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Q ANTHOLOGY
Q ANTHOLOGY
A selection from
the prose and verse of
SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH
Compiled and edited
by
F. BRITTAIN, LITT.D.
Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge
Author of
'Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Biographical Study of Q'
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
This book is copyright. It may not be
reproduced whole or in part by any method
without written permission. Application
should be made to the publishers :
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
Aldine House Bedford St. London
Made in Great Britain
by
The Temple Press Letdwortb Herts
First puUisld 1948
INTRODUCTION
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER- COUCH, known to so many of
his readers and friends simply as 'Q,' was born in 1863 at
Bodmin, the county town of Cornwall. His mother was a
Devonian, but his father was born at the fishing village of
Polperro, on the south coast of Cornwall, where both the
Quillers and the Couches had long been settled. The Quillers,
it is true, were reputed to have come from France some five or
six generations back, but the Couches bore a Cornish name and
had probably lived in Cornwall from time immemorial. None
of them can ever have loved their native county more than Q,
whose books overflow with his devotion to the people, the life,
the legends, and the scenery of Cornwall.
Q had a proper affection for his father, who was a doctor, and
for the memory of his paternal grandfather (also a doctor)
whom he remembered meeting only once. He pays warm
tributes to both of them, and to their professional work, in his
books. His conversation in private life nevertheless showed
that he shared Napoleon's mistrust of the medical profession as
a whole. This mistrust was perhaps a piece of atavism, for
most of Q's ancestors before his grandfather's time had been
hardy seafarers men who probably scorned the learned pro-
fessions in general, who seldom needed the services of a doctor
or, if they needed them, were seldom able to get them.
Q resembled these remoter ancestors also in the great interest
that he took in the sea, in seamen, and in shipping of every kind.
This interest went very deep and was life-long. It was in fact
a passion and, as a consequence, there are very few of his
numerous books from which the sea is completely absent, what-
ever their subject or wherever their scene is laid. He possessed
the rugged, weather-beaten features of a seafaring man and
shared in some of the superstitions of the old type of sailor.
vi Introduction
He found, too, when the test came, that he could not live
happily for long out of sight of the sea.
When Q was only ten years old he was sent away to school
at Newton Abbot in Devon, where his mother's parents lived,
but he spent his holidays at home, and during them he explored
the country around Bodmin thoroughly. It was on one of
these schoolboy expeditions that he first visited the charming
little port of Fowey the place that was to inspire so much of
his writing and from which his name will always be inseparable.
He was entranced by Fowey as soon as he saw it and resolved
that, if he could, he would live in it. He was only fifteen at
the time; but his boyish delight in the town, far from proving
to be merely a passing fancy, developed into a devotion that
became more and more intense as he grew older.
From Newton Abbot Q went on to Clifton College, Bristol,
for further schooling, and here he gained his first literary success
by winning the school prize for a poem about Athens. This
was afterwards privately printed by his parents his first pub-
lished work. He left Clifton in 1882 for Trinity College,
Oxford, where he had been awarded a scholarship.
The love of Greek and Latin letters that he had acquired in
his schooldays was inevitably strengthened by his five years at
Oxford, where he took his degree in classics and stayed for a
further year as lecturer in classics at his college. After he left
Oxford he had no further occasion to study the classics sys-
tematically, but he never lost his love for them and they exerted
steady influence on him for the rest of his life. One might
say that his classical education was to a great extent responsible
for the clarity, conciseness, and common sense for which his
English style became famous.
At Clifton, Q had edited the school magazine; at Oxford,
while still in his early twenties, he wrote his first novel. Dead
Man's Rocky which was very manifestly in the style of
R. L. Stevenson. He also wrote regularly for the newly
founded Oxford Magazine, contributing to it parodies and other
Introduction vii
poems that still give him a high place among English writers of
light verse. It was also to The Oxford Magazine that he con-
tributed, several years after he had left the university, his
beautiful poem, Alma Mater probably the best known of all
his poems. In it he expressed, in haunting language, his life-
long devotion to Oxford, 'mother and mistress and queen and
yet not three goddesses but one goddess,' as he called the city
many years later.
In 1887 Q left Oxford for London, where he lived until 1892,
working partly as a free-lance journalist, but most of the time
for a firm of publishers. During these five years he wrote
three more novels and several other books, and from 1890 he
was assistant editor of a new Liberal weekly paper, The Speaker,
to which he contributed a short story every week and literary
articles and reviews frequently. He was working all day and
half the night in an attempt to make his name as a writer, and also
in a gallant and ultimately successful effort to wipe out some
family debts for which he was not responsible and which he
had no obligation to pay. All the time, too, he was supporting
his widowed mother and his two brothers; and from 1889 he
also had a wife to support, and from 1890 a son as well.
It is not surprising, therefore, that his health broke down and
that he left London in 1892, under medical advice, to live by the
sea. Fowey, the 'Troy Town* of his novels and short stories,
which he had frequently revisited and from which his wife
came, was his obvious choice. There, in a white-painted house
called 'The Haven/ with its narrow steep garden washed by the
water of the harbour, and with a view of the open sea from his
study window, he lived in great happiness until his death more
than fifty years later. He had to work hard, but with a wife
who was devoted to him and to whom he was equally devoted
he was unafraid of the future. In a poem addressed to her
he wrote :
dear my wife, be blithe
To bid the New Year hail. . . .
viii Introduction
For though the snows he '11 shake
Of winter from his head,
To settle, flake by flake,
On ours instead,
Yet we be wreathed green
Beyond his blight or chill
Who kissed at seventeen
And worship still.
Except that he continued for a few years to write short stories
and articles for The Speaker, Q earned his living during his first
twenty years at Fowey entirely as a free-lance writer. His
output consequently had to be considerable and was in fact
amazing, amounting as it did to two books every year on the
average. More than half of this was fiction, but he was also
writing serious verse, light verse (such as the delightful Ballad
of the Jubilee Cup\ and literary studies, and was compiling
anthologies. The best of these the most successful anthology
in our language was The Oxford Book of English Verse, which
made his name familiar wherever the English language was
spoken or English literature studied.
All this time Q was taking an ever-increasing part in Cornish
public affairs, particularly in education and politics. His ex-
periences as a member of the county education committee are
reflected in his novels (especially Shining Ferry) and other
writings, and his political activities appear sporadically in his
stories and sketches. An Anglican and yet a Liberal, he held
very definite opinions both ecclesiastically and politically and
made no attempt to conceal them. Yet, though this was a time
when religious and political feeling ran very high, his integrity
was such that he became a very popular figure an institution
in himself. The Dutch novelist, Maarten Maartens, who paid
him a visit in 1904, described him to a friend as 'King of Fowey
in a quiet way* ; and when W. H. Hudson went to Fowey some
years later and received a letter from his wife saying that she
Introduction ix
had been told that Q lived there he wrote to a friend : 'I replied
to her that she had sent me wonderful news, that I had been
hearing that Quiller-Couch lived at Fowey all my life and that
in Cornwall you heard it every day/ It was like a sea-shanty,
he said, or the chorus of John Brown's Body:
Glory glory halleluja,
Glory glory halleluja,
Glory glory halleluja,
Quiller-Couch lives at Fowey.
Q's services to literature, coupled with his public and political
services and his outstanding character, brought him recognition
from the Liberal Government in 1910, when (to his great sur-
prise) he was knighted. He had never been a blind partisan of
the Liberal party, neither did his knighthood make him one.
On the contrary, only two years later he openly attacked the
Liberal Government's Mental Deficiency Bill in the columns of
The Eye- Witness, comparing the minister responsible for the
introduction of the Bill to a strumpet. His attack was written
at white heat, and was all the more effective from being one of
the very few examples of satire to be found in the whole of
his works.
Nor was Q ever a blind partisan of the Church of England.
It is beyond all doubt that he strongly disliked Nonconformity
his private letters would make that abundantly clear, even if
there were no other evidence yet some of his closest friends
were ardent Nonconformists; and in his Eye- Witness articles he
makes an outspoken and sustained attack on a bishop of the
Church of England his former Oxford tutor for siding with
the Liberal Government's Bill. He puts to the bishop the
direct question: 'Do you still press me to join your damned
Association?' and immediately signs himself 'Your lordship's
obedient servant (but not in this).'
A few weeks after these attacks appeared in print the Liberal
Government showed its magnanimity by appointing Q again,
x Introduction
greatly to his surprise to the King Edward VII Professorship
of English Literature in the University of Cambridge. He was
almost simultaneously elected a fellow of Jesus College, and
from then onward he lived during term in his rooms at college,
but always returned to his beloved Fowey at the earliest possible
moment for each vacation.
From the first, Q was as popular and as prominent at Cam-
bridge as he had long been in Cornwall. His inaugural lecture
was packed to the doors and beyond. Like all his subsequent
lectures, it was prepared and delivered with the greatest care. His
lectures were such works of art, and were so stimulating and
so entertaining, that attendance at them was for years a fashion-
able pursuit among people of all ages at Cambridge somewhat
to Q's embarrassment at times.
His publications, though inevitably less numerous than they
had been, continued to appear at the rate of a volume or more
each year. He had little time now for the writing of fiction,
and after 1918 he published no more novels or volumes of short
stories : his most important books during the Cambridge period
were collections of lectures, published under such titles as The
Art of Writing, The Art of Reading, and Studies in Literature.
In all of them, as Mr. George Sampson has said, 'literature is
consistently presented, with convincing enthusiasm and creative
understanding, as something for hearty, rational, disciplined
enjoyment by normal human beings/
Perhaps the best known of all Q's lectures is the entertaining
Interlude on Jargon, which appeared in the earliest volume. It
should be studied by everybody who intends to write. One
lecture that deserves to be better known than it is was delivered
twenty years later, when Q was seventy years of age, and is
entitled Tradition and Orthodoxy. It is the reply of a life-
long Liberal to an attack on Liberalism by a convert to Toryism
Mr. T. S. Eliot. In style it reminds one of Q's open letters
to the Bishop of Exeter in The Eye-Witness more than twenty
years earlier. A writer who is himself an admirer of Mr.
Introduction xi
Eliot has described it as *a superb example of the magisterial
rebuke/
After that Q wrote no new books, apart from his unfinished
Memories and Opinions, but he wrote a number of charming
introductions to books by younger writers, a few more short
stories and poems, and compiled a new edition of The Oxford
Book of English Verse. Honours came to him in his old age.
In three consecutive years he was made a freeman of Bodmin, of
Fowey, and of Truro, and what probably gave him even more
pleasure in 1937 he was elected mayor of Fowey. Being a
life-long optimist, full of confidence in the younger generation,
he accepted the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939
philosophically, having no doubt about ultimate victory. Un-
perturbed by air raids, he continued to travel backwards and
forwards between Cambridge and Fowey as he had done ever
since 1912. He kept his eightieth birthday at Fowey in 1943,
and (as he would have wished) it was at Fowey that he died on
1 2th May in the following year, and at Fowey that he was buried.
Q was one of the most versatile as well as one of the most
prolific of modern writers. He produced more than twenty
novels, a dozen volumes of short stories, another dozen of
literary studies, half a dozen books for children, two volumes
of original verse, a number of anthologies, and a large quantity
of miscellaneous prose, including some dozens of introductions
to books by other writers or to his own selections from English
literature.
What is even more remarkable than the quantity or the range
of his writing is the high standard that he maintained through
all of it. This was partly due to his natural gifts, but even
more to the severe discipline to which he subjected himself
whenever he wrote whether he was writing a novel, a uni-
versity lecture, a parody, a translation from the classics, or a
limerick. As in his dress and his daily routine, so in his writing
he was thorough in every detail. His chief contribution to
English letters was his style, in which there lives again the
xii Introduction
chivalrous, hospitable Q who loved bright colours, dressed
with great care, was accurate but not pedantic, and refused
ever to be hurried.
*,*
This anthology aims at providing as representative a selec-
tion from Q's writing as is possible in the compass. Since each
item is given unabbreviated, it is obvious that no novel could
be included.
The items are arranged in the order in which they were first
published, as nearly as it can be ascertained. Some of them
have previously appeared only in periodicals or in other
publications equally difficult to obtain.
Q's CHIEF WORKS
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Memories and Opinions, an Unfinished Autobiography, 1944.
LITERARY CRITICISM
Adventures in Criticism, 1896; From a Cornish Window, 1906;
Poetry, 1914; On the Art of Writing, 1916; Shakespeare's Work-
manship, 1918; Studies in Literature (First Series), 1918; On
the Art of Reading, 1920; Introductions to Shakespeare's
Comedies in the New Cambridge Edition, 14 vols., 1921-31;
Studies in Literature (Second Series), 1922; Charles Dickens and
Other Victorians, 1925; The Age of Chaucer, 1926; A Lecture
on Lectures, 1927; Studies in Literature (Third Series), 1929;
The Poet as Citizen, and Other Papers, 1934.
NOVELS
Dead Mans Rock, 1887; Troy Town, 1888; The Splendid
Spur, 1889; The Blue Pavilions, 1891; la, 1896; The Ship of
Stars, 1899; The Westcotes, 1902; The Adventures of Harry
Introduction xiii
Revel, 1903; Hetty Wesley, 1903; Fort Amity, 1904; Shining
Ferry, 1905; Sir John Constantine, 1906; The Mayor of Troy,
1906; Poison Island, 1907; Major Vigour eux, 1907; 7n/<? 7YA/0,
1909; Za</y Good-for-Nothing, 1910; Brother Copas, 1911;
Hocken and Hunken, 1912; Nicky-Nan, Reservist, 1915; -Foe-
Farrell, 1918.
COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES
Noughts and Crosses, 1891; 7 vSW JXree Ships, 1892; jTA e
Delectable Duchy, 1893 ; Wandering Heath, 1895 ; Old Fires and
Profitable Ghosts, 1900; JXe Laird's Luck, 1901; 7/ta White
Wolf, 1902 ; 7V0 vS/W&y of the Face, 1903 ; Shakespeare's Christmas,
1905; Merry Garden, 1907; Corporal Sam, 1910; News from
the Duchy, 1913; Mortallone and Aunt Trinidad, 1917.
CHILDREN S BOOKS
7a/w -for and Near Retold, 1895 ; 7%<? Sleeping Beauty
and other Fairy Tales Retold, 1910; 77ze /?o// Ca// of Honour,
1912; 7rt Powder and Crinoline : Old Fairy Tales Retold, 1913.
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
Warwickshire Avon, 1892; ^ 7?/0r of Ink (translated from
the French of Rene* Bazin by Q and P. M. Francke), 1892;
Historical Tales from Shakespeare, 1 899 ; Memoir of Arthur
John Butler, 1917.
VERSE
Gree/z Azyj, x ^93; Poems and Ballads, 1896; 7Xe Vigil oj
Venus and Other Poems, 1912; Poems (a new edition of Poems
and Ballads, together with the whole of The Vigil of Venus
and other items), 1929; Green Bays (new and enlarged edition),
1930.
xiv Introduction
ANTHOLOGIES
The Golden Pomp, 1895; English Sonnets, 1897; The Oxford
Book of English Verse (i25o-i$oo), 1900; The Pilgrim s Way^
1906; The Oxford Book of Ballads, 1910; The Oxford Book of
Victorian Verse, 1912; The Oxford Book of English Prose, 1925 ;
Pages of English Prose, 1930; Felicities of Thomas Traherne,
1934; English Sonnets (new and enlarged edition), 1935; The
Oxford Book of English Verse (new edition, 1250-1918), 1939.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This selection from the works of Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch
is reprinted by kind permission of his literary executors and of
the following publishers and editors:
J. W. Arrowsmith (London) Ltd.; Blackie & Son Ltd.;
The Cambridge Review, The Cambridge University Press;
Cassell & Co. Ltd.; The Clarendon Press; Hutchinson &
Co. (Publishers) Ltd.; The Oxford Magazine; The Oxford
University Press; The Spectator", Time and Tide; The Times;
The Times Literary Supplement; G. P. Putnam's Sons of New
York ; and Charles Scribner's Sons of New York.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiv
PARODY OF WALT WHITMAN
from The Oxford Magazine, 2nd December 1885 I
PARODY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
from The Oxford Magazine, ist June 1887 3
PARODY OF WILLIAM COWPER
from The Oxford Magazine, 7th December 1887 6
THE SPLENDID SPUR
from The Splendid Spur, 1889 7
OLD AESON
from Noughts and Crosses, 1891 8
PSYCHE
from Noughts and Crosses, 1891 n
THE WHITE MOTH
from Green Bays, 1893 18
CHRISTMAS CAROL
with music by Charles Villiers Stanford, 1893 19
THE PAUPERS
from The Delectable Duchy, 1893 22
LETTER TO MAARTEN MAARTENS
March 1894 31
THE LOOE DIE-HARDS
from Wandering Heath, 1895 33
xvi Contents
PAGE
ALMA MATER
from The Oxford Magazine, nth November 1896 54
ODE UPON ECKINGTON BRIDGE, RIVER AVON
from Poems and Ballads, 1896 56
DOLOR OOGO
from Poems and Ballads, 1896 58
THE PLANTED HEEL
from Poems and Ballads, 1896 60
SONNET: ISLES OF SCILLY
from Poems and Ballads, 1896 63
THE FAMOUS BALLAD OF THE JUBILEE CUP
from The Pall Mall Magazine, April 1897 64
CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE
from The Pall Mall Magazine, July 1898 71
A NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS
from The Pall Mall Magazine, August 1898 73
LAYING UP THE BOAT
from The Pall Mall Magazine, December 1898 79
THE HARBOUR OF FOWEY
from A Fowey Garland, 1899 90
THE ROOM OF MIRRORS
from Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts, 1900 92
THE COLLABORATORS, OR THE COMEDY THAT
WROTE ITSELF
from Two Sides of the Face, 1903 no
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Introduction to The Poems of Matthew Arnold ('World's
Classics' Edition), 1906 141
Contents xvii
PAGE
CARMEN HELLESTONIENSE
from The Western Dally Mercury, 8th May 1907 154
COLERIDGE
Introduction to The Poems of Coleridge : a Selection (' World's
Classics' Edition), 1907 156
'EOTHEN'
Introduction to Kinglake's Eothen ('Red Letter Library*
Edition), 1907 172
THREE OPEN LETTERS TO THE BISHOP OF EXETER
from The Eye Witness, ist, 8th, and I5th August, 1912 178
JENIFER'S LOVE
from The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems, 1912 19)
THE ART OF PARODY
Introduction to Parodies and Imitations Old and New, edited by
J. A. S. Adam and B. C. White, 1912 194
INAUGURAL LECTURE
delivered at Cambridge on 29th January 1913 203
PIPES IN ARCADY
from News from the Duchy, 1913 218
LECTURE ON JARGON
delivered at Cambridge on ist May 1913 230
LIEUTENANT LAPENOTI&RE
from News from the Duchy, 1913 247
VOICES ON THE BANK
from The Cambridge Review, 4th June 1913 261
NOT HERE, O APOLLO! A CHRISTMAS STORY HEARD
AT MIDSUMMER
from News from, the Duchy, 1913 267
O MATRE PULCHRA
from The Cambridge Review, loth June 1914 278
xviii Contents
PAGE
TO THE FRONT FROM THE BACKS
from The Cambridge Review, 24th February 1915 280
'THE TEMPEST'
Introduction to The Tempest, 1921, in The New Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Shakespeare 285
AN ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF KEATS HOUSE,
HAMPSTEAD
delivered on 9th May 1925 295
A TOAST TO THE MEMORY OF SIR WALTER SCOTT
given at the 27th Annual Dinner of the Edinburgh Sir Walter
Scott Club, 26th November 1926 301
A SEXAGENARIAN'S APOLOGIA
Preface to The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales (Duchy
Edition), 1928 311
LECTURE ON W. S. GILBERT
from Studies in Literature, 3rd Series, 1929 313
TWO EPIGRAMS: I. TO CYNTHIA; II. THE CHRYSALIS
from The Spectator, 23rd November 1934 333
LECTURE ON TRADITION AND ORTHODOXY
delivered at Cambridge on i6th May 1934 334
THE SCHOLARLY DON
from Time and Tide, 23rd February 1935 352
SEA STORIES: A CHANCE CATALOGUE
from The Times Literary Supplement, I5th August 1935 361
TWO EPIGRAMS: I. A GARDEN SPEAKS; II. ON THE
CNIDIAN VENUS
from The Spectator, ist May 1936 370
OBITUARY OF GUSTAVE DAVID
from The Cambridge Review, 27th November 1936 371
Contents xix
PAGB
MONUMENTS
from The Cambridge Review, loth June 1936 373
FAITHFUL JANE: A CHRISTMAS STORY
from The Times, 24th December 1937 374
SURSUM CORDA
from The Times, ist June 1940 398
BYRON
Introduction to Byron, Poetry and Prose, edited by D. Nichol
Smith, 1940 399
A LIMERICK
from Chanticlere, Michaelmas Term 1941 406
A CLERIHEW
from Chanticlere, Lent Term 1942 407
TO AN OLD LEADER
from The Cambridge Review, 3ist October 1942 408
BASIC ENGLISH: A CHALLENGE TO INNOVATORS
from The Times Literary Supplement, 3Oth September 1944 409
NOTES 417
INDEX 42 r
BEHOLD! I AM NOT ONE THAT GOES
TO LECTURES
BY W. W.
BEHOLD! I am not one that goes to Lectures or the pow-
wow of Professors.
The elementary laws never apologize : neither do I apologize.
I find letters from the Dean dropt on my table and every one
is signed by the Dean's name
And I leave them where they are; for I know that as long
as I stay up
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
I am one who goes to the river,
I sit in the boat and think of 'life' and of 'time.'
How life is much, but time is more; and the beginning is
everything,
But the end is something.
I loll in the Parks, I go to the wicket, I swipe.
I see twenty-two young men from Foster's watching me, and
the trousers of the twenty-two young men,
I see the Balliol men en masse watching me. The Hottentot
that loves his mother, the untutored Bedowee, the
Cave-man that wears only his certificate of baptism,
and the shaggy Sioux that hangs his testamur with
his scalps.
I see the Don who ploughed me in Rudiments watching me:
and the wife of the Don who ploughed me in
Rudiments watching me.
I see the rapport of the wicket-keeper and umpire.
I cannot see that I am out.
Oh! you Umpires!
2 Behold ! 1 am not one that goes to Lectures
I am not one who greatly cares for experience, soap, bull-dogs,
cautions, majorities, or a graduated Income Tax,
The certainty of space, punctuation, sexes, institutions, copious-
ness, degrees, committees, delicatesse, or the fetters
of rhyme
For none of these do I care : but least for the fetters of rhyme.
Myself only I sing. Me Imperturbe! Me Prononc!
Me progressive and the depth of me progressive,
And the j8a0os, Anglice bathos
Of me hirsute, nakedly whooping,
Me over the tiles to the Cosmos endlessly whooping
The song of Simple Enumeration.
r
BY SIR W. S.
Written on the occasion of t/ie visit of the United Fire
Brigades to Oxford,
ST. GILES'S street is fair and wide,
St. Giles's street is long;
But long or wide, may naught abide
Therein of guile or wrong;
For through St. Giles's, to and fro,
The mild ecclesiastics go
From prime to evensong.
It were a fearsome task, perdue!
To sin in such good company.
ii
Long had the slanting beam of day
Proclaimed the Thirtieth of May
Ere now, erect, its fiery heat
Illumined all that hallowed street,
And breathing benediction on
Thy serried battlements, St. John,
Suffused at once with equal glow
The cluster 'd Archipelago,
The Art Professor's studio
And Mr. Greenwood's shop,
Thy building, Pusey, where below
The stout Salvation soldiers blow
The cornet till they drop ;
Thine, Balliol, where we move, and oh!
Thine, Randolph, -where we stop.
3
Fire!
in
But what is this that frights the air,
And wakes the curate from his lair
In Pusey's cool retreat,
To leave the feast, to climb the stair,
And scan the startled street?
As when perambulate the young
And call with unrelenting tongue
On home, mamma, and sire;
Or voters shout with strength of lung
For Hall & Co.'s Entire;
Or Sabbath-breakers scream and shout
The band of Booth, with drum devout,
Eliza on her Sunday out,
Or Farmer with his choir :
IV
E'en so, with shriek of fife and drum
And horrid clang of brass,
The Fire Brigades of England come
And down St. Giles's pass.
Oh grand, methinks, in such array
To spend a Whitsun Holiday
All soaking to the skin!
(Yet shoes and hose alike are stout;
The shoes to keep the water out,
The hose to keep it in.)
They came from Henley on the Thames,
From Berwick on the Tweed,
And at the mercy of the flames
They left their children and their dames,
Fire / 5
To come and play their little games
On Morrell's dewy mead.
Yet feared they not with fire to play
The pyrotechnics (so they say)
Were very fine indeed.
VI
(p.s. BY LORD MACAULAY)
Then let us bless Our Gracious Queen and eke the Fire Brigade,
And bless no less the horrid mess they 've been and gone and
made;
Remove the dirt they chose to squirt upon our best attire,
Bless all, but most the lucky chance that no one shouted 'Fire!'
TWILIGHT
BY W LL M C WP R
>r Tp!S evening. See with its resorting throng
JL Rude Carfax teems, and waistcoats, visited
With too-familiar elbow, swell the curse
Vortiginous. The boating man returns,
His rawness growing with experience
Strange union! and directs the optic glass
Not unresponsive to Jemima's charms,
Who wheels obdurate, in his mimic chaise
Perambulant, the child. The gouty cit,
Asthmatical, with elevated cane
Pursues the unregarding tram, as one
Who, having heard a hurdy-gurdy, girds
His loins and hunts the hurdy-gurdy-man,
Blaspheming. Now the clangorous bell proclaims
The Times or Chronicle, and Rauca screams
The latest horrid murder in the ear
Of nervous dons expectant of the urn
And mild domestic muffin.
To the Parks
Drags the slow Ladies' School, consuming time
In passing given points. Here glow the lamps,
And tea-spoons clatter to the cosy hum
Of scientific circles. Here resounds
The football-field with its discordant train,
The crowd that cheers yet not discriminates,
As ever into touch the ball returns
And shrieks the whistle, while the game proceeds
With fine irregularity well worth
The paltry shilling.
Draw the curtains close
While I resume the night-cap dear to all
Familiar with my illustrated works.
6
THE SPLENDID SPUR
NOT on the neck of prince or hound,
Nor on a woman's finger twined,
May gold from the deriding ground
Keep sacred that we sacred bind :
Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.
The scarlet hat, the laurelled stave,
Are measures, not the springs, of worth;
In a wife's lap, as in a grave,
Man's airy notions mix with earth.
Seek other spur
Bravely to stir
The dust in this loud world, and tread
Alp-high among the whisp'ring dead!
Trust in thyself, then spur amain !
So shall Charybdis wear a grace,
Grim Etna laugh, the Libyan plain
Take roses to her shrivelled face.
This orb this round
Of sight and sound
Count it the lists that God hath built
For haughty hearts to ride a-tilt.
OLD AESON
TUDGE between me and my guest, the stranger within my
J gates, the man whom in his extremity I clothed and fed.
I remember well the time of his coming : for it happened at
the end of five days and nights during which the year passed
from strength to age; in the interval between the swallow's
departure and the redwing's coming; when the tortoise in my
garden crept into his winter quarters, and the equinox was on
us, with an east wind that parched the blood in the trees, so that
their leaves for once knew no gradations of red and yellow, but
turned at a stroke to brown, and crackled like tin-foil.
At five o'clock in the morning of the sixth day I looked out.
The wind whistled across the sky, but now without the obstruc-
tion of any cloud. Full in front of my window Sinus flashed
with a whiteness that pierced the eye. A little to the right, the
whole constellation of Orion was suspended, clear over a wedge-
like gap in the coast, wherein the sea could be guessed rather
than seen. And, travelling yet farther, the eye fell on two
brilliant lights, the one set high above the other the one steady
and a fiery red, the other yellow and blazing intermittently
the one Aldebaran, the other revolving on the lighthouse top,
fifteen miles away.
Half-way up the east, the moon, now in her last quarter and
decrepit, climbed with the dawn close at her heels. And at this
hour they brought in the Stranger, asking if my pleasure were
to give him clothing and hospitality.
Nobody knew whence he came except that it was from the
wind and the night seeing that he spoke in a strange tongue,
moaning and making a sound like the twittering of birds in a
chimney. But his journey must have been long and painful;
S
Old Aeson 9
for his legs bent under him, and he could not stand when they
lifted him. So, finding it useless to question him for the time,
I learnt from the servants all they had to tell namely that they
had come upon him, but a few minutes before, lying on his face
within my grounds, without staff or scrip, bareheaded, spent,
and crying feebly for succour in his foreign tongue; and that
in pity they had carried him in and brought him to me.
Now for the look of this man, he seemed a century old, being
bald, extremely wrinkled, with wide hollows where the teeth
should be, and the flesh hanging loose and flaccid on his cheek-
bones; and what colour he had could have come only from
exposure to that bitter night. But his eyes chiefly spoke of his
extreme age. They were blue and deep, and filled with the
wisdom of years; and when he turned them in my direction they
appeared to look through me, beyond me, and back upon cen-
turies of sorrow and the slow endurance of man, as if his imme-
diate misfortune were but an inconsiderable item in a long list.
They frightened me. Perhaps they conveyed a warning of that
which I was to endure at their owner's hands. From com-
passion, I ordered the servants to take him to my wife, with
word that I wished her to set food before him, and see that it
passed his lips.
So much I did for this Stranger. Now learn how he
rewarded me.
He has taken my youth from me, and the most of my substance,
and the love of my wife.
From the hour when he tasted food in my house, he sat there
without hint of going. Whether from design, or because age
and his sufferings had really palsied him, he came back tediously
to life and warmth, nor for many days professed himself able
to stand erect. Meanwhile he lived on the best of our hospi-
tality. My wife tended him, and my servants ran at his bidding ;
for he managed early to make them understand scraps of his
language, though slow in acquiring ours I believe out of
io Old Aeson
calculation, lest someone should inquire his business (which was
a mystery) or hint at his departure. I myself often visited the
room he had appropriated, and would sit for an hour watching
those fathomless eyes while I tried to make head or tail of his
discourse. When we were alone, my wife and I used to specu-
late at times on his probable profession. Was he a merchant ?
an aged mariner? a tinker, tailor, beggarman, thief? We
could never decide, and he never disclosed.
Then the awakening came. I sat one day in the chair beside
his, wondering as usual. I had felt heavy of late, with a sore-
ness and languor in my bones, as if a dead weight hung con-
tinually on my shoulders, and another rested on my heart.
A warmer colour in the Stranger's cheek caught my attention;
and I bent forward, peering under the pendulous lids. His
eyes were livelier and less profound. The melancholy was
passing from them as breath fades off a pane of glass. He
was growing younger. Starting up, I ran across the room, to
the mirror.
There were two white hairs in my forelock; and, at the
corner of either eye, half a dozen radiating lines. I was an
old man.
Turning, I regarded the Stranger. He sat phlegmatic as an
Indian idol; and in my fancy I felt the young blood draining
from my own heart, and saw it mantling in his cheeks. Minute
by minute I watched the slow miracle the old man beautified.
As buds unfold, he put on a lovely youthfulness ; and, drop by
drop, left me winter.
I hurried from the room, and seeking my wife, laid the case
before her. 'This is a ghoul,' I said, 'that we harbour: he is
sucking my best blood, and the household is clean bewitched. 1
She laid aside the book in which she read, and laughed at me.
Now my wife was well-looking, and her eyes were the light
of my soul. Consider, then, how I felt as she laughed, taking
the Stranger's part against me. When I left her, it was with a
new suspicion in my heart. 'How shall it be,' I thought,
Old Aeson 1 1
'if after stealing my youth, he go on to take the one thing
that is better?'
In my room, day by day, I brooded upon this hating my
own alteration, and fearing worse. With the Stranger there was
no longer any disguise. His head blossomed in curls; white
teeth filled the hollows of his mouth; the pits in his cheeks
were heaped full with roses, glowing under a transparent skin.
It was Aeson renewed and thankless ; and he sat on, devouring
my substance.
Now, having probed my weakness, and being satisfied that
I no longer dared to turn him out, he, who had half imposed
his native tongue upon us, constraining the household to a
hideous jargon, the bastard growth of two languages, conde-
scended to jerk us back rudely into our own speech once more,
mastering it with a readiness that proved his former dissimula-
tion, and using it henceforward as the sole vehicle of his wishes.
On his past life he remained silent ; but took occasion to confide
in me that he proposed embracing a military career, as soon as
he should tire of the shelter of my roof.
And I groaned in my chamber; for that which I feared had
come to pass. He was making open love to my wife. And
the eyes with which he looked at her, and the lips with which
he coaxed her, had been mine; and I was an old man. Judge
now between me and this guest.
One morning I went to my wife; for the burden was past
bearing, and I must satisfy myself. I found her tending the
plants on her window-ledge; and when she turned, I saw that
years had not taken from her comeliness one jot. And I was old.
So I taxed her on the matter of this Stranger, saying this and
that, and how I had cause to believe he loved her.
'That is beyond doubt,' she answered, and smiled.
'By my head, I believe his fancy is returned!' I blurted out.
And her smile grew radiant, as, looking me in the face, she
answered, 'By my soul, husband, it is.'
Then I went from her, down into my garden, where the day
12 Old Aeson
grew hot and the flowers were beginning to droop. I stared
upon them and could find no solution to the problem that
worked in my heart. And then I glanced up, eastward, to the
sun above the privet-hedge, and saw him coming across the
flower-beds, treading them down in wantonness. He came
with a light step and a smile, and I waited for him, leaning
heavily on my stick.
'Give me your watch!' he called out, as he drew near.
'Why should I give you my watch?' I asked, while some-
thing worked in my throat.
'Because I wish it; because it is gold; because you are too
old, and won't want it much longer.'
'Take it,' I cried, pulling the watch out and thrusting it
into his hand. 'Take it you who have taken all that is
better! Strip me, spoil me '
A soft laugh sounded above, and I turned. My wife was
looking down on us from the window, and her eyes were both
moist and glad.
'Pardon me,' she said, 'it is you who are spoiling the child.'
PSYCHE
'Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her
way back to earth?'
THE man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with
a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually
screwed up, because his life had run for the most part in the teeth
of the wind. The lashes, too, had been scorched off. If you
penetrated the mask of oil and coal-dust that was part of his
working suit, you found a reddish-brown phlegmatic face, and
guessed its age at fifty. He brought the last down train into
Lewminster station every night at 9.45, took her on five minutes
later, and passed through Lewminster again at noon, on his way
back with the Galloper, as the porters called it.
He had reached that point of skill at which a man knows
every pound of metal in a locomotive; seemed to feel just what
was in his engine the moment he took hold of the levers and
started up; and was expecting promotion. While waiting for
it, he hit on the idea of studying a more delicate machine, and
married a wife. She was the daughter of a woman at whose
house he lodged, and her age was less than half of his own.
It is to be supposed he loved her.
A year after their marriage she fell into low health, and her
husband took her off to Lewminster for fresher air. She was
lodging alone at Lewminster, and the man was passing Lew-
minster station on his engine, twice a day, at the time when
this tale begins.
People especially those who live in the west of England
remember the great fire at the Lewminster theatre; how, in the
second Act of the Colleen Bawn^ a tongue of light shot from
the wings over the actors' heads; how, even while the actors
turned and ran, a sheet of fire swept out and on to the audi-
torium with a roaring wind, and the house was full of shrieks
'3
14 Psyche
and blind death ; how men and women were turned to a white
ash as they rose from their seats, so fiercely the flames outstripped
the smoke. These things were reported in ttie papers, with
narratives and ghastly details, and for a week all England talked
of Lewminster.
This engine-driver, as the 9.45 train neared Lewminster, saw
the red in the sky. And when he rushed into the station and
drew up, he saw that the country porters who stood about
Vere white as corpses.
'What fire is that?' he asked one.
Tis the theayter! There's a hundred burnt a'ready, and
the rest treadin' each other's lives out while we stand talkin',
to get 'pon the roof and pitch theirselves over!'
Now the engine-driver's wife was going to the play that
night, and he knew it. She had met him at the station, and
told him so, at mid-day.
But there was nobody to take the train on, if he stepped off
the engine; for his fireman was a young hand, and had been
learning his trade for less than three weeks.
So when the five minutes were up or rather, ten, for the
porters were bewildered that night this man went on out of
the station into the night. Just beyond the station the theatre
was plain to see, above the hill on his left, and the flames were
leaping from the roof; and he knew that his wife was there.
But the train was never taken down more steadily, nor did a
single passenger guess what manner of man was driving it.
At Drakeport, where his run ended, he stepped off the engine,
walked from the railway-sheds to his mother-in-law's, where
he still lodged, and went upstairs to his bed without alarming
a soul.
In the morning, at the usual hour, he was down at the station
again, washed and cleanly dressed. His fireman had the
Galloper's engine polished, fired up, and ready to start.
'Mornin'/ he nodded, and looking into his driver's eyes,
Psyche 1 5
dropped the handful of dirty lint with which he had been
polishing. After shuffling from foot to foot for a minute, he
ended by climbing down on the far side of the engine.
'Oldster/ he said, "tis mutiny p'raps; but s' help me, if I
ride a mile Alongside that new face o' your'n!'
'Maybe you 're right,' his superior answered wearily. 'You 'd
best go up to the office, and get somebody sent down f my
place. And while you 're there, you might get me a third-class
for Lewminster.'
So this man travelled up to Lewminster as passenger, and
found his young wife's body among the two score stretched in
a stable-yard behind the smoking theatre, waiting to be claimed.
And the day after the funeral he left the railway company's
service. He had saved a bit, enough to rent a small cottage
two miles from the cemetery where his wife lay. Here he
settled and tilled a small garden beside the high road.
Nothing seemed to be wrong with the man until the late
summer, when he stood before the Lewminster magistrates
charged with a violent and curiously wanton assault.
It appeared that one dim evening, late in August, a mild
gentleman, with Leghorn hat, spectacles, and a green gauze net,
came sauntering by the garden where the ex-engine-driver was
pulling a basketful of scarlet runners: that the prisoner had
suddenly dropped his beans, dashed out into the road, and
catching the mild gentleman by the throat had wrenched the
butterfly net from his hand and belaboured him with the handle
till it broke.
There was no defence, nor any attempt at explanation. The
mild gentleman was a stranger to the neighbourhood. The
magistrates marvelled, and gave his assailant two months.
At the end of that time the man came out of jail and went
quietly back to his cottage.
Early in the following April he conceived a wish to build a
1 6 Psyche
small greenhouse at the foot of his garden, by the road, and
spoke to the local mason about it. One Saturday afternoon the
mason came over to look at the ground and discuss plans. It
was bright weather, and while the two men talked a white
butterfly floated past them the first of the year.
Immediately the mason broke off his sentence and began to
chase the butterfly round the garden: for in the west country
there is a superstition that if a body neglect to kill the first
butterfly he may see for the season, he will have ill luck through-
out the year. So he dashed across the beds, hat in hand.
'I '11 hat 'en I J ll hat 'en! No, fay! I '11 miss 'en, I b'lieve.
Shan't be able to kill 'n if her 's wunce beyond th* gaate stiddy,
my son! Wo-op!'
Thus he yelled, waving his soft hat : and the next minute was
lying stunned across a carrot-bed, with eight fingers gripping the
back of his neck and two thumbs squeezing on his windpipe.
There was another assault case heard by the Lewminster
bench ; and this time the ex-engine-driver received four months.
As before, he offered no defence: and again the magistrates
were possessed with wonder.
Now the explanation is quite simple. This man's wits were
sound, save on one point. He believed why, God alone
knows, who enabled him to drive that horrible journey without
a tremor of the hand that his wife's soul haunted him in the
form of a white butterfly or moth. The superstition that spirits
take this shape is not unknown in the west; and I suppose that
as he steered his train out of the station, this fancy, by some
odd freak of memory, leaped into his brain, and held it, hour
after hour, while he and his engine flew forward and the burning
-theatre fell farther and farther behind. The truth was known
a fortnight after his return from prison, which happened about
the time of barley harvest.
A harvest-thanksgiving was held in the parish where he
lived; and he went to it, being always a religious man. There
Psyche 17
were sheaves and baskets of vegetables in the chancel ; fruit and
flowers on the communion-table, with twenty-one tall candles
burning above them; a processional hymn; and a long sermon.
During the sermon, as the weather was hot and close, someone
opened the door at the west end.
And when the preacher was just making up his mind to close
the discourse, a large white moth fluttered in at the west door.
There was much light throughout the church ; but the great
blaze came, of course, from the twenty-one candles upon the
altar. And towards this the moth slowly drifted, as if the
candles sucked her nearer and nearer, up between the pillars of
the nave, on a level with their capitals. Few of the congrega-
tion noticed her, for the sermon was a stirring one ; only one or
two children, perhaps, were interested and the man I write of.
He saw her pass over his head and float up into the chancel.
He half rose from his chair.
'My brothers/ said the preacher, 'if two sparrows, that are
sold for a farthing, are not too little for the care of this infinite
Providence '
A scream rang out and drowned the sentence. It was fol-
lowed by a torrent of vile words, shouted by a man who had
seen, now for the second time, the form that clothed his wife's
soul shrivelled in unthinking flames. All that was left of the
white moth lay on the altar-cloth among the fruit at the base
of the tallest candlestick.
And because the man saw nothing but cruelty in the Provi-
dence of which the preacher spoke, he screamed and cursed,
till they overpowered him and took him forth by the door.
He was wholly mad from that hour.
THE WHITE MOTH
IF a leaf rustled y she would start:
And yet she died a year ago.
flow had so frail a thing the heart
To journey where she trembled so ?
And do they turn and turn in fright,
Those little feet 9 in so much night?
