowery balconies, and emerged on the
lake front. The promenade was silent and deserted
and we looked upon a scene of incredible beauty. The
moonlight fell on the dark water, the dim outlines of
the mountains, the distant Borromean Islands terraced
with lights, and the lake shore fringed with white
villas. On our way back to Baverno, the grass was
jewelled with glow-worms, the trees faintly stirred in
the hot air, and the wind sang in the tall cypress, stand-
ing like a Noah's Ark tree, the black sentinel of a garden
or harbour walk. Across the lake Pallanza glittered,
but not so brightly as the clear stars overhead. As we
walked in the night silence, broken only by the incessant
chirp of the grasshopper, we reflected that the drama

206 MODERN ESSAYS

we had seen was a part of this land of beauty and
romance, a cherished heirloom, faithfully handed down
from generation to generation of these childlike people.
It was the drama immortal. Three hundred years
hence children bright and beautiful as these would
laugh and cry at Punch and Judy; long after we had
gone to the Silence. For Punch and Judy were not
human products, as we, so mortal. We were really
the show; the puppets had achieved immortality.

DIXON SCOTT 207

WINTER, THAT ROUGH NURSE
Dixon Scott : A Number of Things

Built out of the golden debris of his August holidays,
your townsman's conception of the country is a queer,
collapsible structure, run up hastily at the approach of
May, fully furnished and equipped by mid- July, but
coming down again, in rust and ruin, among the equi-
noctial rains. It begins with the buds; it ends with
the last melancholy leaf; for the rest — greyness and
rheum. A fall of snow, indeed, because it masks the
true features of the earth, tricking it out like a monster
pierrot, may renew his interest for a moment. But
when February's dykes are filled with rain, he toasts
his toes complacently in Tooting and thinks with a
shudder of the land lying lean and wretched — a naked
corpse if not an actual skeleton. Beneath his study-
window the little square of garden which makes a kind
of mirror for the seasons, and into which they do try
to peer as they pass, shows nothing but apathy and
gloom. And he takes that woebegone picture for a
true portrait of the outside world.

Dismal hallucination! The year never hibernates,
March is never a dead March, and I sometimes think
that the land seems never more living and alert than
when it lies most leafless. There is a sense, and a very
simple and true one, in which the end of autumn is
like the opening of a great bronze door, and the scatter-
ing of the last leaves the withdrawal of a baffling curtain.
For now, as at no other time, the strong drama of the

208 MODERN ESSAYS

actual earth, the supple play of the muscles of the soil,
is revealed to the human spectator. He sees the
organic relation of hill to valley, the way the water-
sheds are welded together, and can watch the cunning
dovetailing of uplifts and divides, the collaborations
between woodlands and streams. The earth is certainly
stripped — but as an athlete is stripped for a race, as a
strong man for a struggle. It is not in the least like
the denudation of poverty. Fold after fold the clog-
ging coverlets of damask and maroon have been
heaved aside; and now the living creature, all rippling
muscle and mighty limb, bends purposefully before you
at its task.

It is a great sight, I always think — restorative as
well as stirring. The eye re-discovers, for example, the
true meaning and movement of the roads. In the
green smother of July they lay half-buried, shining
but capriciously, incomprehensibly, disconnected hiero-
glyphics. But now the scattered curves link up, quick
and consequent, from horizon to horizon ; and to stand
on the tiniest eminence is to see them forging through
the land waves as logically and intently as an army on
the march. They tack delicately to and fro among the
billows ; and you see, as plainly as the men who planned
them saw, the problems they have to face, the distant
mark they fight for, the exhaustless series of canny or
audacious strokes by which they win their end. Simi-
larly with the elder ducts: the watercourses, brooks,
and rivers. If the high-roads, linking Temple Bar with
Torquay, are the tingling nerves of the great body,
the streams may stand for its veins. And winter, like
a subtle demonstrator, displays them by a double
process, exposing them with one stroke, neatly paring
away the tissues that obscured them, and then, by a

DIXON SCOTT 209

second, dilating them, swelling them with rains. Treated
thus, the gleaming mesh springs into sight as surprisingly
as though the landscape had been suddenly slipped
beneath a powerful lens. The refreshing fibres gleam
in unsuspected places. The mysterious richness of a
certain meadow, that used to shine out erratically on
the general shield, a cryptic blazon, is at length logically
explained.

It is this general rationalisation of the view, no doubt,
that makes the wintry landscape seem so friendly.
Certainly, at any rate, there is nothing in the least
steely or repellent in this display of the stark machinery
of the land, its undressed ligaments and thews. The
earth is seen to be a reasonable earth, neither blind,
nor brutish, nor incomprehensible. In the very kind-
ness of summer there is something a little casual and
contemptuous. We wander for ever among ambus-
cades and curtains. We are treated like royal children
— kept in a noble nursery, fobbed off with pretty colours
and rich toys, but never admitted to the council chamber.
But now, in winter, Nature treats you like an equal.
You are taken into her confidence ; find with a reassuring
thrill that you can follow her plans ; discover, in a word,
the kinship between your body and the original clay.
The unmistakable stamina of the structure, too, is a
kind of solace. Far more than the sleepy snugness of
July, this unpartitioned prospect speaks of power and
purpose. With all the unessential barriers deleted, and
even the artificial subdivisions of the hedgerows half-
erased, there is a general merging and co-ordination.
" Views " melt into one massive surface, the deep
rhythm of the land shakes itself clear of localities, its
noble continuity is declared. We see the country as
a pouring tide of plateaus, declivities, plains, flecked

210 MODERN ESSAYS

with towns and cities — a tide that sweeps on unin-
terruptedly until it breaks at length upon the borders
of the actual sea. England lives.

These are the larger, more panoramic issues. But
the}/ invade and vivifjr all the details. The little sounds
of the season, as well as its wide views, display the same
sweet reasonableness. Our poets, pacing their hearth-
rugs, bewail the lack of bird-song. But those who
really know the winter are aware that the very fewness
of the voices gives those that remain not only a height-
ened value, but also an augmented meaning. They
gain intention as well as intensity; so that the voice
of a single thrush, ringing out through a February
evening, will seem not only to fill a whole valley almost
intolerably full of sweetness, but to shine out, on the
grey background of the surrounding stillness, with an
almost legible significance. Instead of the dear, in-
distinguishable babel of the summer-time we are granted
the unentangled lyric of one visible, traceable bird. The
music is no longer a ravelled rain of notes from secret
sources. There, undisguised, clear, on the clean, bare
boughs is the soft courageous throat, visibly throbbing.
And the branches themselves display a lovely logic
which their midsummer splendour wholly hides. Deli-
cately discriminated on a dove-grey sky, every detail
in a double sense distinguished, they are found to follow
a perfect pattern, reticent as an Eastern print, yet as
intricate as Western lace. They spire upward like
fountains, shredding into finer spray as they ascend,
but maintaining one consonant curve from base to
outermost twig. Like fountains, too, they seem (as
at no other time) to be spontaneous expressions of earth's
energy jutting up through the crust of soil. On the
costly landscapes which the townsman knows, the trees

DIXON SCOTT 211

are strewn like surface decorations, great green and
golden flowers, detachable as flowers worn by a woman.
But now, reduced to their elements, they are seen to
sustain and complete the long lilt of the land. Thus,
dark among the dark tillage, a single oak tree will bring
the whole scene to a point, as with a conclusive gesture.
And in the mass, clamping the hill-tops or mustered
in the plains, the banded timber, as resolute as jutting
rock, seem as much a part of the fundamental frame-
work as rock itself. Yet it is not the earth's nakedness
alone that leads to this effect of eagerness and intimacy.
That would be a very incomplete notation of the season's
charms which failed to take account of the special aerial
drama of the time — the constant stir and release of
soft colour, ceaselessly flowing and fading, filling the
February skies with a delicate fever. Here, once more,
our urbane misconceptions are remarkable, for we always
speak of the shortening of the days as though it were
a dismal decapitation. Whereas, in reality, of course,
their brevity is the result of an almost passionate
concentration, a quickening of the revolution of the
hours, every episode in the play being speeded up in
order to make it fit the shrunken stage. From the first
faint silvery overture of the dawn to the deep finale
of the sunset, the tempo of the day is heightened; and
each phase stumbles on the heels of its precursor with an
effect of blushing confusion. It is noon before the sun
has cast aside the special colours of the early morning,
and already, so hotfoot is the pace, he must begin to
assume the livery of evening. No hibernation here!
To begin the day's walk beneath the first twilight and
maintain it until the stars begin to bud again is to feel
that one has rather finely fulfilled the true round and
tenor of the day. One need be no distressing athlete

212 MODERN ESSAYS

to achieve it now. The petals of the dawn have barely
withered before the clouds are clustering together
again to construct the last crimson rose.

Familiar enough, to such a happy walker, the effect
of all this celestial excitement on the empty fields below.
In the shelter of the copses and on the grey grass of
the pastures, the pure, pale colours, light as plum-
bloom, melt and shift like the colours in an opal. The
interfusion of early and late light suggests an inter-
fusion of the seasons — the softly streaming sunlight
of the autumn thrilled with the fresh passion of
spring. Very beautiful are the days (we have had
many of them lately) — the days of violet and misty
gold, when September, secretly returning, meets May
in the midst of the woodlands, the broken bands of sun-
light streaming about her as she runs. Very beautiful,
too, and equally a monopoly of winter, the days when
the earth, mist-suffused, appears as frail as porcelain,
no more substantial than the silken air, and one seems
to move in the midst of exquisite crisis. Just a word,
or a touch, you feel, would complete the spell or spoil
it — dissolve the thin veil completely or set it tossing
together in self-protective folds. And there are other
days, not dissimilar, known even in the suburbs, when
the horizons draw softly together, and the contrast
between the elusive mist and the sharp outlines of the
trees and houses create a queer impression of unreality
and invest the simplest object with a strange significance.
It is, perhaps, an old lane, or some reeds beside a pool,
or a twisted scrap of thorn — but it stands out with a
sudden poignancy, heavy with a wordless beauty. We
may have passed it a thousand times before; but we
see it now as though it had been but that instant created.

And as with the country so too with the country-

DIXON SCOTT 213

folk — the same new candour and cordiality. Wander-
ing through the winter with a knapsack, I came last
week to a certain little mid-England market-town
(why conceal its name? — it was Stratford-on-Avon),
known to me hitherto, as to most others, in its pro-
fessional midsummer character of " Literary Mecca "
and so forth. And now, for the first time, I find it
living its own life, playing an organic part in the life
of the county and the country, serving the surrounding
villages, the villages of the Vale of the Red Horse,
exactly as it did in Shakespeare's time. Revealing
its own character, concealed amid the self-conscious
flurry of the tourist months, in all manner of intimate
artless ways. . . . And this deep change in Stratford's
attitude is typical of the change that passes over all
England. All the summer through, nowadays, the best
of our countryside, from Kent to Cumberland, from
Devon to Durham, is converted into a kind of brightly
coloured channel through which the stream of holiday-
makers continuously pours. But at the end of autumn, as
at the shutting of a dam, the artificial flow is checked and
the true tide of the country life resumes its immemorial
course. There is no fantasy in this ; the human change
is really extraordinarily profound. Instead of landladies
and apartments you find farmers' wives and home-
steads; instead of being regarded as a tourist you are
welcomed as a friend. As at the end of a ball, there is
a general unmasking; and even the spectator finds
himself discarding some well-worn sentiments. The
footlights are lowered, you catch the players in mufti,
and you discover that the people you had looked on as
at players in an idyll are familiar men and women.
The countryman is found to be a finer thing — a fellow-
countryman. Perhaps, too, hard weather makes soft

214

MODERN ESSAYS

hearts, and the cold a warmer welcome. Certainly, at
any rate, et ego in Arcadia is just a sickly-sweet mid-
summer sigh. Now, wherever you go, you will find
something more enduring than an idyU; for every
road you follow will lead you, before nightfall, to the
door of a human home.

EDWARD THOMAS 215

AN AUTUMN HOUSE
Edward Thomas: Rose Acre Papers

On that October day, nothing was visible at first save
yellow flowers, and sometimes a bee's quiet shadow
crossing the petals: a sombre river, noiselessly saunter-
ing seaward, dropped with a murmur, far away among
leaves, into a pool. That sound alone made tremble
the glassy dome of silence that extended miles and
miles. All things were lightly powdered with gold, by
a lustre that seemed to have been sifted through gauze.
The hazy sky, striving to be blue, was reflected as
purple in the waters. There, too, sunken and motion-
less, lay amber willow leaves; some floated down.
Between the sailing leaves, against the false sky, hung
the willow shadows, — shadows of willows overhead,
with waving foliage, like the train of a bird of paradise.
One standing on a bridge was seized by a Hylean shock,
and wondered as he saw his face, death-pale, among
the ghostly leaves below. Everywhere, the languid
perfumes of corruption. Brown leaves laid their fingers
on the cheek as they fell ; and here and there the hoary
reverse of a willow leaf gleamed at the crannied foot
of the trees.

One lonely poplar, in a space of refulgent lawn, was
shedding its leaves as if it scattered largess among a
crowd. Nothing that it gave it lost ; for each leaf lay
sparkling upon the turf, casting a splendour upwards.
Amaidenunwreathing her bridal garlands would cast them
off with a grace as pensive as when the poplar shed its leaf.

216 MODERN ESS . ¥S

We could not walk as slowly as the river floed;
yet that seemed the true pace to move in life, ai so
reach the great grey sea. Hand in hand with the
river wound the path, and that way lay our jou ey.

In one place slender coils of honeysuckle trit to
veil the naked cottage stone, or in another the s )tle
handiwork of centuries had covered the walls ith
lichen. And it was in the years when Nature id;

Incipient magni procedere menses,

when a day meant twenty miles of sunlit forest, 1 ds,
and water,

Oh! moments as big as years,

years of sane pleasure, glorified in later reverit of
remembrance. . . . Near a reedy, cooty backwat of
that river ended our walk.

The day had been an august and pompous fes .*al.
On that day, burning like an angry flame until on,
and afterwards sinking peacefully into the sour ess
deeps of vesperal tranquillity as the light grew )ld,
life seemed in retrospect like the well-told story f a
rounded, melodious existence, such as one could ish
for one's self. How mild, dimly golden, the coirort-
able dawn! Then the canvas of a boat creeping ike
a spider down the glassy river pouted feebly. The
slumberous afternoon sent the willow shadows to 3ep
and the aspens to feverish repose, in a landscape th-
out horizon. Evening chilled the fiery cloud, ad a
grey and level barrier, like the jetsam of a vast up-
heaval, but still and silent, lay alone across the st.
Thereafter a light wind knitted the willow brai hes
against a silver sky with a crescent moon. Ag.nst
that sky, also, we could not but scan the fixed gr ses

EDVARD THOMAS 217

bowig on the wall top. For a little while, troubled
tenerly by autumnal maladies of soul, it was sweet
ancsuitable to follow the path towards our place of

;s— a grey, immemorial house with innumerable
winows.

le house, in that wizard light "sent from beyond
thrsky," — for the moon cast no beams through her

irbn of oak forest, — seemed to be one not made with
hails. Was it empty? The shutters of the plain,
sqtre windows remained un whitened, flapped ajar.
Urto the door ran a yellow path, levelled by moss,
wl e a blackbird left a worm half swallowed, as he
warned our coming. A large red rose, divided and
sp: by birds, petal by petal, lay as beautiful as blood
upi the ground. This path and another carved the
lau into three triangles; and in each an elm rose
uj laying forth auburn foliage against the house in
Ncember even.

he leaves that had dropped earlier lay, crisp and
cued, in little ripples upon the grass. There is a
paect moment for coming upon autumn leaves, as
fc gathering fruit. The full, flawless colour, the false,
h(tic, well-being of decay, and the elasticity, are
auined at the same time in certain favoured leaves;
ai dying is but a refinement of life.

n one corner of the garden stood a yew tree and
it shadow; and the shadow was more real than the
tie, — the shadow inlaid in the sparkling verdure like
e:>ny. In the branches the wind made a low note of
iiantation, especially if a weird moon of blood hung
gidily over it in tossing cloud. To noonday the ebony
sidow was as lightning to night. Towards this tree
t* many front windows guided the sight ; and beyond,
aieep valley was brimmed with haze that just exposed

218 MODERN ESSAYS

the tree-tops to the play of the sunset's last random
fires. To the left, the stubborn leaves of an oak wood
soberly burned like rust, among accumulated shadow.
To the right, the woods on a higher slope here and there
crept out of the haze, like cloud, and received a glory,
so that the hill was by this touch of the heavens exagger-
ated. And still the sound of waters falling among trees.
Quite another scene was discovered by an ivy-hidden
oriel, lit by ancient light, immortal light travelling
freely from the sunset, and from the unearthly splendour
that succeeds. There the leaves were golden for half
a year upon the untempestuous oaks in that sunken
land. The tranquillity, the fairness, the unseasonable
hues, were melancholy: that is to say, joy was here
under strange skies; sadness was fading into joy, joy
into sadness, especially when we looked upon this gold,
and heard the dark sayings of the wind in far-off woods,
while these were still. Many a time and oft was the
forest to be seen, when the dullest rain descended,
fine and hissing, — seen standing like enchanted towers,
amidst it all, untouched and aloof, as in a picture.
But when the sun had just disappeared red-hot in the
warm, grey, still eventide, and left in the west a fiery
tissue of wasting cloud, when the gold of the leaves had
an April freshness, in a walk through the sedate old
elms there was "a fallacy of high content."

Several roses nodded against the grey brick, as if
all that olden austerity was expounded by the white
blossoms that emerged from it, like water magically
struck from the rock of the wilderness. In the twi-
light silence the rose petals descended. So tender was
the air, they lay perfect on the grass, and caught
the moonlight.