The light above the poet's head
Streamed on the page and on the cloth,
And twice and thrice there buffeted
On the black pane a white- winged moth :
'Twas Annie's soul that beat outside
And 'Open! open! open!' cried:
* I could not find the way to God :
There were too many flaming suns
For signposts, and the fearful road
Led over wastes where millions
Of tangled comets hissed and burned
I was bewildered, and I turned.
*Oh, it was easy then! I knew
Your window and no star beside.
Look up, and take me back to you ! '
He rose and thrust the window wide.
'Twas but because his head was hot
With rhyming : for he heard her not.
But poets polishing a phrase
Show anger over trivial things ;
And as she blundered in the blaze
Toward him, on ecstatic wings,
He raised a hand and smote her dead ;
Then wrote, 'TAat I had died instead!'
18
A CAROL
Poem by
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Set to Music by C. V. STANFORD
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THE PAUPERS
ov p,V yap rov ye Kpzlavov /ecu apeiov,
T) 00* 6fJLO(f>pOVOVT
R)UND the skirts of the plantation, and half-way down the
hill, there runs a thick fringe of wild cherry-trees. Their
white blossom makes, for three weeks in the year, a pretty
contrast with the larches and Scotch firs that serrate the long
ridge above; and close under their branches runs the line of
oak rails that marks off the plantation from the meadow.
A labouring man came deliberately round the slope, as if
following this line of rails. As a matter of fact, he was treading
the little-used footpath that here runs close alongside the fence
for fifty yards before diverging downhill towards the village.
So narrow is this path that the man's boots were powdered to
a rich gold by the buttercups they had brushed aside.
By and by he came to a standstill, looked over the fence, and
listened. Up among the larches a faint chopping sound could
just be heard, irregular but persistent. The man put a hand
to his mouth, and hailed :
'Hi-i-i! Knock off! Stable clock's gone noo-oon!'
Came back no answer. But the chopping ceased at once;
and this apparently satisfied the man, who leaned against the
rail and waited, chewing a spear of brome-grass, and staring
steadily, but incuriously, at his boots. Two minutes passed
without stir or sound in this corner of the land. The human
figure was motionless. The birds in the plantation were taking
their noonday siesta. A brown butterfly rested, with spread
wings, on the rail so quietly, he might have been pinned there.
A cracked voice was suddenly lifted a dozen yards off, and
within the plantation :
'Such a man as I be to work! Never heard a note o' that
blessed clock, if you '11 believe me. Ab-sorbed, I s'pose.'
The Paupers 23
A thin withered man in a smock-frock emerged from among
the cherry-trees with a bill-hook in his hand, and stooped to
pass under the rail.
'Ewgh! The pains I suffer in that old back of mine you '11
never believe, my son, not till the appointed time when you come
to suffer 'em youseP. Well-a-well! Says I just now, up among
the larches, "Heigh, my sonny-boys. I can crow over you,
anyways ; for I was a man grown when Squire planted ye ; and
here I be, a lusty gaffer, markin' ye down for destruction."
But hallo! where 's the dinner?'
'There hain't none.'
'Hey?'
'There hain't none.'
'How 's that? Damme! William Henry, dinner 's dinner,
an' don't you joke about it. Once you begin to make fun o'
sacred things like meals and vittles '
'And don't you flare up like that, at your time o' life. We 're
fashionists to-day : dining out. 'Quarter after nine this morning
I was passing by the Green wi' the straw-cart, when old Jan
Trueman calls after me, "Have *ee heard the news?" "What
news?" says I. "Why," says he, "me an* my missus be going
into the House this afternoon can't manage to pull along by
ourselves no more," he says; "an' we wants you an' your
father to drop in soon after noon an' take a bite wi' us, for old
sake's sake. 'Tis our last taste o' free life, and we 'm going to
do the thing fittywise," he says.'
The old man bent a meditative look on the village roofs below.
'We '11 pleasure 'en, of course,' he said slowly. 'So 'tis come
round to Jan's turn ? But a' was born in the year of Waterloo
victory, ten year' afore me, so I s'pose he 've kept his doom off
longer than most.'
The two set off down the footpath. There is a stile at the
foot of the meadow, and as he climbed it painfully, the old man
spoke again.
'And his doorway, I reckon, '11 be locked for a little while,
24 The Paupers
an' then opened by strangers; an' his nimble youth be forgot
like a flower o' the field; an* fare thee well, Jan Trueman!
Maria, too I can mind her well as a nursing mother a comely
woman in her day. I 'd no notion they 'd got this in their mind/
'Far as I can gather, they've been minded that way ever
since their daughter Jane died, last fall.'
From the stile where they stood they could look down into
the village street. And old Jan Trueman was plain to see, in
clean linen and his Sunday suit, standing in the doorway and
welcoming his guests.
'Come ye in come ye in, good friends,' he called, as they
approached. 'There 's cold bekkon, an' cold sheep's liver, an'
Dutch cheese, besides bread, an' a thimbleful o' gin-an' -water for
every soul among ye, to make it a day of note in the parish.'
He looked back over his shoulder into the kitchen. A dozen
men and women, all elderly, were already gathered there. They
had brought their own chairs. Jan's wife wore her bonnet and
shawl, ready to start at a moment's notice. Her luggage in a
blue handkerchief lay on the table. As she moved about and
supplied her guests, her old lips twitched nervously; but when
she spoke it was with no unusual tremor of the voice.
'I wish, friends, I could ha' cooked ye a little something hot;
but there 'd be no time for the washing-up, an' I 've ordained
to leave the place tidy.'
One of the old women answered :
'There's nought to be pardoned, I'm sure. Never do I
mind such a gay set-off for the journey. For the gin-an'-water
is a little addition beyond experience. The vittles, no doubt,
you begged up at the vicarage, sayin' you 'd been a peck o'
trouble to the family, but this was going to be the last time.'
'I did, I did,' assented Mr. Trueman.
'But the gin-an'-water how on airth you contrived it is a
riddle!'
The old man rubbed his hands together and looked around
with genuine pride.
The Paupers 25
'There was old Miss Scantlebury,' said another guest, a
smock-frocked gaffer of seventy, with a grizzled shock of hair.
'You remember Miss Scantlebury?'
'O' course, o' course/
'Well, she did it better 'n anybody I 've heard tell of. When
she fell into redooced circumstances she sold the eight-day clock
that was the only thing o' value she had left. Brown o' Tre-
garrick made it, with a very curious brass dial, whereon he carved
a full-rigged ship that rocked like a cradle, an* went down stern
foremost when the hour struck. 'Twas worth walking a mile
to see. Brown's grandson bought it off Miss Scantlebury for
two guineas, he being proud of his grandfather's skill ; an' the
old lady drove into Tregarrick Work'us behind a pair o' greys
wi' the proceeds. Over and above the carriage hire, she 'd
enough left to adorn the horse wi' white favours an' give the
rider a crown, large as my lord. Aye, an' at the Work'us door
she said to the fellow, said she, "All my life I 've longed to ride
in a bridal chariot; an* though my only lover died of a decline
when I was scarce twenty-one, I 've done it at last," said she;
"an' now heaven an' airth can't undo it!"'
A heavy silence followed this anecdote, and then one or two
of the women vented small disapproving coughs. The reason
was the speaker's loud mention of the Workhouse. A week,
a day, a few hours before, its name might have been spoken
in Mr. and Mrs. Trueman's presence. But now they had
entered its shadow; they were 'going' whether to the dim
vale of Avilion, or with chariot and horses of fire to heaven,
let nobody too curiously ask. If Mr. and Mrs. Trueman chose
to speak definitely, it was another matter.
Old Jan bore no malice, however, but answered, 'That beats
me, I own. Yet we shall drive, though it be upon two wheels
an' behind a single horse. For Farmer Lear's driving into
Tregarrick in an hour's time, an' he 've a-promised us a lift.'
'But about that gin-an'-water? For real gin-an'-water it is,
to sight an' taste.'
26 The Paupers
'Well, friends, I '11 tell ye: for the trick may serve one of ye
in the days when you come to follow me, tho' the new relieving
officer may have learnt wisdom before then. You must know
we 've been considering of this step for some while ; but hearing
that old Jacobs was going to retire soon, I says to Maria,
"We '11 bide till the new officer comes, and if he 's a green hand,
we '11 diddle 'en." Day before yesterday, as you know, was
his first round at the work; so I goes up an' draws out my
ha'af-crown same as usual, an' walks straight off for the "Four
Lords" for a ha'af-crown's worth o' gin. Then back I goes,
an' demands an admission order for me an' the missus. "Why,
where 's your ha'af-crown ? " says he. " Gone in drink," says I.
"Old man," says he, "you 'm a scandal, an' the sooner you 're
put out o' the way o' drink, the better for you an' your poor
wife." "Right you are," I says; an' I got my order. But
there, I 'm wasting time ; for to be sure you ' ve most of ye got
kith or kin in the place where we 'm going, and '11 be wanting
to send 'em a word by us.'
It was less than an hour before Farmer Lear pulled up to the
door in his red-wheeled spring-cart.
'Now, friends,' said Mrs. Trueman, as her ears caught the
rattle of the wheels, 'I must trouble ye to step outside while
I tidy up the floor.'
The women offered their help, but she declined it. Alone
she put the small kitchen to rights, while they waited
outside around the door. Then she stepped out with her
bundle, locked the door after her, and slipped the key
under an old flower-pot on the window-ledge. Her eyes
were dry.
' Come'st along, Jan.'
There was a brief hand-shaking, and the paupers climbed up
beside Farmer Lear.
'I 've made a sort o' little plan in my head,' said old Jan at
parting, 'of the order in which I shall see ye again, one by one.
The Paupers 27
'Twill be a great amusement to me, friends, to see how the fact
fits in wi' my little plan/
The guests raised three feeble cheers as the cart drove away,
and hung about for several minutes after it had passed out of
sight, gazing along the road as wistfully as more prosperous
men look in through churchyard gates at the acres where their
kinsfolk lie buried.
II
The first building passed by the westerly road as it descends
into Tregarrick is a sombre pile of some eminence, having a
gateway and lodge before it, and a high encircling wall. The
sun lay warm on its long roof, and the slates flashed gaily there,
as Farmer Lear came over the knap of the hill and looked down
on it. He withdrew his eyes nervously to glance at the old
couple beside him. At the same moment he reined up his
dun-coloured mare.
'I reckoned,' he said timidly, 'I reckoned you 'd be for
stopping hereabouts an* getting down. You 'd think it more
seemly that 's what I reckoned : an' 'tis all downhill now.'
For ten seconds and more neither the man nor the woman
gave a sign of having heard him. The spring-cart's oscillatory
motion seemed to have entered into their spinal joints; and now
that they were come to a halt, their heads continued to wag
forward and back as they contemplated the haze of smoke spread,
like a blue scarf, over the town, and the one long slate roof that
rose from it as if to meet them. At length the old woman
spoke, and with some viciousness, though her face remained as
blank as the Workhouse door.
'The next time I go back up this hill, if ever I do, I '11 be
carried up feet first.'
'Maria/ said her husband, feebly reproachful, 'you tempt the
Lord, that you do.' .
'Thank 'ee, Farmer Lear,' she went on, paying no heed;
28 The Paupers
'you shall help us down, if you 've a mind to, an* drive on.
We '11 make shift to trickly 'way down so far as the gate; for
I 'd be main vexed if anybody that had known me in life should
see us creep in. Come'st along, Jan.'
Farmer Lear alighted, and helped them out carefully. He
was a clumsy man, but did his best to handle them gently.
When they were set on their feet, side by side on the high road,
he climbed back, and fell to arranging the reins, while he cast
about for something to say.
'Well, folks, I s'pose I must be wishing J ee good-bye.' He
meant to speak cheerfully, but overacted, and was hilarious
instead. Recognizing this, he blushed.
'We'll meet in heaven, I dare say,' the woman answered.
'I put the door-key, as you saw, under the empty geranium-pot
'pon the window-ledge ; an' whoever the new tenant's wife may
be, she can eat off the floor, if she 's minded. Now drive along,
that 's a good soul, and leave us to fend for ourselves.'
They watched him out of sight before either stirred. The
last decisive step, the step across the Workhouse threshold,
must be taken with none to witness. If they could not pass
out of their small world by the more reputable mode of dying,
they would at least depart with this amount of mystery. They
had left the village in Farmer Lear's cart, and Farmer Lear
had left them in the high road; and after that, nothing should
be known.
'Shall we be moving on?' Jan asked at length. There was a
gate beside the road just there, with a small triangle of green
before it, and a granite roller half buried in dock leaves. With-
out making any answer, the woman seated herself on this, and
pulling a handful of the leaves, dusted her shoes and skirt.
'Maria, you '11 take a chill that '11 carry you off, sitting 'pon
that cold stone.'
'I don't care. 'Twon't carry me off afore I get inside;
an' I 'm going in decent, or not at all. Come here, an' let
me tittivate you.'
The Paupers 29
He sat down on the stone beside her, and submitted to be dusted.
'You 'd as lief lower me as not in their eyes, I verily believe/
'I always was one to gather dust/
'An' a fresh spot o' bacon-fat 'pon your weskit, that I 've
kept the moths from since goodness knows when!'
Old Jan looked down over his waistcoat. It was of good
West-of-England broadcloth, and he had worn it on the day
when he married the woman at his side.
'I 'm thinking ' he began nervously.
'Hey?'
'I 'm thinking I '11 find it hard to make friends in in there.
Tis such a pity, to my thinking, that by reggilations we '11 be
parted as soon as we get inside. You 've a-got so used to my
little ways an' cornders, an' we 've a-got so many little secrets
together an' old-fash'ned odds an' ends o' knowledge, that you
can take my meaning almost afore I start to speak. An' that 's
a great comfort to a man o' my age. It '11 be terrible hard,
when I wants to talk, to begin at the beginning every time.
There 's that old yarn o' mine about Hambly's cow an' the lawn-
mowing machine I doubt that anybody '11 enjoy it so much
as you always do ; an' I 've so got out o' the way o' telling the
beginning which bain't extra funny, though needful to a
stranger's understanding the whole joke that I 'most forgets
how it goes/
'We'll see one another now an' then, they tell me. The
sexes meet for Chris'mas-trees an' such-like/
'I 'm jealous that 'twon't be the same. You can't hold your
triflin' confabs with a great Chris'mas-tree blazin' away in your
face as important as a town afire/
'Well, I'm going to start along,' the old woman decided,
getting on her feet; 'or else someone '11 be driving by and
seeing us/
Jan, too, stood up.
'We may so well make our congees here,' she went on, 'as
under the porter's nose/
30 The Paupers
An awkward silence fell between them for a minute, and
these two old creatures, who for more than fifty years had felt
no constraint in each other's presence, now looked into each
other's eyes with a fearful diffidence. Jan cleared his throat,
much as if he had to make a public speech.
'Maria,' he began in an unnatural voice, 'we 're bound for to
part, and I can trewly swear, on leaving ye, that '
* that for two score year and twelve it's never entered
your head to consider whether I 've made 'ee a good wife or
a bad. Kiss me, my old man ; for I tell 'ee I wouldn' ha' wished
it other. An' thank 'ee for trying to make that speech. What
did it feel like?'
'Why, 't reminded me o' the time when I offered 'ee marriage.'
'It reminded me o' that, too,' the woman answered. ' Come'st
along.'
They tottered down the hill towards the Workhouse gate.
When they were but ten yards from it, however, they heard
the sound of wheels on the road behind them, and walked
bravely past, pretending to have no business at that portal.
They had descended a good thirty yards beyond (such haste
was put into them by dread of having their purpose guessed)
before the vehicle overtook them a four-wheeled dog-cart
carrying a commercial traveller, who pulled up and offered
them a lift into the town.
They declined.
Then, as soon as he passed out of sight, they turned, and
began painfully to climb back towards the gate. Of the two,
the woman had shown the less emotion. But all the way her
lips were at work, and as she went she was praying a prayer.
It was the only one she used night and morning, and she had
never changed a word since she learned it as a chit of a child.
Down to her seventieth year she had never found it absurd to
beseech God to make her 'a good girl'; nor did she find it so
as the Workhouse gate opened, and she began a new life.
LETTER TO MAARTEN MAARTENS
THE HAVEN
FOWEY, CORNWALL
March 2nd 1894.
MY DEAR MR. 'MAARTEN MAARTENS,'
When your letter reached me and I think it was the
pleasantest that ever came from an unknown friend we were
in great trouble here, by reason of the illness (fatal, as it turned
out) of my wife's mother. I might have written you a polite
note : but I wanted to send you much more than that : and had
no heart to do it. Then I promised myself that I would write
after reading The Greater Glory \ but again the library has
betrayed me by its delays: the three volumes have not yet
arrived country readers being neglected on principle and I
stand convicted of gross rudeness, unless you will understand
my case and forgive it. As it is, I am ashamed to write, and
yet cannot put off writing any longer.
I did not come to know your books as soon as I ought : but
as soon as I knew them I wanted to know more, of them and of
their author. It must be two years almost since Barrie and I
talked of God's Fool throughout a long afternoon's walk. He
was being taken out expressly to see the country round Fowey :
but we clean forgot our purpose, and in the end I believe he
might just as well have been walking along Oxford Street,
and this is as good a chance as any for saying that next time you
visit England you must spend, if not less time in London, at
any rate more in the country. As you know, from the D. Duchy ^
I do my piping in a corner: and the corner is a long way from
London : but Dr. Nicoll may have told you that it is a beautiful
spot. Moreover we have a prophet's chamber here, and, what-
ever you may think of the invitation, it would be glad news to
hear that you intended to spend a day or two with us. You
3'
32 Letter to Maarten Maartens
could always collar Barrie in London and bring him along, to
make sure of having good company. Tell him that he musty
and he will come like a lamb : he knows that it is good for him.
And, if you don't resent my saying it, it will be good for you,
too, after long dinners and late hours in London, to come for a
while to country fare, with claret and tobacco and much idleness
in boats or by the harbourside, and bathing (if you like it) at
the foot of the garden and ships going to and fro all the day
long. I wish I could persuade you.
You speak too kindly of my books, though I am not the
less obliged to you for that. Or rather you see what they are
trying for, instead of the poor work actually done. That 's
the best of a good word from an artist. The usual critic
imagines one to be content (good Heavens!) with one's writings,
and complacent. As if a man doesn't think fifty times of what
he hopes to do to once of what he has done! And even if as
the chances are all his trouble has only been a preparation for
a feat that never comes off, why meanwhile he has been happy
in his ignorance and happier for the encouragement. I cannot
tell you how much your letter has cheered me. Some day
I hope you will let me tell you face to face. Meanwhile we are
all cultivating our gardens : and if mine is a narrow one, I shall
none the less be happy in your success, and perhaps send you a
flower from time to time as tribute.
Believe me
sincerely yours
THE LOOK DIE-HARDS
CAPTAIN POND, of the East and West Looe Volunteer
Artillery (familiarly known as the Looe Die-hards), put
his air-cushion to his lips and blew. This gave his face a very
choleric and martial expression.
Nevertheless, above his suffused and distended cheeks his
eyes preserved a pensive melancholy as they dwelt upon his
Die-hards gathered in the rain below him on the long-shore, or
Church-end, wall. At this date (November 3, 1809) the com-
pany numbered seventy, besides Captain Pond and his two
subalterns; and of this force four were out in the boat just now,
mooring the practice-mark a barrel with a small red flag stuck
on top; one, the bugler, had been sent up the hill to the nine-
pounder battery, to watch and sound a call as soon as the target
was ready; a sixth, Sergeant Fugler, lay at home in bed, with
the senior lieutenant (who happened also to be the local doctor)
in attendance. Captain Pond clapped a thumb over the orifice
of his air-cushion, and heaved a sigh as he thought of Sergeant
Fugler. The remaining sixty-four Die-hards, with their fire-
locks under their great-coats, and their collars turned up against
the rain, lounged by the embrasures of the shore-wall, and
gossiped dejectedly, or eyed in silence the blurred boat bobbing
up and down in the grey blur of the sea.
'Such coarse weather I hardly remember to have met with
for years,' said Uncle Israel Spettigew, a cheerful sexagenarian
who ranked as efficient on the strength of his remarkable eye-
sight, which was keener than most boys'. 'The sweep from
over to Polperro was cleanin' my chimbley this mornin', and
he told me in his humorous way that with all this rain 'tis so
much as he can do to keep his face dirty hee-hee!'
Nobody smiled. 'If you let yourself give way to the enjoy-
ment of little things like that,' observed a younger gunner
c 33
34 The Looe Die-hards
gloomily, 'one o' these days you '11 find yourself in a better
land like the snuff of a candle. 'Tis a year since the Company's
been allowed to move in double time, and all because you
can't manage a step o' thirty-six inches 'ithout getting the
palpitations/
'Well-a-well, 'tis but for a brief while longer a few fleeting
weeks, an' us Die-hards shall be as though we had never been.
So why not be cheerful ? For my part, I mind back in 'seventy-
nine, when the fleets o' France an' Spain assembled an* come up
agen' us sixty-six sail o' the line, my sonnies, besides frigates
an' corvettes to the amount o' twenty-five or thirty, all as plain
as the nose on your face: an' the alarm guns goin', up to Ply-
mouth, an' the signals hoisted at Maker Tower a bloody flag
at the pole an' two blue 'uns at the outriggers. Four days they
laid to, an' I mind the first time I seed mun, from this very place
as it might be where we 'm standin' at this moment, I said
"Well, 'tis all over with East Looe this time!" I said: "an'
when 'tis over, 'tis over, as Joan said by her weddin'." An'
then I spoke them verses by royal Solomon Wisdom two, six
to nine. "Let us fill oursel's wi' costly wine an' ointments,"
I said: "an' let no flower o' the spring pass by us. Let us
crown oursel's wi' rosebuds, afore they be withered : let none of
us go without his due part of our voluptuousness" '
* Why, you old adage, that 's what Solomon makes th' ungodly
say!' interrupted young Gunner Oke, who had recently been
appointed parish clerk, and happened to know.
'As it happens,' Uncle Issy retorted, with sudden dignity
'as it happens, I was ungodly in them days. The time I'm
talkin' about was August 'seventy-nine; an' if I don't mistake,
your father an' mother, John Oke, were courtin' just then, an'
'most too shy to confide in each other about havin' a parish
clerk for a son.'
'Times hev' marvellously altered in the meanwhile, to be
sure,' put in Sergeant Pengelly of the Sloop Inn.
'Well, then/ Uncle Issy continued, without pressing his
The Looe Die-hards 35
triumph, <<0 Tis all over with East Looe," I said, "an* this is a
black day for King Gearge," an' then I spoke them verses o'
Solomon. "Let none of us," I said, "go without his due part
of our voluptuousness" ; and with that I went home and dined
on tatties an* bacon. It hardly seems a thing to be believed at
this distance o' time, but I never relished tatties an* bacon better
in my life than that day an' yet not meanin' the laste dis-
respect to King Gearge. Disrespect? If his Majesty only
knew it, he 've no better friend in the world than Israel Spettigew.
God save the King!'
And with this Uncle Issy pulled off his cap and waved it
round his head, thereby shedding a moulinet of raindrops full in
the faces of his comrades around.
This was observed by Captain Pond, standing on the plat-
form above, beside Thundering Meg, the big 24-pounder, which
with four i8-pounders on the shore- wall formed the lower
defences of the haven.
'Mr. Clogg,' he called to his junior lieutenant, 'tell Gunner
Spettigew to put on his hat at once. Ask him what he means
by taking his death and disgracing the company.'
The junior lieutenant a small farmer from Talland parish
touched his cap, spread his hand suddenly over his face and
sneezed.
'Hallo! You Ve got a cold.'
'No, sir. I often sneezes like that, and no reason for it
whatever.'
'I 've never noticed it before.'
'No, sir. I keeps it under so well as I can. A great deal
can be done sometimes by pressing your thumb on the upper lip.'
'Ah, well! So long as it's not a gold ' returned the
Captain, and broke off to arrange his air-cushion over the
depressed muzzle of Thundering Meg. Hereupon he took his
seat, adjusted the lapels of his great-coat over his knees, and
gave way to gloomy reflection.
Sergeant Fugler was at the bottom of it. Sergeant Fugler,
36 The Looe Die-hards
the best marksman in the Company, was a hard drinker, with
a hobnailed liver. He lay now in bed with that hobnailed liver
and the Doctor said it was only a question of days. But why
should this so extraordinarily discompose Captain Pond, who
had no particular affection for Fugler, and knew, besides, that
all men and especially hard drinkers are mortal ?
The answer is that the East and West Looe Volunteer
Artillery was no ordinary Company. When, on the i6th of
May, 1803, King George told his faithful subjects, who had been
expecting the announcement for some time, that the Treaty of
Amiens was no better than waste paper, public feeling in the two
Looes rose to a very painful pitch. The inhabitants used to
assemble before the post office, to hear the French bulletins read
out ; and though it was generally concluded that they held much
falsehood, yet everybody felt misfortune in the air. Rumours
flew about that a diversion would be made by sending an army
into the Duchy to draw the troops thither while the invaders
directed their main strength upon London. Quiet villagers,
therefore, dwelt for the while in a constant apprehension, fearing
to go to bed lest they should awake at the sound of the trumpet,
or in the midst of the French troops; scarcely venturing beyond
sight of home lest, returning, they should find the homestead
smoking and desolate. Each man had laid down the plan he
should pursue. Some were to drive off the cattle, others to
fire the corn. While the men worked in the fields, their woman-
kind young maids and grandmothers, and all that could be
spared from domestic work- encamped above the cliffs, wearing
red cloaks to scare the Frenchmen, and by night kept big bon-
fires burning continually. Amid this painful disquietude of the
public mind 'the great and united Spirit of the British People
armed itself for the support of their ancient Glory and Inde-
pendence against the unprincipled Ambition of the French
Government In other words, the Volunteer movement began.
In the Duchy alone no less than 8,362 men enrolled themselves
in thirty Companies of foot, horse, and artillery, as well out of
The Looe Die-hards 3 7
enthusiasm as to escape the general levy that seemed probable
so mixed are all human actions.
Of these the Looe Company was neither the greatest nor the
least. It had neither the numerical strength of the Royal
Stannary Artillery (1,115 men an< ^ officers) nor the numerical
eccentricity of the St. Germans Cavalry, which consisted of
forty troopers, all told, and eleven officers, and hunted the fox
thrice a week during the winter months under Lord Eliot,
Captain and M.F.H. The Looe Volunteers, however, started
well in the matter of dress, which consisted of a dark-blue coat
and pantaloons, with red facings and yellow wings and tassels,
and a white waistcoat. The officers' sword-hilts were adorned
with prodigious red and blue tassels, and the blade of Captain
Pond's, in particular, bore the inscription, ' My Life's Blood for
the Two LooesJ 9 a legend which we must admit to be touching,
even while we reflect that the purpose of the weapon was not
to draw its owner's life-blood.
As a matter of mere history, this devoted blade had drawn
nobody's blood; since, in the six years that followed their
enlistment, the Looe Die-hards had never been given an oppor-
tunity for a brush with their country's hereditary foes. How,
then, did they acquire their proud title?
It was the Doctor's discovery ; and perhaps, in the beginning,
professional pride may have had something to do with it; but
his enthusiasm was quickly caught up by Captain Pond and
communicated to the entire Company.
'Has it ever occurred to you, Pond,' the Doctor began, one
evening in the late summer of 1808, as the two strolled home-
ward from parade, 'to reflect on the rate of mortality in this
Company of yours? Have you considered that in all these five
years since their establishment not a single man has died?'
'Why the deuce should he?'
'But look here: I Ve worked it out on paper, and the mean
age of your men is thirty-four years, or some five years more
than the mean age of the enure population of East and West
38 The Looe Die-hards
Looe. You see, on the one hand, you enlist no children, and
on the other, you 've enlisted several men of ripe age, because
you 're accustomed to them and know their ways which is a
great help in commanding a Company. But this makes the
case still more remarkable. Take any collection of seventy
souls the sum of whose ages, divided by seventy, shall be
thirty-four, and by all the laws of probability three, at least,
ought to die in the course of a year. I speak, for the moment,
of civilians. In the military profession,' the Doctor continued,
with perfect seriousness, 'especially in time of war, the death-
rate will be enormously heightened. But* with a flourish of
the hand 'I waive that. I waive even the real, if uncertainly
estimated, risk of handling, twice or thrice a week and without
timidity or particular caution, the combustibles and explosives
supplied us by Government. And still I say that we might
with equanimity have beheld our ranks thinned during these
five years by the loss of fifteen men. And we have not lost a
single one ! It is wonderful ! '
'War is a fearful thing,' commented Captain Pond, whose
mind moved less nimbly than the Doctor's.
'Dash it all, Pond! Can't you see that I'm putting the
argument on a peace footing? I tell you that in five years of
peace any ordinary Company of the same size would have lost
at least fifteen men.'
' Then all I can say is that peace is a fearful thing, too.'
'But don't you see that at this moment you 're commanding
the most remarkable Company in the Duchy, if not in the
whole of England ? '
'I do,' answered Captain Pond, flushing. 'It's a responsi-
bility, though. It makes a man feel proud ; but, all the same,
I almost wish you hadn't told me.'
Indeed at first the weight of his responsibility counteracted
the Captain's natural elation. It lifted, however, at the next
Corporation dinner, when the Doctor made public announce-
ment of his discovery in a glowing speech, supporting his
The Looe Die-hards 39
rhetoric by extracts from a handful of statistics and calculations,
and ending, ' Gentlemen, we know the motto of the East and
West Looe Volunteer Artillery to be "Never Say Die! 9 ' but
seeing, after five years' trial of them, that they never do die,
what man (I ask) will not rejoice to belong to such a Company?
What man would not be proud to command it? 9
After this, could Captain Pond lag behind ? His health was
drunk amid thunders of applause. He rose : he cast timidity
to the winds: he spoke, and while he spoke, wondered at his
own enthusiasm. Scarcely had he made an end before his
fellow-townsmen caught him off his feet and carried him
shoulder high through the town by the light of torches. There
were many aching heads in the two Looes next morning; but
nobody died: and from that night Captain Pond's Company
wore the name of 'The Die-hards.'
All went well at first; for the autumn closed mildly. But
with November came a spell of north-easterly gales, breeding
bronchial discomfort among the aged; and Black Care began
to dog the Commander. He caught himself regretting the
admission of so many gunners of riper years, although the
majority of these had served in His Majesty's Navy, and were
by consequence the best marksmen. They weathered the
winter, however; and a slight epidemic of whooping-cough,
which broke ouf in the early spring, affected none of the Die-
hards except the small bugler, and he took it in the mildest
form. The men, following the Doctor's lead, began to talk
more boastfully than ever. Only the Captain shook his head,
and his eyes wore a wistful look, as though he listened con-
tinually for the footsteps of Nemesis as, indeed, he did. The
strain was breaking him. And in August, when word came
from headquarters that, all danger of invasion being now at an
end, the Looe Volunteer Artillery would be disbanded at the close
of the year, he tried in vain to grieve. A year ago he would have
wept in secret over the news. Now he went about with a solemn
face and a bounding heart. A few months more and then
40 The Looe Die-hards
And then, almost within sight of goal, Sergeant Fugler had
broken down. Every one knew that Fugler drank prodigi-
ously; but so had his father and grandfather, and each of them
had reached eighty. The fellow had always carried his liquor
well enough, too. Captain Pond looked upon it almost as a
betrayal.
'I don't know what folks' constitutions are coming to in
these days,' he kept muttering, on this morning of November
the 3rd, as he sat on the muzzle of Thundering Meg and
dangled his legs.
And then, glancing up, he saw the Doctor coming from the
town along the shore-wall, and read evil news at once. For
many of the Die-hards stopped the Doctor to question him,
and stood gloomy as he passed on. It was popularly said in
the two Looes, that 'if the Doctor gave a man up, that man
might as well curl up his toes then and there.'
Catching sight of his Captain on the platform, the Doctor
bent his steps thither, and they were slow and inelastic.
'Tell me the worst,' said Captain Pond.
'The worst is that he 's no better; no, the worst of all is that
he knows he 's no better. My friend, between ourselves, it 's
only a question of a day or two.'
Silence followed for half a minute, the two officers avoiding
each other's eyes.
'He has a curious wish,' the Doctor resumed, still with his
face averted and his gaze directed on the dull outline of Looe
Island, a mile away. 'He says he knows he's disgracing the
Company : but he 's anxious, all the same, to have a military
funeral : says if you can promise this, he '11 feel in a way that
he 's forgiven/
'He shall have it, of course.'
'Ah, but that 's not all. You remember, a couple of years
back, when they had us down to Pendennis Castle for a week's
drill, there was a funeral of a Sergeant-Major in the Loyal
Meneage ; and how the band played a sort of burial tune ahead
The Looe Die-hards 41
of the body? Well, Fugler asked me if you couldn't manage
this Dead March, as he calls it, as well. He can whistle the
tune if you want to know it. It seems it made a great impression
on him.'
'Then the man must be wandering! How the dickens can
we manage a Dead March without a band? and we haven't
even a fife and drum ! '
' That 's what I told him. I suppose we couldn't do any-
thing with the church musicians.'
* There 's only one man in the Company who belongs to the
gallery, and that 's Uncle Issy Spettigew : and he plays the bass-
viol. I doubt if you can play the Dead March on a bass-viol,
and I 'm morally certain you can't play it and walk with it too.
I suppose we can't borrow a band from another Company?'
'What, and be the mock of the Duchy? after all our pride!
I fancy I see you going over to Troy and asking Browne for the
loan of his band. "Hallo!" he'd say, "I thought you never
had such a thing as a funeral over at Looe!" I can hear the
fellow chuckle. But I wish something could be done, all the
same. A trifle of pomp would draw folks' attention off our
disappointment.'
Captain Pond sighed and rose from the gun ; for the bugle
was sounding from the upper battery.
'Fall in, gentlemen, if you please!' he shouted. His polite-
ness in addressing his Company might be envied even by
the 'Blues.'
The Doctor formed them up and told them off along the
sea-wall, as if for inspection. ' Or-der arms ! ' ' Fix bayonets ! '
'Shoul-der arms!' Then with a glance of inquiry at his
Captain, who had fallen into a brown study, 'Rear rank, take
open order!'
'No, no,' interposed the Captain, waking up and taking a
guess at the sun's altitude in the grey heavens. ' We 're late
this morning: better march 'em up to the battery at once.'
Then, quickly re-forming them, he gave the word, 'By the
42 The Looe Die-hards
left! Quick march!' and the Die-hards swung steadily up the
hill towards the platform where the four nine-pounders grinned
defiance to the ships of France.
As a matter of fact, this battery stood out of reach of harm,
with the compensating disadvantage of being able to inflict
none. The reef below would infallibly wreck any ship that
tried to approach within the point-blank range of some lyp
yards, and its extreme range of ten times that distance was no
protection to the haven, which lay round a sharp corner of the
cliff. But the engineer's blunder was never a check upon the
alacrity of the Die-hards, who cleaned, loaded, rammed home,
primed, sighted, and blazed away with the precision of clock-
work and the ardour of Britons, as though aware that the true
strength of a nation lay not so much in the construction of her
fortresses as in the spirit of her sons.
Captain Pond halted, re-formed his men upon the platform,
and, drawing a key from his pocket, ordered Lieutenant Clogg
to the store-hut, with Uncle Issy in attendance, to serve out the
ammunition, rammers, sponges, water-buckets, etc.
'But the door's unlocked, sir,' announced the lieutenant,
with something like dismay.
'Unlocked!' echoed the Doctor.
The Captain blushed.
'I could have sworn, Doctor, I turned the key in the lock
before leaving last Thursday. I think my head must be going.
I 've been sleeping badly of late it 's this worry about Fugler.
However, I don't suppose anybody '
A yell interrupted him. It came from Uncle Issy, who had
entered the store-hut, and now emerged from it as if projected
from a gun.
'THE FRENCH! THE FRENCH!'
For two terrible seconds the Die-hards eyed one another.
Then someone in the rear rank whispered, 'An ambush!' The
two ranks began to waver to melt. Uncle Issy, with head
down and shoulders arched, was already stumbling down the
The Looe Die-hards 43
slope towards the town. In another ten seconds the whole
Company would be at his heels.
The Doctor saved their reputation. He was as pale as the
rest; but a hasty remembrance of the cubic capacity of the
store-hut told him that the number of Frenchmen in ambush
there could hardly be more than half a dozen.
'Halt!' he shouted; and Captain Pond shouted 'Halt!' too,
adding, 'There '11 be heaps of time to run when we find out
what 's the matter.'
The Die-hards hung, still wavering, upon the edge of the
platform.
'For my part,' the Doctor declared, 'I don't believe there 's
anybody inside.'
'But there is. Doctor! for I saw him myself just as Uncle Issy
called out,' said the second lieutenant.
'Was it only one man that you saw?' demanded Captain
Pond.
'That's all. You see, it was this way: Uncle Issy stepped
fore, with me a couple of paces behind him thinking of nothing
so little as bloodshed and danger. If you '11 believe me, these
things was the very last in my thoughts. Uncle Issy rolls aside
the powder-cask, and what do I behold but a man ducking
down behind it! "He's firing the powder," thinks I, "and
here endeth William George Clogg!" So I shut my eyes, not
willing to see my gay life whisked away in little portions;
though I feared it must come. And then I felt Uncle Issy flee
past me like the wind. But I kept my eyes tight till I heard the
Doctor here saying there wasn't anybody inside. If you ask
me what I think about the whole matter, I say, putting one
thing with another, that 'tis most likely some poor chap taking
shelter from the rain.'
Captain Pond unsheathed his sword and advanced to the
door of the hut. 'Whoever you be,' he called aloud and
firmly, 'you 've got no business there; so come out of it, in
the name of King George!'
44 The Looe Die-hards
At once there appeared in the doorway a little round-headed
man in tattered and mud-soiled garments of blue cloth. His
hair and beard were alike short, black, and stubbly; his eyes
large and feverish, his features smeared with powder and a trifle
pinched and pale. In his left hand he carried a small bundle,
wrapped in a knotted blue kerchief: his right he waved
submissively towards Captain Pond.
'See now,' he began, 'I give up. I am taken. Look you/
'I think you must be a Frenchman,' said Captain Pond.
'Right. It is war: you have taken a Frenchman. Yes?'
'A spy?' the Captain demanded more severely.
'An escaped prisoner, more like,' suggested the Doctor;
'broken out of Dartmoor, and hiding there for a chance to
slip across.'
'Monsieur le Lieutenant has guessed,' the little man answered,
turning affably to the Doctor. 'A spy? No. It is not on
purpose that I find me near your fortifications oh, not a bit!
A prisoner more like, as Monsieur says. It is three days that
I was a prisoner, and now look here, a prisoner again. Alas!
will Monsieur le Capitaine do me the honour to confide the
name of his corps so gallant?'
'The Two Looes.'
'La Toulouse! But it is singular that we also have a
Toulouse '
'Hey?' broke in Second Lieutenant Clogg.
'I assure Monsieur that I say the truth.'
'Well, go on; only it don't sound natural.'
'Not that I have seen it' ('Ha!' commented Mr. Clogg)
'for it lies in the south, and I am from the north : Jean Alphonse
Marie Trinquier, instructor of music, rue de la Madeleine
quatr'-vingt-neuf, Dieppe.'
'Instructor of music?' echoed Captain Pond and the Doctor
quickly and simultaneously, and their eyes met.
'And Directeur des Fetes Piriodiques to the Municipality of
Dieppe. All the Sundays, you comprehend, upon the sands
The Looe Die-hards 45
poum poum ! while the citizens se prominent sur la plage. But
all is not gay in this world. Last winter a terrible misfortune
befell me. I lost my wife my adored Philomne. I was
desolated, inconsolable. For two months I could not take up
my cornet-a-piston. Always when I blew pouf! the tears
came also. Ah, what memories! Hippolyte, my what you
call it my beau-frere, came to me and said, "Jean Alphonse,
you must forget." I say, "Hippolyte, you ask that which is
impossible." " I will teach you," says Hippolyte : " To-morrow
night I sail for Jersey, and from Jersey I cross to Dartmouth, in
England, and you shall come with me." Hippolyte made his
living by what you call the Free Trade. This was far down
the coast for him, but he said the business with Rye and Deal
was too dangerous for a time. Next night we sailed. It was
his last voyage. With the morning the wind changed, and we
drove into a fog. When we could see again, peste / there was
an English frigate. She sent down her cutter and took the
rest of us ; but not Hippolyte poor Hippolyte was shot in the
spine of his back. Him they cast into the sea, but the rest of
us they take to Plymouth, and then the War Prison on the moor.
This was in May, and there I rest until three days ago. Then
I break out je me sauve. How? It i$ my affair: for I fore-
see, Messieurs, I shall now have to do it over again. I am sot.
I gain the coast here at night. I am weary, je nen puis plus.
I find this cassine here : the door is open : I enter pour faire un
petit somme. Before day I will creep down to the shore. A
comrade in the prison said to me, "Go to Looe. I know a
good Cornishman there "'
'And you overslept yourself/ Captain Paul briskly inter-
rupted, alert as ever to protect the credit of his Company. He
was aware that several of the Die-hards, in extra-military hours,
took an occasional trip across to Guernsey: and Guernsey is
a good deal more than half-way to France.
'The point is/ observed the Doctor, 'that you play the
cornet.'
46 The Looe Die-hards
'It is certain that I do so, monsieur; but how that can be the
point '
'And instruct in music?'
'Decidedly!'
'Do you know the Dead March?'
M. Trinquier was unfeignedly bewildered.
Said Captain Pond: 'Listen while I explain. You are my
prisoner, and it becomes my duty to send you back to Dartmoor
under escort. But you are exhausted ; and notwithstanding my
detestation of that infernal tyrant, your master, I am a humane
man. At all events, I 'm not going to expose two of my Die-
hards to the risks of a tramp to Dartmoor just now I wouldn't
turn out a dog in such weather. It remains a question what I
am to do with you in the meanwhile. I propose that you give
me your parole that you will make no attempt to escape, let us
say, for a month : and on receiving it I will at once escort you
to my house, and see that you are suitably clothed, fed, and
entertained.'
'I give it willingly, Monsieur le Capitaine. But how am I
to thank you?'
'By playing the Dead March upon the cornet-a-piston and
teaching others to do the like.'
'That seems a singular way of showing one's gratitude. But
why the Dead March, monsieur? And, excuse me, there is
more than one Dead March. I myself, par exemple, composed
one to the memory of my adored Philomne but a week before
Hippolyte came with his so sad proposition.'
'I doubt if that will do. You see,' said Captain Pond,
lifting his voice for the benefit of the Die-hards, who by this
time were quite as sorely puzzled as their prisoner, 'we are about
to bury one of our Company, Sergeant Fugler '
'Ah! he is dead?'
'He is dying,' Captain Pond pursued, the more quickly since
he now guessed, not without reason, that Fugler was the 'good
Cornishman' to whose door M. Trinquier had been directed.
The Looe Die-hards 47
'He is dying of a hobnailed liver. It is his wish to have the
Dead March played at his burying.'
'He whistled the tune over to me/ said the Doctor; 'but
plague take me if I can whistle it to you. I Ve no ear : but I 'd
know it again if I heard it. Dismal isn't the word for it/
'It will be Handel. I am sure it will be Handel the Dead
March in his Saul. 9
'In his what?'
' In his oratorio of Saul. Listen poum>poum>prrr,poum '
'Be dashed, but you 've got it!' cried the Doctor, delighted;
' though you do give it a sort of foreign accent. But I dare say
that won't be so noticeable on the key-bugle.'
'But about this key-bugle, monsieur? And the other
instruments? not to mention the players.'
'I 've been thinking of that,' said Captain Pond. 'There 's
Butcher Tregaskis has a key-bugle. He plays Rule, Britannia !
upon it when he goes round with the suet. He '11 lend you
that till we can get one down from Plymouth. A drum, too,
you shall have. Hockaday's trader calls here to-morrow on
her way to Plymouth; she shall bring both instruments back
with her. Then we have the church musicians Peter Tweedy,
first fiddle ; Matthew John Ede, second ditto ; ThomasTripconey,
scorpion '
'Serpent,' the Doctor corrected.
'Well, it 's a filthy thing to look at, anyway. Israel Spetti-
gew, bass-viol; William Henry Phippin, flute; and William
Henry Phippin's eldest boy Archelaus to tap the triangle at the
right moment. That boy, sir, will play the triangle almost as
well as a man grown.'
'Then, monsieur, take me to your house. Give me a little
food and drink, pen, ink, and paper, and in three hours you
shall have la partition!
Said the Doctor, 'That 's all very well, Pond, but the church
musicianers can't march with their music, as you told me
just now.'
48 The Looe Die-hards
'I *ve thought of that, too. We '11 have Miller Penrose's
covered three-horse wagon to march ahead of the coffin.
Hang it in black and go slow, and all the musicianers can sit
around inside and play away as merry as grigs.'
'The cover '11 give the music a sort of muffly sound; but
that/ Lieutenant Clogg suggested, 'will be all the more fitty
for a funeral.'
'So it will, Clogg; so it will. But we're wasting time.
I suppose you won't object, sir, to be marched down to my
house by the Company? It's the regular thing in case of
taking a prisoner, and you '11 be left to yourself as soon as you
get to my door.'
'Not at all,' said M. Trinquier amiably.
'Then, gentlemen, fall in! The practice is put off. And
when you get home, mind you change your stockings, all of
you. We 're in luck's way this morning, but that 's no reason
for recklessness.'
So M. Trinquier, some time Director of Periodical Festivities
to the Municipality of Dieppe, was marched down into East
Looe, to the wonder and delight of the inhabitants, who had
just recovered from the shock of Gunner Spettigew's false
alarm, and were in a condition to be pleased with trifles. As
the Company tramped along the street, Captain Pond pointed
out the Town Hall to his prisoner.
'That will be the most convenient place to hold your practices.
And that is Fugler's house, just opposite.'
'But we cannot practise without making a noise.'
*I hope not, indeed. Didn't I promise you a big drum?'
'But in that case the sick man will hear. It will disturb his
last moments/
'Confound the fellow, he can't have everything! If he'd
asked for peace and quiet, he should have had it. But he didn't :
he asked for a Dead March. Don't trouble about Fugler. He 's
not an unreasonable man. The only question is, if the Doctor
here can keep him going until you 're perfect with the tune.'
The Looe Die-hards 49
And this was the question upon which the men of Looe, and
especially the Die-hards, hung breathless for the next few days.
M. Trinquier produced his score ; the musicianers came forward
eagerly; Miller Penrose promised his wagon; the big drum
arrived from Plymouth in the trader Good Intent^ and was dis-
charged upon the quay amid enthusiasm. The same afternoon,
at four o'clock, M. Trinquier opened his first practice in the
Town Hall, by playing over the air of the 'Dead Marching
SouP (to this the popular mouth had converted the name)
upon his cornet, just to give his pupils a general notion of it.
The day had been a fine one, with just that suspicion of frost
in the air which indicates winter on the warm south-western
coast. While the musicians were assembling the Doctor stepped
across the street to see how the invalid would take it. Fugler
a sharp-featured man of about fifty, good-looking, with blue
eyes and a tinge of red in his hair lay on his bed with his
mouth firmly set and his eyes resting, wistfully almost, on the
last wintry sunbeam that floated in by the geraniums on the
window-ledge. He had not heard the news. For five days
now he expected nothing but the end, and lay and waited for
it stoically and with calm good temper.
The Doctor took a seat by the bed-side, and put a question
or two. They were answered by Mrs. Fugler, who moved
about the small room quietly, removing, dusting and replacing
the china ornaments on the chimneypiece. The sick man lay
still, with his eyes upon the sunbeam.
And then very quietly and distinctly the notes of M. Trinquier's
key-bugle rose outside on the frosty air.
The sick man started, and made as if to raise himself on his
elbow, but quickly sank back again perhaps from weakness,
perhaps because he caught the Doctor's eye and the Doctor's
reassuring nod. While he lay back and listened, a faint flush
crept into his face, as though the blood ran quicker in his weak
limbs; and his blue eyes took a new light altogether.
'That *s the tune, hey?' the Doctor asked.
50 The Looe Die-hards
'That's the tune/
'Dismal, ain't it?'
'Ay, it's that.' His fingers were beating time on the
counterpane.
'That 's our new bandmaster. He 's got to teach it to the
rest, and you 've got to hold out till they pick it up. Whew!
I *d no idea music could be so dismal.'
'Hush 'ee, Doctor, do! till he 've a-done. 'Tis like rain on
blossom.' The last notes fell. 'Go you down, Doctor, and
say my duty and will he please play it over once more, and
Fugler '11 gi'e 'em a run for their money.'
The Doctor went back to the Town Hall and delivered this
encore, and M. Trinquier played his solo again; and in the
middle of it Mr. Fugler dropped off into an easy sleep.
After this the musicians met every evening, Sundays and
weekdays, and by the third evening the Doctor was able to
predict with confidence that Fugler would last out. Indeed,
the patient was strong enough to be propped up into a sitting
posture during the hour of practice, and not only listened with
pleasure to die concerted piece, but beat time with his fingers
while each instrument went over its part, delivering, at the close
of each performance, his opinion of it to Mrs. Fugler or the
Doctor: 'Tripconey's breath's failin'. He don't do no sort
o' justice by that sarpint.' Or: 'There's Uncle Issy agen!
He always do come to grief juss there! I reckon a man of
sixty-odd ought to give up the bass-viol. He ha'n't got the
agility.'
On the fifth evening Mrs. Fugler was sent across to the Town
Hall to ask why the triangle had as yet no share in the per-
formance, and to suggest that William Henry Phippin's eldest
boy, Archelaus, played that instrument 'to the life.' M. Trin-
quier replied that it was unusual to seek the aid of the triangle
in rendering the Dead March in Saul. Mr. Fugler sent back
word that, 'if you came to that, the whole thing was unusual,
from start to finish.' To this M. Trinquier discovered no
The Looe Die-hards 5 1
answer; and the triangle was included, to the extreme delight
of Archelaus Phippin, whose young life had been clouded for
a week past.
On the sixth evening, Mr. Fugler announced a sudden fancy
to 'touch pipe/
'Hey?' said the Doctor, opening his eyes.
'I'd like to tetch pipe. An* let me light the brimstone
mysel'. I likes to see the little blue flame turn yellow, a-dancin'
on the baccy/
'Get 'n his pipe and baccy, missis/ the Doctor commanded.
'He may kill himself clean-off now: the band '11 be ready by
the funeral, anyway/
On the three following evenings Mr. Fugler sat up and smoked
during band practice, the Doctor observing him with a new
interest. The tenth day, the Doctor was called away to attend
a child-birth at Downderry. At the conclusion of the cornet
solo, with which M. Trinquier regularly opened practice, the
sick man said:
'Wife, get me out my clothes/
'WHAT!'
'Get me out my clothes/
'You 're mad! It '11 be your death/
'I don't care: the band's ready. Uncle Issy got his part
perfect las' night, an' that 's more 'n I ever prayed to hear.
Get me out my clothes an' help me downstairs/
The Doctor was far away. Mrs. Fugler was forced to give
in. Weeping, and with shaking hands, she dressed him and
helped him to the foot of the stairs, where she threw open the
parlour door.
'No,' he said, 'I'm not goin' in there. I'll be steppin'
across to the Town Hall. Gi'e me your arm/
Thomas Tripconey was rehearsing upon the serpent when
the door of the Town Hall opened : and the music he made
died away in a wail, as of a dog whose foot has been trodden on,
William Henry Phippin's eldest son Archelaus cast his triangle
52 The Looe Die-hards
down and shrieked 'Ghosts, ghosts!' Uncle Issy cowered
behind his bass-viol and put a hand over his eyes. M. Trinquier
spun round to face the intruder, baton in one hand, cornet in
the other.
'Thank 'ee, friends/ said Mr. Fugler, dropping into a seat
by the door, and catching breath: 'you've got it very suent.
'Tis a beautiful tune : an* I 'm ha'f ashamed to tell 'ee that I
bain't a-goin' to die, this time/
Nor did he.
The East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery was disbanded
a few weeks later, on the last day of the year 1809. The
Corporations of the Two Boroughs entertained the heroes that
evening to a complimentary banquet in the East Looe Town
Hall, and Sergeant Fugler had recovered sufficiently to attend,
though not to partake. The Doctor made a speech over him,
proving him by statistics to be the most wonderful member of
the most wonderful corps in the world. The Doctor granted,
however at such a moment the Company could make con-
cessions that the Die-hards had been singularly fortunate in
the one foeman whom they had been called upon to face. Had
it not been for a gentleman of France the death-roll of the
Company had assuredly not stood at zero. He, their surgeon,
readily admitted this, and gave them a toast, 'The Power of
Music,' associating with this the name of Monsieur Jean
Alphonse Marie Trinquier, Director of Periodic Festivities to
the Municipality of Dieppe. The toast was drunk with accla-
mation. M. Trinquier responded, expressing his confident
belief .that two so gallant nations as England and France could
not long be restrained from flinging down their own arms and
rushing into each other's. And then followed Captain Pond,
who, having moved his audience to tears, pronounced the
Looe Die-hards disbanded. Thereupon, with a gesture full of
tragic inspiration, he cast his naked blade upon the board. As
it clanged amid the dishes and glasses, M. Trinquier lifted his
The Looe Die-hards 53
arms, and the band crashed out the 'Dead Marching Soul/ follow-
ing it with God Save the King as the clock announced midnight
and the birth of the New Year.
' But hallo ! ' exclaimed Captain Pond, sinking back in his
chair, and turning towards M. Trinquier. 'I had clean forgot
that you are our prisoner, and should be sent back to Dart-
moor! And now the Company is disbanded, and I have no
one to send as escort/
'Monsieur also forgets that my parole expired a fortnight
since, and that my service from that hour has been a service
of love!'
M. Trinquier did not return to Dartmoor. For it happened,
one dark night early in the following February, that Mr. Fugler
(now restored to health) set sail for the island of Guernsey
upon a matter of business. And on the morrow the music-
master of Dieppe had become but a pleasing memory to the
inhabitants of the Two Looes.
And now, should you take up Mr. Thomas Bond's History
of East and West Looe, and read of the Looe Volunteers that
'not a single man of the Company died during the six years,
which is certainly very remarkable/ you will be not utterly
incredulous; for you will know how it came about. Still,
when one comes to reflect, it does seem an odd boast for a
company of warriors.
ALMA MATER
[OXFORD]
KNOW you her secret none can utter?
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown ?
Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,
Still by the gateway flits the gown;
Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,
Faces of stone look down.
Faces of stone, and stonier faces
Some from library windows wan
Forth on her gardens, her green spaces,
Peer and turn to their books anon.
Hence, my Muse, from the green oases
Gather the tent, begone!
Nay, should she by the pavement linger
Under the rooms where once she played,
Who from the feast would rise to fling her
One poor sou for her serenade ?
One short laugh for the antic finger
Thrumming a lute-string frayed ?
Once, my dear but the world was young then
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes
Lissom the blades and the backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times
Careless we, and the chorus flung then
Under St. Mary's chimes!
54
Alma Mater 55
Reins lay loose and the ways led random
Christ Church meadow and Iffley track,
'Idleness horrid and dog-cart' (tandem),
Aylesbury grind and Bicester pack
Pleasant our lines, and faith! we scanned J em:
Having that artless knack.
Come, old limmer, the times grow colder;
Leaves of the creeper redden and fall.
Was it a hand then clapped my shoulder?
Only the wind by the chapel wall!
Dead leaves drift on the lute ... So, fold her
Under the faded shawl.
Never we wince, though none deplore us,
We who go reaping that we sowed;
Cities at cock-crow wake before us
Hey, for the lilt of the London road!
One look back, and a rousing chorus !
Never a palinode !
Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway haunts the gown.
Ah! but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it whenjcw go down.
Yet if at length you seek her, prove her,
Lean to her whispers never so nigh;
Yet if at last, not less her lover,
You in your hansom leave the High;
Down from her towers a ray shall hover
Touch you, a passer-by!
ODE
UPON ECKINGTON BRIDGE, RIVER AVON
O PASTORAL heart of England! like a psalm
Of green days telling with a quiet beat
O wave into the sunset flowing calm!
O tired lark descending on the wheat!
Lies it all peace beyond that western fold
Where now the lingering shepherd sees his star
Rise upon Malvern ? Paints an Age of Gold
Yon cloud with prophecies of linked ease
Lulling this land, with hills drawn up like knees,
To drowse beside her implements of war ?
II
Man shall outlast his battles. They have swept
Avon from Naseby Field to Severn Ham ;
And Evesham's dedicated stones have stepped
Down to the dust with Montfort's oriflamme.
Nor the red tear nor the reflected tower
Abides; but yet these eloquent grooves remain
Worn in the sandstone parapet hour by hour
By labouring bargemen where they shifted ropes.
E'en so shall man turn back from violent hopes
To Adam's cheer, and toil with spade again.
Ode upon Eckington Bridge 57
in
Ay, and his mother Nature, to whose lap
Like a repentant child at length he hies,
Not in the whirlwind or the thunder-clap
Proclaims her. more tremendous mysteries:
But when in winter's grave, bereft of light,
With still, small voice divinelier whispering
Lifting the green head of the aconite,
Feeding with sap of hope the hazel-shoot
She feels God's finger active at the root,
Turns in her sleep, and murmurs of the Spring
DOLOR OOGO
THIRTEEN men by Ruan Shore,
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogc
Drowned men since 'eighty-four,
Down in Dolor Oogo :
On the cliff against the sky,
Ailsa, wife of Malachi
That cold woman
Sits and knits eternally.
By her silent husband's side
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oog<
Stretched awake, she hears the tide
Moan in Dolor Oogo :
Till athwart the caster gale
Hark! the merry dead men hail
'Thou cold woman,
Take the lantern from the nail!*
Rising in her chilly sark
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo-
Forth she fares by Behan Pare,
Out to Dolor Oogo :
Kneeling there above the brink,
Lets her long red tresses sink
That cold woman
For the sailor-men to drink.
58
Dolor Oogo 59
Then the sailor men beneath
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo
Take the ends between their teeth,
Deep in Dolor Oogo.
'Lusty blood is this to quaff:
(So the merry dead men laugh)
O, cold woman,
Hath thy man as good by half? '
'Drowned men by Ruan Shore
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo
Lost aboard the Ehinore
Down by Dolor Oogo
If the gulls behind the share
Yesterday had called ' Beware,
Thy cold woman!*
Paler now had been my hair.
'Socks I knit you each a pair
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo
Half of yarn and half of hair,
Over Dolor Oogo/
* Dripping, dripping on the tide,
What red dye thy hair hath dyed,
Thou cold woman ? '
'It hath brushed upon his side.*
Knitting with her double thread
Dolor Oogo, Dolor Oogo
Half of black and half of red
Over Dolor Oogo,
On the cliff against the sky,
Ailsa, wife of Malachi,
That cold woman,
Wipes her hands incessantly.
B
THE PLANTED HEEL
Y Talland Church as I did go,
I passed my kindred all in a row;
Straight and silent there by the spade
Each in his narrow chamber laid.
While I passed, each kinsman's clay
Stole some virtue of mine away :
Till my shoes on the muddy road
Left not a print, so light they trod.
Back I went to the Bearers* Lane,
Begged the dead for my own again.
Answered the eldest one of my line
'Thy heart was no one's heart but mine/
The second claimed my working skill,
The third my wit, the fourth my will :
The fifth one said, 'Thy feet I gave;
But want no fleetness here in the grave.'
'For feet a man need have no care,
If they no weight of his own may bear.
*If I own naught by separate birth,
What binds my heel e'en now to the earth?'
60
The Planted Heel 6 1
The dead together answered back
'Naught but the wealth in thy knapsack.'
'Nay, then,' said I, 'that 's quick to unload':
And strewed my few pence out on the road.
' O kinsmen, now be quick, resume
Each rag of me to its rightful tomb ! '
The dead were silent then for a space.
Still I stood upright in my place.
Said one, 'Some strength he will yet conceal.
Belike 'tis pride of a planted heel ?
'Man has but one perduring pride:
Of knowledge alone he is justified.
* Lie down, lie down by us in the sod :
Thou shalt be wise in the ways of God/
'Nay, so I stand upright in the dust,
I '11 take God's purposes all on trust.
'An inch of heel for a yard of spine,
So give me again the goods that are mine!'
I planted my heel by their headstones,
And wrestled an hour with my kinsmen's bones.
I shook their dust thrice into a sieve,
And gathered all that they had to give.
I winnowed knowledge out of the heap :
'Take it/ I said, 'to warm your sleep.'
62 The Planted Heel
I cast their knowledge back on the sod,
And went on my journey, praising God.
Of all their knowledge I thought me rid :
But one little grain in my pack had hid.
Now, as I go, myself I tell,
'On a planted heel man wrestles well.'
But that little grain keeps whispering me
* Better, perhaps, on a planted knee/
SONNET
ISLES OF SCILLY
I SAW Narcissus in a portico
Leaning his ear toward the yellow bells
Of his own flower, festooned, that from the shells
Voluted on the pavement, caught the low
Long echoes of an Archipelago
Afar, beyond the pillared parallels
Wherein a soft wind wound, and nothing else,
Between his shoulder and the afterglow.
Figure of bronze! Thou listenest alway:
Ever for thee that lazy song beguiles.
But I must wake, and toil again, and pray ;
And yet will come but rarely, and at whiles,
The shout and vision of the sea-gods grey,
Stampeding by the lone Scillonian isles.
THE FAMOUS BALLAD OF THE
JUBILEE CUP
YOU may lift me up in your arms, lad, and turn my face
to the sun,
For a last look back at the dear old track where the Jubilee Cup
was won;
And draw your chair to my side, lad no, thank ye, I feel no
pain
For I 'm going out with the tide, lad, but I '11 tell you the tale
again.
I 'm seventy-nine, or nearly, and my head it has long turned
But it all comes back as clearly as though it was yesterday
The dust, and the bookies shouting around the clerk of the scales,
And the clerk of the course, and the nobs in force, and His
Highness, the Pr*nce of W*les.
*Twas a nine-hole thresh to wind'ard, but none of us cared for
that,
With a straight run home to the service tee, and a finish along
the flat.
'Stiff?' Ah, well you may say it! Spot-barred, and at five-
stone-ten !
But at two and a bisque I 'd ha* run the risk ; for I was a green-
horn then.
So we stripped to the B. Race signal, the old red swallow-tail
There was young Ben Bolt, and the Portland Colt, and Aston
Villa, and Yale;
And W. G., and Steinitz, Leander, and The Saint,
And the German Emperor's Meteor, a-looking as fresh as paint;
The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup 65
John Roberts (scratch), and Safety Match, The Lascar, and
Lorna Doone,
Oom Paul (a bye), and Romany Rye, and me upon Wooden
Spoon;
And some of us cut for partners, and some of us strung to
baulk,
And some of us tossed for stations But there, what use
to talk?
Three-quarter-back on the Kingsclere crack was station enough
for me,
With a fresh jackyarder blowing and the Vicarage goal a-lee!
And I leaned and patted her centre-bit, and eased the quid in
her cheek,
With a 'Soh, my lass!' and a 'Woa, you brute!' for she could
do all but speak.
She was geared a thought too high, perhaps; she was trained a
trifle fine ;
But she had the grand reach forward ! / never saw such a line !
Smooth-bored, clean-run, from her fiddle head with its dainty
ear half-cock,
Hard-bit, pur sang, from her overhang to the heel of her off
hind sock.
Sir Robert he walked beside me as I worked her down to the
mark;
'There 's money on this, my lad,' said he, 'and most of 'em 's
running dark;
But ease the sheet if you 're bunkered, and pack the scrimmages
tight,
And use your slide at the distance, and we '11 drink to your health
to-night!'
D
66 The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup
But I bent and tightened my stretcher. Said I to myself, said I,
'John Jones, this here is the Jubilee Cup, and you have to do
or die/
And the words weren't hardly spoken when the umpire shouted
'Play!'
And we all kicked off from the Gasworks end with a * Yoicks ! '
and a 'Gone away!'
And at first I thought of nothing, as the clay flew by in lumps,
But stuck to the old Ruy Lopez, and wondered who 'd call for
trumps,
And luffed her close to the cushion, and watched each one as
it broke,
And in triple file up the Rowley mile we went like a trail of smoke.
The Lascar made the running : but he didn't amount to much,
For old Oom Paul was quick on the ball, and headed it back to
touch;
And the whole first flight led off with the right, as The Saint
took up the pace,
And drove it clean to the putting green and holed it there with
an ace.
John Roberts had given a miss in baulk, but Villa cleared with
a punt;
And keeping her service hard and low The Meteor forged to
the front,
With Romany Rye to windward at dormy and two to play,
And Yale close up but a Jubilee Cup isn't run for every day.
We laid our course for the Warner I tell you the pace was hot!
And again off Tattenham Corner a blanket covered the lot.
Check side! Check side! Now steer her wide! and barely an
inch of room,
With The Lascar's tail over our lee rail, and brushing Leander's
boom!
The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup 67
We were running as strong as ever eight knots but it
couldn't last;
For the spray and the bails were flying, the whole field tailing
fast;
And the Portland colt had shot his bolt, and Yale was bumped
at the Doves,
And The Lascar resigned to Steinitz, stale-mated in fifteen moves.
It was bellows to mend with Roberts starred three for a
penalty kick:
But he chalked his cue and gave 'em the butt, and Oom Paul
scored the trick
'Off-side no-ball and at fourteen all! Mark cock! and two
for his nob!'
When W. G. ran clean through his lee, and beat him twice
with a lob.
He yorked him twice on a crumbling pitch, and wiped his eye
with a brace,
But his guy-rope split with the strain of it, and he dropped back
out of the race;
And I drew a bead on The Meteor's lead, and challenging none
too soon,
Bent over and patted her garboard strake, and called upon
Wooden Spoon.
She was all of a shiver forward, the spoondrift thick on her
flanks,
But I 'd brought her an easy gambit, and nursed her over the
banks;
She answered her helm the darling! and woke up now with
a rush,
While The Meteor's jock he sat like a rock he knew we rode
for his brush!
68 The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup
There was no one else left in it. The Saint was using his
whip,
And Safety Match, with a lofting catch, was pocketed deep at
slip;
And young Ben Bolt with his niblick took miss at Leander's
lunge,
But topped the net with the ricochet, and Steinitz threw up the
sponge.
But none of the lot could stop the rot nay, don't ask me to
stop!
The Villa had called for lemons, Oom Paul had taken his
drop,
And both were kicking the referee. Poor fellow! he done his
best;
But, being in doubt, he 'd ruled them out which he always did
when pressed.
So, inch by inch, I tightened the winch, and chucked the sand-
bags out
I heard the nursery cannons pop, I heard the bookies shout :
' The Meteor wins!' ' No, Wooden Spoon!' ' Check!' Van-
tage!' 'Leg before!'
'Last lap!' 'Pass Nap!' At his saddle-flap I put up the helm
and wore.
You may overflap at the saddle-flap, and yet be loo'd on the
tape :
And it all depends upon changing ends, how a seven-year-old
will shape ;
It was tack and tack to the Lepe and back a fair ding-dong
to the Ridge,
And he led by his forward canvas yet as we shot 'neath Hammer-
smith Bridge.
The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup 69
He led by his forward canvas he led from his strongest suit
But along we went on a roaring scent, and at Fawley I gained
a foot.
He fisted off from the throttle, and gave me his wash too late!
Deuce vantage check! By neck and neck, we rounded into
the straight.
I could hear the ' Conquering 'Ero ' a-crashing on Godfrey's band,
And my hopes fell sudden to zero, just there with the race in
hand
In sight of the Turf's Blue Ribbon, in sight of the umpire's tape,
As I felt the tack of her spinnaker crack, as I heard the steam
escape!
Had I lost at that awful juncture my presence of mind? . . .
but no !
I leaned and felt for the puncture, and plugged it there with
my toe ...
Hand over hand by the Members' Stand I lifted and eased her up,
Shot clean and fair to the crossbar there, and landed the
Jubilee Cup!
' The odd by a head, and leg before,' so the Judge he gave the
word :
And the Umpire shouted * Over ! ' but I neither spoke nor stirred.
They crowded round : for there on the ground I lay in a dead-
cold swoon,
Pitched neck and crop on the turf atop of my beautiful Wooden
Spoon.
Her dewlap tire was punctured, her bearings all red-hot;
She 'd a lolling tongue, and her bowsprit sprung, and her running
gear in a knot;
And amid the sobs of her backers, Sir Robert loosened her girth
And led her away to the knacker's. She had raced her last on
earth!
jo The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup
But I mind me well of the tear that fell from the eye of our noble
Pr*nce,
And the things he said as he tucked me in bed and I 've lain
there ever since ;
Tho' it all gets mixed up queerly that happened before my spill,
But I draw my thousand yearly: it '11 pay for the doctor's bill.
I 'm going out with the tide, lad You '11 dig me a humble grave,
And whiles you will bring your bride, lad, and your sons (if
sons you have),
And there, when the dews are weeping, and the echoes murmur
'Peace!'
And the salt, salt tide comes creeping and covers the popping-
crease,
In the hour when the ducks deposit their eggs with a boasted
force,
They '11 look and whisper 'How was it?' and you '11 take them
over the course,
And your voice will break as you try to speak of the glorious
first of June,
When the Jubilee Cup, with John Jones up, was won upon
Wooden Spoon.
CHANT ROYAL OF HIGH VIRTUE
WHO lives in suit of armour pent
And hides himself behind a wall,
For him is not the great event,
The garland nor the Capitol.
And is God's guerdon less than they?
Nay, moral man, I tell thee Nay :
Nor shall the flaming forts be won
By sneaking negatives alone,
By Lenten fast or Ramazan ;
But by the challenge proudly thrown
Virtue is that becrowns a Man /
God, in His Palace resident
Of Bliss, beheld our sinful ball,
And charged His own Son innocent
Us to redeem from Adam's fall.
'Yet must it be that men Thee slay/
'Yea, tho' it must, must I obey/
Said Christ; and came, His royal Son,
To die, and dying to atone
For harlot, thief, and publican.
Read on that rood He died upon
Virtue is that becrowns a Man !
Beneath that rood where He was bent
I saw the world's great captains all
Pass riding home from tournament
Adown the road from Roncesvalles
Lord Charlemagne, in one array
Lords Caesar, Cyrus, Attila,
Lord Alisaundre of Macedon . . .
With flame on lance and habergeon
They passed, and to the rataplan
Of drums gave salutation
' Virtue is that becrowns a Man /'
7*
72 Chant Royal of High Virtue
Had tall Achilles lounged in tent
For aye, and Xanthus neigh'd in stall,
The towers of Troy had ne'er been shent,
Nor stay'd the dance in Priam's hall.
Bend o'er thy book till thou be grey,
Read, mark, perpend, digest, survey,
Instruct thee deep as Solomon,
One only chapter thou shalt con,
One lesson learn, one sentence scan,
One title and one colophon
Virtue is that becrowns a Man !
High Virtue's hest is eloquent
With spur and not with martingall :
Swear not to her thou 'rt continent :
BE COURTEOUS, BRAVE, AND LIBERAL.
God fashion'd thee of chosen clay
For service, nor did ever say,
'Deny thee this,' 'Abstain from yon,'
But to inure thee, thew and bone,
To be confirmed of the clan
That made immortal Marathon
Virtue is that becrowns a Man !
ENVOY
Young Knight, the lists are set to-day!
Hereafter shall be time to pray
In sepulture, with hands of stone.
Ride, then! outride the bugle blown!
And gaily dinging down the van
Charge with a cheer 'Set on / Set on !
Virtue is that becrowns a Man /'
A NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS
t~ I f HE King sits in Dunfermline toun
JL Drinking the blude-red wine :
' O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'
O up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King's right knee
* Of a' the clerks by Granta side
Sir Patrick bears the gree.
"Tis he was taught by the Tod-hunte*re
Tho' not at the tod-huntfng ;
Yet gif that he be given a line,
He '11 do as brave a thing.'
Our Bang has written a braid letter
To Cambrigge or thereby,
And there it found Sir Patrick Spens
Evaluating TT.
73
74 4 New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
He hadna warked his quotient
A point but barely three,
There stepped to him a little foot-page
And louted on his knee.
The first word that Sir Patrick read,
'Plus x 9 was a' he said:
The neist word that Sir Patrick read,
'Twas 'plus expenses paid/
The last word that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his e'e :
'The pound I most admire is not
In Scottish currencie.'
Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he north :
He fetched a compass frae his ha*
And stood beside the Forth.
Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth,
And gurlier by-and-by
* O never yet was sic a storm,
Yet it isna sic as I!'
Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth
Until Dunfermline toun;
And tho' he came with a kittle wame
Fu* low he louted doun.
'A line, a line, a gude straight line,
O King, purvey me quick!
And see it be of thilka kind
That 's neither braid nor thick.*
A New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens 75
'Nor thick nor braid?' King Jamie said,
'I '11 eat my gude hat-band
If arra line as ye define
Be found in our Scotland.'
'Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule,
It sail be ruled by me' ;
And lichtly with his little pencil
He 's ruled the line A B.
Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he west;
'Ye touch the button,' Sir Patrick said,
'And I sail do the rest.'
And he has set his compass foot
Untill the centre A,
From A to B he 's stretched it oot
' Ye Scottish carles, give way ! '
Syne he has moved his compass foot
Untill the centre B,
From B to A he 's stretched it oot,
And drawn it viz-a-vee.
The tane circle was BCD,
And A C E the tither:
'I rede ye well,' Sir Patrick said,
'They interseck ilk ither.
'See here, and whaur they interseck
To wit, with yon point C
Ye '11 just obsairve that I conneck
The twa points A and B.
76 A New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
'And there ye have a little triangle
As bonny as e'er was seen ;
The whilk is not isosceles,
Nor yet it is scalene.'
' The proof! the proof! ' King Jamie cried :
'The how and eke the why!'
Sir Patrick laughed within his beard
' 'Tis ex hypothesi
'When I ligg'd in my mither's wame,
I learn'd it frae my mither,
That things was equal to the same,
Was equal ane to t'ither.
'Sith in the circle first I drew
The lines B A, B C,
Be radii true, I wit to you
The baith maun equal be.
'Likewise and in the second circle,
Whilk I drew widdershins,
It is nae skaith the radii baith,
A B, A C, be twins.
'And sith of three a pair agree
That ilk suld equal ane,
By certes they maun equal be
Ilk unto ilk by-lane.'
'Now by my faith!' King Jamie saith,
' What plane geometric!
If only Potts had written in Scots,
How loocid Potts wad be!'
A New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens 77
'Now wow 's my life!' said Jamie the King,
And the Scots lords said the same,
For but it was that envious knicht,
Sir Hughie o' the Graeme.
' Flim-flam, flim-flam V and 'Ho indeed?'
Quod Hughie o' the Graeme;
' 'Tis I could better upon my heid
This prabblin prablem-game.'
Sir Patrick Spens was nothing laith
When as he heard 'flim-flam/
But syne he 's ta'en a silken claith
And wiped his diagram.
' Gif my small feat may better'd be,
Sir Hew, by thy big head,
What I hae done with an A B C
Do thou with X Y Z.'
Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew,
And loudly laucht the King;
But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew,
And played that eldritch thing!
He 's play'd it reel, he 's played it jig,
And the baith alternative;
And he 's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg,
That 's Proposetion Five.
And there they 've met, and there they 've fet,
Forenenst the Asses' Brigg,
And waefu', waefu', was the fate
That gar'd them there to ligg.
78 A New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens
For there Sir Patrick 's slain Sir Hew,
And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens
Now wasna' that a fine to-do
For Euclid's Elemen's?
But let us sing Long live the King!
And his foes the Deil attend 'em :
For he has gotten his little triangle
Quod erat faciendum !
LAYING UP THE BOAT
*HERE arrives a day towards the end of October or with
JL luck we may tide over into November when the wind in
the mainsail suddenly takes a winter force, and we begin to talk
of laying up the boat. Hitherto we have kept a silent compact
and ignored all change in the season. We have watched the
blue afternoons shortening, fading through lilac into grey, and
let pass their scarcely perceptible warnings. One afternoon a
few kitti wakes appeared. A week later the swallows fell to
stringing themselves like beads along the coastguard's telephone-
wire on the hill. They vanished, and we pretended not to miss
them. When our hands grew chill with steering we rubbed
them by stealth or stuck them nonchalantly in our pockets. But
this vicious unmistakable winter gust breaks the spell. We take
one look around the harbour, at the desolate buoys awash and
tossing; we cast another seaward at the thick weather through
which, in a week at latest, will come looming the earliest of the
Baltic merchantmen, our November visitors bluff vessels with
red-painted channels, green deckhouses, white top-strakes,
wooden davits overhanging astern, and the Danish flag flutter-
ing aloft in the haze. Then we find speech; and with us, as
with the swallows, the move into winter quarters is not long
delayed when once it comes into discussion. We have dis-
sembled too long; and know, as we go through, the form of
debating it, that our date must be the next spring-tides.
This ritual of laying up the boat is our way of bidding fare-
well to summer; and we go through it, when the day comes, in
ceremonial silence. Favete linguist The hour helps us, for
the spring-tides at this season reach their height a little after
night-fall, and it is on an already slackening flood that we cast
off our moorings and head up the river with our backs to the
waning sunset. Since we tow a dinghy astern and are ourselves
79
8o Laying up the Boat
towed by the silent yachtsman, you may call it a procession.
She has been stripped, during the last two days, of sails, rigging,
and all spars but the mainmast. Now we bring her alongside
the town quay and beneath the shears the abhorred shears
which lift this too out of its step, dislocated with a creak as
poignant as the cry of Polydorus. We lower it, lay it along the
deck, and resume our way; past quay doors and windows where
already the townsfolk are beginning to light their lamps ; and so
by the jetties where foreign crews rest with elbows on bulwarks
and stare down upon us idly through the dusk. She is after all
but a little cutter of six tons, and we might well apologize, like
the Athenian, for so diminutive a corpse. But she is our own ;
and they never saw her with jackyarder spread, or spinnaker or
jib-topsail delicate as samite those heavenly wings! nor felt
her gallant spirit straining to beat her own record before a tense
northerly breeze. Yet even to them her form, in pure white
with gilt fillet, might tell of no common obsequies.
For in every good ship the miracle of Galatea is renewed;
and the shipwright who sent this keel down the ways to her
element surely beheld the birth of a goddess. He still speaks
of her with pride, but the conditions of his work keep him a
modest man; for he goes about it under the concentred gaze of
half a dozen old mariners hauled ashore, who haunt his yard
uninvited, slow of speech but deadly critical. Nor has the
language a word for their appalling candour. Often, admiring
how cheerfully he tolerates them, I have wondered what it
would feel like to compose a novel under the eyes of half a dozen
reviewers. But to him, as to his critics, the ship was a frame-
work only until the terrible moment when with baptism she took
life. Did he in the rapture, the brief ecstasy of creation, realize
that she had passed from him ? Ere the local artillery band had
finished Rule, Britannia! and while his friends were still shaking
his hands and drinking to him, did he know his loss in his
triumph ? His fate is to improve the world, not to possess ; to
chase perfection, knowing that under the final mastering touch
Laying up the Boat 81
it must pass from his hand; to lose his works and anchor himself
upon the workmanship, the immaterial function. For of art
this is the cross and crown in one; and he, modest man, was
born to the sad eminence.
She is ours now by purchase, but ours, too, by something
better. Like a slave's her beautiful untaught body came to us ;
but it was we who gave wings to her, and with wings a soul,
and a law to its grace, and discipline to its vital impulses. She
is ours, too, by our gratitude, since the delicate machine
Has like a woman given up its joy;
and by memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we
tempt, of her sweet companionship through long days empty
of annoyance land left behind with its striving crowds, its
short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries;
the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt
airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean! Then it was that
we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort,
lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no
answer, by the pulse of her tiller soft against the palm. Patter
of reef-points, creak of cordage, hum of wind, hiss of brine
I think at times that she has found a human language. Who that
has ever steered for hours together cannot report of a mysterious
voice * breaking the silence of the seas,' as though a friend were
standing and speaking astern ? or has not turned his head to the
confident inexplicable call? The fishermen fable of drowned
sailors 'hailing their names.' But the voice is of a single
speaker; it bears no likeness to the hollow tones of the dead;
it calls no name; it utters no particular word. It merely speaks.
Sometimes, ashamed at being tricked by an illusion so absurd,
I steal a glance at the yachtsman forward. He is smoking,
placidly staring at the clouds. Patently he was not the speaker,
and patently he has heard nothing. Was it Cynthia, my dearer
shipmate? She, too, knows the voice; even answered it one
day, supposing it mine, and in her confusion I surprised our
82 Laying up the Boat
common secret. But we never hear it together. She is seated
now on the lee side of the cockpit, her hands folded on the
coaming, her chin rested on them, and her eyes gazing out beneath
the sail and across the sea from which they surely have drawn
their wine-coloured glooms. She has not stirred for many
minutes. No, it was not Cynthia. Then either it must be the
wild, obedient spirit who carries us, straining at the impassable
bar of speech, to break through and be at one with her master,
or else Can it have been Ariel, perched aloft in the shrouds,
with mischievous harp?
That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue ;
But whether note of joy or knell
Not his own Father-singer knew;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only how it shivers through ;
The breast of us a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew.
Perhaps; but for my part I believe it was the ship; and if you
deride my belief, I shall guess you one of those who need a
figure-head to remind them of a vessel's sex. There are minds
which find a certain romance in figure-heads. To me they seem
a frigid, unintelligent device, not to say idolatrous. I have
known a crew to set so much store by one that they kept a tinsel
locket and pair of ear-rings in the forecastle and duly adorned
their darling when in port. But this is materialism. The true
personality of a ship resides in no prefiguring lump of wood
with a sightless smile to which all seas come alike and all
weathers. Lay your open palm on the mast, rather, and feel
life pulsing beneath it, trembling through and along every nerve
of her. Are you converted? That life is yours to control.
Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god! for indeed
you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries shall
Laying up the Boat 83
run out with the chain as you slip moorings run out and drop
from you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you
cannot forget in a moment the times to which you were born,
each wave shall turn back a page as it rolls past to break on the
shore towards which you revert no glance. Even the romance
of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.
Sails of silk and ropes of sendal,
Such as gleam in ancient lore,
And the singing of the sailor,
And the answer from the shore
these shall pass and leave you younger than romance a child
open-eyed and curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling
porpoise, or to watch the gannets diving
As Noah saw them dive
O'er sunken Ararat.
Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of a kingdom
I must pause to describe for you, though when you reach it
you will forget my description and imagine yourself its first
discoverer. But that is a part of its charm.
Walter Pater, reading the Odyssey y was brought up (as we say)
'with a round turn' by a passage wherein Homer describes
briefly and with accuracy how some mariners came to harbour,
took down sail, and stepped ashore. It filled him with wonder
that so simple an incident nor to say ordinary could be made
so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the credit
between the poet and his fortunate age a time (said he) in
which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect,
or the sailors pulled down their sail without making a picture
'in the great style* against a sky charged with marvels.