In ways such as these the mansion spoke. For the

EDWARD THOMAS 219

house had a characteristic personality. Strangely out
of keeping with the trees, it grew incorporate with them
by night. Behold it, as oft we did, early in the morning,
when a fiery day was being born in frost, and neither
wing nor foot was abroad, and it was clothed still in
something of midnight; then its shadows were homes
of awful thoughts; you surmised who dwelt therein.
Long after the sun was gay, the house was sombre,
unresponsive to the sky, with a Satanic gloom.

The forest and meadow flowers were rooted airily
in the old walls. The wildest and delicatest birds had
alighted on the trees.

Things inside the house were contrasted with the
lugubrious wall as with things without. The hangings
indeed were sad, with a design of pomegranates; but
the elaborate silver candelabra dealt wonderfully with
every thread of light entering contraband. One braided
silver candlestick threw white flame into the polished
oaken furniture, and thence by rapid transit to the
mirror. An opening door would light the apartment
as lightning. Under the lights at night the shadowy
concaves of the candelabra caught streaked reflections
from the whorls of silver below. The Holy Grail might
have been floating into the room when a white linen
cloth was unfolded, dazzling the eyes.

In the upper rooms, the beds (and especially that one
which owned the falcon's eye of an oriel) — the beds,
with their rounded balmy pillows, and unfathomable
eider-down that cost much curious architecture to
shape into a trap for weary limbs, were famous. All
the opiate influence of the forest was there. Perhaps
the pillow was daily filled with blossoms that whisper
softliest of sleep. There were perfumes in the room
quite inexplicable. Perhaps they had outlived the flowers

220 MODERN ESSAYS

that bore them ages back, flowers now passed away
from the woods. The walls were faded blue; the bed
canopy a combination of three gold and scarlet flags
crossed by a device in scarlet and gold: "Blessed is
he that sleepeth well, but he that sleeps here is
twice blessed."

The whole room was like an apse, with altar, and pure,
hieratic ornament. To sleep there was a sacramental
thing. Such dreams we had.

Against that window were flowers whose odour the
breeze carried to our nostrils when it puffed at dawn.
If excuses could be found, it was pleasant to be early
abed in summer, for the sake of that melancholy western
prospect, when the songs of the lark and the nightingale
arose together. We fell suddenly asleep with a faint
rush of the scent of juniper in the room, and the light
still fingering the eyelashes. Or, if we closed the window
in that chamber —

That chamber deaf of noise and blind of sight —

we could hear our own thoughts. Moreover, there was
a graceful usage of making music while the owl hooted
vespers; for a bed without music is a sty, the host
used to say, — as the philosopher called a table without
a manger.

Alongside the bed, and within reach of the laziest
hand, ran two shelves of books. One shelf held an old
Montaigne; the Lyrical Ballads] the Morte d' Arthur;
The Compleat Angler; Lord Edward Herbert's Autobio-
graphy; George Herbert's Temple; Browne's Urn
Burial; Cowper's Letters. The other shelf was filled
by copies, in a fine feminine hand and charmingly mis-
spelt, of the long-dead hostess's favourites, all bound
according to her fancy by herself : Keats' Odes; Twelfth

EDWARD THOMAS 221

Night; L' Allegro and II Penseroso; the Twenty-first
Chapter of St. John and the Twenty-third Psalm ; Virgil's
Eclogues; Shelley's Adonais; part ii. section ii. member
4, of the Anatomy of Melancholy, called " Exercise
Rectified of Body and Mind"; Lord Clarendon's Eulogy
of Falkland, in the History of the Great Rebellion; a
great part of The Opium Eater, and Walter Pater's
Child in the House and Leonardo da Vinci, added by a
younger but almost equally beautiful hand.

What healing slumbers had there been slept, what
ravelled sleaves of care knit up! Ancient room that
had learned peacefulness in centuries, to them whose
hunger bread made of wheat doth not assuage, to those
that are weary beyond the help of crutches, you, ancient
room in that grey immemorial house, held sweet food
and refuge. To the bereaved one, sleeping here, you
redeemed the step that is soundless for ever, the eyes
that are among the moles, the accents that no subtlest
hearing shall ever hear again; — You, ancient bed, full
of the magic mightier than " powerfullest lithomancy,"
had blessings greater than St. Hilary's bed, on which
distracted men were laid, with prayer and ceremonial,
and in the morning rose restored. With you, perhaps,
was Sleep herself; Sleep that sits, more august than
Solomon or Minos, in a court of ultimate appeal, whither
move the footsteps of those who have mourned for
justice at human courts, and mourned in vain: Sleep,
by whose equity divine the bruised and dungeoned
innocent roams again emparadised in the fields of home,
under the smiles of familiar skies: Sleep, whose mercy
is not bounded, but

droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,

even upon the beasts. Sleep soothes the hand of

222 MODERN ESSAYS

poverty with gold, and pleases with the ache of long-
stolen coronets the brows of fallen kings. Had Tantalus
dropped his eyelids, sleep had ministered to his lips.
The firman of sleep goes forth: the peasant is enthroned
and accomplished in the superb appurtenances of empire ;
the monarch finds himself among the placid fireside
blisses of light at eventide; and those in cities pent
sleep beguiles with the low summons :

Ad claras Asise volemus urbes.

Because sleep clothes the feet of sorrow with leaden
sandals and fastens eagles' wings upon the heels of
joy, I wonder that some ask at nightfall what the morrow
shall see concluded: I would rather ask what sleep
shall bring forth, and whither I shall travel in my dreams.
It seems indeed to me that to sleep is owed a portion
of the deliberation given to death. If life is an appren-
ticeship to death, waking may be an education for
sleep. We are not thoughtful enough about sleep;
yet is it more than half of that great portion of
life spent really in solitude. "Nous sommes tous dans
le desert! Personne ne comprend personne." In the
desert what then shall we do? We truly ought to
enter upon sleep as into a strange, fair chapel. Fragrant
and melodious ante-chamber of the unseen, sleep is a
novitiate for the beyond. Nevertheless, it is likely that
those who compose themselves carefully for sleep are
few as those who die holily; and most are ignorant of
an art of sleeping (as of dying). The surmises, the
ticking of the heart, of an anxious child, — the awful
expectation of Columbus spying the fringes of a world,
— such are my emotions, as I go to rest. I know not
whether before the morrow I shall not pass by the stars
of heaven and behold the "pale chambers of the west,"

EDWARD THOMAS 223

returning before dawn. To many something like
Jacob's dream often happens. The angels rising are
the souls of the dreamers dignified by the insignia of
sleep. Without vanity, I think in my boyhood, in my
sleep, I was often in heaven. Since then, I have gone
dreaming by another path, and heard the sighs and
chatterings of the underworld; have gone from my
pleasant bed to a fearful neighbourhood, like the fifth
Emperor Henry, who, for penance, when lights were
out, the watch fast asleep, walked abroad barefoot,
leaving his imperial habiliments, leaving Matilda the
Empress. And when the world is too much with me,
when the past is a reproach harrying me with dreadful
faces, the present a fierce mockery, the future an open
grave, it is sweet to sleep. I have closed a well-loved
book, ere the candle began to fail, that I might sleep,
and let the soul take her pleasure in the deeps of
eternity. It may be that the light of morning is ever
cold, when it breaks in upon my sleep and disarrays
the palaces of my dreams.

Each matin bell . . .
Knells us back to a world of death.

The earth then seems but the fragments of my dream,
that was so high.

/

224 MODERN ESSAYS

A RARE TRAVELLER: W. H. HUDSON
Ernest Rhys

Picturesque topographers and guides to famous places
are many. The real discoverers and born naturalists,
able to make a country new and wonderful even to the
people who have lived in it all their lives, are few at
the best of times.

It was the author of The Paradox Club who first an-
nounced, some years ago, a traveller from South America
who had rediscovered Britain. The traveller's name
recalled Hudson's Bay and Henry Hudson the Naviga-
tor; but his own initials were W. H. and his country
was Guayana. To that side of the world, after writing
several books about the wilds of London, Sussex,
Wilts, Hampshire and Cornwall, Hudson later returned
in his unfinished autobiography — Far Away and Long
Ago. A strange book, as biographies and autobio-
graphies go, treating of nature, human nature, and
aspects of life that to-day are often left out of the
reckoning, its pages recall some of the earlier books that
made its writer known — Idle Days in Paraguay, The
Naturalist in La Plata, South American Sketches, The
Purple Land that England Lost, and the perfect little
Indian romance, Green Mansions, which is in its wild
disguise personal too.

The spell of these early South American adventures
was so strong and the vision of the world they unfolded
so remarkable, that originally they left one wishing

ERNEST RHYS 225

almost that the writer would write only on Guayana
and the neighbouring lands. But another and older
instinct was in his blood, which led him over to this
country, and in his English adventures he fully kept
his sense of discovery. He described them like a
man coming fresh to the scene, while yet feeling the
place association that usually comes only with old
acquaintance.