You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which
I am telling, and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water
you will discover (and with ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater
was entirely mistaken, and the credit belongs neither to Homer
84 Laying up the Boat
nor to his fortunate age. For here are woods with woodlanders,
and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with fishermen hauling
nets ; and all these men, as they go about their work, contrive
to make pictures 'in the great style* against a sky charged with
marvels, obviously without any assistance from Homer, and
quite as if nothing had happened for, say, the last three thousand
years. That the immemorial craft of seafaring has no specially
'heroic age' or that, if it have, that age is yours you will
discover by watching your own yachtsman as he moves about
lowering foresail and preparing to drop anchor.
It is a river of gradual golden sunsets, such as Wilson painted
a broad-bosomed flood between deep and tranquil woods, the
main banks holding here and there a village as in an arm
maternally crook'd, but opening into creeks where the oaks dip
their branches in the high tides, where the stars are glassed all
night long without a ripple, and where you may spend whole
days with no company but herons and sandpipers. Even by
the main river each separate figure the fisherman on the shore,
the ploughman on the upland, the ferryman crossing between
them moves slowly upon a large landscape, while, permeating
all, 'the essential silence cheers and blesses.' After a week at
anchor in the heart of this silence Cynthia and I compared notes,
and set down the total population at fifty souls ; and even so she
would have it that I had included the owls. Lo! the next
morning an unaccustomed rocking awoke us in our berths, and,
raising the flap of our dew-drenched awning, we 'descried at
sunrise an emerging prow' of a peculiarly hideous excursion
steamboat. She blew no whistle, and we were preparing to
laugh at her grotesque temerity when we became aware of a
score of boats putting out towards her from the shadowy banks.
Like spectres they approached, reached her, and discharged their
complements, until at last a hundred and fifty passengers crowded
her deck. In silence or in such silence as a paddle-boat can
achieve she backed, turned, and bore them away: on what
festal errand we never discovered. We never saw them return.
Laying up the Boat 85
They raised no cheer; no band accompanied them; they passed
without even the faint hum of conversation. In five minutes
at most the apparition had vanished around the river-bend sea-
wards and out of sight. We stared at the gently heaving water,
turned, and caught sight of Euergetes, his head and red cap
above the forecastle hatch. (I call our yachtsman Euergetes
because it is so unlike his real name that neither he nor his
family will recognize it.) ' Why, Euergetes,' exclaimed Cynthia,
* wherever did they all come from?' 'I 'm sure I can't tell you,
ma'am,' he answered, 'unless 'twas from the woods' giving
us to picture these ardent holiday-makers roosting all night in
the trees while we slumbered. But the odd thing was that the
labourers manned the fields that day, the fishermen the beach
that evening, in undiminished numbers. We landed, and could
detect no depletion in the village. We landed on subsequent
days, and discovered no increase. And the inference, though
easy, was startling.
I suppose that 'in the great style' could hardly be predicated
of our housekeeping on these excursions ; and yet it achieves,
in our enthusiastic opinion, a primitive elegance not often recap-
tured by mortals since the passing of the Golden Age. We
cook for ourselves, but bring a fine spirit of emulation both to
cuisine and service. We dine frugally, but the claret is sound.
From the moment when Euergetes awakes us by washing down
the deck, and the sound of water rushing through the scuppers
calls me forth to discuss the weather with him, method rules the
early hours, that we may be free to use the later as we list.
First the cockpit beneath the awning must be prepared as a
dressing-room for Cynthia ; next Euergetes summoned on deck
to valet me with the simple bucket. And when I am dressed
and tingling from the douche, and sit me down on the cabin top,
barefooted and whistling, to clean the boots, and Euergetes has
been sent ashore for milk and eggs, bread and clotted cream,
there follows a peaceful half-hour until Cynthia flings back a
corner of the awning and, emerging, confirms the dawn. Then
86 Laying up the Boat
begins the business, orderly and thorough, of redding up the
cabin, stowing the beds, washing out the lower deck, folding
away the awning, and transforming the cockpit into a breakfast-
room, with table neatly set forth. Meanwhile Euergetes has
returned, and from the forecastle comes the sputter of red
mullet cooking. Cynthia clatters the cups and saucers, while
in the well by the cabin door I perform some acquired tricks
with the new-laid eggs. There is plenty to be done on board
a small boat, but it is all simple enough. Only, you must not
let it overtake you. Woe to you if it fall into arrears!
By ten o'clock or thereabouts we have breakfasted, my pipe
is lit, and a free day lies before us:
All the wood to ransack,
All the wave explore.
We take the dinghy and quest after adventures. The nearest
railway lies six miles off, and is likely to deposit no one in whom
we have the least concern. The woods are deep, we carry our
lunch-basket and may roam independent of taverns. If the
wind invite, we can hoist our small sail ; if not, we can recline
and drift and stare at the heavens, or land and bathe, or search
in vain for curlews' or kingfishers' nests, or in more energetic
moods seek out a fisherman and hire him to shoot his seine.
Seventy red mullet have I seen fetched at one haul out of those
delectable waters, remote and enchanted as the lake whence the
fisherman at the genie's orders drew fish for the young king of
the Black Isles. But such days as these require no filling, and
why should I teach you how to fill them?
Best hour of all perhaps is that before bed-time, when the
awning has been spread once more, and after long hours in the
open our world narrows to the circle of the reading-lamp in
the cockpit. Our cabin is prepared. Through the open door we
see its red curtain warm in the light of the swinging lamp, the
Beds laid, the white sheets turned back. Still we grudge these
moments to sleep. Outside we hear the tide streaming sea-
Laying up the Boat 87
wards, light airs play beneath the awning, above it rides the
host of heaven. And here, gathered into a few square feet, we
have home larder, cellar, library, tables, and cupboards ; life's
small appliances with the human comradeship they serve, chosen
for their service after severely practical discussion, yet ultimately
by the heart's true nesting instinct. We are isolated, bound
even to this strange river-bed by a few fathoms of chain only.
To-morrow we can lift anchor and spread wing; but we carry
home with us.
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night;
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom ;
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
You see now what memories we lay up with the boat. Will
you think it ridiculous that after such royal days of summer,
her inconspicuous obsequies have before now put me in mind of
Turner's 'Fighting Temeraire'? I declare, at any rate, that the
fault lies not with me, but with our country's painters and poets
for providing no work of art nearer to my mood. We English
have a great seafaring and a great poetical past. Yet the magic
of the sea and shipping has rarely touched our poetry, and for
its finest expression we must still turn to an art in which as a
race we are less expert, and stand before that picture of Turner's
in the National Gallery. The late Mr. Froude believed in a
good time coming when the sea-captains of Elizabeth are to find
their bard and sit enshrined in 'a great English national epic as
grand as the Odyssey.' It may be, but as yet our poets have
achieved but a few sea-fights, marine adventures, and occasional
pieces, which wear a spirited but accidental look, and suggest
88 Laying up the Boat
the excursionist. On me, at any rate, no poem in our language
not even The Ancient Mariner binds as that picture binds, the
Mystic spell,
Which none but sailors know or feel,
And none but they can tell
if indeed they can tell. In it Turner seized and rolled together
in one triumphant moment the emotional effect of noble shipping
and a sentiment as ancient and profound as the sea itself human
regret for transitory human glory. The great warship, glim-
mering in her Mediterranean fighting-paint, moving like a queen
to execution; the pert and ignoble tug, itself an emblem of the
new order, eager, pushing, ugly, and impatient of the slow
loveliness it supersedes; the sunset hour, closing man's labour;
the fading river-reach you may call these things obvious, but
all art's greatest effects are obvious when once genius has dis-
covered them. I should know well enough by this time what
is coming when I draw near that picture, and yet my heart never
fails to leap with the old wild wonder. There are usually one
or two men standing before it I observe that it affects women
less and I glance at them furtively to see how they take it.
If ever I surprise one with tears in his eyes, I believe we shall
shake hands. And why not? For the moment we are not
strangers, but men subdued by the wonder and sadness of our
common destiny: 'we feel that we are greater than we know.'
We are two Englishmen, in one moment realizing the glories
of our blood and state. We are alone together, gazing upon
a new Pacific, 'silent, upon a peak in Darien.'
For and here lies his subtlety in the very flush of amaze-
ment the painter flatters you by whispering that for you has his
full meaning been reserved. The Temeraire goes to her doom
unattended, twilit, obscure, with no pause in the dingy bustle
of the river. You alone have eyes for the passing of greatness,
and a heart to feel it.
There 's a far bell ringing,
Laying up the Boat 89
but you alone hear it tolling to evensong, to the close of day,
the end of deeds.
So, as we near the beach where she is to lie, a sense of proud
exclusiveness mingles with our high regret. Astern the jetty-
men and stevedores are wrangling over their latest job; trains
are shunting, cranes working, trucks discharging their cargoes
amid clouds of dust. We and we only assist at the passing of a
goddess. Euergetes rests on his oars, the tow-rope slackens,
she glides into the deep shadow of the shore, and with a soft
grating noise ah, the eloquence of it ! takes ground. Silently
we carry her chain out and noose it about a monster elm ; silently
we slip the legs under her channels, lift and make fast her stern
moorings, lash the tiller for the last time, tie the coverings over
cabin top and well ; anxiously, with closed lips, praetermitting
no due rite. An hour, perhaps, passes, and November darkness
has settled on the river ere we push off our boat, in a last farewell
committing her our treasure 'locked up, not lost 5 to a winter
over which Jove shall reign genially
Et fratres Helenae, lucida sidera.
As we thread our dim way homeward among the riding-lights
flickering on the black water, the last pale vision of her alone
and lightless follows and reminds me of the dull winter ahead,
the short days, the long nights. She is haunting me yet as I
land on the wet slip strewn with dead leaves to the tide's edge.
She follows me up the hill, and even to my library door.
I throw it open, and lo! a bright fire burning, and, smiling
over against the blaze of it, cheerful, companionable, my books
have been awaiting me.
THE HARBOUR OF FOWEY
OTHE Harbour of Fdwey
Is a beautiful spot,
And it 's there I enjowey
To sail in a yot;
Or to race in a yacht
Round a mark or a buoy
Such a beautiful spacht
Is the Harbour of Fuoy !
When her anchor is weighed
And the water she ploughs,
Upon neat lemoneighed
O it 's then I caroughs ;
And I take Watts's hymns
And I sing them aloud
When it 's homeward she skymns
O'er the waters she ploud.
But the wave mountain-high,
And the violent storm,
Do I risk them? Not Igh!
But prefer to sit worm
With a book on my knees
By the library fire,
While I list to the brees
Rising hire and hire.
And so, whether I weigh
Up the anchor or not,
I am happy each deigh
In my home or my yot ;
Every care I resign,
Every comfort enjoy,
In this cottage of mign
By the Harbour of Foy.
90
The Harbour ofFowey 91
And my leisure 's addressed
To composing of verse
Which, if hardly the bessed,
Might be easily werse.
And, the spelling I use
Should the critics condemn,
Why, I have my own vuse
And I don't think of themn.
Yes, I have my own views :
But the teachers I follow
Are the Lyrical Miews
And the Delphic Apollow.
Unto them I am debtor
For spelling and rhyme,
And I *m doing it bebtor
And bebtor each thyme.
THE ROOM OF MIRRORS
A STORY OF HATE, TOLD BY THE PURSUER
A LATE hansom came swinging round the corner into
Lennox Gardens, cutting it so fine that the near wheel
ground against the kerb and jolted the driver in his little seat.
The jingle of bells might have warned me; but the horse's hoofs
came noiselessly on the half-frozen snow, which lay just deep
enough to hide where the pavement ended and the road began ;
and, moreover, I was listening to the violins behind the first-
floor windows of the house opposite. They were playing the
Wiener Blitt.
As it was, I had time enough and no more to skip back and
get my toes out of the way. The cabby cursed me. I cursed
him back so promptly and effectively that he had to turn in his
seat for another shot. The windows of the house opposite let
fall their light across his red and astonished face. I laughed,
and gave him another volley. My head was hot, though my
feet and hands were cold ; and I felt equal to cursing down any
cabman within the four-mile radius. That second volley
finished him. He turned to his reins again and was borne
away defeated ; the red eyes of his lamps peering back at me
like an angry ferret's.
Up in the lighted room shadows of men and women crossed
the blinds, and still the Wiener Blut went forward.
The devil was in that waltz. He had hold of the violins and
was weaving the air with scents and visions visions of Ascot
and Henley; green lawns, gay sunshades, midsummer heat, cool
rivers flowing, muslins rippled by light breezes ; running horses
and silken jackets; white tables heaped with roses and set with
silver and crystal, jewelled fingers moving in the soft candle-
light, bare necks bending, diamonds, odours, bubbles in the
wine; blue water and white foam beneath the leaning shadow
9*
The Room of Minors 93
of sails; hot air flickering over stretches of moorland; blue
again Mediterranean blue long facades, the din of bands and
King Carnival parading beneath showers of blossom : and all
this noise and warmth and scent and dazzle flung out into the
frozen street for a beggar's portion. I had gone under.
The door of the house opposite had been free to me once
and not six months ago ; freer to me perhaps than to any other.
Did I long to pass behind it again ? I thrust both hands into
my pockets for warmth, and my right hand knocked against
something hard. Yes . . . just once. . . .
Suddenly the door opened. A man stood on the threshold
for a moment while the butler behind him arranged the collar
of his fur overcoat. The high light in the portico flung the
shadows of both down the crimson carpet laid on the entrance
steps. Snow had fallen and covered the edges of the carpet,
which divided it like a cascade of blood pouring from the hall
into the street. And still overhead the Wiener Blut went
forward.
The man paused in the bright portico, his patent-leather
boots twinkling under the lamp's rays on that comfortable
carpet. I waited, expecting him to whistle for a hansom. But
he turned, gave an order to the butler, and stepping briskly
down into the street, made off eastwards. The door closed
behind him. He was the man I most hated in the world. If
I had longed to cross the threshold a while back it was to seek
him, and for no other reason.
I started to follow him, my hands still in my pockets. The
snow muffled our footfalls completely, for as yet the slight
north-east wind had frozen but the thinnest crust of it. He
was walking briskly, as men do in such weather, but with no
appearance of hurry. At the corner of Sloane Street he halted
under a lamp, pulled out his watch, consulted it, and lit a
cigarette; then set off again up the street towards Knightsbridge.
This halt of his had let me up within twenty paces of him.
He never turned his head ; but went on, presenting me his back,
94 The Room of Mirrors
a target not to be missed. Why not do it now? Better now
and here than in a crowded thoroughfare. My right hand
gripped the revolver more tightly. No, there was plenty of
time: and I was curious to know what had brought Gervase
out at this hour: why he had left his guests, or his wife's guests,
to take care of themselves : why he chose to be trudging afoot
through this infernally unpleasant snow.
The roadway in Sloane Street was churned into a brown
mass like chocolate, but the last bus had rolled home and left
it to freeze in peace. Half-way up the street I saw Gervase
meet and pass a policeman, and altered my own pace to a
lagging walk. Even so, the fellow eyed me suspiciously as I
went by or so I thought: and guessing that he kept a watch
on me, I dropped still farther behind my man. But the lamps
were bright at the end of the street, and I saw him turn to the
right by the great drapery shop at the corner.
Once past this corner I was able to put on a spurt. He
crossed the roadway by the Albert Gate, and by the time he
reached the Park railings the old distance separated us once
more. Half-way up the slope he came to a halt, by the stone
drinking-trough : and flattening myself against the railings, I
saw him try the thin ice in the trough with his finger-tips, but in
a hesitating way, as if his thoughts ran on something else and he
scarcely knew what he did or why he did it. It must have
been half a minute before he recovered himself with a shrug of
his shoulders, and plunging both hands deep in his pockets,
resumed his pace.
As we passed Hyde Park Corner I glanced up at the clock
there : the time was between a quarter and ten minutes to one.
At the entrance of Down Street he turned aside again, and began
to lead me a zigzag dance through the quiet thoroughfare : and
I followed,* still to the tune of the Wiener Slut.
But now, at the corner of Charles Street, I blundered against
another policeman, who flashed his lantern in my face, stared
after Gervase, and asked me what my game was. I demanded
The Room of Mirrors 95
innocently enough to be shown the nearest way to Oxford
Street, and the fellow, after pausing a moment to chew his
suspicions, walked with me slowly to the south-west corner of
Berkeley Square, and pointed northwards.
'That's your road,' he growled, 'straight on. And don't
you forget it!'
He stood and watched me on my way. Nor did I dare to
turn aside until well clear of the square. At the crossing of
Davies and Grosvenor Streets, however, I supposed myself
safe, and halted for a moment.
From the shadow of a porch at my elbow a thin voice
accosted me.
'Kind gentleman '
'Heh?' I spun round on her sharply: for it was a woman,
stretching out one skinny hand and gathering her rags together
with the other.
'Kind gentleman, spare a copper! I 've known better days
I have indeed.'
'Well,' said I, 'as it happens, I'm in the same case. And
they couldn't be much worse, could they?'
She drew a shuddering breath back through her teeth, but
still held out her hand. I felt for my last coin, and her fingers
closed on it so sharply that their long nails scraped the back
of mine.
'Kind gentleman '
'Ay, they are kind, are they not?'
She stared at me, and in a nerveless note let one horrible
oath escape her.
'There '11 be one less before morning,' said I, 'if that 's any
consolation to you. Good night!' Setting off at a shuffling
run, I doubled back along Grosvenor Street and Bond Street to
the point where I hoped to pick up the trail again. And just
there, at the issue of Bruton Street, two constables stood
ready for me.
'I thought as much,' said the one who set me on my way.
96 The Room of Mirrors
*Hi, you! Wait a moment, please'; then to the other, 'Best
turn his pockets out, Jim/
'If you dare to try ' I began, with my hand in my pocket;
the next moment I found myself sprawling face downward on
the sharp crust of snow.
'Hallo, constables!' said a voice. 'What's the row?' It
was Gervase. He had turned leisurely back from the slope
of Conduit Street, and came strolling down the road with his
hands in his pockets.
'This fellow, sir we have reason to think he was followin'
you.'
'Quite right,' Gervase answered cheerfully. 'Of course he
was.'
' Oh, if you knew it, sir '
'Certainly I knew it. In fact, he was following at my
invitation.'
'What for did he tell me a lie, then?' grumbled the constable,
chapfallen.
I had picked myself up by this time and was wiping my
face. 'Look here,' I put in, *I asked you the way to Oxford
Street, that and nothing else.' And I went on to summarize
my opinion of him.
'Oh! it's you can swear a bit,' he growled. 'I heard you
just now.'
'Yes,' Gervase interposed suavely, drawing the glove from
his right hand and letting flash a diamond finger-ring in the
lamp-light. 'He is a bit of a beast, policeman, and it 's not for
the pleasure of it that I want his company.'
A sovereign passed from hand to hand. The other constable
had discreetly drawn off* a pace or two.
'All the same, it 's a rum go.'
'Yes, isn't it?' Gervase assented in his heartiest tone, 'Here
is my card, in case you 're not satisfied.'
'If you 're satisfied, sir '
'Quite so. Good night!' Gervase thrust both hands into
The Room of Mirrors 97
his pockets again and strode off. I followed him, with a heart
hotter than ever followed him like a whipped cur, as they say.
Yes, that was just it. He who had already robbed me of every-
thing else had now kicked even the pedestal from under me as
a figure of tragedy. Five minutes ago I had been the implacable
avenger tracking my unconscious victim across the city. Heaven
knows how small an excuse it was for self-respect ; but one who
has lost character may yet chance to catch a dignity from circum-
stances; and to tell the truth, for all my desperate earnestness
I had allowed my vanity to take some artistic satisfaction in
the sinister chase. It had struck me shall I say? as an
effective ending, nor had I failed to note that the snow lent it
a romantic touch.
And behold, the unconscious victim knew all about it, and
had politely interfered when a couple of unromantic Bobbies
threatened the performance by tumbling the stalking avenger
into the gutter! They had. knocked my tragedy into harle-
quinade as easily as you might bash in a hat; and my enemy
had refined the cruelty of it by coming to the rescue and
ironically restarting the poor play on lines of comedy. I saw
too late that I ought to have refused his help, to have assaulted
the constable and been hauled to the police station. Not an
impressive wind-up, to be sure; but less humiliating than this!
Even so, Gervase might have trumped the poor card by
following with a gracious offer to bail me out!
As it was, I had put the whip into his hand, and must follow
him like a cur. The distance he kept assured me that the
similitude had not escaped him. He strode on without deigning
a single glance behind, still in cold derision presenting me his
broad back and silently challenging me to shoot. And I
followed, hating him worse than ever, swearing that the last
five minutes should not be forgotten, but charged for royally
when the reckoning came to be paid.
I followed thus up Conduit Street, up Regent Street, and
across the Circus. The frost had deepened and the mud in the
98 The Room of Mirrors
roadway crackled under our feet. At the Circus I began to
guess, and when Gervase struck off into Great Portland Street,
and thence by half a dozen turnings northwards by east, I knew
to what house he was leading me.
At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted
and motioned me to come close.
'I forget/ he said with a jerk of his thumb, 'if you still have
the entry. These people are not particular, to be sure/
'I have not,' I answered, and felt my cheeks burning. He
could not see this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as
he answered :
'Ah? I hadn't heard of it. ... You 'd better step round
by the mews, then. You know the window, the one which
opens into the passage leading to Pollox Street. Wait there.
It may be ten minutes before I can open.'
I nodded. The house was a corner one, between the street
and a by-lane tenanted mostly by cabmen; and at the back of
it ran the mews where they stabled their horses. Half-way
down this mews a narrow alley cut across it at right angles: a
passage unfrequented by traffic, known only to the stablemen,
and in the daytime used only by their children, who played hop-
scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted them.
You wondered at its survival from end to end it must have
measured a good fifty yards in a district where every square
foot of ground fetched money; until you learned that the house
had belonged, in the twenties, to a nobleman who left a name
for eccentric profligacy, and who, as owner of the land, could
afford to indulge his humours. The estate since his death was
in no position to afford money for alterations, and the present
tenants of the house found the passage convenient enough.
My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and
doubling back noiselessly through the passage, I took up my
station beside the one low window which opened upon it from
the blank back premises of the house. Even with the glimmer
of snow to help me, I had to grope for the window-sill to make
The Room of Mirrors 99
sure of my bearings. The minutes crawled by, and the only
sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked
through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy
hoof upon the cobbles. Then, just as I too had begun to
shuffle my frozen feet, I heard a scratching sound, the unbolting
of a shutter, and Gervase drew up the sash softly.
'Nip inside!' he whispered. 'No more noise than you can
help. I have sent off the night porter. He tells me the
bank is still going in the front of the house half a dozen
playing, perhaps/
I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside. The wall
of this annexe which had no upper floor, and invited you to
mistake it for a harmless studio was merely a sheath, so to
speak. Within, a corridor divided it from the true wall of the
room: and this room had no window or top-light, though a
handsome one in the roof a dummy beguiled the eyes of its
neighbours.
There was but one room : an apartment of really fine pro-
portions, never used by the tenants of the house, and known
but to a few curious ones among its frequenters.
The story went that the late owner, Earl C , had reason
to believe himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends,
and in particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could
hardly be accused to his face. The Earl's sense of honour
forbade him to accuse any meaner man while the big culprit
went unrebuked. Therefore he continued to lose magnificently
while he devised a new room for play: the room into which
I now followed Gervase.
I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and
costly thoroughness of the Earl's rebuke. I had imagined him
conducting his expectant guests to the door, ushering them in
with a wave of the hand, and taking his seat tranquilly amid
the dead, embarrassed silence: had imagined him facing the
Royal Duke and asking: 'Shall we cut?' with a voice of the
politest inflection.
ioo The Room of Mirrors
For the room was a sheet of mirrors. Mirrors panelled the
walls, the doors, the very backs of the shutters. The tables
had mirrors for tops: the whole ceiling was one vast mirror.
From it depended three great candelabra of cut-glass, set with
reflectors here, there, and everywhere.
I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished
brass. If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and
sold them : for now a few cheap oriental rugs carpeted the un-
polished boards. The place was abominably dusty : the striped
yellow curtains had lost half their rings and drooped askew from
their soiled valances. Across one of the wall-panels ran an
ugly scar. A smell of rat pervaded the air. The present
occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to
games of chance, as they understood chance : and I doubt if a
servant entered it once a month. Gervase had ordered candles
and a fire : but the chimney was out of practice, and the smoke
wreathed itself slowly about us as we stood surrounded by the
ghostly company of our reflected selves.
'We shall not be disturbed,' said Gervase. 'I told the man
I was expecting a friend, that our business was private, and that
until he called I wished to be alone. I did not explain by what
entrance I expected him. The people in the front cannot hear
us. Have a cigar?' He pushed the open case towards me.
Then, as I drew back: 'You Ve no need to be scrupulous,' he
added, 'seeing that they were bought with your money.'
' If that 's so, I will,' said I ; and having chosen one struck a
match. Glancing round, I saw a hundred small flames spurt
up, and a hundred men hold them to a hundred glowing
cigar-tips,
'After you with the match.' Gervase took it from me with
a steady hand. He, too, glanced about him while he puffed.
'Ugh!' He blew a long cloud, and shivered within his furred
overcoat. 'What a gang!'
'It takes all sorts to make a world,' said I fatuously, for lack
of anything better.
The Room of Mirrors 101
'Don't be an infernal idiot!' he answered, flicking the dus
off one of the gilt chairs, and afterwards cleaning a space for hi!
elbow on the looking-glass table. 'It takes only two sorts tc
make the world we 've lived in, and that 's you and me.' He
gazed slowly round the walls. * You and me, and a few fellows
like us not to mention the women, who don't count.'
'Well,' said I, 'as far as the world goes if you must discuss
it I always found it a good enough place.'
'Because you started as an unconsidering fool: and because
afterwards, when we came to grips, you were the under-dog
and I gave you no time. My word how I have hustled you !
I yawned. ' All right : I can wait. Only if you suppose !
came here to listen to your moral reflections '
He pulled the cigar from between his teeth and looked a
me along it.
'I know perfectly well why you came here,' he said slowly
and paused. 'Hadn't we better have it out with the cards 01
the table ? ' He drew a small revolver from his pocket and lai(
it with a light clink on the table before him. I hesitated for \
moment, then followed his example, and the silent men aroune
us did the same.
A smile curled his thin lips as he observed this multiplie<
gesture. 'Yes,' he said, as if to himself, 'that is what it al
comes to.'
'And now,' said I, 'since you know my purpose here, perhap
you will tell me yours.'
'That is just what I am trying to explain. Only you are s<
impatient, and it well, it's a trifle complicated.' He puffe<
for a moment in silence. ' Roughly, it might be enough to sa;
that I saw you standing outside my house a while ago; that
needed a talk with you alone, in some private place; tha
I guessed, if you saw me, you would follow with no mon
invitation; and that, so reasoning, I led you here, where n<
one is likely to interrupt us/
'Well/ I admitted, 'all that seems plain sailing.'
IO2 The Room of Mirrors
' Quite so ; but it 's at this point the thing grows complicated/
He rose, and walking to the fire-place, turned his back on me
and spread his palms to the blaze. 'Well/ he asked, after a
moment, gazing into the mirror before him, 'why don't you
shoot?'
I thrust my hands into my trouser-pockets and leaned back
staring I dare say sulkily enough at the two revolvers
within grasp. 'I 've got my code,' I muttered.
'The code of these mirrors. You don't do the thing
because it's not the thing to do; because these fellows' he
waved a hand and the ghosts waved back at him 'don't do such
things, and you haven't the nerve to sin off your own bat.
Come' he strolled back to his seat and leaned towards me
across the table 'it 's not much to boast of, but at this eleventh
hour we must snatch what poor credit we can. You are, I
suppose, a more decent fellow for not having fired : and I
By the way, you did feel the temptation?'
I nodded. 'You may put your money on that. I never
see you without wanting to kill you. What 's more, I 'm
going to do it.'
'And I,' he said, 'knew the temptation and risked it. No:
let 's be honest about it. There was no risk : because, my good
sir, I know you to a hair.'
'There was,' I growled.
'Pardon me, there was none. I came here having a word
to say to you, and these mirrors have taught me how to say it.
Take a look at them the world we are leaving that 's it : and
a cursed second-hand, second-class one at that.'
He paced slowly round on it, slewing his body in the
chair.
'I say a second-class one,' he resumed, 'because, my dear
Reggie, when all 's said and done, we are second class, the pair
of us, and pretty bad second class. I met you first at .
Out fathers had money : they wished us to be gentlemen with-
out well understanding what it meant: and with unlimited
The Room of Mirrors 103
pocket-money and his wits about him any boy can make him-
self a power in a big school. That is what we did : towards
the end we even set the fashion for a certain set; and a rank bad
fashion it was. But, in truth, we had no business there: on
every point of breeding we were outsiders. I suspect it was a
glimmering consciousness of this that made us hate each other
from the first. We understood one another too well. Oh,
there 's no mistake about it! Whatever we Ve missed in life,
you and I have hated.'
He paused, eyeing me queerly. I kept my hands in my
pockets. 'Go on,' I said.
'From we went to College the same business over
again. We drifted, of course, into the same set; for already
we had become necessary to each other. We set the pace of
that set were its apparent leaders. But in truth we were alone
you and I as utterly alone as two. shipwrecked men on a raft.
The others were shadows to us : we followed their code because
we had to be gentlemen, but we did not understand it in the
least. For, after all, the roots of that code lay in the breeding
and tradition of honour, with which we had no concern. To
each other you and I were intelligible and real; but as con-
cerned that code and the men who followed it by right of
birth and nature, we were looking-glass men imitating
imitating imitating.'
'We set the pace,' said I. 'You Ve allowed that.'
'To be sure we did. We even modified the code a bit
to its hurt; though as conscious outsiders we could dare
very little. For instance, the talk of our associates about
women and no doubt their thoughts, too grew sensibly
baser. The sanctity of gambling debts, on the other hand, we
did nothing to impair: because we had money. I recall your
virtuous indignation at the amount of paper floated by poor
W towards the end of the great baccarat term. Poor
devil! He paid up or his father did and took his name off
the books. He 's in Ceylon now, I believe. At length you
IO4 The Room of Mirrors
have earned a partial right to sympathize: or would have, if
only you had paid up/
'Take care, Gervase!'
'My good sir, don't miss my point. Wasn't I just as indig-
nant with W ? If I 'd been warned off Newmarket Heath,
if I 'd been shown the door of the hell we 're sitting in, shouldn't
I feel just as you are feeling? Try to understand!'
'You forget Elaine, I think.'
'No: I do not forget Elaine. We left College: I to add
money to money in my father's office; you to display your
accomplishments in spending what your father had earned.
That was the extent of the difference. To both of us, money
and the indulgence it buys meant everything in life. All I can
boast of is the longer sight. The office-hours were a nuisance,
I admit: but I was clever enough to keep my hold on the old
set; and then, after office-hours, I met you constantly, and
studied and hated you studied you because I hated you.
Elaine came between us. You fell in love with her. That I,
too, should fall in love with her was no coincidence, but the
severest of logic. Given such a woman and two such men, no
other course of fate is conceivable. She made it necessary for
me to put hate into practice. If she had not offered herself,
why, then it would have been somebody else : that 's all. Good
Lord ! ' he rapped the table, and his voice rose for the first time
above its level tone of exposition : 'You don't suppose all my
study all my years of education were to be wasted ! '
He checked himself, eyed me again, and resumed in his
old voice:
'You wanted money by this time. I was a solicitor your
old college friend and you came to me. I knew you would
come, as surely as I knew you would not fire that pistol just
now. For years I had trained myself to look into your mind
and anticipate its working. Don't I tell you that from the first
you were the only real creature this world held for me? You
were my only book, and I had to learn you: at first without
The Room of Mirrors 105
fixed purpose, then deliberately. And when the time came I
put into practice what I knew: just that and no more. My
dear Reggie, you never had a chance/
'Elaine?' I muttered again.
'Elaine was the girl for you or for me: just that again and
no more.'
' By George ! ' said I, letting out a laugh. ' If I thought that ! '
'What?'
'Why, that after ruining me, you have missed being happy!'
He sighed impatiently, and his eyes, though he kept diem
fastened on mine, seemed to be tiring. 'I thought,' he said,
'I could time your intelligence over any fence. But to-night
there 's something wrong. Either I 'm out of practice or your
brain has been going to the deuce. What, man! You're
shying at every bank! Is it drink, hey? Or hunger?'
'It might be a little of both,' I answered. 'But stay a
moment and let me get things straight. I stood between you
and Elaine no, give me time between you and your aims,
whatever they were. Very well. You trod over me; or,
rather, you pulled me up by the roots and pitched me into outer
darkness to rot. And now it seems that, after all, you are not
content. In the devil's name, why?'
'Why? Oh, cannot you see? . . . Take a look at these
mirrors again our world, I tell you. See you and I you
and I always you and I! Man, I pitched you into darkness
as you say, and then I woke and knew the truth that you
were necessary to me.'
'Hey?'
'/ cant do -without you /' It broke from him in a cry. 'So
help me God, Reggie, it is the truth!'
I stared in his face for half a minute maybe, and broke out
laughing. 'Jeshurun waxed fat and turned sentimental! A
nice copy-book job you make of it, too!
Oh, send my brother back to me
I cannot play alone!
106 The Room of Mirrors
Perhaps you 'd like me to buy a broom and hire the crossing
in Lennox Gardens ? Then you 'd be able to contemplate me
all day long, and nourish your fine fat soul with delicate eating.
Pah! You make me sick/
'It 's the truth/ said he quietly.
'It may be. To me it looks a sight more like foie gras.
Can't do without me, can't you? Well, I can jolly well do
without you, and I 'm going to.'
'I warn you,' he said: *I have done you an injury or two
in my time, but by George if I stand up and let you shoot me
well, I hate you badly enough, but I won't let you do it
without fair warning.'
'I '11 risk it anyway,' said I.
'Very well.' He stood up, and folded his arms. 'Shoot,
then, and be hanged!'
I put out my hand to the revolver, hesitated, and with-
drew it.
'That 's not the way,' I said. 'I 've got my code, as I told
you before.'
'Does the code forbid suicide?' he asked.
'That 's a different thing.'
'Not at all. The man who commits suicide kills an unarmed
man.'
'But the unarmed man happens to be himself.'
'Suppose that in this instance your distinction won't work?
Look here,' he went on, as I pushed back my chair impatiently,
'I have one truth more for you. I swear I believe that what
we have hated, we two, is not each other, but ourselves or our
own likeness. I swear I believe we two have so shared natures
in hate that no power can untwist and separate them to render
each his own. But I swear also I believe that if you lift that
revolver to kill, you will take aim, not at me, but by instinct
at a worse enemy yourself, vital in my heart.'
'You have some pretty theories to-night,' I sneered. 'Per-
haps you 'II go on to tell me which of us two had been Elaine's
The Room of Mirrors 107
husband, feeding daintily in Lennox Gardens, clothed in purple
and fine linen, while the other '
He interrupted me by picking up his revolver and striding
to the fire-place again.
'So be it, since you will have it so. Kill me/ he added,
with a queer look, 'and perhaps you may go back to Lennox
Gardens and enjoy all these things in my place/
I took my station. Both revolvers were levelled now. I
took sight along mine at his detested face. It was white but
curiously eager hopeful even. I lowered my arm, scanning
his face still; and still scanning it, set my weapon down on
the table.
'I believe you are mad,' said I slowly. 'But one thing I see
that, mad or not, you 're in earnest. For some reason you
want me to kill you; therefore that shall wait. For some
reason it is torture to you to live and do without me : well, I '11
try you with that. It will do me good to hurt you a bit/
I slipped the revolver into my pocket and tapped it. 'Though
I don't understand them, I won't quarrel with your sentiments
so long as you suffer for them. When that fails, I '11 find another
opportunity for this. Good night/ I stepped to the door.
'Reggie!'
I shut the door on his cry : crossed the corridor, and climbing
out through the window, let myself drop into the lane.
As my feet touched the snow a revolver-shot rang out in the
room behind me.
I caught at the frozen sill to steady myself: and crouching
there, listened. Surely the report must have alarmed the house!
I waited for the sound of footsteps : waited for three minutes
perhaps longer. None came. To be sure, the room stood
well apart from the house : but it was incredible that the report
should have awakened no one! My own ears still rang with it.
Still no footsteps came. The horse in the stable close by was
still shuffling his hoof on the cobbles, no other sound. . . .
Very stealthily I hoisted myself up on the sill again, listened,
io8 The Room of Mirrors
dropped inside, and tiptoed my way to the door. The candles
were still burning in the Room of Mirrors. And by the light
of them, as I entered, Gervase stepped to meet me.
'Ah, it 's you/ 1 stammered. 'I heard that is, I thought '
And with that I saw recognized with a catch of the breath
that the figure I spoke to was not Gervase, but my own
reflected image, stepping forward with pale face and ghastly
from a mirror. Yet a moment before I could have sworn it
was Gervase.
Gervase lay stretched on the hearthrug with his hand towards
the fire. I caught up a candle, and bent over him. His
features were not to be recognized.
As I straightened myself up, with the candle in my hand,
for an instant those features, obliterated in the flesh, gazed at
me in a ring, a hundred times repeated behind a hundred candles.
And again, at a second glance, I saw that the face was not
Gervase's but my own.
I set down the candle and made ofF, closing the door behind
me. The horror of it held me by the hair, but I flung it off
and pelted down the lane and through the mews. Once in the
street I breathed again, pulled myself together, and set off at a
rapid walk, southwards, but not clearly knowing whither.
As a matter of fact, I took the line by which I had come :
with the single difference that I made straight into Berkeley
Square through Bruton Street. I had, I say, no clear purpose
in following this line rather than another. I had none for
taking Lennox Gardens on the way to my squalid lodgings in
Chelsea. I had a purpose, no doubt; but will swear it only
grew definite as I came in sight of the lamp still burning beneath
Gervase's portico.
There was a figure, too, under the lamp the butler
bending there and rolling up the strip of red carpet. As he
pulled its edges from the frozen snow I came on him suddenly.
'Oh, it's you, sir!' He stood erect, and with the air of a
man infinitely relieved.
The Room of Mirrors 109
'Gervase!'
The door opened wide and there stood Elaine in her ball-
gown, a-glitter with diamonds.
'Gervase, dear, where have you been? We have been
terribly anxious '
She said it, looking straight down on me on me who
stood in my tattered clothes in the full glare of the lamp. And
then I heard the butler catch his breath, and suddenly her voice
trailed off in wonder and pitiful disappointment.
'It's not Gervase! It's Reg Mr. Travers. I beg your
pardon. I thought '
But I passed up the steps and stood before her : and said, as
she drew back:
'There has been an accident. Gervase has shot himself/
I turned to the butler. 'You had better run to the police
station. Stay: take this revolver. It won't count anything
as evidence: but I ask you to examine it and make sure all the
chambers are loaded.'
A thud in the hall interrupted me. I ran in and knelt beside
Elaine, and as I stooped to lift her as my hand touched her
hair this was the jealous question on my lips :
'What has she to do with it. It is / who cannot do without
him who must miss him always!'
THE COLLABORATORS
OR, THE COMEDY THAT WROTE ITSELF: AS RELATED BY
G. A. RICHARDSON
How pleasant it is to have money, heigho !
How pleasant it is to have money!
sings (I think) Clough. Well, I had money, and more of it
than I felt any desire to spend; which is as much as any
reasonable man can want. My age was five-and-twenty, my
health good, my conscience moderately clean, and my appetite
excellent: I had fame in some degree, and a fair prospect of
adding to it: and I was unmarried. In later life a man may
seek marriage for its own sake, but at five-and-twenty he
marries against his will because he has fallen in love with a
woman ; and this had not yet happened to me. I was a bachelor,
and content to remain one.
To come to smaller matters The month was early June, the
weather perfect, the solitude of my own choosing, and my
posture comfortable enough to invite drowsiness. I had bathed
and, stretched supine in the shade of a high sand-bank, was
smoking the day's first cigarette. Behind me lay Ambleteuse;
before me the sea. On the edge of it, their shrill challenges
softened by the distance to music, a score of children played
with spades and buckets, innocently composing a hundred pretty
groups of brown legs, fluttered hair, bright frocks and jerseys,
and innocently conspiring with morning to put a spirit of youth
into the whole picture. Beyond them the blue sea flashed with
its own smiles, and the blue heaven over them with the glancing
wings of gulls. On this showing it is evident that I, George
Anthony Richardson, ought to have been happy; whereas, in
fact, Richardson was cheerful enough, but George Anthony
restless and ill-content: by reason that Richardson, remembering
no
The Collaborators in
the past, enjoyed by contrast the present, and knew himself to be
jolly well off; while George Anthony, likewise remembering
the past, felt gravely concerned for the future.
Let me explain. A year ago I had been a clerk in the Office
of the Local Government Board a detested calling with a
derisory stipend. It was all that a University education (a
second in Moderations and a third in Literae Humaniores) had
enabled me to win, and I stuck to it because I possessed no
patrimony and had no 'prospects' save one, which stood pre-
cariously on the favour of an uncle my mother's brother,
Major-General Allan Mclntosh, C.B. Now the General could
not be called ah indulgent man. He had retired from active
service to concentrate upon his kinsfolk those military gifts
which even on the wide plains of Hindostan had kept him the
terror of his country's foes and the bugbear of his own soldiery.
He had an iron sense of discipline and a passion for it; he
detested all forms of amusement; in religion he belonged to the
sect of the Peculiar People; and he owned a gloomy house
near the western end of the Cromwell Road, where he dwelt
and had for butler, valet, and factotum a Peculiar Person
named Trewlove.