This dual interest much increases the effect of his
writing. In "A Shepherd of the Downs " he looked
on that Sussex country with the eyes of an heir to an
old estate, back from exile. But the land of his birth
is still in his mind, and every wilder aspect of the one
calls up the spirit and the colour of the other. So
Wiltshire and Guayana were both in a way mother-
earth to him; the South Downs remind him of La
Plata, Paraguay and the Banda Oriental, and behind
the scenes described in his English pages loom up the
deserts and splendours of the new world seen from the
top of Ytaioa. In Sussex a day on Kingston Hill (near
Lewes) does the trick:

The wide extent of unenclosed and untilled earth, its
sunburnt colour and its solitariness, when no person was
in sight; the vast blue sky, with no mist or cloud on it;
the burning sun and wind, and the sight of thousands upon
thousands of balls or stars of down, reminded me of old
days on horseback on the open pampas — an illimitable
waste of rust-red thistles, and the sky above covered with
its million floating flecks of white.

By this reversion and his power of bringing an appre-
ciable strangeness into a familiar bit of landscape, he
expresses in a fashion peculiar to himself what we may
call the primitive colours of the English uplands.
His feeling for them was that of a countryman who

226 MODERN ESSAYS

was yet a far traveller, a great naturalist, an artist in
wild life. To him any scene where there was room,
open sky and plenty of wing-space, was haven enough,
though to others it seemed treeless and uninviting. He
took a place like Winterbourne Bishop — the village
without any ivied relic or new hotel to attract the
tourist — and made it into the mirror of that place-
memory which haunts us like a repeated dream. He
could take a tree, as in El Ombu, and make it reveal
life upon life, generation after generation, in the story
it tells. The result is one only attained by an uncommon
conjunction of the right subject and the fit man to deal
with it.

The actual narrator in El Ombu is a Spanish- American
exile; and something of a Spanish gravity in the style
much enhances the narrative illusion:

Do you hear the manganga, the carpenter bee, in the
foliage over our heads? Look at him. Like a ball of
shining gold among the green leaves, suspended in one
place, humming loudly. Ah, sefior, the years that are
gone, the people that have lived and died, speak to me
thus audibly when I am sitting here by myself. These
are memories; but there are other things that come back
to us from the past; I mean ghosts. Sometimes at
midnight, the whole tree, from its great roots to its top-
most leaves, is seen from a distance shining like white
fire. What is that fire, seen of so many, which does not
scorch the leaves? And sometimes, when a traveller lies
down here to sleep the siesta, he hears sounds of footsteps
coming and going, and noises of dogs and fowls, and of
children shouting and laughing, and voices of people talking.
But when he starts up and listens, the sounds grow faint,
and seem at last to pass away into the tree with a low
murmur as of wind among the leaves.

The story of this haunted tree is one to be read out of

ERNEST RHYS 227

doors — under English trees, let us say, that reflect by
their likeness in unlikeness the great trunk of the tropical
Ombu. No story that I know, written in our time, so
conveys the desire of life, and the extremest cruelty of
death, without once breaking the tale-teller's profound
pleasure in the things he has to relate. In Green
Mansions too, it may be remembered, the daughter of
the Di-di meets her fate in a tree; and that story can
be read along with El Ombu and the later English tale
An Old Thorn, which form a trilogy without a parallel
in English fiction.

More about the Ombu tree is to be learnt from Far
Away and Long Ago:

The house where I was born was named Los Veinte-
cinco Ombues, that is " The Twenty-five Ombu Trees."
For there were in fact just so many of them in a long row.
It is a tree of huge girth, and yet the wood is soft and
spongy, unfit for firewood and otherwise useless, and the
leaves are poisonous. Being of so little service to man
it is likely to die out: but it formed a gigantic landmark
on those South American plains and gave welcome shade
to man and horse from the sun.

On the Pampas or on the Downs, we find how impor-
tant a role is that of the single figure in the foreground.
A tree, a shepherd, a beggar on horseback, a hermit
like "Con-Stair Lovair," a patriarch like Don Evaristo
Penalva serves to focus to a fine degree the particular
spot of earth that is described. On the South Downs
it may be a picture of a farm-boy: "The Boy with
the Thistle":

He wore a round grey peakless cap, and for ornament
he had fastened in the middle of it, where there had perhaps
once been a top-knot or ball, a big woolly thistle-flower.

228 MODERN ESSAYS

No doubt there are dangers in this kind of figurative
particularity. Some people who attempt it become too
diffuse in their wish to be exact, and end by growing
garrulous over a bit of straw or a stray pig. Again, a
wrong word or a touch of self-consciousness is fatal as
the cough of the hunter who hopes to pass for a stone or
a tree-trunk when stalking a deer. The naturalist in
Hudson saves him at the point where you may think
him getting too notionable for his woodcraft. Indeed
it is the reaction between nature and human nature in
his work which makes it interesting. The insect race
and the bird race and the human race — are they not
alike alive, alike confounded by the mortal decay of
things? In the September pages of his Sussex book,
he described "the wind sweeping through the yellow
bennets with a long scythe-like sound." Then the
thought of the past summer's insect life, and the noise
of all those fine small voices blending into one voice,
and the glistening of their minute swift-moving bodies
like thin dark lines on the air, overtakes him:

And now in so short a time, in a single day and night
as it seems, it is all over, the feast and fairy dance of life;
the myriads of shining gem-like bodies turned to dead
dust, the countless multitudes of brilliant little individual
souls dissipated into thin air, and blown whithersoever the
wind blows.

It may seem that the impression this leaves is too
mournful, but though a tinge of melancholy — even,
it may be, of ingrained melancholy — does show in these
pages, the whole sense of the spectacle of life which they
bear is a large and invigorative one.

Take the sketch of Shepherd Caleb Bawcombe's
mother and the black sheep-dog, Jack. The dog was
of the old Welsh type once common in Wiltshire, and

ERNEST RHYS 229

a great adder-killer: "I can see her now," said Caleb,
"sitting on that furze bush, in her smock and leggings,
with a big hat like a man's on her head — for that's how
she dressed." But presently she jumped up, crying
out that she felt a snake under her, and snatched off
the shawl on which she had been sitting. There, sure
enough, appeared the head of an adder: and Jack
dashed at the bush, seized the snake and killed it.

Take again the "History of Tommy Ierat," in the
same book. The long life and curiously easy death of
this man, as there told, are affecting as the end of Sir
Launcelot in the Morte d' Arthur. One can hardly say
more than that.

In the last chapter of his autobiography, by turning
the glass upon himself he shows where his boyish hopes
and fears were leading him, when his own story was but
a quarter told, with the years of his full experience
still to come:

. . . Barring accidents, I could count on thirty, forty,
even fifty years, with their summers and autumns and
winters. And that was the life I desired . . . the life
the heart can conceive — the earth life.

Of that life so conceived he was the natural historian,
and it is worth note that, when other tests failed, he got
his effect by looking into the most curious of all natural
phenomena — himself. For Nature, the arch-revealer,
when she finds a man to her mind, can make him a
part of her own expression. Idle Days in Patagonia — a
book in which the professional naturalist seems at times
struggling with the natural man — serves to show how
it came about. There, as he describes the bird-sounds,
and the resonant quality of their notes, which tells
you of the mysterious bell: "somewhere in the air,

230 MODERN ESSAYS

suspended on nothing," or, as he recalls the Plains, and
the grey waste, he has already let you far into his secret.
He speaks of the state of mind, induced by the change
of consciousness, that comes to a man who has been long
in a state of solitude. It leads, he says, to "a revelation
of an unfamiliar and unsuspected nature" hidden under
the nature we commonly recognise ; and it is accounted
for by a sudden awakening in us of the old primitive
animal instinct which is often accompanied (as it is
in the very young) by an intense delight. To that
delight, instinctive yet spiritual in its higher develop-
ment, he returns in the portrait he draws of his mother:

Everything beautiful in sight or sound, that affected
me, came associated with her, and this was especially so
with flowers. Her feeling for them was little short of
adoration. To her they were little voiceless messengers
from heaven, symbols of a place and a beauty beyond
our power to imagine. Her favourites were mostly among
wild flowers that are never seen in England. But [he
says] if ever I should return to the Pampas I should go
out in search of them, and seeing them again, feel that I
was communing with her spirit.

This is a confession which explains something of the
faculty that must be possessed by one who is more than
a mere chronicler of wild life — the curious power which
can see earth transformed by sympathetic understand-
ing. The delight he found in that life did not fail as
time went; it grew instead, and gained a deeper pur-
chase upon his mind. And even when he was shut
out from Nature in London for long periods, sick and
poor and friendless, it was his sure consolation.