In those days I found my chief recreation in the theatre ; and
by and by, when I essayed to write for it, and began to pester
managers with curtain-raisers, small vaudevilles, comic libretti
and the like, you will guess that in common prudence I called
myself by a nom de guerre. Dropping the 'Richardson,' I
signed my productions 'George Anthony,' and as 'George
Anthony' the playgoing public now discusses me. For some
while, I will confess, the precaution was superfluous, the
managers having apparently entered into league to ensure me
as much obscurity as I had any use for. But at length in an
unguarded moment the manager of the Duke of Cornwall's
Theatre (formerly the Euterpe) accepted a three-act farce. It
was poorly acted, yet for some reason it took the town. 'Larks
in Aspic, a Farcical Comedy by George Anthony/ ran for a
112 The Collaborators
solid three hundred nights ; and before it ceased my unsuspecting
uncle had closed his earthly career, leaving me with seventy
thousand pounds (the bulk of it invested in India Government
stock), the house in the Cromwell Road, and, lastly, in sacred
trust, his faithful body-servant, William John Trewlove.
Here let me pause to deplore man's weakness and the allure-
ment of splendid possessions. I had been happy enough in
my lodgings in Jermyn Street, and, thanks to Larks in Aspic,
they were decently furnished. At the prompting, surely, of
some malignant spirit, I exchanged them for a house too large
for me in a street too long for life, for my uncle's furniture (of
the Great Exhibition period), and for the unnecessary and
detested services of Trewlove.
This man enjoyed, by my uncle's will, an annuity of fifty
pounds. He had the look, too, of one who denied himself
small pleasures, not only on religious grounds, but because
they cost money. Somehow, I never doubted that he owned
a balance at the bank, or that, after a brief interval spent in
demonstrating that our ways were uncongenial, he would retire
on a competence and await translation to join my uncle in an
equal sky equal, that is, within the fence of the elect. But
not a bit of it! I had been adjured in the will to look after
him : and at first I supposed that he clung to me against inclina-
tion, from a conscientious resolve to give me every chance.
By and by, however, I grew aware of a change in him; or,
rather, of some internal disquiet, suppressed but volcanic,
working towards a change. Once or twice he staggered me
by answering some casual question in a tone which, to say the
least of it, suggested an ungainly attempt at facetiousness. A
look at his sepulchral face would reassure me, but did not clear
up the mystery. Something was amiss with Trewlove.
The horrid truth broke upon me one day as we discussed
the conduct of one of my two housemaids. Trewlove, return-
ing one evening (as I gathered) from a small rdunion of his
fellow-sectarians in the Earl's Court Road, had caught her in
The Collaborators 113
the act of exchanging railleries from an upper window with a
trooper in the 2nd Life Guards, and had reported her.
'Most unbecoming,' said I.
'Unwomanly,' said Trewlove, with a sudden contortion of
the face; 'unwomanly, sir! but ah, how like a woman!'
I stared at him for one wild moment, and turned abruptly to
the window. The rascal had flung a quotation at me out of
Larks in Aspic\ He knew, then! He had penetrated the dis-
guise of ' George Anthony,' and, worse still, he meant to forgive
it. His eye h^d conveyed a dreadful promise of complicity.
Almost I would have given worlds to know, and yet dared
not face it almost it had been essaying a wink!
I dismissed him with instructions not very coherent, I fear
to give the girl a talking-to, and sat down to think. How
long had he known? that was my first question, and in justice
to him it had to be considered: since, had he known and kept
the secret in my uncle's lifetime, beyond a doubt, and un-
pleasant as the thought might be, I was enormously his debtor.
That stern warrior's attitude towards the playhouse had ever
been uncompromising. Stalls, pit, and circles the very names
suggested Dantesque images and provided illustrations for many
a discourse. Themselves verbose, these discourses indicated
A Short Way with State-players, and it stood in no doubt that
the authorship of Larks in Aspic had only to be disclosed to
him to provide me with the shortest possible cut out of seventy
thousand pounds.
I might, and did, mentally consign Trewlove to all manner
of painful places, as, for instance, the bottom of the sea ; but
I could not will away this obligation. After cogitating for a
while I rang for him.
'Trewlove,' said I, 'you know, it seems, that I have written
a play.'
'Yessir! Larks in Aspic, sir.'
I winced. ' Since when have you known this ? '
The dog, I am sure, took the bearings of this question at
114 The Collaborators
once. But he laid his head on one side, and while he pulled
one whisker, as if ringing up the information, his eyes grew dull
and seemed to be withdrawing into visions of a far-away past.
'I have been many times to see it, Mr. George, and would be
hard put to it to specify the first occasion. But it was a
mattinay/
'That is not what I asked, Trewlove. I want to know when
you first suspected or satisfied yourself that I was the author/
'Oh, at once, sir! The style, if I may say so, was un-
mistakable : w-nimitable, sir, if I may take the libbaty/
'Excuse me,' I began, but he did not hear. He had passed
for the moment beyond decorum, and his eyes began to roll in a
manner expressive of inward rapture, but not pretty to watch.
'I had not listened to your talk, sir, in private life I had
not, as one might say, imbibed it for nothink. The General,
sir your lamented uncle had a flow: he would, if allowed,
and meaning no disrespect, talk the hind leg off a jackass ; but
I found him lacking in 'umour. Now you, Mr. George, 'ave
'umour. You 'ave not your uncle's flow, sir the Lord forbid !
But in give-and-take, as one might say, you are igstreamly droll.
On many occasions, sir, when you were extra sparkling I do
assure you it required pressure not to explode/
'I thank you, Trewlove,' said I coldly. 'But will you,
please, waive these unsolicited testimonials and answer my
question? Let me put it in another form. Was it in my
uncle's lifetime that you first witnessed my play?'
Trewlove's eyes ceased to roll, and, meeting mine, withdrew
themselves politely behind impenetrable mists. 'The General
sir, was opposed to theatre-going in toto; anathemum was no
word for what he thought of it. And if it had come to Larks in
Aspic , with your permission I will only say "Great Scot!"'
' I may take it then that you did not see the play and surprise
my secret until after his death?'
Trewlove drew himself up with fine reserve and dignity.
'There is such a thing, sir, I 'ope, as Libbaty of Conscience/
The Collaborators 115
With that I let him go. The colloquy had not only done me
no service, but had positively emboldened him or so I seemed
to perceive as the weeks went on in his efforts to cast off his
old slough and become a travesty of me, as he had been a
travesty of my uncle. I am willing to believe that they caused
him pain. A crust of habit so inveterate as his cannot be rent
without throes, to the severity of which his facial contortions
bore witness whenever he attempted a witticism. Warned by
them, I would sometimes admonish him.
'Mirth without vulgarity, Trewlove!'
' Yessir,' he would answer, and add with a sigh : 'It 's the best
sort, sir admittedly.'
But if painful to him, this metamorphosis was torture to my
nerves. I should explain that, flushed with the success of Larks
in Aspic, I had cheerfully engaged myself to provide the Duke
of Cornwall's with a play to succeed it. At the moment of
signing the contract, my bosom's lord had sat lightly on its
throne, for I felt my head to be humming with ideas. But
affluence, or the air of the Cromwell Road, seemed uncongenial
to the Muse.
Three months had slipped away. I had not written a line.
My ideas, which had seemed on the point of precipitation,
surrendering to some strange centrifugal eddy, slipped one by
one beyond grasp. I suppose every writer of experience knows
these vacant terrifying intervals; but they were strange to me
then, and I had not learnt the virtue of waiting. I grew
flurried, and saw myself doomed to be the writer of one play.
In this infirmity the daily presence of Trewlove became
intolerable. There arrived an evening when I found myself
toying with the knives at dinner, and wondering where precisely
lay the level of his fifth rib at the back of my chair.
I dropped the weapon and pushed forward my glass to be
refilled. 'Trewlove,' said I, 'you shall pack for me to-morrow,
and send off the servants on board wages. I need a holiday.
I I trust this will not be inconvenient to you?'
n6 The Collaborators
'I thank you, sir; not in the least/ He coughed, and I bent
my head, some instinct forewarning me.
'I shall be away for three months at least,' I put in quickly.
(Five minutes before I had not dreamed of leaving home.)
But the stroke was not to be averted. For months it had
been preparing.
'As for inconvenience, sir if I may remind you the course
of Trewlove never did '
'For three months at least,' I repeated, rapping sharply on
the table.
Next day I crossed the Channel and found myself at Amble-
teuse.
ii
I chose Ambleteuse because it was there that I had written the
greater part of Larks in Aspic. I went again to my old quarters
at Madame Peyron's. As before, I eschewed company, excur-
sions, all forms of violent exercise. I bathed, ate, drank, slept,
rambled along the sands, or lay on my back and stared at the
sky, smoking and inviting my soul. In short, I reproduced all
the old conditions. But in vain! At Ambleteuse, no less than
in London, the Muse either retreated before my advances, or,
when I sat still and waited, kept her distance, declining to
be coaxed.
Matters were really growing serious. Three weeks had
drifted by with not a line and scarcely an idea to show for them;
and the morning's post had brought me a letter from Cozens,
of the Duke of Cornwall's, begging for (at least) a scenario of
the new piece. My play (he said) would easily last this season
out; but he must reopen in the autumn with a new one, and in
short, weren't we beginning to run some risk?
I groaned, crushed the letter into my pocket, arid by an effort
of will put the tormenting question from me until after my
morning bath. But now the time was come to face it. I began
weakly by asking myself why the dickens I with enough for
The Collaborators 117
my needs had bound myself to write this thing within a given
time, at the risk of turning out inferior work. For that matter,
why should I write a comedy at all if I didn't want to? These
were reasonable questions, and yet they missed the point. The
point was that I had given my promise to Cozens, and that
Cozens depended on it. Useless to ask now why I had given
it! At the time I could have promised cheerfully to write him
three plays within as many months.
So full my head was then, and so empty now! A grotesque
and dreadful suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured
himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging
brains with him ? I laughed ; but I was unhinged. I had been
smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the
vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and the
pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off
personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions,
his bagginess at the knees, his mournful, pensile whiskers
This would never do! I must concentrate my mind on the
play. Let me see The title can wait. Two married
couples have just been examined at Dunmow, and awarded the
'historic* flitch for conjugal happiness. Call them A and
Mrs. A, B and Mrs. B. On returning to the hotel with their
trophies, it is discovered that B and Mrs. A are old flames, while
each finds a mistaken reason to suspect that A and Mrs. B have
also met years before, and at least dallied with courtship. Thus
while their spouses alternately rage with suspicion and invent
devices to conceal their own defaults, A and Mrs. B sit inno-
cently nursing their illusions and their symbolical flitches. The
situation holds plenty of comedy, and the main motive begins
to explain itself. Now then for anagnorisis, comic peripeteia,
division into acts, and the rest of the wallet!
I smoked another two cigarettes and flung away a third in
despair. Useless! The plaguy thing refused to take shape.
I sprang up and paced the sands, dogged by an invisible Cozens
piping thin reproaches above the hum of the breakers.
n8 The Collaborators
Suddenly I came to a halt. Why this play? Why expend
vain efforts on this particular complication when in a drawer at
home lay two acts of a comedy ready written, and the third and
final act sketched out? The burden of months broke its
straps and fell from me as I pondered. My Tenant was the
name of the thing, and I had thrust it aside only when the idea
of Larks in Aspic occurred to me not in any disgust. And
really, now, what I remembered of it seemed to me astonishingly
good!
I pulled out my watch ; and as I did so there flashed on me
ifi that sudden freakish way which the best ideas affect a new
and brilliant idea for the plot of My Tenant. The whole of the
third and concluding act spread itself instantaneously before me.
I knew then and there why the play had been laid aside. It had
waited for this, and it wanted only this. I held the thing now,
compact and tight, within my five fingers : as tight and compact
as the mechanism of the watch in my hand.
But why had I pulled out the watch? Because the manu-
script of My Tenant lay in the drawer of my writing-table in
the Cromwell Road, and I was calculating how quickly a
telegram would reach Trewlove with instructions to find and
forward it. Then I bethought me that the lock was a patent
one, and that I carried the key with me on my private key-
chain. Why should I not cross from Calais by the next boat
and recover my treasure? It would be the sooner in my
possession. I might be reading it again that very night in my
own home and testing my discovery. I might return with it
on the morrow that is, if I desired to return. After all,
Ambleteuse had failed me. In London I could shut myself up
and work at white heat. In London, too, I should be near
Cozens : a telegram would fetch him out to South Kensington
within the hour, to listen and approve. (I had no doubt of his
approval.) In London I should renew relations with the real
Trewlove the familiar, the absurd. I will not swear that for
the moment I thought of Trewlove at all : but he remained at
The Collaborators 119
the back of my mind, and at Calais I began the process of
precipitating him (so to speak) by a telegram advertising him of
my return, and requesting that my room might be prepared.
I had missed the midday boat, and reached Dover by the later
and slower one as the June night began to descend. From
Victoria I drove straight to my club, and snatched a supper of
cold meats in its half-lit dining-room. Twenty minutes later
I was in my hansom again and swiftly bowling westward
I say 'bowling* because it is the usual word, and I was in far
too fierce a hurry to think of a better.
I had dropped back upon London in the fastest whirl of the
season, and at the hour when all the world rolls homeward
from the theatres. Two hansoms raced with mine, and red
lights by the score dotted the noble slope of Piccadilly. To
the left the street-lamps flung splashes of theatrical green on the
sombre boughs of the Green Park. In one of the porticoes to
the right half a dozen guests lingered for a moment and laughed
together before taking their leave. One of them stood on the
topmost steps, lighting a cigarette: he carried his silk-lined
Inverness over his arm so sultry the night was and the ladies
wore but the slightest of wraps over their bright frocks and
jewels. One of them as we passed stepped forward, and I saw
her dismissing her brougham. A night for walking, thought
the party : and a fine night for sleeping out of doors, thought
the road-watchman close by, watching them and meditatively
smoking behind his barricade hung with danger - lanterns.
Overhead rode the round moon.
It is the fashion to cry down London, and I have taken my
part in the chorus; but always be the absence never so short
I come back to her with the same lift of the heart. Why
did I ever leave her? What had I gone a-seeking in Amble-
teuse ? a place where a man leaves his room only to carry his
writing-desk with him and plant it by the sea. London offered
the only true recreation. In London a man might turn the key
on himself and work for so long as it pleased him. But let
I2O The Collaborator
him emerge, and pf ! the jostle of the streets shook his head
clear of the whole stuffy business. No ; decidedly I would not
return to Madame Peyron's. London for me, until my comedy
should be written, down to the last word on the last page!
We were half-way down the Cromwell Road when I took
this resolution, and at once I was aware of a gathering of carriages
drawn up in a line ahead and close beside the pavement. At
intervals the carriages moved forward a few paces and the line
closed up ; but it stretched so far that I soon began to wonder
which of my neighbours could be entertaining on a scale so
magnificent.
'What number did you say, sir?' the cabman asked through
his trap.
'Number 402,' I called up.
* Blest if I can get alongside the pavement then,' he grumbled.
He was a surly man.
'Never mind that. Pull up opposite Number 402 and I '11
slip between. I 've only my bag to carry.'
'Didn't know folks was so gay in these outlyin' parts,' he
commented sourly, and closed the trap, but presently opened
i t again. His horse had dropped to a walk. ' Did you say
four-nought-two?' he asked.
'Oh, confound it yes!' I was growing impatient.
He pulled up and began to turn the horse's head.
' Hi ! What are you doing ? '
' Coin' back to the end of the line back to take our bloomin'
turn,* he answered wearily. 'Four-nought-two, you said
didn't you?'
' Yes, yes ; are you deaf? What have I to do with this crowd ? *
'I hain't deaf, but I got eyes. Four-nought-two 's where
the horning 's up, that 's all/
' The horning ? What 's that ? '
'Oh, I'm tired of egsplanations. A homing's a horning,
what they put up when they gives a party; leastways,' he added
jreflectively, Hi don't/
The Collaborators 121
'But there's no party at Number 402,' I insisted. 'The
thing 's impossible.'
'Very well, then; I 'm a liar, and that ends it.' He wheeled
again and began to walk his horse sullenly forward. "Go's
blind this time?' he demanded, coming to a standstill in from:
of the house.
An awning stretched down from the front door and across
the pavement, where two policemen guarded the alighting guests
from pressure by a small but highly curious crowd. Overhead,
the first-floor windows had been flung wide ; the rooms within
were aflame with light; and, as I grasped the rail of the splash-
board, and, straightening myself up, gazed over the cab-roof
with a wild surmise into the driver's face, a powerful but
invisible string band struck up the * Country Girl' Lancers!
' 'Oo 's a liar now ? ' He jerked his whip towards the number
'402* staring down at me from the illuminated pane above the
awning.
'But it 's my own house!' I gasped.
'Hoh?' said he. 'Well, it may be. / don't conteraddict.'
'Here, give me my bag!' I fumbled in my pocket for his
fare.
' Cook giving a party ? Well, you 're handy for the Wild
West out here good old Earl's Court!' He jerked his whip
again towards the awning as a North American Indian in full
war-paint passed up the steps and into the house, followed by
the applause of the crowd.
I must have overpaid the man extravagantly, for his tone
changed suddenly as he examined the coins in his hand. ' Look
here, guvnor, if you want any little 'elp, I was barman one
time at the "Elephant" '
But I caught up my bag, swung off the step, and, squeezing
between a horse's wet nose and the back of a brougham, gained
the pavement, where a red baize carpet divided the ranks of the
crowd.
'Hallo! ' One of the policemen put out a hand to detain me.
122 The Collaborators
'It's all right,' I assured him, 'I belong to the house.' It
seemed a safer explanation than that the house belonged to me.
'Is it the ices?' he asked.
But I ran up the porchway, eager to get to grips with
Trewlove.
On the threshold a young and extremely elegant footman
confronted me.
'Where is Trewlove?' I demanded.
The footman was glorious in a tasselled coat and knee-
breeches, both of bright blue. He wore his hair in powder,
and eyed me with suspicion if not with absolute disfavour.
'Where is Trewlove?' I repeated, dwelling fiercely on each
syllable.
The ass became lightly satirical. 'Well we may wonder/
said he; 'search the wide world over! But reely and truly
you 've come to the wrong 'ouse this time. Here, stand to one
side! ' he commanded, as a lady in the costume of the Pompadour,
followed by an Old English Gentleman with an anachronistic
Hebrew nose, swept past me into the hall. He bowed deferen-
tially while he mastered their names, 'Mr. and Mrs. Levi-Levy!'
he cried, and a second footman came forward to escort them up
the stairs. To convince myself that this was my own house
I stared hard at a bust of Havelock my late uncle's chief, and
for religious as well as military reasons his beau ideal of a
British warrior.
The young footman resumed. 'When you 've had a good
look round and seen all you want to see '
'I am Mr. Richardson,' I interrupted; 'and up to a few
minutes ago I supposed myself to be the owner of this house.
Here if you wish to assure yourself is my card.'
His face fell instantly, fell so completely and woefully that
I could not help feeling sorry for him. 'I beg pardon, sir
most 'umbly, I do indeed. You will do me the justice, sir
I had no idea, as per description, sir, being led to expect a
different kind of gentleman altogether.'
The Collaborators 123
'You had my telegram, then?'
'Telegram, sir?' He hesitated, searching his memory.
' Certainly a telegram sent by me at one o'clock this after-
noon, or thereabouts '
Here, with an apology, he left me to attend to a new arrival
a Yellow Dwarf with a decidedly music-hall manner, who
nudged him in the stomach and fell upon his neck exclaiming :
'My long-lost brother!'
'Cert'nly, sir. You will find the company upstairs, sir.'
The young man disengaged himself with admirable dignity and
turned again to me. 'A telegram did you say '
'Addressed to "Trewlove, 402, Cromwell Road.'"
'William!' He summoned another footman forward. 'This
gentleman is inquiring for a telegram sent here this afternoon,
addressed "Trewlove."'
'There was such a telegram,' said William. 'I heard Mr.
Horrex a-discussing of it in the pantry. The mistress took
the name for a telegraphic address, and sent it back to the
office, saying there must be some mistake.'
'But I sent it myself!'
'Indeed, sir?'
'It contained an order to get my room ready.'
'This gentleman is Mr. Richardson,' explained the younger
footman.
'Indeed, sir?' William's face brightened. 'In that case
there 's no 'arm done, for your room is ready, and I laid out
your dress myself. Mr. 'Erbert gave particular instructions
before going out.'
'Mr. Herbert?' I gazed around me blankly. Who in the
name of wonder was Mr. Herbert ?
'If you will allow me, sir,' suggested William, taking my bag,
while the other went back to his post.
'Thank you,' said I, 'but I know my own room, I hope.'
He shook his head. 'The mistress made some alterations at
the last moment, and you 're on the fourth floor over the street.
124 The Collaborators
Mr. 'Erbert's last words were that if you arrived before him I
was to 'ope you didn't mind being so near the roof.'
Well, of one thing at least I could be sure : I was in my own
house. For the rest, I might be Rip Van Winkle or the Sleeper
Awakened. Who was this lady called 'the mistress'? Who
was Mr. Herbert? How came they here? And deepest
mystery of all how came they to be expecting me ? Some
villainy of Trewlove's must be the clue of this tangle ; and,
holding to this clue, I resolved to follow whither fate might lead.
in
William lifted my bag and led the way. On the first landing,
where the doors stood open and the music went merrily to the
last figure of the Lancers, we had to pick our way through a
fantastic crowd which eyed me with polite curiosity. Couples
seated on the next flight drew aside to let us pass. But the
second landing was empty, and I halted for a moment at the
door of my own workroom, within which lay my precious
manuscript.
'This room is unoccupied?'
'Indeed, no, sir. The mistress considers it the cheerfullest
in the 'ouse.'
'Our tastes agree, then.'
'She had her bed moved in there the very first night.'
'Indeed?' I swung round on him hastily. 'By die by,
what is your mistress's name ? '
He drew back a pace and eyed me with some embarrassment.
'You '11 excuse me, sir, but that ain't quite a fair question as
between you and me.'
'No? I should have thought it innocent enough.'
' Of course, it 's a hopen secret, and you 're only askin* it to
try me. But so long as the mistress fancies a hincog '
'Lead on,' said I. 'You are an exemplary young man, and I,
too, am playing the game to the best of my lights/
The Collaborators 125
'Yes, sir/ He led me up to a room prepared for me with
candles lit, hot water ready, and bed neatly turned down. On
the bed lay the full costume of a Punchinello: striped stockings,
breeches with rosettes, tinselled coat with protuberant stomach
and hump, cocked hat, and all proper accessories even to a
false nose.
'Am I expected to get into these things?' I asked.
'If I can be of any assistance, sir '
'Thank you: no/ I handed him the key of my bag, flung
off coat and waistcoat, and sat down to unlace my boots. ' Your
mistress is in the drawing-room, I suppose, with her guests?'
'She is, sir/
'And Mr. Herbert?'
' Mr. 'Erbert was to have been 'ome by ten-thirty. He is
as you know, sir a little irregilar. But youth' William
arranged my brushes carefully 'youth must 'ave its fling.
Oh, he 's a caution ! ' A chuckle escaped him ; he checked it
and was instantly demure. Almost, indeed, he eyed me with
a look of rebuke. 'Anything more, sir?'
'Nothing more, thank you/
He withdrew. I thrust my feet into the dressing slippers he
had set out for me, and, dropping into an arm-chair, began to
take stock of the situation. 'The one thing certain,' I told
myself, 'is that Trewlove in my absence has let my house.
Therefore Trewlove is certainly an impudent scoundrel, and
any grand jury would bring in a true bill against him for a
swindler. My tenants are a lady whose servants may not reveal
her name, and a young man her husband perhaps described
as "a little irregilar." They are giving a large fancy-dress ball
below which seems to prove that, at any rate, they don't fear
publicity. And, further, although entire strangers to me, they
are expecting my arrival and have prepared a room. Now, why ? '
Here lay the real puzzle, and for some minutes I could make
nothing of it. Then I remembered my telegram. According
to William it had been referred back to the post office. But
126 The Collaborators
William on his own admission had but retailed pantry gossip
caught up from Mr. Horrex (presumably the butler). Had the
telegram been sent back unopened? William's statement left
this in doubt. Now supposing these people to be in league
with Trewlove, they might have opened the 'telegram, and,
finding to their consternation that I was already on the road
and an exposure inevitable, have ordered my room to be pre-
pared, trusting to throw themselves on my forgiveness, while
Trewlove lay in hiding or was fleeing from vengeance across
the high seas. Here was a possible explanation; but I will
admit that it seemed, on second thoughts, an unlikely one. An
irate landlord, returning unexpectedly and finding his house in
possession of unauthorized tenants catching them, moreover,
in the act of turning it upside-down with a fancy-dress ball
would naturally begin to be nasty on the doorstep. The idea
of placating him by a bedroom near the roof and the costume of
a Punchinello was too bold altogether, and relied too much on
his unproved fund of good nature. Moreover, Mr. Herbert
(whoever he might be) would not have treated the situation so
cavalierly. At the least (and however 'irregilar'), Mr. Herbert
would have been waiting to deprecate vengeance. A wild sus-
picion occurred to me that 'Mr. Herbert' might be another name
for Trewlove, and that Trewlove under that name was gaining
a short start from justice. But no: William had alluded to
Mr. Herbert as to a youth sowing his wild oats. Impossible
to contemplate Trewlove under this guise! Where then did
Trewlove come in? Was he, perchance, 'Mr. Horrex,' the
butler?
I gave it up and began thoughtfully, and not without difficulty,
to case myself in the disguise of Punchinello. I resolved to see
this thing through. The costume had evidently not been made
to my measure, and in the process of enduing it I paused once
or twice to speculate on the eccentricities of the figure to which
it had been shaped or the abstract anatomical knowledge of the
tailor who had shaped it. I declare that the hump seemed the
The Collaborators 127
one normal thing about it. But by this time my detective-
hunger not to call it a thirst for vengeance was asserting
itself above petty vanity. I squeezed myself into the costume;
and then, clapping on the false nose, stood arrayed as queer a
figure, surely, as ever was assumed by retributive Justice.
So, with a heart hardened by indignation and prepared for
the severest measures, I descended to the drawing-room landing.
Two doors opened upon it that of the drawing-room itself,
which faced over a terrace roofing the kitchens and across it to
a garden in the rear of the house, and that of a room over-
looking the street and scarcely less spacious. This had been the
deceased General's bedroom, and in indolence rather than
impiety I had left it unused with all its hideous furniture
including the camp-bed which his martial habits affected. And
this was the apartment I entered, curious to learn how it had
been converted into a reception-room for the throng which
now filled it.
I recognized only the wall-paper. The furniture had been
removed, the carpet taken up, the boards waxed to a high degree
of slipperiness ; and across the far end stretched a buffet-table
presided over by a venerable person in black, with white hair,
a high clear complexion, and a deportment which hit a nice
mean between the military and the episcopal.
I had scarcely time to tell myself that this must be Mr. Horrex >
before he looked up and caught sight of me. His features under-
went a sudden and astonishing change; and almost dropping a
bottle of champagne in his flurry, he came swiftly round the
end of the buffet towards me.
I knew not how to interpret his expression : surprise was in
it, and eagerness, and suppressed agitation, and an appeal for
secrecy, and at the same time (if I mistook not) a deep relief.
'I beg your pardon, sir/ he began, in a sort of confidential
whisper, very quick and low, 'but I was not aware you had
arrived/
I gazed at him with stern inquiry.
128 The Collaborators
'You are Mr. Richardson, are you not?' he asked. There
could be no doubt of his agitation.
'I am; and I have been in this, my house, for some three-
quarters of an hour/
'They never told me!' he groaned. 'And I left particular
instructions But perhaps you have already seen the
mistress?'
'I have not. May I ask you to take me to her since I have
not the pleasure of her acquaintance?'
'Cert'nly, sir. Oh, at once! She is in the drawing-room
putting the best face on it. Twice she has sent in to know
if you have arrived, and I sent word, "No, not yet," though
it cut me to the 'eart.'
'She is anxious to see me?'
'Desprit, sir.'
'She thinks to avoid exposure, then?' said I darkly, keeping
a set face.
'She 'opes, sir: she devoutly 'opes.' He groaned and led
the way. 'It may, after all, be a lesson to Mr. 'Erbert,' he
muttered as we reached the landing.
'I fancy it 's going to be a lesson to several of you.'
'The things we've 'ad to keep dark, sir the goings-on!'
'I can well believe it.'
'I was in some doubts about you, sir begging your pardon:
tut in spite of the dress, sir which gives a larky appearance,
if I may say it and doubtless is so meant you reassure me,
sir: you do indeed. I feel the worst is over. We can put
ourselves in your 'ands.'
'You have certainly done that,' said I. 'As for the worst
being over '
We were within the drawing-room by this time, and he
plucked me by the sleeve in his excitement, yet deferentially.
* Yonder is the mistress, sir in the yellow h'Empire satin
talking with the gentleman in sky-blue rationals. Ah, she
-sees you!'
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She did. And I read at once in her beautiful eyes that while
talking with her partner she had been watching the door for me.
She came towards me with an eager catch of the breath one
so very like a cry of relief that in the act of holding out her
hand she had to turn to the nearest guests and explain.
'It's Mr. Richardson "George Anthony," you know
who wrote Larks in Aspic\ I had set my heart on his coming,
and had almost given him up. Why are you so cruelly late?'
she demanded, turning her eyes on mine.
Her hand was still held out to me. I had meant to hold
myself up stiffly and decline it; but somehow I could not. She
was a woman, after all, and her look told me and me only
that she was in trouble. Also I knew her by face and by report.
I had seen her acting in more than one exceedingly stupid
musical comedy, and wondered why 'Clara Joy* condescended
to waste herself upon such inanities. I recalled certain notes
in her voice, certain moments when, in the midst of the service
of folly, she had seemed to isolate herself and stand watching,
aloof from the audience and her fellow-actors, almost pathetically
alone. Report said, too, that she was good, and that she had
domestic troubles, though it had not reached me what these
troubles were. Certainly she appeared altogether too good for
these third-rate guests for third rate they were to the most
casual eye. And the trouble, which signalled to me now in
her look, clearly and to my astonishment included no remorse
for having walked into a stranger's house and turned it upside-
down without so much as a by-your-leave. She claimed my
goodwill confidently, without any appeal to be forgiven. I held
my feelings under rein and took her hand.
As I released it she motioned me to give her my arm. 'I must
find you supper at once,' she said quietly, in a tone that warned
me not to decline. 'Not not in there; we will try the library
downstairs/
Down to the library I led her accordingly, and somehow was
aware by that supernumerary sense which works at times in
F
130 The Collaborators
the back of a man's head of Horrex discreetly following us.
At the library door she turned to him. 'When I ring/ she said.
He bowed and withdrew.
The room was empty and dark. She switched on the light
and nodded to me to close the door.
'Take that off, please/ she commanded.
*I beg your pardon? . . . Ah, to be sure: I had forgotten
my false nose/
'How did Herbert pick up with you?' she asked musingly.
'His friends are not usually so so '
'Respectable?' I suggested.
'I think I meant to say "presentable." They are never
respectable by any chance.'
'Then, happily, it still remains to be proved that I am one
of them.'
'He seems, at any rate, to reckon you high amongst them,
since he gave your name.'
'Gave my name? To whom?'
' Oh, I don't know to the magistrate or the policeman
or whoever it is. I have never been in a police cell myself,'
she added, with a small smile.
'Is Herbert, then, in a police cell?'
She nodded. 'At Vine Street. He wants to be bailed out.'
'What amount?'
'Himself in ten pounds and a friend in another ten. He gave
your name; and the policeman is waiting for the answer.'
'I see/ said I. 'But excuse me if I fail to see why, being
apparently so impatient to bail him out, you have waited for
me. To be sure (for reasons which are dark to me) he appears
to have given my name to the police; but we will put that riddle
aside for the moment. Any respectable citizen would have
served, with the money to back him. Why not have sent
Horrex, for example?'
'But I thought the the '
'Surety?' I suggested.
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'I thought he must be a householder. No/ she cried, as I
turned away with a slight shrug of the shoulder, ' that was not the
real reason! Herbert is oh, why will you force me to say it?'
'I beg your pardon/ said I. 'He is at certain times not too
tractable; Horrex, in particular, cannot be trusted to manage
him; and and in short you wish him released as soon as
possible, but not brought home to this house until your guests
have taken leave?'
She nodded at me with swimming eyes. She was passing
beautiful, more beautiful than I had thought.
'Yes, yes; you understand! And I thought that as his
friend and with your influence over him '
I pulled out my watchl 'Has Horrex a hansom in waiting?'
'A four-wheeler/ she corrected me. Our eyes met, and with
a great pity I read in hers that she knew only too well the
kind of cab suitable.
'Then let us have in die policeman. A four-wheeler will
be better, as you suggest, since with your leave I am going to
take Horrex with me. The fact is, I am a little in doubt as to
my influence : for to tell you the plain truth, I have never to my
knowledge set eyes on your husband.'
' My husband ? ' She paused with her hand on the bell-pull, and
gazed at me blankly. ' My husband ? ' She began to laugh softly,
uncannily, in a way that tore my heart. 'Herbert is my brother.'
'Oh!' said I, feeling pretty much of a fool.
'But what gave you what do you mean '
'Lord knows/ I interrupted her; 'but if you will tell Horrex
to get himself and the policeman into the cab, I will run upstairs,
dress, and join them in five minutes.'
IV
In five minutes I had donned my ordinary clothes again and,
descending through the pack of guests to the front door, found
a four-wheeler waiting, with Horrex inside and a policeman
whom, as I guessed, he had been drugging with strong waters
132 The Collaborators
for an hour past in some secluded chamber of the house. The
fellow was somnolent, and in sepulchral silence we journeyed
to Vine Street. There I chose to be conducted to the cell
alone, and Mr. Horrex, hearing my decision, said fervently,
'May you be rewarded for your goodness to me and mine!'
I discovered afterwards that he had a growing family of six
dependent on him, and think this must explain a gratefulness
which puzzled me at the time.
' He 's quieter this last half-hour/ said the police sergeant, un-
locking the cell and opening the door with extreme caution.
The light fell and my eyes rested on a sandy-haired youth
with a receding chin, a black eye, a crumpled shirt-front smeared
with blood, and a dress-suit split and soiled with much rolling
in the dust.
* Friend of yours, sir, to bail you out,' announced the sergeant
'I have no friends,' answered the prisoner in hollow tones.
'Who's this Johnny?'
'My name is Richardson,' I began.
'From the Grampian Hills? APri', old man; what can I do
for you?'
'Well, if you 've no objection, I 've come to bail you out.'
' Norra a bit of it. Go 'way : I want t' other Richardson,
good old larks-in-aspic! Sergeant '
'Yessir.'
'I protest you hear? protest in sacred name of law; case
of mish case of mistaken 'dentity. Not this Richardson
take him away! Don't blame you: common name. Richard-
son / want has whiskers down to here, tiddy-fol-ol ; calls 'em
"Piccadilly weepers." Can't mistake him. If at first you
don't succeed, try, try again.'
'Look here,' said I, 'just you listen to this; I 'm Richardson,
and I 'm here to bail you out.'
'Can't do it, old man; mean well, no doubt, but can't do it.
One may lead a horse to the water twenty can't bail him out.
Go 'way and don't fuss/
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I glanced at the sergeant. 'You '11 let me deal with him as
I like? 1 I asked.
He grinned. * Bless you, sir, we 're used to it. / ain't
listening.'
'Thank you.' I turned to the prisoner. 'Now, then, you
drunken little hog, stand up and walk,' said T, taking him by
the ear and keeping my left ready.
I suppose that the drink suddenly left him weak, for he stood
up at once.
' There 's some ho horrible mistake,' he began to whimper.
'But if the worst comes to the worst, you '11 adopt me, won't
you?'
Still holding him by the ear, I led him forth and flung him
into the cab, in a corner of which the trembling Horrex had
already huddled himself. He fell, indeed, across Horrex's knees,
and at once screamed aloud.
'Softly, softly, Master 'Erbert,' whispered the poor man
soothingly. 'It 's only poor old Horrex, that you 've known
since a boy.'
'Horrex?' Master Herbert straightened himself up. 'Do
I understand you to say, sir, that your name is Horrex ? Then
allow me to tell you, Horrex, that you are no gentleman. You
hear?' He spoke with anxious lucidity, leaning forward and
tapping the butler on the knee. 'No gentleman.'
'No, sir,' assented Horrex.
'That being the case, we '11 say no more about it. I decline
to argue with you. If you 're waking, call me early there 's
many a black, black eye, Horrex, but none so black as mine.
Call me at eleven-fifteen, bringing with you this gentleman's
blood in a bottle an 9 don't forget soda. Goo'-night, go
bye-bye. . . .'
By the fleeting light of a street-lamp I saw his head drop
forward, and a minute later he was gently snoring.
It was agreed that on reaching home Master Herbert must
be smuggled into the basement of No. 402 and put to rest on
134 The Collaborators
Horrex's own bed; also that, to avoid the line of carriages
waiting in the Cromwell Road for the departing guests, the cab
should take us round to the gardens at the back. I carried on
my chain a key which would admit us to these and unlock the
small gate between them and the kitchens. This plan of action
so delighted Horrex that for a moment I feared he was going
to clasp my hands.
'If it wasn't irreverent, sir, I could almost say you had
dropped on me from heaven!'
'You may alter your opinion,' said I grimly, 'before I've
done dropping.'
At the garden entrance we paid and dismissed the cab.
I took Master Herbert's shoulders and Horrex his heels, and
between us we carried his limp body across the turf a pro-
cession so suggestive of dark and secret tragedy that I blessed
our luck for protecting us from the casual intrusive policeman.
Our entrance by the kitchen passage, however, was not so
fortunate. Stealthily as we trod, our footsteps reached the ears
in the servants' hall, and we were met by William and a small
but compact body of female servants urging him to armed
resistance. A kitchen-maid fainted away as soon as we were
recognized, and the strain of terror relaxed.
I saw at once that Master Herbert's condition caused them no
surprise. We carried him to the servants' hall and laid him in
an arm-chair, to rest our arms, while the motherly cook lifted
his unconscious head to lay a pillow beneath it.
As she did so, a bell jangled furiously on the wall above.
'Good Lord!' Horrex turned a scared face up at it. 'The
library!'
'What 's the matter in the library?'
But he was gone: to reappear, a minute later, with a face
whiter than ever.
'The mistress wants you at on'st, sir, if you '11 follow me.
William, run out and see if you can raise another cab four-
wheeler.'
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'What, at this time of night?' answered William. 'Get
along with you!'
'Do your best, lad.' Mr. Horrex appealed gently but with
pathetic dignity. 'If there's miracles indoors there may be
miracles outside. This way, sir!'
He led me to the library door, knocked softly, opened it,
and stood aside for me to enter.
Within stood his mistress, confronting another policeman!
Her hands rested on the back of a library chair: and though
she stood up bravely and held herself erect with her finger-tips
pressed hard into the leather, I saw that she was swaying on the
verge of hysterics, and I had the sense to speak sharply.
'What 's the meaning of this?' I demanded.
'This one comes from Maryborough Street!' she gasped.
I stepped back to the door, opened it, and, as I expected,
discovered Horrex listening.
'A bottle of champagne and a glass at once,' I commanded,
and he sped. 'And now, Miss Joy, if you please, the constable
and I will do the talking. What 's your business, constable?'
' Prisoner wants bail, sir,' answered the policeman.
'Name?'
' George Anthony Richardson.'
'Yes, yes but I mean the prisoner's name.'
'That 's what I 'm telling you. "George Anthony Richard-
son, four-nought-two, Cromwell Road" that's the name on
the sheet, and I heard him give it myself.'
'And I thought, of course, it must be you,' put in Clara;
'and I wondered what dreadful thing could have happened
until Horrex appeared and told me you were safe, and
Herbert too '
'I think,' said I, going to the door again and taking the
tray from Horrex, 'that you were not to talk. Drink this,
please.'
She took the glass, but with a rebellious face. ' Oh, if you
take that tone with me '
136 The Collaborators
'I do. And now,' I turned to the constable, 'what name
did he give for his surety?'
'Herbert Jarmayne, same address.'
'Herbert Jarmayne?' I glanced at Clara, who nodded back,
pausing as she lifted her glass. 'Ah! yes yes, of course.
How much?'
'Two tenners.'
'Deep answering deep. Drunk and disorderly, I suppose?'
'Blind. He was breaking glasses at Toscano's and swearing
he was Sir Charles Wyndham in David Garrick : but he settled
down quiet at the station, and when I left he was talking religious
and saying he pitied nine-tenths of the world, for they were
going to get it hot.'
'Trewlove!' I almost shouted, wheeling round upon Clara.
'I beg your pardon?'
'No, of course you wouldn't understand. But all the same
it's Trewlove!' I cried, radiant. 'Eh?' this to Horrex,
mumbling in the doorway 'the cab outside? Step along,
constable : I '11 follow in a moment to identify your prisoner,
not to bail him out.' Then as he touched his helmet and
marched out after Horrex: 'By George, though! Trewlove!'
I muttered, meeting Clara's eye and laughing.
'So you've said,' she agreed doubtfully; 'but it seems a
funny sort of explanation.'
'It's as simple as A B C,' I assured her. 'The man at
Marlborough Street is the man who let you this house.'
'I took it through an agent.'
'I 'm delighted to hear it. Then the man at Marlborough
Street is the man for whom the agent let the house.'
'Then you are not Mr. Richardson not "George Anthony"
and you didn't write Larks in Aspic}' said she, with a
flattering shade of disappointment in her tone.
'Oh! yes, I did.'
'Then I don't understand in the least unless unless '
She put out two deprecating hands. 'You don't mean to tell
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me that this is your house, and we 've been living in it without
your knowledge! Oh! why didn't you tell me?'
'Come, I like that!' said I. 'You'll admit, on reflection,
that you haven't given me much time.'
But she stamped her foot. 'I '11 go upstairs and pack at
once,' she declared.
' That will hardly meet the case, I 'm afraid. You forget that
your brother is downstairs: and by his look, when I left him,
he '11 take a deal of packing.'
' Herbert ? ' She put a hand to her brow. ' I was forgetting.
Then you are not Herbert's friend after all?'
'I have made a beginning. But in fact, I made his acquain-
tance at Vine Street just now. Trewlove that 's my scoundrel
of a butler has been making up to him under my name.
They met at the house-agent's, probably. The rogue models
himself upon me: but when it comes to letting my house
By the way, have you paid him by cheque?'
'I paid the agent. I knew nothing of you until Herbert
announced that he 'd made your acquaintance '
'Pray go on,' said I, watching her troubled eyes. 'It would
be interesting to hear how he described me.'
* He used a very funny word. He said you were the rummiest
thing in platers he 'd struck for a long while. But, of course,
he was talking of the other man.'
'Of course,' said I gravely: whereupon our eyes met, and
we both laughed.
'Ah, but you are kind!' she cried. 'And when I think how
we have treated you if only I could think ' Her hand
went up again to her forehead.
'It will need some reparation,' said I. 'But we'll discuss
that when I come back.'
'Was was Herbert very bad?' She attempted to laugh,
but tears suddenly brimmed her eyes.
'I scarcely noticed,' said I; and, picking up my hat, went
out hurriedly.
138 The Collaborators
Trewlove in his Marlborough Street cell was a disgusting
object offensive to the eye and to one's sense of the dignity
of man. At sight of me he sprawled, and when the shock of
it was over he continued to grovel until the sight bred a shame
in me for being the cause of it. What made it ten times worse
was his curious insensibility even while he grovelled to the
moral aspect of his behaviour.
'You will lie here/ said I, 'until to-morrow morning, when
you will probably be fined fifty shillings and costs, plus the
cost of the broken glass at Toscano's. I take it for granted
that the money will be paid?'
'I will send, sir, to my lodgings for my cheque-book.'
'It's a trifling matter, no doubt; but since you will be
charged under the name of William John Trewlove, it will be
a mistake to put "G. A. Richardson" on the cheque.'
'It was an error of judgment, sir, my giving your name here.'
'It was a worse one,' I assured him, 'to append it to the
receipt for Miss Jarmayne's rent.'
'You don't intend to prosecute, Mr. George?'
'Why not?'
'But you don't, sir; something tells me that you don't.'
Well, in fact (as you may have guessed), I did not. I had
no desire to drag Miss Jarmayne into further trouble; but I
resented that the dog should count on my clemency without
knowing the reason of it.
'In justice to myself, sir, I 'ave to tell you that I shouldn't
'ave let the 'ouse to hanybody. It was only that, she being
connected with the stage, I saw a hopening. Mr. 'Erbert was,
as you might say, a hafterthought : which, finding him so affable,
I thought I might go one better. He cost me a pretty penny
first and last. But when he offered to introjuice me and me,
at his invite, going back to be put up at No. 402 like any other
gentleman why, 'ow could I resist it?'
The Collaborators 139
'If I forbear to have you arrested, Trewlove, it will be on
condition that you efface yourself. May I suggest some
foreign country, where, in a colony of the Peculiar People
unacquainted with your past '
'I 'm tired of them, sir. Their style of life don't suit me
nor yours I 've tried 'em both, and I give it up I 'm too late
to learn; but I '11 say this for it, it cures you of wantin' to go
back and be a Peculiar. Now, if you 've no objection, sir,
I thought of takin' a little public down Putney way.'
' You mean it ? ' asked Clara, a couple of hours later.
'I mean it,' said I.
'And I am to live on here alone as your tenant?'
'As my tenant, and so long as it pleases you.' I struck a
match to light her bedroom candle, and with that we both
laughed, for the June dawn was pouring down on us through
the stairway skylight.
'Shall I see you to-morrow, to say good-bye?'
'I expect not. We shall catch the first boat.'
'The question is, will you get Herbert awake in time to
explain matters?'
'I'll undertake that. Horrex has already packed for him.
Oh, you needn't fear: he'll be right enough at Ambleteuse,
under my eye.'
'It's good of you,' she said slowly; 'but why are you
doing it?'
' Can't say,' I answered lightly.
'Well, good-bye, and God bless you!' She put out her
hand. 'There's nothing I can say or do to '
' Oh, yes, by the way, there is/ I interrupted, tugging a key
off my chain. 'You see this? It unlocks the drawers of a
writing-table in your room. In the top left-hand drawer you
will find a bundle of papers.'
She passed up the stair before me and into the room. 'Is
140 The Collaborators
this what you want?' she asked, reappearing after a minute
with my manuscript in her hand. 'What is it? A new
comedy?'
'The makings of one/ said I. 'It was to fetch it that I came
across from Ambleteuse.'
'And dropped into another.'
'Upon my word/ said I, 'you are right, and to-night's is a
better one up to a point.'
'What are you going to call it?'
'My Tenant.'
For a moment she seemed to be puzzled. 'But I mean the
other,' said she, nodding towards the manuscript in my hand.
'Indeed, that is its name,' said I, and showed her the title
on the first page. 'And I 've a really splendid idea for the
third act,' I added as we shook hands.
I mounted the stairs to my room, tossed the manuscript into
a chair, and began to wind up my watch.
'But this other wants a third act too!' I told myself suddenly.
You will observe that once or twice in the course of this
narrative my pen has slipped and inadvertently called Miss
Jarmayne 'Clara.'
MATTHEW ARNOLD
I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and powerful genius,
but rather as a delightful and edifying genius. ... He is the most
prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the good of loving light.
Because he sincerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little
private darkness of his own, he found light. . . . And because he was
full of light he was also full of happiness. . . . His life was as charming
as his thoughts. For certainly it is natural that the love of light, which
is already in some measure the possession of light, should irradiate
and beatify the whole life of him who has it.
MANY a reader of Essays in Criticism must have paused
and in thought transferred to Matthew Arnold these words
of his in praise of Joubert, as well as the fine passage in which
he goes on to ask What, in literature, we mean by fame ? Only
two kinds of authors (he tells us) are secure of fame : the first
being the Homers, Dantes, Shakespeares, 'the great abiding
fountains of truth,' whose praise is for ever and ever. But
beside these sacred personages stand certain elect ones, less
majestic, yet to be recognized as of the same family and character
with the greatest, 'exercising like them an immortal function,
and like them inspiring a permanent interest.' The fame of
these also is assured. 'They will never, like the Shakespeares,
command the homage of the multitude; but they are safe; the
multitude will not trample them down.'
To this company Matthew Arnold belongs. We all feel it,
and some of us can give reasons for our confidence; but per-
haps, if all our reasons were collected, the feeling would be
found to reach deeper into certainty than any of them. He
was never popular, and never will be. Yet no one can say
that, although at one time he seemed to vie with the public in
distrusting it, his poetry missed its mark. On the other hand.
142 Matthew Arnold
while his critical writings had swift and almost instantaneous
effect for good, the repute they brought him was moderate and
largely made up of misconception. For the mass of his country-
men he came somehow to personify a number of things which
their minds vaguely associated with kid gloves, and by his
ironical way of playing with the misconception he did more
than a little to confirm it. But in truth Arnold was a serious
man who saw life as a serious business and chiefly relied, for
making the best of it, upon a serene common sense. He had
elegance, to be sure, and was inclined at any rate, in contro-
versy to be conscious of it; but it was elegance of that plain
Attic order to which common sense gives the law and almost
the inspiration. The man and the style were one. Alike in
his life and his writings he observed and preached the golden
mean, with a mind which was none the less English and practical
if, in expressing it, he deliberately and almost defiantly avoided
that emphasis which Englishmen love to a fault.
Matthew Arnold, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the
famous Head Master of Rugby, was born on Christmas Eve,
1822, at Laleham on the Thames, where his father at that time
taught private pupils. The child was barely six years old when
the family removed to Rugby, and at seven he returned to Lale-
ham to be taught by his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland. In
August, 1836, he proceeded to Winchester, but was removed
at the end of a year and entered Rugby, where he remained
until he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1841, with an
open scholarship. He had written a prize poem at Rugby
the subject, Alaric at Rome ; and on this performance he improved
by taking the Newdigate in 1843 the subject, Cromwell. But
we need waste no time on these exercises, which are of interest
only to people interested in such things. It is better worth
noting that the boy had been used to spending his holidays, and
now spent a great part of his vacations, at Fox How, near
Grasmere, a house which Dr. Arnold had taken to refresh his
eyes and his spirits after the monotonous ridge and furrow,
Matthew Arnold 143
field and hedgerow, around Rugby; and that, as Mr. Herbert
Paul puts it, young Matthew 'thus grew up under the shadow
of Wordsworth^ whose brilliant and penetrating interpreter he
was destined to become/ Genius collects early, and afterwards
distils from recollection; and if its spirit, like that of the
licentiate Pedro Garcias, is to be disinterred, he who would
find Matthew Arnold's must dig in and around Fox How and
Oxford.
At Oxford, which he loved passionately, he 'missed his first,'
but atoned for this, three months later, by winning a fellowship
at Oriel. (This was in 1844-5. His father had died in 1842.)
He stayed up, however, but a short while after taking his degree :
went back to Rugby as an assistant master; relinquished this in
1847 to become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, then
President of the Council; and was by him appointed in 1851
to an Inspectorship of Schools, which he retained for five-and-
thirty years. In 1851, too, he married Frances Lucy Wight-
man, daughter of a Judge of the Queen's Bench; and so settled
down at the same time to domestic happiness and to daily work
which, if dull sometimes, was not altogether ungrateful as it was
never less than conscientiously performed.
Meanwhile, in 1849, he had put forth a thin volume, The
Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A\ which was followed
in 1852 by Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems, by A. In
1853 he dropped anonymity and under the title Poems, by
Matthew Arnold republished the contents of these two volumes,
omitting Empedocles, with a few minor pieces, and adding some
priceless things, such as Sohrab and Rustum, The Church of
Brou, Requiescat, and The Scholar-Gipsy.
'It was received, we believe, with general indifference,' wrote
Mr. Froude of the first volume, in The Westminster Review,
1854. We need not trouble to explain the fact, beyond saying
that English criticism was just then at about the lowest ebb it
reached in the last century, and that the few capable ears were
occupied by the far more confident voice of Tennyson and the
144 Matthew Arnold
far more disconcerting one of Browning: but the fact sur-
prising when all allowance has been made must be noted, for
it is important to remember that the most and best of Arnold's
poetry was written before he gained the world's ear, and that
he gained it not as a poet but as a critic. In 1855 appeared
Poems by Matthew Arnold, Second Series, of which only Balder
Dead and Separation were new; and in 1858 Merope with its
Preface: but in the interval between them he had been elected
Professor of Poetry at Oxford (May 1857).
The steps by which a reputation grows, the precise moment
at which it becomes established, are often difficult to trace and
fix. The poems, negligently though they had been received at
first, must have helped : and, since men who improve an office
are themselves usually improved by it, assuredly the professor-
ship helped too. The lectures on Homer which adorned
Arnold's first tenure of the Chair strike a new note of criticism,
speak with a growing undertone of authority beneath their
modest professions, and would suffice to explain if mere
custom did not even more easily explain why in 1862 he
was re-elected for another five years. But before 1865, no
doubt, the judicious who knew him had tested him by
more than his lectures, and were prepared for Essays in
Criticism.
Although we are mainly concerned here with the poems, a
word must be said on Essays in Criticism, which Mr. Paul pro-
nounces to be 'Mr. Arnold's most important work in prose, the
central book, so to speak, of his life.' Mr. Saintsbury calls it
"the first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression
and illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed
manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one
of the epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in
English' and on this subject Mr. Saintsbury has a peculiar
right to be heard.
Now for a book to be 'epoch-making' it must bring to its
age something which its age conspicuously lacks: and Essays
Matthew Arnold 145
in Criticism did this. No one remembering what Dryden did,
and Johnson, and Coleridge, and Lamb, and Hazlitt, will pre-
tend that Arnold invented English criticism, or that he did well
what these men had done ill. What he did, and they missed
doing, was to treat criticism as a deliberate disinterested art,
with laws and methods of its own, a proper temper, and certain
standards or touchstones of right taste by which the quality of
any writing, as literature, could be tested. In other words he
introduced authority and, with authority, responsibility, into a
business which had hitherto been practised at the best by
brilliant nonconformists and at the worst by Quarterly Reviewers,
who, taking for their motto Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur^
either forgot or never surmised that to punish the guilty can be
but a corollary of a higher obligation to discover the truth.
Nor can any one now read the literature of that period without
a sense that Arnold's teaching was indispensably needed just
then. A page of Macaulay or of Carlyle dazzles us with its
rhetoric; strikes, arrests, excites us with a number of things
tellingly put and in ways we had scarcely guessed to be possible;
but it no longer convinces. It does not even dispose us to be
convinced, since (to put it vulgarly) we feel that the author
'is not out after* truth; that Macaulay's William III is a figure
dressed up and adjusted to prove Macaulay's thesis, and that
the France of Carlyle's French Revolution not only never existed
but, had it ever existed, would not be France. Arnold helping
us, we see these failures for surely that history is a failure
which, like Cremorne, will not bear the daylight to be in-
evitable in a republic of letters where laws are not and wherein
each author writes at the top of his own bent, indulging and
exploiting his personal eccentricity to the fullest. It has prob-
ably been the salvation of our literature that in the fourteenth
tontury the Latin prevailed over the Anglo-Saxon line of its
descent, and that in the forming of our verse as well as of our
prose we had, at the critical moments, the literatures of Latin
races, Italian or French, for models and correctives; as it was
146 Matthew Arnold
the misfortune of the Victorian period before 1865 that its men
of genius wrote with eyes turned inward upon themselves or,
if outward, upon that German literature which, for all its great
qualities, must ever be dangerous to Englishmen because it
flatters and encourages their special faults. 1
Of Arnold from 1865 onward of the books in which he
enforced rather than developed his critical method (for all the
gist of it may be found in Essays in Criticism) of his incursions
into the fields of politics and theology much might be written,
but it would not be germane to our purpose. New Poems,
including Bacchanalia, or the New Age, Dover Beach, and the
beautiful Thyrsis, appeared in 1867; and thereafter for the last
twenty years of his life he wrote very little in verse, though the
fine Westminster Abbey proved that the Muse had not died in
him. He used his hold upon the public ear to preach some
sermons which, as a good citizen, he thought the nation needed.
In his hard-working official life he rendered services which those
of us who engage in the work of English education are constantly
and gratefully recognizing in their effects; and we still toil in
the wake of his ideals. He retired in November, 1886. He
died on April i5th, 1888, of heart failure: he had gone to
Liverpool to meet his eldest daughter on her return from the
United States, and there, in running to catch a tram-car, he fell
and died in a moment. He was sixty-five, but in appearance
carried his years lightly. He looked, and was, a distinguished
and agreeable man. Of good presence and fine manners; per-
fect in his domestic relations, genial in company and radiating
cheerfulness; setting a high aim to his official work yet ever
conscientious in details; he stands (apart from his literary
achievement) as an example of the Englishman at his best. He
cultivated this best deliberately. His daily note-books were
filled with quotations, high thoughts characteristically chosen
and jotted down to be borne in mind ; and some of these such
1 That Matthew Arnold himself over-valued contemporary German
literature does not really affect our argument.
Matthew Arnold 147
as Semper aliquid certi proponendum est and Ecce labora et noli
contristari! recur again and again. But the result owed its
amiability also to that * timely relaxation' counselled by
Milton :
To measure life, learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way ;
For other things mild Heav'n a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.
To those, then, who tell us that Arnold's poetic period was
brief, and imply that it was therefore disappointing, we might
answer that this is but testimony to the perfect development of
a life which in due season used poetry and at the due hour cast
it away, to proceed to things more practical. But this would
be to err almost as deeply as those who tell us that Arnold, as
he himself said of Gray, 'never spoke out' whereas Arnold
habitually spoke out, and now and then even too insistently.
Again it would be a mistake for us to apply to him au pied de
la lettre the over-sad verses:
Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock, and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount,
The fount which shall not flow again.
The man mature with labour chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanish'd out of hand.
And then the old man totters nigh,
And feebly rakes among the stones.
The mount is mute, the channel dry;
And down he lays his weary bones.
148 Matthew Arnold
Yet it were stupid not to recognize that here is contained a cer-
tain amount of general truth and of truth particularly applicable
to Arnold. 'The poet/ Mr. Saintsbury writes of him (and it
sums up the matter), 'has in him a vein, or, if the metaphor be
preferred, a spring, of the most real and rarest poetry. But the
vein is constantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the
spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only/ Else-
where Mr. Saintsbury speaks of his 'elaborate assumption of
the singing-robe,' a phrase very happily critical. Arnold felt
no man more deeply the majesty of the poet's function: he
solemnly attired himself to perform it: but the singing-robe
was not his daily wear. The ample pall in which Tennyson
swept, his life through, as to the manner born ; the stiffer skirts
in which Wordsworth walked so complacently; these would
have intolerably cumbered the man who protested that even
the title of Professor made him uneasy. Wordsworth and
Tennyson were bards, authentic and unashamed; whereas in
Arnold, as Sir William Watson has noted,
Something of worldling mingled still
With bard and sage.
There was never a finer worldling than Matthew Arnold: but
the criticism is just.
The critics, while noting this, have missed something which
to us seems to explain much in Arnold's verse. We said just
now that English literature has been fortunate in what it owes
to the Latin races ; we may add that it has been most fortunate
in going to Italy for instruction in its verse, to France for in-
struction in its prose. This will be denied by no one who has
studied Elizabethan poetry or the prose of the 'Augustan* age:
and as little will any one who has studied the structure of poetry
deny that Italy is the natural, France the unnatural, school for
an English poet. The reason is not that we understand Italian
better than French history and with more sympathy though
Matthew Arnold 149
this, too, scarcely admits of dispute; nor again that the past of
Italy appeals to emotions of which poetry is the consecrated
language. It lies in the very structure and play of the lan-
guage; so that an Englishman who has but learnt how to pro-
nounce the Italian vowels can read Italian poetry passably.
The accent comes to him at once ; the lack of accent in French
remains foreign after many months of study. Now although
Arnold was no great admirer of French poetry (and indeed had
a particular dislike for the Alexandrine), France was, to him,
among modern nations, the heir of those classical qualities which
differentiate the Greek from the barbarian, and his poetry seems
ever to be striving to reproduce the Greek note through verse
subdued to a French flatness of tone, as though (to borrow a
metaphor from another art) its secret lay in low relief. But an
English poet fighting against emphasis is as a man fighting
water with a broom: and an English poet, striving to be un-
emphatic, must yet contrive to be various, or he is naught.
Successfully as he managed his prose, when he desired it to be
emphatic Arnold had, in default of our native methods of
emphasis, to fall back upon that simple repetition which irritates
so many readers. In his poetry the devices are yet more clumsy.
We suppose that no English poet before or since has so cruelly
overworked the interjection 'Ah!' But far worse than any
number of *ah!V is Arnold's trick of italic type:
How / bewail you ! . . .
We mortal millions live alone . .
In the rustling night-air comes the answer :
' Wouldst thou be as these are ? Live as they ! ' . . .
a device almost unpardonable in poetry. So when he would
give us variety, as in Tristram and Iseult, Arnold has no
better resource than frequent change of metre: and although
1 50 Matthew Arnold
every reader must have felt the effect of that sudden fine
outburst
What voices are these on the clear night-air ?
What lights in the court what steps on the stair? . . .
yet some must also have reflected that the great masters, having
to tell a story, choose their one metre and, having chosen, so
adapt and handle it that it tells all. Sohrab and Rustum indeed
tells itself perfectly, from its first line to its noble close. But
Sohrab and Rustum is, and professes to be, an episode. Balder
is little more, and most readers find Balder, in spite of its fine
passages and general dignity, long enough. Arnold let it be
repeated was not a bard: not a Muse-intoxicated man. He
had not the bardic, the architectonic, gift. * Something of the
worldling* in him forbade any such fervour as, sustained day
after day for years, gave the world Paradise Lost, and inci-
dentally, no doubt, made Milton's daughters regret at times
that their father was not as ordinary men.
Nor had Arnold an impeccable ear for rhyme (in The New
Sirens, for instance, he rhymes 'dawning* with 'morning*) : and
if we hesitate to follow the many who have doubted his ear for
rhythm, it is not for lack of apparently good evidence, but
because some of his rhythms which used to give us pause have
come, upon longer acquaintance, to fascinate us: and the ex-
planation may be, as we have hinted, that they follow the
French rather than the Italian use of accent, and are strange to
us rather than in themselves unmusical. Certainly the critics
who would have us believe that The Strayed Reveller is an
unmusical poem will not at this time of day persuade us by
the process of taking a stanza or two and writing them down
in the form of prose. We could do the same with a dozen
lines of The Tempest or Antony and Cleopatra, were it worth
doing; and prove just as much, or as little.
Something of Arnold's own theory of poetry may be extracted
from the prefaces of 1853 an d 1854. They contain, like the
Matthew Arnold 151
prefaces of Dryden and of Wordsworth, much wisdom ; but the
world, perhaps even more wisely, refuses to judge a poet by his
theory, which (however admirable) seldom yields up his secret.
Yet Arnold had a considered view of what the poet should
attempt and what avoid ; and that he followed it would remain
certain although much evidence were accumulated to prove that
he who denounced 'poetry's eternal enemy, Caprice,' could him-
self be, on occasion, capricious. He leaves the impression that
he wrote with difficulty; his raptures, though he knew rapture,
are infrequent. But through all his work there runs a strain of
serious elevated thought, and on it all there rests an air of
composure equally serious and elevated a trifle statuesque,
perhaps, but by no means deficient in feeling. No one can
read, say, the closing lines of Mycennus and fail to perceive
these qualities. No one can read any considerable portion of
his work and deny that they are characteristic. Nor, we think,
can any one study the poetry of 1850 and thereabouts without
being forced to admit that it needed these qualities of thoughtful-
ness and composure which Arnold brought to it. He has been
criticized for discovering in Tennyson a certain 'deficiency in
intellectual power.' But is he by this time alone in that dis-
covery? And if no lack of thoughtfulness can be charged
against Browning as it cannot is not Browning violent, un-
chastened, far too often energetic for energy's sake? Be it
granted that Arnold in poetical strength was no match for these
champions: yet he brought to literature, and in a happy hour,
that which they lacked, insisting by the example of his verse,
as well as by the precepts of his criticism, that before anything
becomes literature it must observe two conditions it must be
worth saying, and it must be worthily written.
Also he continued, if with a difference, that noble Words-
worthian tradition which stood in some danger of perishing
chiefly, we think, beneath the accumulation of rubbish piled
upon it by its own author during his later years. That which
Matthew Arnold disinterred and repolished may have been but
152 Matthew Arnold
a fragment. His page has not, says Mr. Watson, 'the deep,
authentic mountain- thrill/ We grant that Arnold's feeling for
Nature has not the Wordsworthian depth: but so far as it
penetrates it is genuine. Lines such as
While the deep-burnish'd foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon . . .
may owe their felicity to phrase rather than to feeling. The
Mediterranean landscape in A Southern Night may seem almost
too exquisitely elaborated. Yet who can think of Arnold's
poetry as a whole without feeling that Nature is always behind
it as a living background ? whether it be the storm of wind
and rain shaking Tintagel
I forgot, thou comest from thy voyage
Yes, the spray is on thy cloak and hair . . .
or the scent-laden water-meadows along Thames, or the pine
forests on the flank of Etna, or an English garden in June, or
Oxus, its mists and fens and 'the hush'd Chorasmian waste/
If Arnold's love of natural beauty have not those moments of
piercing apprehension which in his master's poetry seem to break
through dullness into the very heaven : if he have not that secret
which Wordsworth must have learnt upon the Cumbrian
mountains, from moments when the clouds drift apart and the
surprised climber sees all Windermere, all Derwentwater,
shining at his feet ; if on the other hand his philosophy of life,
rounded and complete, seem none too hopeful, but call man back
from eager speculations which man will never resign : if it repress,
where Browning encouraged, our quest after
Thoughts hardly to be pack'd
WitKin the narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped . . .
yet his sense of atmosphere, of background, of the great stage
on which man plays his part, gives Arnold's teaching a wonder-
ful comprehension, within its range. 'This,' we say, 'is poetry
Matthew Arnold 153
we can trust, not to flatter us, but to sustain, console/ If the
reader mistake it for the last word on life his trust in it will be
illusory. It brings rather that
lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast ;
And then . . .
^if after protesting against italics in poetry we may italicize
ivhere, for once, Arnold missed the opportunity)
he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
CARMEN HELLESTONIENSE
Ann. MCMVI1 in F lor alia Compositum *
CONFITEMINI, O molles
agni humilesque colles,
hodie cur exultetis :
tu praesertim, magnum Mare,
fac me certiorem quare
baud dedignas crura dare
hiphoorariis in fretis ?
Venit annus, venit mensis,
cum Praefectus Londinensis
red it in paterna rura :
quem advenientem gratu-
latur urbs in commeatu
tympanis et aeris flatu :
Ergo (aiunt) damus crura.
Venit mensis, venit dies,
Hellestoniensis quies
ruit in immensum sonum:
foris, foras, turn in forum
per praesepia caballorum 2
ducimus antiquum chorum
O qua musica trombonum!
1 Welcoming Sir William Purdie Treloar, Bart., Lord Mayor of London,
to his ancestral town of Helston in Cornwall, 8th May 1907, when he took
part in the * Furry* or Feast of Flora annually held on that day. The
inhabitants go out early to the fields to gather flowers and green branches,
and returning dance through the streets and houses, in and out of the
open doors. Q.
1 The festivities include a horse show. Q.
154
Carmen Hellestoniense 155
Venit dies, venit hora,
venit et solennis Flora
mane quae postridie nonas
Maias lucens exoptata
nos e portis, nos in prata
margaritis constellata
vocat nectere coronas.
Ambarvales prorsus retro
(Locuples in curru petro-
lensl, Lazarus in pannis)
Maiae praedum reportantes
irruamus corybantes
te nostratem salutantes
'Macte tu redi quotannis!*
Eja collis cum agnello
Cantat 'He 's a jolly good fellow!'
id quod nemo denegare
audet: 'mos est hie, ut malis,
Militaris vel Navalis,
hunc et Studii Generalis,
proles solet celebrare ! *
Tuque nostras, Anglicanae
Urbis Metropolitanae
et tutamen et decor,
terram repetitam unde
partus es ter pede tunde,
Vir honorificabunde
Gulielme P. Treloar!
COLERIDGE
THE story of Coleridge's life is hard to write and, in a sense,
even harder to read : hard to write because the innumerable
lapses, infirmities, defections of the will, all claiming as facts
to be chronicled, cannot but obscure that lovable living
presence to which all his contemporaries bore witness and to
which the biographer must hold fast or his portrait misses most
that is true and essential ; and hard to read because the reader,
at the hundredth instance of Coleridge's taking the wrong
coach, or forgetting to write to his wife and family, or accepting
money and neglecting the conditions on which it was bestowed,
is apt to let Christian charity go to the winds, and so on his
part, too, to miss, nor care that he misses, the better Coleridge
which is the real Coleridge, the affectionate forgiving Coleridge,
so anxious to cure his faults, so eager to make people see, so
childlike and yet condemned to sit
obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind.
The story not only exasperates the temper; it dodges the
understanding, and leaves even the patient reader in such
bewilderment as, no doubt, afflicted the much-enduring Odysseus
after a third attempt to embrace his mother in the Shades. For
Providence (as De Quincey put it) set 'perpetual relays* along
Coleridge's path through life. We pursue the man and come
up with group after group of his friends: and each, as we
demand, 'What have you done with Coleridge?' answers,
'Coleridge? That wonderful fellow? ... He was here just
now, and we helped him forward a little way.'
The late James Dykes Campbell (to whose Life of Coleridge
156
Coleridge 157
the reader is referred) took up his task with enthusiasm and
performed it with astonishing success. He honoured the poet's
memory a little 'on this side idolatry/ Yet as we follow his
condensed narrative we feel the growth of misgivings in the
writer's mind, and at the close he has to make a clean breast of
them. 'If/ says he, 'my presentment of what I believe to be
the truth be not found to tend, on the whole, to raise Coleridge
in the eyes of men, I shall, I confess, feel both surprised and
disappointed/
I am sure that the temple, with all the rubble which blended with
its marble, must have been a grander whole than any we are able to
reconstruct for ourselves from the stones which lie about the field.
The living Coleridge was ever his own apology men and women
who neither shared nor ignored his shortcomings, not only loved him
but honoured and followed him. This power of attraction, which
might almost be called universal, so diverse were the minds and
.natures attracted, is itself conclusive proof of very rare qualities.
We may read and re-read his life, but we cannot know him as the
Lambs, or the Wordsworths, or Poole, or Hookham Frere, or the
Gillmans, or Green knew him. Hatred as well as love may be blind,
but friendship has eyes, and their testimony may wisely be used in
correcting our own impressions.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, at
the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, the youngest of
nine sons by a second marriage. His father, die Reverend John
Coleridge, was an amiable, absent-minded scholar, and apparently
somewhat unpractical. We are told that he printed several
books by subscription, and he tried to improve the Latin
grammars in use by calling the ablative case the 'quale-quare-
quidditive.' He died in 1781, and a few months later young
Samuel obtained a presentation to Christ's Hospital.
The school and the Coleridge of those days were afterwards
depicted in imperishable colours by Charles Lamb, who, though
Coleridge's junior by two years, had become a Blue-coat boy
some months earlier. In Chris? s Hospital Five-and-Thirty
158 Coleridge
Years Ago, by one of those tricks which were dear to him and
endear him to us, Lamb professedly supplements his own
Recollections of Christ's Hospital with the recollections of a lad
not fortunate like him in having a home and parents near.
I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should
care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which
they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little
forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first
arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed
to them to recur too often, though I found them few enough; and,
one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among
six hundred playmates.
O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead!
The yearnings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged
years ! How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west)
come back, with its church, and trees, and faces ! How I would wake
weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne
in Wiltshire!
The child is Coleridge, of course, and sweet Calne in Wilt-
shire is sweet Ottery in Devon, disguised. Of course Coleridge
felt this loneliness : a nature so sensitive could not help feeling
it; and sixteen years later in Frost at Midnight he feelingly re-
called it, and promised his own child a happier fate. But,
equally of course, he did not feel it all the time. His earliest
letters contain allusions to half-crowns and 'a plumb cake,' and
in due course, as he grows up, the theme changes naturally to
raiment. 'You will excuse me for reminding you that, as our
holidays commence next week, and I shall go out a good deal,
a good pair of breeches will be no inconsiderable accession
to my appearance,' the pair in use being *not altogether well
adapted for a female eye.'
In due course, too, he became a Grecian, fell in love and
wrote boyish poetry: and both the love-making and the versify-
ing, though no great matters at the time, were destined to have
more formidable consequences than usually attach themselves to
Coleridge 159
youthful experiments. The young lady who inspired them was
a Miss Mary Evans, a widow's daughter, and sister of a small
Blue-coat boy whom Coleridge had protected.
And oh! from sixteen to nineteen what hours of paradise had
Allen [a schoolfellow] and I in escorting the Miss Evanses home on a
Saturday, who were then at a milliner's . . . and we used to carry
thither, of a summer morning, the pillage of the flower-gardens
within six miles of town, with sonnet or love-rhyme wrapped round
the nosegay.
But not all the inspiration came from Miss Evans. That of
the love-making she shared, if a Christ's Hospital tradition be
true, with the daughter of the school 'nurse'; to whom the
poem Genevieve was addressed. ('For the head boys to be in
love with these young persons was an institution of long stand-
ing,' says Mr. Dykes Campbell.) That of Coleridge's poetic
awakening she undoubtedly shared with the Rev. William Lisle
Bowles, as we learn from Chapter I of Biographia Literaria.
Critic after critic has found occasion for wonder in this ; though
in truth there is none at all. To begin with, Bowles's sonnets
are by no means bad; and, moreover, even to-day they are
perceptibly, if palely, tinged with the dawn that was breaking
over English poetry. Doubtless, had the book which fell into
his hands as he was entering his seventeenth year been a volume
of Blake, or of Cowper, or of Burns, his young conversion
would have been more striking; would, at any rate, have made
a better story. But by 1790 or thereabouts the new poetic
movement was 'in the air,' as we say: a youth might take
infection from any one, nor did it greatly matter from whom.
Had Coleridge derived it from a stronger source the results
might have been more precipitate, more violent. As it was,
the blameless Sonnets these and the equally blameless society
of the Evans girls weaned him from metaphysics and theology,
on which he was immaturely feeding, and weaned him gently.
He swore assent to Bowles: Bowles 'did his heart more good'
than all other books 'excepting the Bible': but in his own
160 Coleridge
attempts at versifying he still observed, even timidly, the
conventions.
In January, 1791, the Committee of Almoners of Christ's
Hospital emancipated him, with an Exhibition, to Jesus College,
Cambridge. He started well. In 1792 he gained the Browne
Gold Medal for a Sapphic Ode on the Slave Trade, and barely
missed (on Porson's selection) the Craven Scholarship. In
November, 1793, he bolted from Cambridge, in a fright of his
college debts, or in a wild fit following on Mary Evans's rejection
of his addresses. Both causes are suspected, and the two may
have acted in combination. At all events he found his way to
London, and on the second of December enlisted in the 1 5th or
King's Light Dragoons, sinking all but his initials and his
unlikeness to other men in the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comber-
backe. Probably a worse light dragoon he was short of
stature, fat, and unwieldy never occupied, or failed to occupy,
a saddle. In April, 1794, his relatives procured his discharge,
and Jesus College readmitted him. In June he visited his old
schoolfellow Allen at Oxford, and there became acquainted
with Robert Southey of Balliol. Mr. Robert Southey was then
a youth of 'violent principles,' out of which his friends and
Coleridge aiding the famous scheme of Pantisocracy was
hastily incubated. Mr. Campbell summarizes it thus:
'Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles are to
embark with twelve ladies in April next/ fixing themselves in some
'delightful part of the new back settlements of America.' The labour
of each man for two or three hours a day, it was imagined, would
suffice to support the colony. The produce was to be common
property, there was to be a good library, and ample leisure was to be
devoted to study, discussion, and the education of the children on a
settled system. The women were to be employed in taking care of
the infant children and in other suitable occupations, not neglecting
the cultivation of their minds. Among other matters not yet
determined was 'whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved,
if agreeable to one or both parties.' Every one was 'to enjoy
Coleridge 161
his own religious and political opinions, provided they do not
encroach on the rules previously made.' 'They calculate that every
gentleman providing 125 will be sufficient to carry the scheme into
execution.'
While Pantisocracy was hatching, Coleridge had departed
on a walking-tour in Wales. On the thirteenth of July he
reached Wrexham, and there, standing at the inn window, he
spied Mary Evans coming down the street with her sister.
'I sickened,' he writes, 'and wellnigh fainted, but instantly
retired.' The two sisters, it appears, had caught sight of him.
They 'walked by the window four or five times, as if anxiously.'
But the meeting, the possible reconcilement, were not to be.
Coleridge fled to Bristol, joined his friend Southey there, with
other Pantisocrats, including a family of young ladies named
Fricker. Southey married Edith Fricker. Coleridge such
things happen in the revulsion of disappointed passion married
Sara Fricker. The marriage, says Mr. Campbell, was not
made in Heaven. It was in great measure brought about by
Southey.
Heaven alone knows but no one who loves Coleridge can
help wistfully guessing what Dorothy Wordsworth might
have made of him, as his wife. We have, perhaps, no right to
guess at these things, but we cannot help it. He met her too
late, by a little while, as it was all but too late that he met
William Wordsworth. The Coleridges, after a brief experience
of housekeeping at Clevedon and Bristol interrupted by a
tour to collect subscriptions for a projected newspaper, The
Watchman hied them down with their first-born to Nether
Stowey in Somerset, to be neighbours of Thomas Poole, an
admiring friend and a good fellow. To Nether Stowey, in
July, 1797, came Wordsworth with his 'exquisite sister,' and
were joined by Charles Lamb all three as the Coleridges'
guests. (The visit is commemorated in This Lime-Tree Bower
my Prison.} At the end of his week's holiday Lamb returned
to London; the Wordsworths, charmed by Coleridge's society,
1 62 Coleridge
removed themselves but three miles away, to Alfoxden, and set
up house.
Then the miracle happened. Coleridge had already published
a volume of verse and brought it to a second edition : but it
contained no promise of what was to come. Wordsworth was
meditating the Muse, if the word 'meditating' can be used of
a composition so frantic as The Borderers; but that he (the
slower to take fire) would within a year be writing Tintern
Abbey was a thing impossible, which nevertheless befell. Brother,
sister, and friend these three, as Coleridge has testified be-
came one soul. 'They saw as much of one another as if the
width of a street, and not a pair of coombes, had separated their
several abodes'; and in the soul of that intimacy, under the
influence of Dorothy herself the silent one, content to en-
courage, criticize, admire wrapped around by the lovely soli-
tudes of the Quantocks Coleridge and Wordsworth found
themselves poets, speaking with new voices in a new dawn.
On the thirteenth of November, at half-past four in the after-
noon, the three friends set off to walk to Watchet, on their way
to the Exmoor country, intending to defray their expenses by
the sale of a poem which the two men were to compose by the
way. Before the first eight miles had been covered, the plan
of joint authorship had broken down, and Coleridge took the
poem into his sole hands. He wrought at it until die following
March. On the twenty-third of that month, writes Dorothy,
'Coleridge dined with us. He brought his ballad [The Ancient
Mariner] finished. We walked with him to the Miner's house.
A beautiful evening, very starry, the horned moon/ We
feel that the stars were out with excuse, to celebrate the birth
of a star.
The Ancient Mariner sets one reflecting that, after all, the men
of the Middle Ages had much to say for themselves, who con-
nected poetry with magic, and thought of Virgil as a wizard.
As we said jiist now, by taking small pains we can understand
that the sonnets of Bowles pale, faded essays as they appear
Coleridge 163
to us wore a different complexion in the sunrise of 1790. But
we can ignore the time and circumstance of its birth, ignore the
theorizings out of which it sprang, ignore Wordsworth and his
prefaces and the taste on which they made war; and still, after
more than a hundred years, The Ancient Mariner is the wild
thing of wonder, the captured star, which Coleridge brought in
his hands to Alfoxden and showed to Dorothy and William
Wordsworth. Not in the whole range of English poetry not
in Shakespeare himself has the lyrical genius of our language
spoken with such a note.
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard . . .
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Its music is as effortless as its imagery. Its words do not
cumber it: exquisite words come to it, but it uses and straight-
way forgets them. Not Shakespeare himself, unless by snatches,
so sublimated the lyrical tongue, or obtained effects so magical
by the bearest necessary means. Take
The many men, so beautiful !
And they all dead did lie.
Or
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide ;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
Or
The body of my brother's son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pull'd at one rope,
But he said nought to me.
Here, and throughout, from the picture of the bride entering the
hall to that of the home-coming in the moon-lit harbour, every
scene in the procession belongs to high romance, yet each is
conjured up with that economy of touch we are wont to call
1 64 Coleridge
classical. We forget almost, listening to the voice, that there
are such things as words.
And now 'twas like all instruments,
Now like a lonely flute;
And now it is an angel's song,
That makes the Heavens be mute.
If, in criticism, such an epithet be pardonable, we would call that
voice seraphic ; if such a simile, we would liken it to a seraph's,
musing, talking before the gate of Paradise in the dawn.
Critics, allowing the magic of the poem, proceed to stultify
the admission by inquiring why Coleridge did not follow it up
and write others like it. The question, when foolishness has
put it, can in terms of foolishness be readily answered. Coleridge
yielded his will to opium. He had already begun to contract
the habit, and he soon became a man capable (in Hazlitt's
phrase) of doing anything which did not present itself as a duty.
Once or twice, in Christabel and in Kubla Khan, he found new
and divine openings, but his will could not sustain the flight,
and the rest of the story of him as a poet resolves itself into
repeated futile efforts to carry Christabel to a conclusion.
All this is true enough, or at least can be made convincing by
any one who sets forth the story of Coleridge's subsequent
aberrations. But before we blame his weakness let us ask our-
selves if it be conceivably within one man's measure to produce
a succession of poems on the plane of The Ancient Mariner,
and, next, if the magic granted, as it must be granted it
would not almost necessarily exhaust a man. In other words,
let us inquire if, in a man who performed that miracle, his
failure to perform others may not be more charitably set down
to a divine exhaustion than charged upon his frailties. Surely
by Christabel itself that question is answered; and almost as
indisputably by Kubla Khan. Coleridge himself tells us that
he began Christabel in 1797; that is, either before or during the
composition of The Ancient Mariner. Between the conception
of the two poems there was no interval of opium-taking. Yet
Coleridge 165
who, studying Christabel y can, after the first two or three pages
have been turned, believe that the poem could ever and by any
possibility have been finished? Coleridge, no doubt, believed
that it could : but in his struggles to finish it he was fighting
against stronger adversaries than opium; against fate and a
providence under which, things being what they are, their
consequences will be what they will be.
The metre of Christabel, perfectly handled by its inventor,
probably suffers in our ears by association with the jingle of
Scott, and the vastly worse jingle of Byron, who borrowed it
in turn. It has since been utterly vulgarized, and the very lilt
of it nowadays suggests The Mistletoe Bough, melodrama, and
the balladry of Bow Bells. Yet, and although the suspicion
may be unworthy, one cannot help tracing something of Bow
Bells back to an origin in such lines as
Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale,
Murmuring o'er the name again,
'Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine'?
In short, there are some to which Christabel rings false, pain-
fully false, here and there, in spite of its witchery. Yet, where
it rings true, we ask, Was there ever such pure romantic music?
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full :
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray:
'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.