One wayfaring book of his remains to be described
— Afoot in England. It appeared more than ten years
ago, but I only chanced upon it after reading the later

ERNEST RHYS 231

English books. Some chapters and pages of it are in
his most characteristic vein; and they help one to find
the measure of his traveller's philosophy. It has an
introduction on Guide Books well worth pondering.
He goes to a Guide Book town, much boomed, made
notorious by railway placards ; and even there he comes
upon a peal of bells which recalls the Monk of Eynsham's
Easter Bells — "a ringing of marvellous sweetness as if
all the bells of the world, or whatsoever is sounding,
had been rung together at once." He travels in Cob-
bett's footsteps to Coombe and "Uphusband" or
Hurstbourne Tarrant ; he goes to Salisbury, Stonehenge,
Bath, and Wells. He considers cathedrals anew as
bird resorts. At Salisbury he finds a wondrous popula-
tion of birds: swallows, martins, swifts; to say nothing
of daws, starlings and sparrows: even kestrels, and
stock-doves, instead of the common town pigeons, are
of that church-keeping company:

Nor could birds in all this land find a more beautiful
building to rest on — unless I except Wells Cathedral,
solely on account of its west front, beloved of daws, where
their numerous black company have so fine an appearance.
Salisbury, so vast in size, is yet a marvel of beauty in its
entirety. Still to me the sight of the birds' airy gambols
and the sound of their voices, from the deep human-like
dove tones to the perpetual subdued rippling running-
water sound of the aerial martins, must always be a prin-
cipal element in the beautiful effect. Nor do I know a
building where Nature has done more in enhancing the
loveliness of man's work with her added colouring. . . .
This colouring is most beautiful [he adds] on a day of
flying clouds and a blue sky with a brilliant sunshine on
the vast building after a shower.

A cathedral to him, as to Ibafiez, is a cathedral and
something more. It is a part of the indigenous growth

232 MODERN ESSAYS

of the country, and, in exploring it, he is like St. Bran-
dan in The Golden Legend discovering an Isle of Birds.

A discoverer of strange things in familiar places,
Hudson saw birds as another race, not so far from our
own, a little more aerial, a little less earthy. At another
remove, the insect race is again behind, or a little
below the bird race. The lowest of all, I am afraid, is
of the homunculus type — one which invariably moves
his spleen. For we must admit that he is splenetic at
times. He is angry with the Toby Philpots of Chi-
chester; he is annoyed with Cornish folk — I imagine
because they are not like the Devon folk he loves
so well. He is angry with fashionable women who
go to Holy Communion with aigrettes in their hats.
He is annoyed by dirty little boys who follow their
instincts, and stone or catch little birds. But this is
only because he is a kind-hearted vagabond who is
ready to love all creatures that on earth do dwell, so
long as they are not too degenerate to preserve their
natural instincts. He is one among the rare itinerants
who have revealed the beauty of this country by their
affectionate art — including White of Selborne, Old
Crome, Constable, Turner, Richard Jefferies, Words-
worth, and certain unnamed and undistinguished
provincial poets. There are pages of his that enshrine
scenes and memories of places to be ranked with Old
Crome's "Mousehold Heath," the picture of Appin
sketched by Dorothy Wordsworth in her Tour in
Scotland, Dyer's Grongar Hill, Bewick's thumb-nail
vignettes of Prudhoe-on-Tyne, and Constable's "Old
Sarum."

In days to come when nearly all the wildness of Britain
is tamed, men will look back with envy to Hudson's
account of the birds in Savernake, and of the London

ERNEST RHYS 233

daws, now growing scarcer every year, that rose to
fly with the homing crows as they passed over
Kensington Gardens.

Of two more books which are part of his English
cycle, the first is Birds in Town and Village, which has
a greenfinch interlude for the consolation of true bird-
lovers, a charming tale of a duet between a girl and a
nightingale, and many other characteristic vagabond
passages. What will surprise some readers, less tolerant
than the naturalist himself, is a critical appreciation
of a concert of London sparrows. The fit sequel to that
is the chapter on "Chanticleer"; and there are other
London contributions and notably one on the moor-
hens in Hyde Park. The book is illustrated by some
wonderfully brilliant bird-portraits by E. J. Detmold
— brilliantly coloured and sunlit. Indeed the blue-tit
and goldfinch, in one picture, are almost dazzling —
every wing-feather detailed like a fan.

The other is The Book of a Naturalist, which adds
some delightful pages, natural and human-natural, to
the writer's account of Britain re-discovered. It opens
with a pine wood, and it ends with earthworms and an
experiment with acacia-leaves to test the value of the
worm as a lawn-maker. Two chapters on the mole,
two on the heron considered as an ancient British
notable and aristocrat, and four on serpents, native
and foreign, serve to carry on the record. The story
of the she-rat that communed with her natural enemy,
a cat, and who in the end tried to steal the fluff from the
rat's abundant side-whiskers, and so provoked a misunder-
standing, is an unexpected diversion, since Hudson was
not fond of rats, and has even been known to call them
those "cursed cattle." But the book is above all to

234 MODERN ESSAYS

be gratefully remembered for its scenes and episodes
of the wild chronicle of the English shires: — an en-
chanting June evening in the valley of the Wiltshire
Avon, when the ghost-moths were out upon their love-
dance over the dusky meadows; an adder episode in
the New Forest, when the creature proved to have an
under surface of the most exquisite turquoise blue;
or a brown-purple field of fritillaries, or ginny-flowers,
which are of the wild lily kind, pendulous as a
harebell, and of a delicate pink chequered with dark
maroon-purple.

These voyages and discoveries seemed to occur to
Hudson so easily, that they leave one newly penetrated
with the sense of the wild splendour, the beauty inex-
haustible, of the new-old country that he travelled.
No need for him to go back to Guayana, since he found
his tropics in a Wiltshire meadow, and his wood beyond
the world in Hants or Dorset. There are many wild
places — downs, woods and lowlands — that will miss
hereafter that tall, grey, falcon-faced traveller.

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 235

A NEGLECTED HEROINE OF SHAKESPEARE
John Middleton Murry: Countries of the Mind1

Coriolanus is, if not one of the greatest, one of the
most masterly of Shakespeare's plays. If it does not
hold all the spiritual significance of any of the three
great tragedies, if it has not the profound emotional
appeal of Antony and Cleopatra or Julius Ccesar, it
indubitably belongs to the same period of serene mastery
of theme and expression. French critics continually,
and English critics occasionally — these last improperly
obeisant before the prestige of French criticism — have
said that Coriolanus is Shakespeare's most perfect work
of art. While we deplore their language, we under-
stand their meaning. Coriolanus is a magnificent
example of creative control. Its design is, as Mr. Walter
Sickert has well said of Poussin's painting, "marshalled."
Its economy, its swiftness, its solidity, its astonishing
clarity and pregnancy of language are not only satis-
fying and exhilarating in themselves, but may have a
peculiar and profound appropriateness to the warlike
argument. Just as the looser texture of Antony and
Cleopatra seems to be the inevitable garment of the
decaying soldiership of Antony, so the exact and
unrelenting pattern of Coriolanus seems essential
to the unfaltering decision and the unswerving suc-
cess of the earlier Roman general. The play marches
onward like a legion in the days when Roman
soldiers were Romans still.

1 Published in America by Messrs. E. P. Dutton and Co.

236 MODERN ESSAYS

Perhaps it is this quality of Roman relentlessness
and inevitability which has made it unsympathetic to
the general English taste, for among us it is surely the
least popular of Shakespeare's great plays. In France,
on the contrary, it is said to be the most popular ; prob-
ably not for the same reason. Beyond the fact that
Coriolanus is a familiar and traditional hero of the
French theatre, the concentrated and controlled drama-
tic action which distinguishes Shakespeare's Coriolanus
from his other great dramas appeals directly to the
French palate. Since, however, this only means that
Coriolanus is an unusually well-constructed play, it
cannot account for the general reluctance of English
people to admit it to their affections. The reason,
one imagines, is that it is too Roman. An English
audience, and English readers, for that matter, like to
surrender themselves to their heroes. They can idolise
Brutus as an eloquent Hampden, and sympathise with
an Antony lost in the embraces of his serpent of old
Nile. A martyr for political liberty, a martyr for love,
these are intimate and comprehensible to us; but a
martyr to the aristocratic idea is not. He is an alien;
there is too much of the British constitution in our
blood for him to warm it.

In other and more familiar terms, Coriolanus is an
unsympathetic hero, and all the characters of the play,
save one, to whom we shall return, strike chill upon the
general heart. Volumnia is altogether too much like
that forbidding Spartan mother who haunted our
schooldays with her grim farewell: "Return with your
shield or upon it"; Menenius is too cynical, too worldly-
wise to move us humanly in his discomfiture; Brutus
and Sicinius arouse neither sympathy nor disdain, and
the emotion we feel at the knightly generosity of Aufidius

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 237

is dashed too soon by his confession that, if he cannot
overthrow Coriolanus by fair means, he will by foul.
Coriolanus himself we cannot like, any more than a
schoolboy can like Themistocles. One may despise
one's country, one may hate one's country, but one may
not lead an enemy against her. These are primitive
ethics, no doubt, but they are profound, and though
they may be alien to aesthetic criticism, they have their
roots deep in the human heart. The writer who ignores
them deliberately imperils the universality of his appeal.