Of Kubla Khan, even if 'a person . . . from Porlock' had
not interrupted it, who will contend that it could ever have
been finished, or even continued to any length? It abides the
most entrancing magical fragment in English poetry; more than
this it never could have been or have hoped to be.
1 66 Coleridge
Some three weeks after that starry evening on which Coleridge,
his immortal ballad finished, walked with his friends, reciting it,
we find Wordsworth writing to a friend that he, too, has been
'very rapidly adding to his stock of poetry,' and that the season
is advancing with strides, 'and the country becomes almost
every day more lovely.' The splendour of that summer in
the Quantocks has passed into the history of our literature.
Coleridge's best harvest was done; Wordsworth's longer of
continuance, yet brief in comparison with its almost insufferably
long aftermath on the point of ripening. The brother and
sister quitted Alfoxden at midsummer. In September Coleridge
met them in London and voyaged with them on a happy, almost
rollicking, jaunt to Hamburg. The Lyrical Ballads had been
published a few days before, Coleridge contributing The Ancient
Mariner (or, to spell it accurately, The Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere^y The Nightingale, The Foster-Mother's Tale, and The
Dungeon. The two friends had launched their thunderbolt,
and went off gaily. It was a real thunderbolt, too ; a book to
which the over- worked epithet 'epoch-making' may for once in a
way be applied without strain on the truth ; but for the moment
England took it with her habitual phlegm. Mrs. Coleridge
sent news that 'the Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any.'
At Hamburg, after a few crowded days, the travellers separated
Coleridge for Ratzeburg, intent on acquiring a thorough
knowledge of German. He returned to Nether Stowey in
July, 1799, an ^ towards the close of the year met the Words-
worths again and toured with them through the Lake Country.
Thither in June, 1800, he wandered back to them from London
and Stowey. They had installed themselves at Dove Cottage,
Grasmere, and in July the Coleridges settled at Greta Hall,
Keswick, twelve miles away. Wordsworth was now working
at the height of his powers: but to Coleridge the renewed
intimacy brought no secondary spring. For him there was
never to be another Stowey. And here, both fortunately and
unfortunately, the story may break off: unfortunately, because
* Coleridge 167
his poetic period had come to an end (he had, he writes to
Thelwall, 'for ever renounced poetry for metaphysics/ and
moreover was beginning his long slavery to opium); fortu-
nately, because its end releases us from following him to Malta
and Bristol, through quarrels and patchings-up of friendship,
through wanderings, returns, vows and defections, partial
recoveries, relapses and despairs, to the long-drawn sunset of
his life in the home of the Gillmans at Highgate.
Let two things be noted, however, before we give assent to
those who write contemptuously of Coleridge and his infirmity.
The first is, that even in the lowest depths he still fought, and
in the end he did emerge with the victory. He had won it at
a terrible cost; the fight had killed a hundred splendid poten-
tialities; but though scarred, battered, enfeebled, the man
emerged, and with his manhood still in his hands, though they
trembled on the prize. Next let us, reading of quarrels and
misunderstandings between him and his friends, note how, as
time effaces the petty circumstance of each, so the essential
goodness of the man shines through, more and more clearly;
how, in almost any given quarrel, as the years go on, we see
that after all Coleridge was in the right. He knew his weak-
ness : but at least it taught him to be tender towards the weak-
nesses of his fellows, and no man had a better reason to ask
of his sufferings
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me ?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
As this affectionate disposition made him all but unintelligible
to the Southeys and Hazlitts of his time, and lay somewhat
outside the range of self-centred Wordsworth, whose fault in
friendship was that of the Dutch in matters of commerce, 1 so
1 'But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are
too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed the
mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved by you,
for those who love you.' Coleridge to Allsop, 2nd December 1818.
(The reference is to Wordsworth.)
1 68 Coleridge
the very brilliance of his intellect too often isolated him within
the circle of its own light. But on this Shelley has said the
last word :
You will see Coleridge he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
In justice and in decency we should strive to imagine Coleridge
as he impressed those who loved him and listened to him in his
great days of promise; not the Coleridge of later Highgate days,
the spent giant with whose portrait Carlyle made brutal play to
his own ineffaceable discredit; nor even the Coleridge of 1816,
the * archangel a little damaged* as Lamb, using a friend's
privilege, might be allowed to describe him in a letter to Words-
worth, a friend of almost equal standing; not these, but the
Coleridge of whom the remembrance was the abiding thought
in Lamb's mind and on his lips during the brief while he sur-
vived him 'Coleridge is dead/ 'His great and dear spirit
haunts me. . . . Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the
world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more
passionately than when he lived. . . , What was his mansion
is consecrated to me a chapel/ If we must dwell at all on the
later Coleridge, let it be in the spirit of his own most beautiful
epitaph :
Stop, Christian passer-by! Stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.
O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C. ;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise to be forgiven for fame
He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!
Coleridge 169
None the less, in a world ever loath to admit that omelets
involve the breaking of eggs, men will go on surmising what
might have been, what full treasures of poetry Coleridge might
have left, had he never drunk opium, had he eschewed meta-
physics, had he married Dorothy Wordsworth, had he taken a
deal of advice his friends gave him in good intent to rescue the
Coleridge which God made (with their approval) and the
creature marred. 'He lived until 1834,' wrote the late Dr.
Garnett. ' If every year of his life had yielded such a harvest
as 1797, he would have produced a greater amount of high
poetry than all his contemporaries put together.' Yes, indeed!
and Kubla Khan has this in common with a cow's tail that it
only lacks length to reach the moon. And yet, vain though
these speculations are, we do wrong to laugh at them, for their
protest goes deeper than their reasoning ; and while fate tramples
on things of beauty the indignant human heart will utter it.
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus, when a poet and such a
poet is broken in his prime?
On the other hand, the question sometimes raised whether,
in the Quantock time, when the pair learnt to be poets, Coleridge
owed more to Wordsworth, or Wordsworth to Coleridge is,
as Sir Thomas Browne would say, puzzling, but not beyond all
conjecture: and we raise it again because we think it usually
receives the wrong answer. It is usually argued that Coleridge
received more than he gave, because he was the more im-
pressionable. We might oppose this with the argument that
Coleridge probably gave more than he received, as his presence
and talk were the more inspiring. But let us look at a date or
two. In June, 1797, Coleridge wrote This Lime-Tree Bower
my Prison, and it contains such lines as diese :
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in die bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure . . .
and
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.
iyo Coleridge
Frost at Midnight is dated February, 1798, and it contains the
passage beginning
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee. . . .
The exquisite Nightingale belongs to the summer of 1798, and
contains the images of the 'night-wandering man/ of the
nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes . . .
of the other birds awake in the bushes with
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full . . .
and that most lovely picture of the infant hushing his woe as he
gazes up at the moon through the orchard boughs :
While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears,
Did glitter in the yellow moonbeam ! Well !
It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven
Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up
Familiar with these songs, that with the night
He may associate joy.
Now the first thing to be noted of these lines, these images, is
that they are what we now call Wordsworthian ; some, the very
best Wordsworthian; but all Wordsworthian with an intensity
to which (if we study his verse chronologically) we find that in
1798 Wordsworth had never once attained or once only, in a
couple of lines of The Thorn. When Coleridge wrote these
things, Wordsworth was writing We are Seven, Goody Blake,
Simon Lee, and the rest. It was only after, though soon after,
Coleridge had written them that Wordsworth is seen capable
of such lines as
The still sad music of humanity . . .
or of
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place.
Coleridge 171
This note Coleridge might teach to Wordsworth, as Words-
worth might improve on it and make it his own. But that
other note the lyrical note of The Ancient Mariner was
incommunicable. He bequeathed it to none, and before him
no poet had approached it; hardly even Shakespeare, on the
harp of Ariel.
'EOTHEN'
A LEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE was born in 1809,
./V the son of a country gentleman Mr. W. Kinglake of
Wilton House, Taunton. He was educated at Eton and
Trinity College, Cambridge, and from Cambridge proceeded to
Lincoln's Inn. For some years he practised with moderate
success at the Chancery Bar; but his circumstances were easy,
and permitted him to spend a long holiday as so many English-
men would choose to spend it, in the hard delights of travel.
The result for us is Eothen. It took the town in 1844, as it
deserved. It remains one of the little classics of the mid-
nineteenth century; ribr could one readily name a book more
genuinely English and of its class. Written with a fastidious
polish worthy of Congreve, it keeps the reader constantly in
mind of Congreve's famous request to Voltaire, that he wished
to be visited not as an author but as a plain gentleman. 'Here
is my story/ the writer seems to say, 'and you may take it or
leave it. The trouble I may have chosen to spend on it is my
own affair.' And the manner of the book was repeated in
Kinglake's manner of treating his success. He turned his back
on it and resumed his legal work.
Ten years later the Nearer East (as we call it nowadays)
claimed him again, and on more serious business. On the out-
break of war with Russia he accompanied his friend Lord Raglan
to the Crimea. For insight into the national feeling of those
days, when Great Britain awoke to war after forty years of peace,
we may turn to Tennyson's Maud and read its call for * the glory
of manhood* to stand once more "on its ancient height,' its
protest against 'the cobweb woven across the cannon's throat,'
its scornful trust
That the smooth-faced snub-nosed rogue would leap from his counter
and till,
And strike, if he could, were it but with his cheating yard-wand, home.
17*
'JEothen 9 173
(For we had just then to learn over again, and not for the last
time, the recurring lesson that war is the swindler's fattest
opportunity.) Napier, in his History of the War in the Penin-
sula, lets fall a remark that the British are a bellicose rather than
a military people. He might have added that they are incurably
given to mistaking war for a form of sport, and might find their
tribal emblem of Victory in a statue of Picton fighting the
Battle of Quatre Bras (as he did) in a tall hat. Kinglake, who
consented after Lord Raglan's death to write a history of the
war, could never get over his habit of regarding a battle as a
sort of glorified steeplechase or fox-hunt, and in the crisis of
a fight has usually to fall back on these noble sports for a
criticism or a simile.
Meanwhile he had retired from die Bar, and entered Parlia-
ment in 1857 as member for Bridgwater. He held the seat
until 1869, when he lost it on petition, and thenceforward gave
himself up to his History. The first volume appeared in 1863,
the final one in 1887. He died Jan. 2, 1891, of a slow and
painful malady, which had driven him to retire from London,
where society had known him for many years as one of its most
graceful talkers. His conversation was temperate and restrained,
nor would he ever (writes one who knew him) enter into that
competition for celebrity in which men of less delicacy found
pleasure.
He was content to wait his turn ; he would not claim it, but when
it came he took it, and he was sure of attention as soon as his low
firm voice was heard. He liked a few friends rather than many ; and
even when he talked and the whole table listened, there was some-
thing confidential in his method. He wore a Damascus blade, but
kept it for the most part sheathed. It was only when challenged, or
when an injustice was offered to somebody else than himself, that you
saw the flash of this polished and glittering steel ; and whoever felt
its point or edge did not care for another experience. The first
volume of his History, and the chapter on the Emperor of the French,
show what he could do when provoked, and how he hated an
174 'Eothen 9
impostor. His spoken style was, of course, less elaborate, but hardly
less finished, and such was his reserve of character that you had to
know him well before you discovered how many were his resources
and gifts. 1
The Invasion of the Crimea is a monumental work, exquisitely
written throughout, and containing many splendid pages that
will rank with the best prose of its century. That it lives as a
whole is less certain. Kinglake started with the two indispens-
able qualifications prescribed by Lucian for his perfect historian :
he had political insight and the faculty of expression, and he
had both in a high degree. He could 'superinduce upon events
the charm of order,' and set forth an intricate tale with perfect
lucidity. But his fastidiousness allowed his theme to over-
weight him. As time removes the events of 1854-5, men read
of them more carelessly ; interested, indeed, but no longer over-
shadowed by them; disposed, rightly or wrongly, to regard
them as no such tremendous matters after all. But with the
historian this very natural process was reversed. Time and
he spent thirty years over the task but emphasized for him
the perspective it was diminishing for his readers. If they are
critics they recognize the mere writing, so carefully vivid, for
a kind which is not produced without strain; but they need
not be critics to feel the burden of the subject and, oppressed
by it, to transfer their sympathy from the story to the author.
In Eothen the author is young ; young and full of that vppis
which he would have been apt to translate, in metaphor, as
* beans.' His theme is what he chooses to make it, and the
laboured brilliance of the composition is, so to speak, a part of
the fun an overflow of the indefatigable high spirits that have
already carried him across the desert and through plague-stricken
Cairo. Artifice, though apparent enough, detracts nothing
from the freshness or genuineness of Eothen, as it detracts
nothing from the freshness and genuineness (say) of Venus and
Adonis ; for artifice is natural to youth. We allow for it before
1 From London Letters, by the late George W. Smalley.
'Eothen* 175
passing his claim, in the preface, that his narrative conveys 'not
those impressions which ought to have been produced upon any
"well-constituted mind/* but those which were really and truly
received at the time of his rambles by a headstrong and not
very amiable traveller, whose prejudices in favour of other
people's notions were then exceedingly slight.' As a fact, the
unconventionality he achieves is often but conventionality
inverted; and once, at least, he comes near to confessing this
when a comment of his brings him up short, face to face with
the humbling proof that I am subject to that nearly immutable law
which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering now and
then some sentiment not his own. It seems as though the power of
expressing regrets and desires by written symbols were coupled with
a condition that the writer should from time to time express die
regrets and desires of other people as though, like a French peasant
under the old rtgime, he was bound to perform a certain amount of
work upon the public highways.
'I rebel,' he says, 'as stoutly as I can against this horrible
corvee' Yes, but the purely original man would pass the
temptation nay, if he yielded, would even yield without
being aware cf it. It is not by dint of being unamiable at
times even truculently unamiable that Kinglake can escape the
tradition of The Sentimental Journey. At times, when the right
opportunity presents itself, this defiantly unsentimental traveller
has to halt and render due literary toll to sentiment. He does
it with a good set face and pays down royally. But the coin,
when you test it, rings on a half-hearted note. It is worth
remarking that his prose, at these checks, has a trick of loosening
its knees into the iambics of blank verse. 'But soon the genial
morn burst down from heaven, And stirred the blood so gladly
through our veins. . . . The baggage-horses served us for a
drag, And kept us to the rate of little more Than five miles in
the hour; but now and then . . .' Damascus, when our
traveller reaches it, calls for a strong effort of sentiment, and he
responds with his very best. Because it is his best it has
76 'Eothen
lothing to do with Damascus, but everything with England.
The waters and gardens of his green spot of exile call up
nemories, real or fictitious, of an English country house de-
erted, with grass in the stable-yard and the shrubberies relapsing
nto wilderness. 'Just there, in October mornings, the keeper
yould wait with the dogs and the guns : no keeper now/ And
he locked wicket leads to regret for days when the path was
:lear, and you 'chase that phantom of a muslin sleeve that once
weighed warm upon your arm.' It is all extremely well done;
>ut it ends in a tangle of iambic decasyllabics :
Wild as that, the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England,
ut without its sweet sadness [perhaps, for an Englishman], is <he
umptuous garden of Damascus. Forest trees, tall and stately
nough, if you could see their lofty crests, yet lead a tussling life
f it below, with their branches struggling against strong numbers
>f bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is black as
tight. High, high above your head, and on every side all down to
hie ground, the thicket is hemmed in, and choked up by the inter-
icing boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow
ir with their damask breath.
Two or three rhapsodical passages, such as this inspired by
)amascus, shine with great effect against the morgue britannique
/hich is the author's general manner. But obviously too many
if them would have spoilt the book; and therefore it was ex-
remely fortunate that, under pledge to write as he felt, he
uffered no strong emotions as he walked about Jerusalem, but
>n the contrary 'was rudely chilled at the foot of Zion by
isenchanting scenes.' To have felt 'as he ought' would have
ivolved a dangerous flight of fine writing, whereas the worldly
Dne he actually adopts in describing the Holy Sepulchre is
afer and very artistically wayward.
Nevertheless, and although more derivative than Kinglake
uspected and would have us believe, Eothen is a genuine book,
nd carries the general impress of truth. The writer confesses
imself 'a headstrong and not very amiable traveller/ That he
'JEotAen' 177
was headstrong, his defying the plague at Cairo, his lonely ride
across the desert to Suez, his serio-comic invasion of Satalieh
these and half a dozen other adventures more than sufficiently
prove. That he was unamiable, at times even unfeeling, we
gather from at least a score of small hints. Possibly he exhibits
this failing with design, and lays on the colours too strongly.
In any case, he was young and in the saddle his 'loved saddle'
with Homer in his soul and the East before him ; and strong
youth is intolerant of weakness or disease. The later King-
lake, wise, tempered by years, and dying of a slow inward
agony, must have looked back on some passages in this book
with a very wistful forgiveness. In any case, if Eothen throws
some light on the reasons why our English are not precisely
loved when they travel, it also helps us to understand why they
travel, and (convincingly) why they are feared. This particular
traveller may sometimes do violence to our feelings; but he
seldom fails to thrill them, and it is with a touch of racial pride
that we follow and watch how sometimes by cool audacity,
alone against numbers, sometimes by sheer bullying, he opposes
himself to the depressed and succumbing mind of the Mussul-
man, sweeps away all resistance, and not only comes triumphing
out of difficulty, but with the population of a province at his
feet suing his illusory power for protection.
This dominance of the Western will over the East may be
a passing one may in great measure have passed already. It
is almost certainly transitory in comparison with the spell of the
East upon Western imagination. Of the two in interplay, at
a happy moment, Kinglake gives us a sketch only, but a finished
sketch, vivid and fascinating.
THREE OPEN LETTERS
TO THE RIGHT REVEREND ARCHIBALD ROBERTSON, D.D.
LORD BISHOP OF EXETER
M YLORD '
* v - 1 - It is now many years since we last met, and you may
well be surprised at my addressing you in this public manner.
Yet, and however unconsciously, you provoked it some months
ago when I received the prospectus of a certain 'Association
for the Permanent Care of the Feeble-Minded,' and this was
recommended to me by your lordship's name and that of the
Bishop of Truro on the list of its Executive Committee.
Shocked as I was by the objects of that Association, as declared
in the circular (which I will presently quote), I could not carry
my trouble to my own diocesan and friend, the Bishop of
Truro; for he was a dying man, already far within the shadow
across the edge of which the voices of men, if they reach at all,
carry but empty vexings. He is dead since then, and at the
moment I write they have not yet installed his successor whose
hands for some time will be full of other business. Yet this
business, too, is important as I shall try to show. I remember
that during my childhood as long before the diocese of
Exeter covered all Cornwall, even to the Scillies; and I can
appeal on more personal grounds. For you were Dean of our
old college at Oxford; the first don from whom, as a raw
freshman, I took kindly advice. You, of course, have clean
forgotten it all : but such an interview is to the boy one of the
scenes of his life, and I recall the room now, its background of
bookshelves, our positions at the table, and you, as you leant,
uttering wise counsel. . . .
178
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 179
Well now, my lord, after these many years you come or a
circular comes with the authority of your name (now advanced
in public honour, but always a name of command to me)
asking your old pupil to join a Society, the objects of which
are thus defined:
(1) To awaken the public to the danger to the community of
allowing the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded to continue un-
checked.
(2) To obtain reliable statistics with regard to the number of
Feeble-Minded in the South- Western Counties, and to press for such
legislation as may be needed.
(3) To establish one or more institutions for the care and improve-
ment of the Feeble-Minded, and to promote their happiness while
providing for their permanent detention.
I italicize these last words, my lord ; and in the course of my
argument shall tell you why. But, for a start, I will ask if
(i) and (2) find themselves in the order you would have placed
them when you lived in Oxford and taught Aristotle to young
men ? Would you not then have instructed us that the obliga-
tion to obtain * reliable statistics* came before that of 'awakening
the public* to a danger which the statistics might, or might not,
prove to be real? And would you, in those days, have mixed
up in one sentence the demand for clear information with the
answer, begging one for legislation ? I submit that you would
have done nothing of the sort. It would have offended your
self-respect.
In those days, too, you taught us that things have their right
names, and that men are to be distrusted who start by mixing
up the meaning of words. You must of your own past forgive
me if, when a man talks of a 'home* and I discover him to mean
a house of detention, I judge that he is trying to deceive me, and
if I go on to judge that his mind is not honest. The word
'home* has many connotations, beautiful and sacred; but per-
manent detention is not one of them. 'Permanent detention*
means imprisonment for life. You cannot deny that. Well,
i8o Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
now, see how it runs 'and to promote their happiness while
providing for their imprisonment for life. 9 Say now, my lord,
how do you like the look of it ?
Again, when your Association talks of 'the permanent care
of the Feeble-Minded* what does it mean precisely? It uses
language conveying that its primary tender care is for these
unhappy people. But does it mean this? I think not: for I
observe that the first of its three main objects is * to awaken the
public to the danger to the community of allowing the multiplica-
tion of the Feeble-Minded,' etc. : and again I think not because,
as your lordship very well knows, the methods proposed include
(i) permanent deprivation of liberty, (2) segregation of the
sexes, and even (3) 'sterilization,' which means castration or
something of the sort. Salus civitatis suprema lex\ it may be
necessary I will take this point by and by to deprive a man
of his manhood in order to save the State. But for God's sake,
and if we would not incur Christ's rebuke upon the Pharisees,
let us not pretend that we are doing it in love for our victim.
I have before me a newspaper which, in an account of the
International Eugenics Congress held last week in London,
reports Dr. Saleeby to have urged 'that when segregation was
asked for they must not tell the State that it was in the interests
of the race but (that it was) in the interests of the individual
affected'! I can hardly believe that Dr. Saleeby a highly
distinguished man uttered this horrible cant; but, if he did,
I would tell Dr. Saleeby that a community which accepts the
moral standard of his argument has reached a point of degrada-
tion at which ten thousand male imbeciles and as many females
may mate without making things worse. If we are all to be
committed to this revolting campaign upon the helpless, at
least let us go into it as men, neither deceiving ourselves with
false words, nor insulting our victims with hypocritical pro-
fessions: and before Dr. Saleeby troubles the world with his
bowels he should teach them to yearn honestly.
Well, now, you will admit, my lord, that if this campaign
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 181
upon the Feeble-Minded be a necessity, it is a very sad one; so
sad that the necessity should be made plain to us by irrefragable
proof. But is that happening ? The Eugenists tell us that they
are men of science, and that what they say is for us unscientific
men to accept. But, be it said with all respect to these experts,
that is not quite final. We, and not the experts only, are to be
made responsible. If there be a Day of Judgment, we shall
have to stand at the bar facing these poor wastrels and answer
if we wronged their helplessness. That is a very terrible
thought to me, my lord. In my own small way as a magistrate
I may be called on to sentence such a fellow-creature to lifelong
loss of liberty, even to mutilation. I see myself interrogating
the unhappy bewildered eye, the inarticulate tongue, seeking to
pierce to what of intellect gropes behind them myself, too,
groping after the mystery which sets me in judgment over this
hunted thing. No, by Heaven! Such wits as Heaven has lent
me I will use first on the experts before I do their dirty work.
I have known experts literary experts, at any rate. One of
them sent me, the other day, a poem he had discovered in the
library of Trinity College, Dublin, and made bold to attribute
it (I believe) to Hagthorpe. 'Was it not a gem?' It was: it
was also familiar to me as a lyric of Ben Jonson's, printed in
every edition of his works : and the man who sent it to me
bore a European reputation as a specialist in the Elizabethan
drama !
Scientific experts may be less fallible. But using such wits
as Heaven has lent me, I put this to you, my lord : we know (in
Hamlet's phrase) what a piece of work is man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express
and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension
how like a god! Yet we know also, how by the most trivial of
accidents, the mechanical pressure of less than an inch of bone
upon the grey matter of the brain, this godlike creature is
changed to a maniac, at war with the stuffing of his mattress.
Then who shall say (I ask) but that some small mechanical
1 82 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
touch may be equally potent to recall numbers of our Feeble-
Minded back to grace of mind and body ?
Some vital spring adjusted,
Some faculty that rusted
Cleansed to legitimate use
Some undeveloped action stirred, some juice
Of God; distilling dropt into the core
That is what my reason suggests to me. Now what do these
specialists bring to overawe it ?
Nothing; or next to nothing.
They have not even produced real statistics to prove that the
mating of the Feeble-Minded results in such a wholesale genera-
tion of Feeble-Mindedness as they pretend to be an instant danger
to the community. Where are the figures that alone could justify
our beginning to lend an ear to these frantic cures ? I cannot
find them anywhere. Will you supply me with them, my lord ?
But supposing the figures supplied, and that they are con-
vincing how, with our present knowledge of causes (the
experts' knowledge, if you will), can we be certain of a cure?
Why, if you have read the reports of the recent Eugenics Con-
gress, you must have perceived that the quacks are all at sea and
bumping their heads one against another in the silly gale they
only have raised. Of the incestuous union of brother and sister
was born a Cleopatra. And Edward II, an imbecile, begat
Edward III with descendants who numbered amongst them the
Black Prince, Henry V, Edward IV, Henry VIII, Queen
Elizabeth, and Queen Victoria!
The kindest word to be said for these ignoramuses is a prayer
that they may be forgiven because they know not what they do.
But in their ignorant cocksureness they have managed to thrust
a Bill upon Parliament: and this Bill has reached a second
reading almost without opposition. I propose to examine it
in a second letter, and am meanwhile, my lord,
Your obedient servant,
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 183
ii
MY LORD,
There lies before me the copy of a Bill called the 'Mental
Deficiency Bill,' which has already passed a second reading in
the House of Commons and will shortly be sent to Committee.
It is fathered by the Right Hon. Reginald McKenna, His
Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Home Affairs, and I
think you already know something of Mr. McKenna; but I do
not think you can have gauged him unless you have carefully
studied the provisions of this Bill.
By this Bill which, unless Englishmen bestir themselves and
take it by the throat, will speedily become an Act any person,
'capable of earning his living under favourable circumstances,'
but adjudged incapable (I will presently tell you how) of com-
peting on equal terms with his normal fellows, or of managing
himself or his affairs with ordinary prudence, shall be deemed
to be a 'defective' (Par. 17, 2), and may be assigned to one or
other of several classes which include (17, i):
(1) Those in whose case it is desirable in the interests of the
community that they should be deprived of the opportunity of
procreating children, and
(2) Those in whose case such other circumstances exist as may be
specified in any order made by the Secretary of State as being circum-
stances which make it desirable that they should be dealt with under
this Act.
Now let us take these two provisions in reverse order :
No. 2, gloss it as you will, is simply lettre de cachet back again
among civilized men. The Home Secretary may, if he find any
person inconvenient to him, simultaneously find him 'incapable
of managing his affairs with ordinary prudence/ and by an
'order' commit the poor wretch to lifelong detention without
a trial. Hideous as this sounds, it is in the Sill.
' Oh,' you will say, 'but good Mr. McKenna and his successors
184 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
will never in this Christian England of ours, dream of com-
mitting such an infamy!' Are you so sure? It was the good
Mr. McKenna who, the other day, invoked a statute, which for a
hundred years had been a dead letter, to imprison a political
opponent whose activity just then would have been inconvenient
to the Government. You, my lord, may be enjoying a sudden
recpvery of faith in Mr. McKenna : but there are some of us who,
after the imprisonment of Mr. Tom Mann, do not propose to
trust this politician as the vulgar saying goes one inch
further than we can fling him. Possibly in time you, too,
may revert to your distrust. But, and anyhow, why give to
him, or to any man, this power of secretly consigning any one
to a living death ?
But it needs not be Mr. McKenna. By Paragraph 20 of this
precious Bill any relative or friend (sweet word) who wants to
get somebody out of the way may make private application to a
magistrate. It needs so far as I can see only one magistrate,
and at the best a couple of medical certificates, and if the magis-
trate and the 'friend' happen to be in collusion, the poor devil
may be put away without further parley. Nay, if he has the
pluck to kick an intrusive doctor to the door, no medical certifi-
cate is needed. He will be sentenced as recalcitrant and carted
off to a house of detention for a year. If, at the end of a year,
the Commissioners (to be appointed under the Act) refuse to
set him free, he is closed up for five years, and then again for
another five years, and so on until death releases him. That
until each dark quinquennium has expired he may lift any voice
from the tomb does not appear.
My lord, I have been a writer now these twenty-five years,
and I cannot remember to have written in that time sentences
so vile as those which I am now copying from an Act of Parlia-
ment proposed by a Liberal Government a Government into
the cause of which some of us, through three campaigns, flung
such energies as men give for the sake of high hopes. Let the
hopes be: but our trust, at least, was that liberty to a Liberal
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 185
Government was as chastity to a woman. Of each it is true
that, once broken, it descends by easier and yet easier lapses to
the standard of a strumpet, or of Mr. McKenna.
I am sorry to drag your lordship further, but it is necessary.
Paragraph 27, Section (2), would enact that :
When any person tried before any court of assize or quarter sessions
is acquitted, the court may, if it appears that there is reasonable ground
for believing that he is defective, notwithstanding any enactment or
rule of law to the contrary, order him to be examined as to his mental
condition, and for that purpose, if necessary, to be detained in an
institution for defectives pending the examination, and for such time
as may be required for the presentation of a petition for an order
under the Act.
Where it appears to the police authority that any person charged
with an offence is a defective they shall communicate with the local
authority and it shall be the duty of the police authority to bring before
the court such evidence as to his mental condition as may be available.
In other words, a jury of his peers finds a man innocent of a
charge brought against him. Then the police, who have brought
this wrongful charge, choose a second and more deadly shot out
of their locker. As the innocent man steps free, he is re-arrested
and charged again. 'No, to be sure,' says 'the Court,' 'you
are guiltless of the deed of which you were just now accused.
But all the same the public think you unable to manage your
affairs with ordinary prudence, and that you should be deprived
of the opportunity of procreating children. Therefore, innocent
man, you will go to prison for life/
Shall we call a brief halt, my lord, and before we deal with yet
worse abominations yes, there are worse to come will you
let me fumigate the air with a pipe of tobacco while you turn
over in mind two questions I would here put to you ?
In the first place, I think you must know well enough that in
practice these precious enactments will be put in force only upon
the poor, or upon the children of the poor. Yet stay! I must
make one small reservation they may here and there be used
1 86 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
by some rich and unscrupulous man to get an inheritance made
void and to be rid of an unhappy none-too-strong-minded child
who stands in the succession to wealth. (You might study the
history of the Annesley suit in this connection.) With this
reservation I put it to you that the victims of this Act will be
moneyless persons. Yet you know well that dukes and
millionaires have begotten monstrous children, and that at least
one marquis has been declared incapable of managing his affairs.
Do you believe for one moment that the net of the 'Mental
Deficiency' Bill will be drawn around these?
Secondly, I put it to you, who studied such questions in the
old days, that this law falls into no proper category of law. It is
not law at all: it is Experiment by Legal Process. Certain
scientific or quasi-scientific men have started a theory or two.
For these theories they can produce nothing that begins to
amount to proof: and since they cannot, even in modern England,
run about emasculating children by private licence, they get a
Bill introduced whereby the State shall do their dirty work of
experimenting of course, upon the weak and helpless. I
wonder if you at all realize the strength of the mania that has
taken hold of these Eugenists or to what fantastic cruelties it
can persuade them. No ? . . . Then courage, my lord ! Pick
up your pastoral staff, and we will wade through a yet deeper
and filthier stream.
Some little while ago the Chief Magistrate of the most popu-
lous town in your diocese seriously proposed that children of
weak intellect should be put to a painless death. (It was kind
of him to make it painless!) Will you harden your face while
I hold for a moment that suggestion steadily up to your nostrils ?
. . . Yes, my lord, it will do you good in the end. . . . Bethink
you (it is painfully known to us, who have to deal with these
'cases' on a County Education Committee) that a mother clings
passionately to her child who is born 'afflicted/ and more
passionately as a rule to the idiot child than to the deaf or the
dumb. Next bethink that the 'deficiency* of few children, or
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 187
none, can be determined even for purposes of a certificate
until the mother has suckled it, weaned it and (God knows,
with what alternations of hope and woe) learnt, as love only
can teach, to shield its helplessness by a thousand sweet devices.
Lastly, bethink you of a policeman or an 'inspector* of some
sort calling on that mother and demanding, 'Your child is weak-
minded. Hand it to me, please, that I may lead it away and
kill it (as proposed by a late Chief Magistrate of Plymouth), or
that I may imprison it for life (as, your consent not asked, I am
authorized to do by Act of Parliament which may be cited as
the Mental Deficiency Act, 1912).'
My lord, I know you to be a good man. Pardon me, but
do you still press me to join your damned Association ?
Your lordship's obedient servant,
(but not in this),
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.
in
MY LORD,
Let me, at the outset of this third and last letter state quite
unequivocally what I mean by saying that the Eugenists behind
Mr. McKenna's Bill adduce for their theories 'nothing that
begins to amount to proof/ I mean something fatal to all their
statistics, which, though they were piled to the moon would yet
rest on a base incurably rotten, since in classifying A or B as
'normal* or ' defective 9 these people have no standard at all. They
are using loose indefinite terms which not only can be made to
vary at will but cannot even be hindered from conveying a dozen
different denotations (let alone connotations) to as many different
minds. What, for example, does your Eugenist understand by
'normal'? Is he himself, by any chance, normal? We know
that he cannot reason scientifically; but can he, as a set-off,
throw a discus or a cricket-ball, or sail a boat, or ride to hounds,
1 88 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
or shoot straight, or walk forward steadily under an enemy's
fire ? in fine can he do any of the score of things that would
come within the ambit of any Hellenic conception of the normal
man? Before discussing your Eugenist's capacity to breed
'fitness' I want to know what, to his mind, 'fitness' is. (What
is Mrs. Todgers' Notion of a Wooden Leg?) Before he pokes
his quasi-scientific thumb into God's machinery, he might at
least tell us that. What sort of man does he want to breed ?
Is it a Philip Sidney or a Roosevelt? a Leonardo da Vinci or a
Bismarck? a Francis of Assisi or a John D. Rockefeller or
perchance some nice mean between these last two ? At present
his modest demand would seem to be that we should turn him
loose with a gelding-knife in one hand and in the other a legal
permit to find out what in the devil's name he really does want!
For my part, my lord (to follow an idle speculation for a
moment), if asked what kind of man we should aim at breeding
as likely to be most salutary to the State, I should answer, * One
who held by clear thinking, while sensitively aware that we walk
encompassed by mysteries.' Such a man, combining Hebrew
reverence with the straight outlook of an old Greek, would
needs be gracious in himself and serviceable to his fellows :
Sweetly to ease, loose, and bind,
As need requires, this frail fall'n human kind.
But such a man would be the polar opposite of your modern
Eugenist, who rushes in where angels fear to tread, flourishes
words which have no defined relation to things, talks of 'homes'
where he intends prisons or barracks, or of 'permanent care'
when he means to mutilate or to immure a fellow-creature for
life, and (worst of all) wraps his cruel accost in professions of
tender solicitude for the victim.
What again does he understand by 'abnormal,' seeing that
he has no ' norm ' ? Or by ' defective ' ? Deficiency a falling
short (of what?) is in the nature of things a word of degree:
and amid the many thousand shades of human imperfection
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 189
where is that degree to be fixed? Someone at one of these
Congresses I think it was Dr. Saleeby again defied the whole
world to show him a 'normal' child born of defective parents:
and I don't know what he means by 'normal,' as neither does he.
But if he care to risk a black eye, I will engage to introduce him
to two lusty brothers who daily pass my door each an intelli-
gent servant valued by his employer, each the father of a healthy
family, and each (I dare swear) quick to resent a word against
either of their parents, although both father and mother might
easily have been 'sequestrated' under the provisions of Mr.
McKenna's Bill. 1 From men who argue before taking the
trouble to define their terms even to themselves, I believe you,
my lord as a scholar trained in dialectic would in the old days
have turned aside with a politely dissembled weariness. 'Quis
est iste ? Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without
knowledge?' But when, of their half-baked sciences, these
muddy reasoners offer to improve on the works of Almighty
God to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, and bring forth
Mazzaroth in (or out of) his season why then indeed my eye-
brows go up to find you in their company.
I suspect, though, that by this time you are heartily tired of
them, as am I. Shall we drop them here and, going on together,
conclude our walk by following reverently along the edge of a
speculation at which they would doubtless smile?
Your predecessor in the cathedral throne of Exeter provoked
even such a smile when he went down and confirmed a number
of inmates of the Starcross Asylum. The smile widened when,
being a very simple sincere man, he explained (I forget die exact
words) that in his experience persons of weak intellect were
peculiarly amenable to the Christian Faith. The laugh was
cheap and came easy. Yet I rather choose to remember with
1 The Eugenist, by the way, on his own showing would prove too much
for his brief. If, as he asserts, the defective * breed like rabbits' and have
been doing so unrestrained for centuries, our villages long before this
would have been swamped out with 'village idiots/ whereas, and as every
one knows, nothing of the sort has happened.
190 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
how sweet a charity for centuries the poor folk of Europe have
suffered and fed their half-wits, naming them 'God's fools/
Ponder that name, my lord ... I remember also a thing that
happened in the small town where I was born. Listen: for
this is a true story :
A native of that town, who had emigrated to South Africa
and prospered, returned to it after many years for a brief visit.
Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine. . . . This man came back
somewhat haughtily curious to discover if any one would
recognize him. Well, no one did ; not even the farmer, his old
employer, who came down the aisle on Sunday and held out
the alms-bag. But, as the exile walked out of the church porch,
a man caught at his hand, mumbling his name, laughing in his
eyes with glad welcome. It was the town idiot, Dicky Winny,
at whom as a boy he had been used to fling stones. While the
exile wondered, the idiot first spread a palm some four feet from
the ground 'Pete little boy so high!' Then he stooped
and made pretence to pick up a flint and fling it. 'Pete he
fling so. . . . These boys' (spitting, shaking his head with
infinite contempt) 'nowadays no good at all!'
Upon this story the Eugenist would probably make some such
comment as that ' if the poor fool had only been shut up, he had
never been pelted.' To which I should retort, 'Sir, the story
is not for you : but if you must still be teaching, go home and
teach your children not to follow your example of stoning the
weak.' I hope, however, that you, my lord, may read it as a
deeper parable. I think you must sometimes have preached
of the inscrutable purposes of God, and warned men against
leaving hidden things out of account or interpreting them too
rashly. Now when you see a mother poring over an imbecile
child, searching for some answer of love in the vacant eyes, or
when I tell you of this grown idiot laughing and forgiving his
fellows under an affliction that would tempt us to curse God and
die, does it not occur to you that after all these poor 'fools of
God* may be serving some divine purpose in the world and
Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter 191
serving it more happily than we deem ? to cleanse and soften with
tears some mother's eyes, which else had grown hard with petty
cares; to remind grumbling men how easily their lot had de-
served lamentation; to unlock in small dispersed societies the
waters of universal charity and to keep them evidently running ?
Who are we, my lord, to deny that these witless ones yes,
or even these Eugenists may have their place in the great
* God sits upon His hill,
And sees the shadows fly;
And if He laugh at fools, why should He not ?
It may even be that He has provided himself with these
Eugenists, as ancient kings kept Fools, for ironical delectation
in hours of leisure.
I wonder, my lord, if you can recall a vacation ramble we
once took together, and a most beautiful, pitiful sight we beheld
in the course of it. We halted beside a river, across which
in greed or in ignorance men had built a dam just too high for
the salmon to leap; nor had they supplied any Madder* for the
fish to ascend by successive easy assaults. Do you remember
how we sat and watched the lovely things hurling themselves
up against that brutal dam; leaping some twenty feet in air,
some forty leaps to minute bruising their bright sides upon
the masonry and tumbling back into the lower pool, that was
all aseethe with creatures mad to reach the head-waters and
deposit their spawn ?
What impulse urged them, baffled again and again, to persist at
that tremendous leap ? My grandfather (who was a patient man
of science and spent his life in observing and recording die habits
offish, without attempting to teach the Almighty how to improve
them) permitted himself in his chapter on the Salmon (A History
of the Fishes of the British Islands, vol. iv, p. 173) an indignant
paragraph upon men who intrude such barriers upon Nature.
He lived before men had invented such sciences arts, rather
as Eugenics or, 'How to be Dirty in the Drawing-Room'; and
192 Three Open Letters to the Bishop of Exeter
his answer to the question 'Why should these salmon pant for
the upper streams?' would have been, 'They do it as I track
them, following after but not disputing the divine wisdom';
even as to the claims of the Eugenists I am sure he will have
quoted the great smashing answer in Esdras :
Before the waters of the world stood, or ever the winds blew; before it
thundered or lightened, or ever the foundations of paradise were laid;
before the fair flowers were seen, or ever the moveable powers were
established; before the measures of the firmament were named, or ever
the chimneys in Sion were hot; and ere the present years were sought out,
or ever the inventions of them that now sin were turned; then did I con-
sider these things, and they were all made through me alone, and through
none other. By me also they shall be ended, and by none other.
My lord, I put it to you plainly that it were a sin and
wickedness for us, knowing so little as we know, to promote the
Bill now before Parliament. Forgive me that I have used some
coarse words upon it : they were the fittest for a very dirty sub-
ject which has begun to recommend itself as a parlour science.
But for I am very earnest in this matter I ask something
more than your forgiveness. Will you if these three letters
of mine have at all opened your eyes to the infamy of the Bill
and its proposals make a noble return upon yourself and say,
'I find this thing to be evil, and it no longer has my consent'?
That would be such an utterance as great men and only they
dare to make; and for a smaller matter, my lord, it would
vindicate at a stroke the trust and admiration, founded these
years ago, of
Your old pupil and still obedient servant,
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH.
JENIFER'S LOVE
SMALL is my secret let it pass
Small in your life the share I had,
Who sat beside you in the class,
Awed by the bright superior lad :
Whom yet with hot and eager face
I prompted when he missed his place.