We can see clearly enough why Coriolanus should be
that among Shakespeare's greater plays which is most
neglected by the public, and therefore the least familiar
to the stage. It is not so easy to understand why it
should have been so neglected by the critics, unless,
perhaps, they are not quite so immune from the effects
of instinctive sympathy as in theory they ought to be.
By the critics I mean the true literary critics, not the
textual "philologers." These have been busy enough,
sometimes to good effect, as with the whole line which
they have neatly restored from North's Plutarch, but
at least as often in a spirit perhaps best described as
one of slight impatience with poetry. This is, however,
not the occasion to catalogue the things they have done
which they ought not to have done; but only to try to
show that they have also left undone a few things that
they ought to have done. Far from me at this moment
the desire to shiver a lance in open battle with the
editors; I only crave their leave to ride to the rescue
of an all vanished lady to whom they have had no time
to stretch out a helping hand.

All that needs to be premised is the simple fact that
Coriolanus was first printed in the Folio of 1623, and
that we have no other authority for the text. On the

238 MODERN ESSAYS

whole we may say that the Folio text is careless enough,
although I believe that — obvious misprints apart — it
is at least as near to Shakespeare's original as most
modern recensions, which take us as much farther away
by some of their readings as they bring us nearer to it
by others. The most persistent weakness of the Folio
Coriolanus is the haphazard distribution of lines among
the speakers. One of the most palpable of these blunders
has been rectified by common assent. In Act III.
(scene i., I. 237), when Menenius is trying hard to per-
suade Coriolanus to moderate his contemptuous lan-
guage towards the plebs, the Folio gives him these
impossible words:

I would they were barbarians, as they are

Though in Rome litter'd: not Romans, as they are not

Though calved i' th' porch o* th' Capitol.

It is as certain that Menenius did not speak them as
it is certain that Coriolanus did. They have been pro-
perly restored to the hero. The Folio Coriolanus
then, although the true and authentic original, is
far from impeccable.

So much by way of preamble to the attempt at rescue.

Of all the characters in Coriolanus one alone can be
said to be truly congenial; and she is the least sub-
stantial of them all. Virgilia, Coriolanus's wife, though
she is present throughout the whole of four scenes,
speaks barely a hundred words. But a sudden, direct
light is cast upon her by a phrase which takes our breaths
with beauty, when Coriolanus welcomes her on his
triumphant return as: "My gracious silence!" Magical
words! They give a miraculous substance to our
fleeting, fading glimpses of a lovely vision which seems
to tremble away from the clash of arms and pride that

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 239

reverberates through the play. Behind the disdainful
warrior and his Amazonian mother, behind the vehement
speech of this double Lucifer, the exquisite, timid spirit
of Virgilia shrinks out of sight into the haven of her
quiet home. One can almost hear the faint click of
the door behind as it shuts her from the noise of
brawling tongues. Yet in her presence, and in the
memory of her presence, Coriolanus becomes another
and a different being. It is true we may listen in vain
for other words so tender as "My gracious silence!"
from his lips. A man who has one love alone finds
only one such phrase in a lifetime. But in the heat
of victorious battle, when Coriolanus would clasp
Cominius in his arms for joy, he discovers in himself
another splendid phrase to remember his happiness
with Virgilia:

Oh! let me clip ye

In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry, as when our nuptial day was done
And tapers burned to bed ward.

And even in the anguish of the final struggle between
his honour and his heart, when his wife comes with his
mother to intercede for Rome, it is in the very accents
of passionate devotion that he cries to Virgilia:

Best of my flesh,
Forgive my tyranny; but do not say
For that, " Forgive our Romans." Oh! a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge !
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss
I carried from thee, dear, and my true lip
Hath virgin'd it e'er since.

In the proud, unrelenting man of arms these sudden
softenings are wonderful. They conjure up the picture

240 MODERN ESSAYS

of a more reticent and self-suppressed Othello, and we
feel that, to strike to the heart through Coriolanus's
coat of mail, it needed an unfamiliar beauty of soul, a
woman whose delicate nature stood apart, untouched
by the broils and furies of her lord's incessant battling
with the Roman people and the enemies of Rome.

In the play Virgilia speaks barely a hundred words.
But they are truly the speech of a "gracious silence,"
as precious and revealing as they are rare. She appears
first (Act I., scene iii.) in her own house, sitting silent
at her sewing. Coriolanus has gone to the wars.
Volumnia tries to kindle her with something of her own
Amazonian ecstasy at the thought of men in battle.
"I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at
first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing
he had proved himself a man." Virgilia's reply, the
first words she speaks in the play, touch to the quick
of the reality of war and her own unquiet mind:

But had he died in the business, madam, how then?

The thoughts of her silence thus revealed, she says no
more until chattering Valeria, for all the world like one
of the fashionable ladies in Colonel Repington's diary,
is announced. She has come to drag her out to pay calk.
Virgilia tries to withdraw. Volumnia will not let her,
and even while the maid is in the room waiting to know
whether she may show Valeria in, she bursts into another
ecstatic vision of her son in the midst of battle: "his
bloody brow with his mailed hand then wiping." Again
Virgilia reveals herself:

His bloody brow! O Jupiter, no blood I

Valeria enters on a wave of small talk. She has seen
Virgilia's little boy playing. The very image of his

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 241

father; "such a confirmed countenance." She had
watched him chase a butterfly, catching it and letting
it go, again and again. "He did so set his teeth and
tear it ; oh, I warrant how he mammocked it ! "

Volum. One on 's father's moods.
Val. Indeed, la, it is a noble child.
Virg. A crack, madam.

"An imp, madam!" The meaning leaps out of the
half-contemptuous word. Don't call him a noble child
for his childish brutality. It pains, not rejoices Vir-
gilia. Nor, for all the persuasions of Volumnia and
Valeria, will she stir out of the house. She does not
want society; she cannot visit "the good lady that
lies in." She is as firm as she is gentle.

'Tis not to save labour, nor that I want love.

Simply that she is anxious and preoccupied. She will
not "turn her solemness out of doors"; she cannot.
Coriolanus is at the wars.

So, in two dozen words and a world of unspoken
contrast Virgilia is given to us: her horror of brutality
and bloodshed, her anxiety for her husband, her reti-
cence, her firmness. She is not a bundle of nerves,
but she is full of the aching fears of love. Truly, "a
gracious silence."

She next appears when the news is come that Corio-
lanus has triumphed (Act II., scene i.). Volumnia and
Valeria are talking with Menenius. She stands aside
listening. He is sure to be wounded, says Menenius,
he always is. She breaks out: "Oh, no, no, no!"
She retires into her silence again while Volumnia proudly
tells the story of her son's twenty-five wounds. "In
troth, there's wondrous things spoke of him," says

242 MODERN ESSAYS

chattering Valeria. Virgilia murmurs : " The gods grant
them true!" "True! Pow-wow!" says Volumnia, in
hateful scorn: one can see her sudden turn, hear her
rasping voice. Virgilia is not one of the true breed of
Roman wives and mothers. And indeed she is not.
She is thinking of wounds, not as glorious marks of
bravery, but as the mutilated body of the man she
adores. Wounds, wounds! They talk of nothing but
wounds. Virgilia suffers in silence. Coriolanus is
wounded. That is a world wounded to her.

Coriolanus enters, swathed in bandages, unrecog-
nisable. He kneels before his mother. Then he sees
Virgilia standing apart, weeping silently. These are
the words of the Folio text. The spelling has been
modernised; the punctuation has been left untouched.

Corio. My gracious silence, hail:

Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home

That weep'st to see me triumph ? Ah my dear,

Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear

And mothers that lack sons.
Mene. Now the Gods crown thee.
Corio. Oh my sweet lady, pardon . . .
Virg. And live you yet?
Val. I know not where to turn.

Oh welcome home : and welcome General,

And y'are welcome all.

The first two of these speeches and their speakers
contain no difficulty. But, obviously, "And live you
yet? Oh, my sweet lady, pardon," does not belong
to Cominius. On his lips it is nonsense. The editors
have resolved the problem by giving the line to Corio-
lanus, and the following speech of Volumnia to Valeria.
Coriolanus is supposed to say to Menenius: "And five
you yet?" then, suddenly catching sight of Valeria,
to beg her pardon for not having seen her before.

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 243

We have a free hand in disposing of the line. There
is no objection to Volumnia's speech being given to
Valeria, whose effusive manner it suits better. But to
make Coriolanus surprised that Menenius is still alive
is pointless ; he had no reason to suppose that the arm-
chair hero was dead. Moreover, to make him turn to
Valeria and say: "Oh, my sweet lady, pardon," is to
give the great warrior the manners of a carpet knight.

Now think of the relation between Virgilia and Corio-
lanus ; remember how her imagination has been pre-
occupied by his wounds ; see her in imagination weeping
at the pitiful sight of her wounded husband — and
read the lines through without regard to the speakers.
It will, I believe, occur to any one with an instinct for
psychology that: "And live you yet? " takes up Corio-
lanus's previous words. "Ah, my dear," he has said,
"it is the women who have no husbands who weep as
you do." Then, and not till then, Virgilia breaks silence *.
" And live you yet ? " And are you really my husband ?
Is this thing of bandages the lord of my heart ? At her
sudden, passionate words Coriolanus understands her
tears. He has a glimpse of the anguish of her love.
He has been an unimaginative fool. "Oh, my sweet
lady, pardon ! " This, I suggest, is the way the passage
should be read:

Corio. Ah, my dear,

Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear
And mothers that lack sons.

Mene. Now the gods crown thee !

Virg. And live you yet?

Corio. Oh, my sweet lady, pardon . . .

Val. I know not where to turn.

And to my own mind it is an essential part of the
beauty of the passage that these few lightning words

244 MODERN ESSAYS

of love should flash through the hubbub of Menenius's
welcome and Valeria's effusive congratulations.

Virgilia appears again in the scene following Corio-
lanus's banishment (Act IV., scene ii.). Here the altera-
tions necessary are self-evident, and it is difficult to
understand why they have not been made before. Again
the test of reading through the short scene with an
imaginative realisation of Virgilia must be applied.
Again her exquisite timidity of speech must be con-
trasted, as Shakespeare deliberately contrasted it, with
Volumnia's headstrong and contemptuous anger. It
will then, I believe, be plain that of Volumnia's
final words:

Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself

And so shall starve with feeding. Come, let's g».

Leave this faint puling and lament as I do

In anger, Juno-like. Come, come, come,

the last two lines are addressed to Virgilia alone. Be-
sides Volumnia herself only the two tribunes, Brutus
and Sicinius, are there. The lines cannot be spoken to
them. Only Virgilia remains. She is not angry, but
sad, at Coriolanus's banishment, just as in his triumph
she was sad, not joyful: and just as then, Volumnia
scorns her for her weakness.

Now read again the Folio text, which is that of the
modern editions of lines 11-28. Volumnia meets the
two tribunes who have been the prime movers in her
son's banishment:

Volurn. Oh y'are well met:

Th' hoarded plague a' th' gods requite your love.
Mene. Peace, peace, be not so loud.
Volutn. If that I could for weeping, you should hear,

Nay, and you shall hear some. Will you be gone?
Virg. You shall stay too: I would I had the power

To say so to my husband.

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 245

Sicin. Are you mankind ?

Volum. Aye, fool, is that a shame. Note but this, fool,

Was not a man my father? Had'st thou foxship

To banish him that struck more blows for Rome

That thou hast spoken words.
Sicin. Oh blessed Heavens !
Volum. More noble blows than ever your wise words.

And for Rome's good, I'll tell thee what: yet go:

Nay, but thou shalt stay too : I would my son

Were in Arabia, and thy tribe before him.

His good sword in his hand.
Sicin. What then?

Virg. What then? He'd make an end of thy posterity
Volum. Bastards, and all.
Virg. Good man, the wounds that he does bear for Rome !

It is obvious that the peremptory "You shall stay too"
(1. 14) is not spoken by Virgilia. It is as completely
discordant with her character, and with Volumnia's
description of her behaviour during the scene ("this
faint puling"), and it is accordant with the character
of Volumnia. Volumnia forces first one, then the
other tribune to stay; we can see her clutch them by
the sleeve, one in either of her nervous hands. At her
words Virgilia interposes a sighing aside : "I would I
had the power to say so to my husband."

It is equally clear that Virgilia cannot possibly have
indulged in the brutal imagination of line 27, "What
then? He'd make an end of thy posterity." There is
no stop at the end of the line in the Folio: it runs on
to the next half line; and the whole line and a half
undoubtedly belong to Volumnia. A simple trans-
position of the rubrics is all that is needed.

Volum. What then ?

He'd make an end of thy posterity

Bastards and all.
Virg. Good man, the wounds that he does bear for Rome!

246 MODERN ESSAYS

It is another sighing aside and another indication that
Virgilia is haunted by the memoiy of those wounds
she could not bear to see. Unless these asides are
restored to her, and the brutal words taken away,
quite apart from the violation of her character, there
is no point in Volumnia's sneer at her "faint puling."
Virgilia appears for the last time as the silent par-
ticipant in Volumnia's embassy of intercession. For
the first and only time a bodily vision of her beauty is
given to us, when Coriolanus cries;

What is thy curtsy worth or those dove's eyes
Which can make gods forsworn ? I melt and am not
Of stronger earth than others.

She has no need of words to make her appeal ; her eyes
speak for her. She says simply;

My lord and husband !
Corio. These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome.
Virg. The sorrow that delivers us thus changed makes you

think so.
Corio. Like a dull actor now,

I have forgot my part, and I am out

Even to a full disgrace. Best of my flesh

Forgive my tyranny; but do not say

For that, " Forgive our Romans." Oh! a kiss

Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge !

Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss

I carried from thee, dear, and my true lip

Hath virgin'd it e'er since.

After this Virgilia speaks but a single sentence more.
Volumnia ends her pleading with an impassioned
adjuration to her son:

For myself, son,
I purpose not to wait on Fortune till
These wars determine : if I cannot persuade thee
Rather to show a noble grace to both parts

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 247

Than seek the end of one, thou shalt no sooner
March to assault thy country than to tread —
Trust to't, thou shalt not — on thy mother's womb
That brought thee to this world.
Virg. Ay, and mine

That brought you forth this boy, to keep your name
Living to time.

Virgilia's words contain much in little space. They,
her last words in the play, are the first in which she
shows herself at one with her husband's mother. Always
before Volumnia has been angry, contemptuous,
spiteful, malevolent towards Virgilia ; and Virgilia has
held her peace without yielding an inch of ground to
Volumnia's vehemence. We have felt throughout that
they are the embodiments of two opposed spirits — of
pride and love. Not that Volumnia's pride has changed
to love; it is the same pride of race that moves her,,
the fear of disgrace to a noble name:

The end of war's uncertain; but this is certain,
That, if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name
Whose repetition shall be dogged with curses,
Whose chronicle thus writ: " The man was noble
But with his last attempt he wip'd it out,
Destroy' d his country, and his name remains
To the ensuing age abhorr'd."

But now these spirits of love and pride are reconciled;
for once they make the same demand. Volumnia
pleads that her son shall remember honour. Virgilia
that her husband shall remember mercy. The double
appeal is too strong. Coriolanus yields to it, and pays
the penalty.

Not one of the readjustments suggested in this essay
calls for the alteration of a single word in the text of the
Folio. They consist solely in a redistribution of words

248 MODERN ESSAYS

among the speakers, and in the most complicated in-
stance a redistribution of some kind has long since been
seen to be necessary and long since been made. I
venture to think that together they will help to dis-
engage the true outline of one of Shakespeare's most
delicate minor heroines. There was no place for a
Desdemona in the story of Coriolanus; but in a few
firm touches Shakespeare has given us a woman whose
silence we can feel to be the unspoken judgment on the
pride of arms and the pride of race which are the theme
of the play.

For it is surely not against the democratic idea that
Coriolanus is tried and found wanting. In spite of
Signor Croce's assurance to the contrary, it is impossible
to believe that the contempt for the city mob with which
the play is penetrated was not shared by Shakespeare
himself. The greatest writers strive to be impersonal,
and on the whole they achieve impersonality; but,
though they carve out an image that is unlike them-
selves, they cannot work wholly against the grain of
their own convictions. Prejudice will out. And the
loathing of the city mob which is continually expressed
in Shakespeare's work and comes to a head in Coriolanus
was indubitably his own. It is indeed less plausible
to deny this, than it would be to argue that at a time
when his genius was seizing on themes of a greater
tragic scope, it was his sympathy with the anti-plebeian
colour of the Coriolanus story that led Shakespeare to
choose it for his play.

This is not a question of Shakespeare's political
views. We do not know what they were, and we have
•no means of finding out. Signor Croce is thus far
right. But when he goes on to assure us that it is a
wild-goose chase to look to discover where Shakespeare's

J. MIDDLETON MURRY 249

sympathies lay in the world in which he lived, we can
point to the knowledge we actually have of every great
writer. We do know their sympathies. It may be an
illegitimate knowledge, but the laws it violates are laws
of Signor Croce's own devising. It is his own logical
fiat that holds the kingdoms of the aesthetic and the
practical asunder. In fact, there is no dividing line
between them. A writer's predispositions in practical
life do constantly colour his aesthetic creation, and
every great writer who has been conscious of his activity
has either confessed the fact or glorified in it.

We know that Shakespeare detested the city mob.
If we care to know why, we have only to exercise a little
imagination and picture to ourselves the finest creative
spirit in the world acting in his own plays before a
pitful of uncomprehending, base mechanicals. The
man who used that terrible phrase, who "gored his own
thoughts"1 to wring shillings from the pockets of the
greasy, grinning crowd in front of him, has no cause to
love them; and Shakespeare did not. He was an
aristocrat, not in the political sense, but as every man
of fine nerves who shrinks from contact with the coarse-
nerved is an aristocrat, as Anton Tchehov was an
aristocrat when he wrote: "Alas, I shall never be a
Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things,
and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in
carpets, spring carriages, and keenness of wit."

Shakespeare could not therefore measure Coriolanus
against the democratic idea in which he did not be-
lieve; nor could he pit the patriotic idea against him, for
Coriolanus was immune from a weakness for his country.

1 Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

250

MODERN ESSAYS

It is domestic love that pierces his armour and inflicts
the mortal wound. And perhaps in Shakespeare's
mind the power of that love was manifested less in the
silver speech of the vehement and eloquent Volumnia
than in the golden silence of the more delicate woman
to whom we have attempted to restore a few of her
precious words.

SIR W. R. NICOLL 251

THE ART OF PACKING

Sir W. Robertson Nicoll: The Day Book of
Claudius Clear

The art of packing is confessedly rare and difficult, and
I never mastered it. In the old days when I had to do
my best, there was nothing for it but brute force. A
bag or a trunk was a thing to be subdued and over-
come. When a student, I purchased as large a box as
I could afford, and when the end of the session arrived
I put everything into my box, and then sat down on it till
it was brought to reason. The results were not entirely
satisfactory, but they were the best I could achieve.

Later on my difficulties increased. Like most men I
have an ineradicable prejudice against luggage. When
I put a bag or a box into the luggage van it is with
small hope of ever seeing it again. For ten minutes
after in the railway carriage I think of how I shall be
able to get on if my luggage vanishes into space. For
those who cannot learn to pack, the one resource is to
get some one who will pack for them. Wonderful is the
competency of some packers. They put in everything
you want, and nothing else. They put it in small com-
pass. They pack it in such a way that it emerges
uninjured. I praise and admire, and thank them. If
there is trouble it comes in at the other end. When you
have to return you may find, if left alone, that you
cannot get the things back into their place. In that case
you will be followed for days after your return by
mysterious parcels sent from the hotel. This is humiliat-
ing enough, but perhaps you cannot help it. A delightful

252 MODERN ESSAYS

writer whose hand, alas ! is cold to-day has described
the adventures of a husband and wife who agreed on
their honeymoon to have their luggage put together.
The lady had her preferences, and so had the gentleman.
She wished to have with her five paint-boxes, six sketch-
books, two cameras, three kodaks, a butterfly net and
box, a camp stool, a formidable array of hats, three
sunshades of different colours, and a collection of rugs
and wraps fit for the Arctic regions. They were going
to the Italian Lakes at the hottest time of the year.
The gentleman despised all these things, but he could
not get on without a large assortment of boots and
shoes, and a series of volumes on the geological strata
of the Alps and the Renaissance in Lombardy. " Trouble
followed," as the theological student said in summarising
the experience of Jonah. At the end of the journey, the
lady found her best comb smashed, a precious silver
mirror shivered to atoms, her dresses crushed, and her
hats reduced to jellies.

I thought about my many adventures in packing the
other day when I was dictating some articles for a half-
penny paper. In these journals a thousand words is
the limit, and if you can get your matter into five
hundred words, so much the better. Every well-edited
journal seeks to have a justification for everything it
prints. Many people fancy that editors have difficulty
in filling their columns. If they have, it is a proof that
they are incompetent. Every journal in a healthy state
is compelled to reject constantly articles with a good
claim to publication. But in a halfpenny daily, where
many subjects must be touched, the problem is acute.
It is a question of packing. In the first place, no article
should be packed in it that is not needed. Every para-
graph should be its own justification. Then the articles

SIR W. R. NICOLL 253

should be skilfully packed, and not rumpled and crushed.
It is no credit to get many things into a small bag if
they all emerge damaged. Many writers would find it
useful to take a thousand words of their writing and
reduce the thousand to five hundred without impair-
ing the effect. It is not easy with writing that is
worth anything. A theological professor, criticising a
student's sermon, said that the half of it had better
be omitted, and it did not matter which half. You
cannot condense your article simply by cutting it in
two. You must rewrite it upon another scale. It is
not enough to be brief. You must be interesting, and
it is possible and very easy to be both brief and tedious.
The editing of the ideal halfpenny newspaper, simple
as it seems to the outsider, is in reality as difficult as
the editing of The Times, for every headed paragraph,
however short, is a study in the art of condensation.
I quite understand that certain subjects cannot be
satisfactorily dealt with in very brief articles or para-
graphs. Nevertheless, the man who runs to length
should suspect himself. There are preachers who think
that the religion of the country is dying out because
people object to sermons an hour long. But the old
story comes up irresistibly. If a man cannot strike oil
in twenty minutes, he had better cease boring.

This leads me to say that the art of packing is the
art of life. What shall we do with the day? Here are
the twelve hours before us. What work can we put into
them? A very favourite theme of Addison's Spectator
was the waste of the day, especially by fine ladies. This
is a specimen :

Saturday. — Rose at eight o'clock in the morning. Sat
down to my toilette.

From eight to nine. Shifted a patch for half an hour

254 MODERN ESSAYS

before I could determine it. Fixed it above my left
eyebrow.

From nine to twelve. Drank my tea and dressed.

From twelve to two. At chapel. A great deal of good
company. Mem. — The third air in the new opera. Lady
Blithe dressed frightfully.

From three to four. Dined. Miss Kitty called upon me
to go to the opera before I was risen from table.

From dinner to six. Drank tea. Turned off a footman
for being rude to Veny.

Six o'clock. Went to the opera. I did not see Mr. Froth
till the beginning of the second act. Mr. Froth talked to a
gentleman in a black wig; bowed to a lady in the front
box. Mr. Froth and his friend clapped Nicolini in the
third act. Mr. Froth cried out: "Ancora." Mr. Froth led
me to my chair. I think he squeezed my hand.

Eleven at night. Went to bed. Melancholy dreams.
Methought Nicolini said he was Mr. Froth.

Sunday. — Indisposed .

There are people who never waste a moment, who get
up very early, and have done much work by breakfast,
who are always pulling out pen, pencil, or needle, while
others seem unemployed. I remember Robertson Smith
telling me that he learned Italian when he was dressing.
This perhaps may be overdone. There may be seasons
and spaces which it is not worth while to fill with an
occupation. Is it worth while to read at meals or out
of doors ? I think not, unless one is very lonely indeed.
Haydon, the painter, tells us a pleasant story of Sir
Walter Scott. Sir Walter went to see a picture of Hay-
don's which was on view. He arrived before the door
was open, and was told that the man would not be long
in coming. He quietly sat down and waited. Haydon
found him thus, and delightedly records it as a beauti-
ful trait of this great genius. It was a beautiful trait.

SIR W. R. NICOLL 255

but many of us would have tried to fill up the short
interval somehow.

The truth is that in order to give out you must take
in, and that the time spent in absorbing is just as neces-
sary and just as well spent as the time spent in testi-
fying. The other day I was in a country town, and took
out of the circulating library two books I had not seen
for years — the Life of Bishop Wilberforce and the Life
of Dean Hook. Both were indefatigable men. Of Wil-
berforce it was said that he could write two letters at
once, one with his left hand and the other with his right.
Also it is said that he could dictate seven letters at one
and the same time. I do not believe these stories, but
many people do believe them. Wilberforce was an early
riser, he was always writing, always preaching, always
travelling, and being a man of fine gifts, he won a
great position. Yet his life on the whole was impaired
and disappointed. He never succeeded in achieving the
place of his ambition. He saw over and over again men
preferred to him who were conspicuously his inferiors.
He came under a general suspicion of insincerity. The
queen suspected him, and so did many of her subjects.
Yet I think unprejudiced readers of his letters and
journals will see that in intention he was always honest.
What injured him was that he knew nothing. He read
practically nothing, he was not in any sense a scholar;
he thought the time spent in study was wasted time.
In spite of his ignorance he rushed headlong into con-
troversies where no man can do any good who is not
equipped with the results of patient and scholarly
investigation. Thus he assaulted the authors of Essays
and Reviews in the Quarterly, and declared them enemies
of the Christian faith. In the same periodical he made
a furious onslaught on Darwin. It is safe to say that

256 MODERN ESSAYS

Wilberforce had given moments to science where Darwin
had given days, and his article is simply presumptuous
nonsense. He rushed into a fray about Bishop Hampden,
and it turned out in the end that he had not read
Hampden's books. Having got into false positions, he
had to get out of them as best he could, and he did not
get out of them well. How much more Wilberforce
would have accomplished if he had been content to be
quiet at times! Dean Hook was another example of
immense and prolonged industry. He, too, was an early
riser. He sometimes wrote three sermons in one day.
Hook was a reader as well as a writer, and he has left
many books behind him, but I doubt whether any of
them will live. There was no touch of intellectual
distinction about him, nothing at all of the saving
grace of style. Honest, laborious, bold, ambitious, he
•did good and even great work in his day, perhaps the
best work that he could accomplish, and yet one
imagines that under conditions of more leisure and less
absorption he might have done something of another
kind. For myself, I particularly dislike people who
profess to be busy, and seem to be hurried, people who
look at the clock when you visit them, or when they
visit you. We must not try to pack life too close.

THE END

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