For you the call came swift and soon :
But sometimes in your holidays
You met me trudging home at noon
To dinner through the dusty ways,
And recognized, and with a nod
Passed on, but never guessed thank God!
Truly our ways were separate.
I bent myself to hoe and drill,
Yea, with an honest man to mate,
Fulfilling God Almighty's will;
And bore him children. But my prayers
Were yours and, only after, theirs.
While you still loftier, more remote,
You sprang from stair to stair of fame,
And you 've a riband on your coat,
And you Ve a title to your name.
But have you yet a star to shine
Above your bed, as I o'er mine ?
193
THE ART OF PARODY
An Introduction to Parodies and Imitations Old and New, edited
by J. A. S. Adam and B. C. White. 1912.
SAYS Ruskin, in his lecture on The Mystery of Life and its
Arts *The moment a man can really do his work he
becomes speechless about it. All words become idle to him
all theories/ With a rhetorical flourish he goes on to ask:
'Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, or boast
of it when built?'
Well, as to the bird, I don't know, and (with all respect)
I very much doubt if Ruskin knew; though by the noise the
sparrows were making, a few weeks ago, in the ivies outside
this window of mine, I should judge that as they say in Parlia-
ment ' the answer to the second part of the question is in the
affirmative.' But if Ruskin be right in his general proposition,
that a man straightway falls silent about any work he can really
do, it would seem that the editors of this anthology in asking
me to write a Preface have paid a left-handed compliment, the
blow of which is sharpened rather than softened by their
gracefully including two or three parodies of my own.
Well, well en los nidos de antano no hai pdjaros hogano /
I may theorize a little, perhaps, about; last year's nests.
Now, the first thing to be said about Parody is that it plays
with the gods : its fun is taken with Poetry, which all good men
admit to be a beautiful and adorable thing, and some would
have to be a holy thing. 1 It follows then that Parody must be
1 There are, of course, false gods in Poetry. But parodies of these
directly expose their falsity, while parodies of true poetry subtly pay
homage to its truth. Moreover, we may say generally that in parody,
as elsewhere, exposure of the false (though useful and necessary) ranks
below illustration of die true.
194
The Art of Parody 195
delicate ground, off which the profane and vulgar should be
carefully warned. A deeply religious man may indulge a smile
at this or that in his religion; as a truly devout lover may rally
his mistress on her foibles, since for him they make her the more
enchanting. Without being conscious of it, he knows un-
erringly ' how far to go/ as they say ; he cannot offend, because
his true reverence does not so much control as permeate him:
Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me :
and the tone of the laugh tells of that sweet understanding. So,
or almost so, it should be with the parodist. He must be friends
with the gods, and worthy of their company, before taking these
pleasant liberties with them. Nor, if we keep a mind at once
fearless and modest in approaching them, shall we fail of that
friendship, thanks to their magnificent condescension. As
Emerson has noted:
It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior
beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their
stateliest picture in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs
of will or of genius anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for our betters ; but rather it is true that,
in their grandest strokes, there we feel most at home. All that
Shakespeare says of the King, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the
corner feels to be true of himself. . . .
If this be true and I think no one will dispute it then the
more shame must we feel when an outsider comes along and
takes advantage of their noble condescension to call hail-fellow
with Milton, for example, or to slap Wordsworth on the back.
A David may dance before the ark, to which an Uzzah may not
put forth a hand: and even David must lay his account with
Michal's shocked protestantism.
The material, then, on which Parody works is Poetry, and
preferably great Poetry. Its method consists in a nice apposi-
196 The Art of Parody
tion of the incongruous, catching as nearly as possible the
authentic speech of the bard and applying it unexpectedly, even
absurdly, to things beneath his notice; thereby reminding him
that he is mortal without denying rather, insisting that he is
divine. In its easiest form Parody will take his actual words,
and turn them to some new and ridiculous connotation. It is
a trick not far removed from punning ; yet, when well executed,
it gives pleasure, I think, to any one not born a prig. For an
instance, I choose a few lines of Mr. Hartley Carrick's, one of
our younger parodists. He takes Wordsworth's She was a
Phantom of Delight, and applies the actual words, or some of
them, which in our minds carry their own associations, to
a motor-omnibus.
It was a phantom of delight
When first it gleam d upon my sight,
And seem'd to hint a time of bliss
In store for the metropolis . . .
A perfect motor, nobly plannd
To traverse Holborn and the Strand. . . ,
But now from early morn till e'en
I hear the pulse of the machine
That clatters past my humble door
In one unending shriek and roar;
With aching head and deafen'd ear
I note with apprehensive fear
The traveller *twixt life and death
Endeavour to regain his breath,
As once again it skids away
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
At the risk of being numbered among the friends of Mr.
Peter Magnus, I confess that these absurdities amuse me. But
now let us compare the above with a specimen of parody carried
almost, if not quite, to its fullest powers, and for this purpose
The Art of Parody 197
let us choose another 'imitation' of Wordsworth, this time by
J. K. Stephen (genius untimely lost) :
POETIC LAMENTATION ON THE INSUFFICIENCY OF STEAM
LOCOMOTION IN THE LAKE DISTRICT
Bright Summer spreads his various hue
O'er nestling vales and mountains steep,
Glad birds are singing in the blue,
In joyous chorus bleat the sheep.
But men are walking to and fro,
Are riding, driving, far and near,
And nobody as yet can go
By train to Buttermere.
Wake, England, wake! 'tis now the hour
To sweep away this black disgrace
The want of locomotion proves
In so enjoyable a place.
Nature has done her part, and why
Is mightier Man in his to fail ?
I want to hear the porters cry,
* Change here for Ennerdale!'
Presumptuous Nature! do not rate
Unduly high thy humble lot,
Nor vainly strive to emulate
The fame of Stephenson and Watt.
The beauties which thy lavish pride
Has scatter'd through the smiling land
Are little worth till sanctified
By Man's completing hand.
The form is here true Wordsworth, from the verbose title to
the last exquisite quatrain, with scarcely a lapse. * Enjoyable'
in stanza 2 is not quite Wordsworth, but a little more than
Wordsworth, and 'the fame of Stevenson and Watt* occupies
198 The An of Parody
Stephen for a moment with his own cleverness. On the other
hand, what, for example, could be more exquisitely Words-
worthian in operation of mind and in actual cadence of speech
than
But men are walking to and fro,
Are riding, driving, far and near * . . ?
There is more than this: with almost diabolical cunning
Stephen has seized on the subject that of all others would have
engaged Wordsworth; has turned it upside down; and has
presented the poet uttering to us in his own authentic words
precisely the last sentiments his admirers would expect him to
utter. And yet again (so clever it is), we are left with a frolic
doubt (remembering Wordsworth's ineradicable streak of the
prosaic and his actual return upon himself in his later years)
that somehow, had it been possible to fill the great man up with
laughing gas, in the moments preceding unconsciousness he
might not improbably have uttered these very sentiments as he
would assuredly have cast them in similar words. I call this
the perfection of Parody.
But if the parodist can do so much as this, it follows further
that Parody must be a form of Criticism, and may be enlightening
as it is vivacious. Again I turn for the simplest illustration to
the work of a young practitioner. Some years ago, in his last
Oxford lectures, Mr. Froude lamented that no poet in this
country had arisen to undertake a national epic of the great
Elizabethan seamen; a hint which has since been acted on by
Mr. Alfred Noyes in his fine Drake, an epic poem in twelve
books. Now in any long poem of the sea there inheres the
difficulty that while the action of Epic has to be rapid and the
verse correspondingly rapid (as Matthew Arnold noted in his
Lectures On Translating Homer\ actually the business of sea-
faring is full of patience and longueurs. You cannot upon the
wide Atlantic hustle action and reaction to and fro as upon the
fields of windy Troy. Homer, when he came to the Odyssey,
The Art of Parody 199
dodged a part of this difficulty by casting a whole mass of his
hero's adventures into the form of reported speech a traveller's
yarn at the court of Alcinous ; and another part he could dodge
because he was dealing with the purely fictitious, and could
introduce a shipwreck or a miracle whenever things were getting
slow. But in these days you cannot play tricks like this with
Drake, whose voyages are matters of history. This difficulty,
then, was inherent in Mr. Noyes's subject, and it seems to me
very shrewdly detected and hit off in Mr. Wilfrid Blair's parody :
THE NOYES OF BATTLE 1
Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake
Put down the helm, and drove against the seas.
Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman,
Full-fraught with weather-wisdom, once again
Put down the helm, and so drove on, until
The everlasting and omnipotent
Dawn, through the splendid gloom and golden clouds
Broke : and a great, golden, gilded galleon
In raggy piles of gloom and shaggy splendour
Rose up against them, clouded with the dawn.
Plushed, plumed, and purpled on the imperious poop,
Crusty with cramoisie the Spaniards stood.
They quite refused surrender, till Drake cried
*I am El Draque!' At once they recognized
The name, tho* spoken with a Devon burr.
Down came their flag at once upon the deck,
As when a fragment of the ceiling falls.
Brief and delicious simile!
So with instructions to the wheel
Drake went below, and had a glass of grog.
For a second and more accomplished illustration, let us take
James Smith's famous parody of Crabbe in Rejected Addresses.
\Poets~orfthe Isis. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1910.
200 The Art of Parody
Crabbe is a very considerable poet: for a certain power of
poignancy, hard yet human, and (its best quality) stark clear of
sentiment, you will hardly find his match. But he exhibited
this power in versified stories, and in the art of introducing and
laying out a story he was incurably clumsy and could be bald,
unpoetical to the last degree. Those of us who love him best
must have smiled oftenest over such passages as :
Peter had heard there were in London then
Still have they being! workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind . . .
The difficulty here is somewhat cognate with that of logging
Drake's voyages: and perhaps among narrative poets Homer
stands alone in his handling of flat intervals, his skill in poetizing
such operations as cooking a dinner or hauling up a boat so that
while never aspiring above their due level in the narrative they
never fall below the grand manner. Crabbe (' a Pope in worsted
stockings') avoided, to be sure, the Charybdis of Pope and his
compeers. He seldom or never clothed triviality in fine and
banal writing such as :
The Heavens illumed by Sol's bright ray
or
Inoculation! heavenly maid, descend,
which was the approved way to talk of the weather or of
Dr. Jenner's vaccine. On the other hand, at the beginning of
a tale he would bump for twenty or thirty lines together upon
a Scylla commonplace so bald and awkward that James Smith's
famous lines contain more of criticism than of exaggeration :
John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire ;
But when John Dwyer 'listed in the Blues,
Emanuel Jennings polish* d Stubbs's shoes.
Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
Up as a corn-cutter a safe employ.
The Art of Parody 201
This is fun and criticism together; and as criticism it indicates
at once Crabbe's * worsted stockings' and his frequent, almost
habitual clumsiness in starting them out for a walk.
Again, could the fatuity of the ordinary Prize Poem be
better rationalized in twenty pages of prose than it was by
the parodist who summarized all the Oxford Newdigates in
one line?
What though no cenotaph enshrine thy bones!
Or, again, has the banality of poetic diction ever received
a shrewder knock than it did from the parodies of the Anti-
Jacobin ?
The feather' d tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear.
Or yet, again, could the musical flagrancies of our latest and
greatest Strauss, and the affabilities of all the eighteenth-century
Odes to Saint Cecilia, be more neatly touched than they are by
Mr. Charles L. Graves simply opposing them in an
ODE TO DISCORD
Hence, loathed Melody, whose name recalls
The mellow fluting of the nightingale
In some sequester' d vale,
The Murmur of the stream
Heard in a dream,
Or drowsy plash of distant waterfalls.
But thou, divine Cacophony, assume
The rightful overlordship in her room,
And with Percussion's stimulating aid
Expel the heavenly but no longer youthful maid.
The mischief with Parody is that while no neater or swifter
vehicle of criticism has ever been invented, the most of men
practise it in youth, as a way of breaking their teeth upoa,
literature, and abandon it as middle age brings the critical
judgment which it would seem designed to convey. There
*H
202 The Art of Parody
once was an Aristophanes to whom years but brought fresh
gusto in the gentle art : and our own times have in England, in
Mr. Owen Seaman, a parodist as near perfection as our language
is likely to achieve for his first living rival, Mr. A. G. Godley,
is an Horatian rather than a parodist, and indeed his line has
lain in that direction from the first. Calverley, Hilton of The
Light Green, ]. K. Stephen, all died young. Perhaps the gods
loved them. For, as I said at the start, Parody plays with the
gods ; and, as George Meredith says in his Essay on Comedy
and we may reverently apply it to the gods : 'You may estimate
your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the
ridicule of them you love, without loving them less : and more
by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes,
and accepting the correction their image of you proposes/
INAUGURAL LECTURE
CAMBRIDGE, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1913
IN all the long quarrel set between philosophy and poetry I
know of nothing finer, as of nothing more pathetically hope-
less, than Plato's return upon himself in his last dialogue ' The
Laws.' There are who find that dialogue (left unrevised) in-
sufferably dull, as no doubt it is without form and garrulous.
But I think they will read it with a new tolerance, maybe even
with a touch of feeling, if upon second thoughts they recognize
in its twistings and turnings, its prolixities and repetitions, the
scruples of an old man who, knowing that his time in this world
is short, would not go out of it pretending to know more than
he does, and even in matters concerning which he was once
very sure has come to divine that, after all, as Renan says,
'La verite consiste dans les nuances.' Certainly 'the soul's
dark cottage battered and decayed' does in that last dialogue
admit some wonderful flashes,
From Heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates,
or rather to that noble 'banquet-hall deserted' which aforetime
had entertained Socrates.
Suffer me, Mr. Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen, before reach-
ing my text, to remind ourselves of the characteristically
beautiful setting. The place is Crete, and the three inter-
locutors Cleinias a Cretan, Megillus a Lacedaemonian, and
an Athenian stranger have joined company on a pilgrimage
to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, first lawgiver
of the island, had reputedly derived not only his parentage but
much parental instruction. Now the day being hot, even
scorching, and the road from Cnossus to the Sacred Cave a
203
204 Inaugural Lecture
long one, our three pilgrims, who have foregathered as elderly
men, take it at their leisure, and propose to beguile it with talk
upon Minos and his laws. 'Yes, and on the way/ promises
the Cretan, 'we shall come to cypress-groves exceedingly tall
and fair, and to green meadows, where we may repose ourselves
and converse.' 'Good,' assents the Athenian. 'Ay, very
good indeed, and better still when we arrive at them. Let us
push on.'
So they proceed. I have said that all three are elderly men;
that is, men who have had their opportunities, earned their wages,
and so nearly earned their discharge that now, looking back on
life, they can afford to see Man for what he really is at his best
a noble plaything for the gods. Yet they look forward, too, a
little wistfully. They are of the world, after all, and nowise so
tired of it, albeit disillusioned, as to have lost interest in the
game or in the young who will carry it on. So Minos and his
laws soon get left behind, and the talk (as so often befalls with
Plato) is of the perfect citizen and how to train him of educa-
tion, in short ; and so, as ever with Plato, we are back at length
upon the old question which he could never get out of his
way What to do with the poets?
It scarcely needs to be said that the Athenian has taken hold
of the conversation, and that the others are as wax in his hands.
'O Athenian stranger,' Cleinias addresses him 'inhabitant of
Attica I will not call you, for you seem to deserve rather the
name of Athene herself, because you go back to first principles.'
Thus complimented, the stranger lets himself go. Yet somehow
he would seem to have lost speculative nerve.
It was all very well in the ' Republic,' the ideal State, to be
bold and declare for banishing poetry altogether. But elderly
men have given up pursuing ideals; they have 'seen too many
leaders of revolts.' Our Athenian is driving now at practice
(as we say), at a well-governed State realizable on earth; and
after all it is hard to chase out the poets, especially if you your-
self happen to be something of a poet at heart. Hear, then,
Inaugural Lecture 205
the terms on which, after allowing that comedies may be per-
formed, but only by slaves and hirelings, he proceeds to allow
serious poetry.
And if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write
tragedy, come to us and say : ' O strangers, may we go to your city
and country, or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry?
What is your will about these matters?* how shall we answer the
divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows:
'Best of strangers,' we will say to them, 'we also, according to our
ability, are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest: for
our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life. . . . You
are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals
and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law alone can
perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a
moment allow you to erect your stage in the Agora, and introduce
the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit
you to harangue our women and children and the common people
in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our
own. For a State would be mad which gave you this licence, until
the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited
and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions
of the softer Muses ! first of all show your songs to the Magistrates
and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same
or better, we will give you a chorus ; but if not, then, my friends,
we cannot.'
Lame conclusion! Impotent compromise! How little appli-
cable, at all events, to our Commonwealth! though, to be sure
(you may say) we possess a relic of it in His Majesty's Licenser
of Plays. As you know, there has been so much heated talk
of late over the composition of the County Magistracy; yet I
give you a countryman's word, Sir, that I have heard many
names proposed for the Commission of the Peace, and on
many grounds, but never one on the ground that its owner had
a conservative taste in verse!
Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with these poets
somehow. It is possible (though not, I think, likely) that in
206 Inaugural Lecture
the ideal State there would be no Literature, as it is certain
there would be no Professors of it; but since its invention men
have never been able to rid themselves of it for any length of
time. Tamen usque recurret. They may forbid Apollo, but
still he comes leading his choir, the Nine:
1 /tiV eycuye /LICPOC/U KCV' es Se /c
Oapcrijaas Moiaaiai avv d^ercpatcrtv t/cot/iav.
And he may challenge us English boldly! For since Chaucer,
at any rate, he and his train have never been a/cA^vot to us
least of all here in Cambridge.
Nay, we know that he should be welcome. Cardinal New-
man, proposing the idea of a University to the Roman Catholics
of Dublin, lamented that the English language had not, like the
Greek, 'some definite words to express, simply and generally,
intellectual proficiency or perfection, such as "health," as used
with reference to the animal frame, and "virtue," with reference
to our moral nature/ Well, it is a reproach to us that we do
possess the term: and perhaps again a reproach to us that our
attempts at it the word 'culture* for instance have been apt
to take on some soil of controversy, some connotative damage,
from over-preaching on the one hand and impatience on the
other. But we do earnestly desire the thing. We do prize
that grace of intellect which sets So-and-so in our view as
'a scholar and a gentleman.' We do wish as many sons of this
University as may be to carry forth that lifelong stamp from her
precincts ; and this is my point from our notion of such a
man the touch of literary grace cannot be excluded. I put to
you for a test Lucian's description of his friend Demonax :
His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he
was just a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony.
But his discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went
away neither disgusted by servility nor repelled by ill-tempered
censure, but on the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and
encouraged to more orderly, contented, hopeful lives.
Inaugural Lecture 207
I put it to you, that Lucian needs not to say another word,
but we know that Demonax had loved letters, and partly by
aid of them had arrived at being such a man. No ; by consent
of all, Literature is a nurse of noble natures, and right reading
makes a full man in a sense even better than Bacon's; not
replete, but complete rather, to the pattern for which Heaven
designed him. In this conviction, in this hope, public-spirited
men endow Chairs in our Universities, sure that Literature is a
good thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds.
That he has in him some power to guide such operation a
man must believe before accepting such a Chair as this. And
now, Sir, the terrible moment is come when your ^c'vos must
render some account I will not say of himself, for that cannot
be attempted but of his business here. Well, first let me
plead that while you have been infinitely kind to the stranger,
feasting him and casting a gown over him, one thing not all
your kindness has been able to do. With precedents, with
traditions such as other Professors enjoy, you could not furnish
him. The Chair is a new one, or almost new, and for the
present would seem to float in the void, like Mahomet's coffin.
Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief Justice Crewel
phrase) would ' take hold of a twig or a twine-thread to uphold
it'; being also prone (with Bacon) to believe that 'the counsels
to which Time hath not been called, Time will not ratify' ; I do
assure you that, had any legacy of guidance been discovered
among the papers left by my predecessor, it would have been
eagerly welcomed and as piously honoured. O, trust me, Sir!
if any design for this Chair of English Literature had been
left by Dr. Verrall, it is not I who would be setting up any new
stage in your agora! But in his papers most kindly searched
for me by Mrs. Verrall no such design can be found. He
was, in truth, a stricken man when he came to the Chair, and of
what he would have built we can only be sure that, had it been
this or had it been that, it would infallibly have borne the impress
of one of the most beautiful minds of our generation. The
208 Inaugural Lecture
gods saw otherwise; and for me, following him, I came to a
trench and stretched my hands to a shade.
For me, then, if you put questions concerning the work of
this Chair, I must take example from the artist in Don Quixote,
who being asked what he was painting answered modestly,
'That is as it may turn out.' The course is uncharted, and for
sailing directions I have but these words of your Ordinance :
It shall be the duty of the Professor to deliver courses of lectures
on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise
to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University
of the subject of English Literature.
And I never even knew that English Literature had a 'subject';
or, rather, supposed it to have several ! To resume :
The Professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical rather
than on philological and linguistic lines:
a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, large in itself,
if not comparatively, of the new Professor's ignorance. But
I ask you to note the phrase 'to promote, so far as may be in
his power, the study' not, you will observe, 'to teach'; for
this absolves me from raising at the start a question of some
delicacy for me, as Green launched his Prolegomena to Ethics
upon the remark that 'an author who seeks to gain general con-
fidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins
with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of
which he proposes to treat.' In spite of mark, pray, that I
say in spite of the activity of many learned Professors, some
doubt does lurk in the public mind if, after all, English Litera-
ture can, in any ordinary sense, be taught, and if the attempts
to teach it do not, after all, justify (as Wisdom is so often
justified of her grandparents) the silent sapience of those old
benefactors who abstained from endowing any such Chairs.
But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in
young minds by an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged,
their tastes directed, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged
Inaugural Lecture 209
this, I take it, no man of experience will deny. Nay, since our
two oldest Universities have a habit of marking one another
with interest an interest, indeed, sometimes heightened by
nervousness I may point out that all this has been done of
late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gave
to Oxford. This, then, Mr. Vice-Chancellor this or some-
thing like this, Gentlemen is to be my task if I have the good
fortune to win your confidence.
Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which
I propose to be guided, (i) For the first principle of all I put
to you that in studying any work of genius we should begin by
taking it absolutely ; that is to say, with minds intent on dis-
covering just what the author's mind intended; this being at
once the obvious approach to its meaning (its TO rl fjv cfvcw,
the * thing it was to be'), and the merest duty of politeness we
owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay our minds
open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be
noble and high and beautiful, we should surrender and let soak
our minds in it.
Let me premise that in claiming, even insisting upon, the
first place for this absolute study of a great work I use no dis-
respect towards those learned scholars whose labours will help
you, Gentlemen, to enjoy it afterwards in other ways and from
other aspects ; since I hold there is no surer sign of intellectual
ill-breeding than to speak, even to feel, slightingly of any know-
ledge oneself does not happen to possess. Still less do I aim to
persuade you that any one should be able to earn a Cambridge
degree by the process (to borrow Macaulay's phrase) of reading
our great authors 'with his feet on the hob/ a posture I have
not even tried, to recommend it for a contemplative man's
recreation. , These editors not only set us the priceless example
of learning for learning's sake : but even in practice they clear
our texts for us, and afterwards when we go more minutely
into our author's acquaintance, wishing to learn all we can about
him by increasing our knowledge of detail they enhance our
2 1 o Inaugural Lecture
delight. Nay, with certain early writers say Chaucer or
Dunbar, as with certain highly allusive ones Bacon, or Milton,
or Sir Thomas Browne some apparatus must be supplied from
the start. But on the whole I think it a fair contention that
such helps to studying an author are secondary and subsidiary;
that, for example, with any author who by consent is less of his
age than for all time, to study the relation he bore to his age may
be important indeed, and even highly important, yet must in
the nature of things be of secondary importance, not of the first.
But let us examine this principle a little more attentively
for it is the palmary one. As I conceive it, that understanding
of literature which we desire in our Euphues, our gracefully
minded youth, will include knowledge in varying degree, yet
is itself something distinct from knowledge. Let us illustrate
this upon Poetry, which the most of us will allow to be the
highest form of literary expression, if not of all artistic expres-
sion. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands
better witness than this that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy,
it 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and
with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' When
George Eliot said, 'I never before met with so many of my
own feelings expressed just as I should like them,' she but
repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more familiar fashion)
what Johnson said of Gray ; and the same testimony lies implicit
in Emerson's fine remark that 'universal history, the poets, the
romancers' all good writers, in short 'do not anywhere make
us feel that we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it
is true that, in their greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.'
The mass of evidence, of which these are samples, may be
summarized thus : As we dwell here between two mysteries, of
a soul within and an ordered Universe without, so among us
are granted to dwell certain men of more delicate intellectual
fibre than their fellows men whose minds have, as it were,
filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to
us stray messages between these two mysteries, as modern
Inaugural Lecture 211
telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatch, gather home human
messages astray over waste waters of the Ocean.
If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet,
that (as Dr. Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers
to have felt before, but he feels it with a great increase of sensi-
bility ; or even if, though the message be unfamiliar, it suggest
to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to 'feel that we are greater than
we know,' I submit that we respond to it less by anything that
usually passes for knowledge, than by an improvement of sensi-
bility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch ; so that the
man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be
remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and
exhibit for knowledge, than for being something, and that
'something* a man of unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose
trained judgment we can trust to choose the better and reject
the worse.
But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be
less easy of practice than the memorizing of much that passes
for knowledge of what happened to Harriet or what Blake
said to the soldier and far less easy to examine on, the peda-
gogic mind (which I implore you not to suppose me confusing
with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble tends all the while
to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling up accidents and
irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. And we
should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind
with the scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue
pretends to derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine
commentators be it a Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old
reverence' sake?) an Aldis Wright fetching home bits of
erudition, non sua poma, and announcing 'This must be the
true Sion, for we found it in a wood.'
Hence a swarm of little school-books pullulates annually, all
upside down and wrong from beginning to end; and hence a
worse evil afflicts us, that the English schoolboy starts with a
false perspective of any given masterpiece, his pedagogue
212 Inaugural Lecture
urging, obtruding, the poem or the play itself, is seen in distorted
glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view.
This same temptation to remove a work of art from the
category for which the author designed it into another where it
can be more conveniently studied reaches even above the
schoolmaster to assail some very eminent critics. I cite an
example from a book of which I shall hereafter have to speak
with gratitude as I shall always name it with respect The
History of English Poetry, by Dr. Courthope, some time Pro-
fessor of Poetry at Oxford. In his fourth volume, and in his
estimate of Fletcher as a dramatist, I find this passage :
But the critical test of a play's quality is only applied when it is
read. So long as the illusion of the stage gives credit to the action,
and the words and gestures of the actor impose themselves on the
imagination of the spectator, the latter will pass over a thousand
imperfections which reveal themselves to the reader, who, as he has
to satisfy himself with the drama of silent images, will not be content
if this in any way falls short of his conception of truth and nature,
which seems equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the
frieze of the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in
Bloomsbury. So long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave
credit to Pheidias's design, and the sunlight of Attica imposed
its delicate intended shadows edging the reliefs, the country-
men of Pericles might be tricked ; but the visitor to the British
Museum, as he has to satisfy himself with what happens indoors
in the atmosphere of the West Central Postal Division of
London, will not be content if Pheidias in any way fall short
of his conception of truth and nature. Yet Fletcher (I take it)
constructed his plays as plays; the illusion of the stage, the
persuasiveness of the actor's voice, were conditions for which
he wrought, and on which he had a right to rely; and, in short,
any critic behaves uncritically who, distrusting his imagination
to recreate the play as a play, elects to consider it in the category
of something else.
Inaugural Lecture 213
In sum, if the great authors never oppress us with airs of
condescension, but, like the great lords they are, put the meanest
of us at our ease in their presence, I see no reason why we
should pay to any commentator a servility not demanded by
his master.
My next two principles may be more briefly stated.
(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will
deal largely with style, that curiously personal thing ; and since
(as I have said) they cannot in their nature be readily brought
to rule-of-thumb tests, and may therefore so easily be suspected
of evading all tests, of being mere dilettantism; I propose
(I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this suspicion by constantly
aiming at the concrete, at the study of such definite beauties as
we can see presented in print under our eyes; always seeking
the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at any
rate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of
which the particular achievement of genius is so apt to. slip.
And having excluded them at first in prudence, I make little
doubt we shall go on to exclude them in pride. Definitions,
formulae (some would add, creeds) have their use in any
society in that they restrain the ordinary unintellectual man
from making himself a public nuisance with his private opinions.
But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real
sense of prose or verse. In other words, they are good disci-
pline for some thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use
for them. As Thomas a Kempis 'would rather feel compunc-
tion than understand the definition thereof,' so the initiated
man will say of the ' Grand Style,' for example ' Why define
it for me?' When Viola says simply:
I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too,
or Macbeth demands of the Doctor :
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow . . . ?
214 Inaugural Lecture
or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered!
or when Milton tells of his dead friend how
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield,
or describes the battalions of Heaven :
On they move
Indissolubly firm; nor obvious hill,
Nor strait' ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divides
Their perfect ranks,
or when Gray exalts the great commonplace:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th* inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave,
or when Keats casually drops us such a line as
The journey homeward to habitual self,
or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when
I open on a page of William Watson and read :
O ancient streams, O far descended woods,
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls! . . .
'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any
definition of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here,
and again here in all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite
or solemn I recognize and feel the thing? 9
Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just
here. Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact
definitions can be applied. It is an Art rather, the success of
which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill
to give as on ours to receive.
(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with
Inaugural Lecture 215
me to Plato's wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the
cypresses; and loth as we must be to lay hands on our father
Parmenides, I feel we must treat the gifted Athenian stranger
to a little manhandling. For did you not observe though
Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind the
only language how envious he showed himself to seal up
the well, or allow it to trickle only under permit of a public
analyst: to treat all innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred
odd years ago, the Lyrical Ballads were suspect?
But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies
on the courage of the young. As Literature is an Art and
therefore not to be pondered only, but practised, so ours is a
living language and therefore to be kept alive, supple, active in
all honourable use. The orator can yet sway men, the poet
ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with salutary laughter
or purge their emotions by pity or terror. The historian
'superinduces upon events the charm of order.' The novelist
well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you
against despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in
the hands of men. For my part, I believe, bearing in mind
Mr. Barrie's Peter Pan and the old bottles he renovated to hold
that joyous wine, that even Musical Comedy, in the hands of a
master, might become a thing of beauty. Of the Novel, at any
rate whether we like it or not we have to admit that it does
hold a commanding position in the literature of our times, and
to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the
other day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant
study of Thomas Hardy, that ' the right to such a position is
not to be disputed ; for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position
is no more than the power to maintain it.' You may agree
with that or you may not; you may or may not deplore the
forms that literature is choosing nowadays; but there is no
gainsaying that it is still very much alive. And I would say
to you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and be glad that Literature and
the English tongue are both alive.' Carlyle, in his explosive
2 1 6 Inaugural Lecture
way, once demanded of his countrymen, ' Shakespeare or India ?
If you had to surrender one to retain the other, which would
you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire is yet in the making,
while the works of Shakespeare are complete and purchasable
in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely in pan materia ;
and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble half-way.
But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the
making, you have at once an Empire and an emprise. In that
alone you have inherited something greater than Sparta. Let
us strive, each in his little way, to adorn it.
But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that
Literature is an Art and English a living tongue, has led me
right up to a fourth principle, the plunge into which (though I
foresaw it from the first) all the coward in me rejoices at having
to defer to another lecture. I conclude then, Gentlemen, by
answering two suspicions, which very likely have been shaping
themselves in your minds. In the first place, you will say, 'It
is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating an
increased sensibility/' and the like; but we know what that
leads to to quackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty?
Don't you admire that?'" Well, I am not greatly frightened.
To begin with, when we come to particular criticism I shall
endeavour to exchange it with you in plain terms; a manner
which (to quote Mr. Robert Bridges' Essay on Keats) 'I prefer,
because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he means,
it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the
true business of criticism is advanced.' But I have a second
safeguard, more to be trusted : that here in Cambridge, with all
her traditions of austere scholarship, any one who indulges
in loose discinct talk will be quickly recalled to his tether.
Though at the time Athene be not kind enough to descend
from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, yet the very
genius loci will walk home with him from the lecture room,
whispering monitions, cruel to be kind.
'But/ you will say alternatively, 'if we avoid loose talk on
Inaugural Lecture 217
these matters we are embarking on a mighty difficult business.'
Why, to be sure we are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoy-
ment. After all, we have a number of critics among whose
methods we may search for help from the Persian monarch
who, having to adjudicate upon two poems, caused the one
to be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the prize
to the other, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall finally
invoke to sustain my hope of building something; that is if
you, Gentlemen, will be content to accept me less as a Professor
than as an Elder Brother.
The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a debt, perhaps
appropriately here, by quoting him as translated by the friend
of mine, now dead, who first invited me to Cambridge and
taught me to admire her one Arthur John Butler, some time
a Fellow of Trinity, and later a great pioneer among English-
men in the study of Dante. Thus while you listen to the appeal
of Sainte-Beuve, I can hear beneath it a more intimate voice,
not for the first time encouraging me.
Sainte-Beuve then si magna licet componere parvis is de-
livering an Inaugural Lecture in the Ecole Normale, the date
being April i2th, 1858. ' Gentlemen,' he begins, 'I have written
a good deal in the last thirty years; that is, I have scattered
myself about a good deal; so that I need to gather myself
together, in order that my words may come before you with
all the more freedom and confidence.' That is his opening;
and he ends:
As time goes on, you will make me believe that I can for my part
be of some good to you : and with the generosity of your age you
will repay me, in this feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to
give you in intellectual direction, or in literary insight. If in one
sense I bestow on you some of my experience, you will requite me,
and in a more profitable manner, by the sight of your ardour for
what is noble: you will accustom me to turn oftener and more
willingly towards the future in your company. You will teach me
again to hope.
PIPES IN ARCADY
I HARDLY can bring myself to part with this story, it has
been such a private joy to me. Moreover, that I have lain
awake in the night to laugh over it is no guarantee of your being
passably amused. Yourselves, I dare say, have known what it
is to awake in irrepressible mirth from a dream which next
morning proved to be flat and unconvincing. Well, this my
pet story has some of the qualities of a dream; being absurd, for
instance, and almost incredible, and even a trifle inhuman. After
all, I had better change my mind, and tell you another
But no; I will risk it, and you shall have it, just as it befel.
I had taken an afternoon's holiday to make a pilgrimage : my
goal being a small parish church that lies remote from the rail-
way, five good miles from the tiniest of country stations ; my
purpose to inspect or say, rather, to contemplate a Norman
porch, for which it ought to be widely famous. (Here let me
say that I have an unlearned passion for Norman architecture
to enjoy it merely, not to write about it.)
To carry me on my first stage I had taken a crawling local
train that dodged its way somehow between the regular expresses
and the 'excursions' that invade our Delectable Duchy from
June to October. The season was high midsummer, the after-
noon hot and drowsy with scents of mown hay ; and between
the rattle of the fast trains it seemed that we, native denizens of
the Duchy, careless of observation or applause, were executing
a tour de force in that fine indolence which has been charged as
a fault against us. That we halted at every station goes without
saying. Few sidings however inconsiderable or, as it might
seem, fortuitous escaped the flattery of our prolonged sojourn.
218
Pipes in Arcady 219
We ambled, we paused, almost we dallied with the butterflies
lazily afloat over the meadow-sweet and cow-parsley beside the
line; we exchanged gossip with station-masters, and received
the congratulations of signalmen on the extraordinary spell of
fine weather. It did not matter. Three market-women, a
pedlar, and a local policeman made up with me the train's
complement of passengers. I gathered that their business
could wait ; and as for mine well, a Norman porch is by this
time accustomed to waiting.
I will not deny that in the end I dozed at intervals in my
empty smoking compartment; but wish to make it clear that
I came on the Vision (as I will call it) with eyes open, and that
it left me staring, wide awake as Macbeth.
Let me describe the scene. To the left of the line as you
travel westward there lies a long grassy meadow on a gentle
acclivity, set with three or four umbrageous oaks and backed
by a steep plantation of oak saplings. At the foot of the
meadow, close alongside the line, runs a brook, which is met
at the meadow's end by a second brook which crosses under
the permanent way through a culvert. The united waters con-
tinue the course of the first brook, beside the line, and maybe
for half a mile farther; but, a few yards below their junction,
are partly dammed by the masonry of a bridge over which a
country lane crosses the railway; and this obstacle spreads them
into a pool some fifteen or twenty feet wide, overgrown with
the leaves of the arrow-head, and fringed with water-flags and
the flowering rush.
Now I seldom pass this spot without sparing a glance for it;
first because of the pool's still beauty, and secondly because
many rabbits infest the meadow below the coppice, and among
them for two or three years was a black fellow whom I took
an idle delight in recognizing. (He is gone now, and his place
knows him no more; yet I continue to hope for sight of a black
rabbit just there.) But this afternoon I looked out with special
interest because, happening to pass down the line two days
22O Pipes in Arcady
before, I had noted a gang of navvies at work on the culvert;
and among them, as they stood aside to let the train pass, I
had recognized my friend Joby Tucker, their ganger, and an
excellent fellow to boot.
Therefore my eyes were alert as we approached the curve
that opens the meadow into view, and as I am a Christian
man, living in the twentieth century I saw this Vision : I beheld
beneath the shade of the midmost oak eight men sitting stark
naked, whereof one blew on a flute, one played a concertina,
and the rest beat their palms together, marking the time ; while
before them, in couples on the sward, my gang of navvies
rotated in a clumsy waltz watched by a ring of solemn ruminant
kine.
I saw it. The whole scene, barring the concertina and the
navvies' clothes, might have been transformed straight from a
Greek vase of the best period. Here, in this green corner of
rural England on a workaday afternoon (a Wednesday, to be
precise), in full sunlight, I saw this company of the early gods
sitting, naked and unabashed, and piping, while twelve British
navvies danced to their music. ... I saw it; and a derisive
whistle from the engine told me that driver and stoker saw it
too. I was not dreaming, then. But what on earth could it
mean? For fifteen seconds or so I stared at the Vision . . .
and so the train joggled past it and rapt it from my eyes.
I can understand now the ancient stories of men who, having
by hap surprised the goddesses bathing, never recovered from
the shock but thereafter ran wild in the woods with their
memories.
At the next station I alighted. It chanced to be the station
for which I had taken my ticket; but anyhow I should have
alighted there. The spell of the vision was upon me. The
Norman porch might wait. It is (as I have said) used to
waiting, and in fact it has waited. I have not yet made another
holiday to visit it. Whether or no the market-women and the
local policeman had beheld, I know not. I hope not, but now
Pipes in Arcady 221
shall never know. . . . The engine-driver, leaning in converse
with the station-master, and jerking a thumb backward, had
certainly beheld. But I passed him with averted eyes, gave up
my ticket, and struck straight across country for the spot.
I came to it, as my watch told me, at twenty minutes after
five. The afternoon sunlight still lay broad on the meadow.
The place was unchanged save for a lengthening of its oak-tree
shadows. But the persons of my Vision naked gods and
navvies had vanished. Only the cattle stood, knee-deep in
the pool, lazily swishing their tails in protest against the flies;
and the cattle could tell me nothing.
Just a fortnight later, as I spent at St. Blazey junction the forty
odd minutes of repentance ever thoughtfully provided by our
railway company for those who, living in Troy, are foolish
enough to travel, I spied at some distance below the station a
gang of men engaged in unloading rubble to construct a new
siding for the clay-traffic, and at their head my friend Mr. Joby
Tucker. The railway company was consuming so much of
my time that I felt no qualms in returning some part of the
compliment, and strolled down the line to wish Mr. Tucker
good day. 'And, by the by,' I added, 'you owe me an explana-
tion. What on earth were you doing in Treba meadow two
Wednesdays ago you and your naked friends?'
Joby leaned on his measuring rod and grinned from ear
to ear.
'You see'd us ? ' he asked, and, letting his eyes travel along the
line, he chuckled to himself softly and at length. 'Well, now,
I 'm glad o' that. 'Fact is, I 've been savin' up to tell 'ee about
it, but (thinks I) when I tells Mr. Q. he won't never believe.'
'I certainly saw you,' I answered; 'but as for believing *
'Iss, iss,' he interrupted, with fresh chucklings; 'a fair knock-
out, wasn' it? ... You see, they was blind poor fellas!'
'Drunk?'
222 Pipes in Arcady
'No, sir blind "pity the pore blind"; three-parts blind,
anyways, an' undergoin' treatment for it/
'Nice sort of treatment!'
'Eh? You don't understand. See'd us from the train,
did'ee? Which train?'
'The 1.35 ex Millbay.'
' Wish I 'd a-knowed you was watchin' us. I 'd ha' waved
my hat as you went by, or maybe blawed 'ee a kiss that bein'
properer to the occasion, come to think.'
Joby paused, drew the back of a hand across his laughter-
moistened eyes, and pulled himself together, steadying his voice
for the story.
'I '11 tell 'ee what happened, from the beginnin'. A gang of
us had been sent down, two days before, to Treba meadow, to
repair the culvert there. Soon as we started work we found
the whole masonry fairly rotten, and spent the first afternoon
(that was Monday) underpinning while I traced out the extent
o* the damage. The farther I went, the worse I found it; the
main mischief bein' a leak about midway in the culvert, on the
down side; whereby the water, perc'latin' through, was un-
packin' the soil, not only behind the masonry of the culvert,
but right away down for twenty yards and more behind the
stone-facing where the line runs alongside the pool. All this
we were forced to take down, shorein' as we went, till we cut
back pretty close to the rails. The job, you see, had turned
out more serious than reported ; and havin' no one to consult,
I kept the men at it.
' By Wednesday noon we had cut back so far as we needed,
shorein' very careful as we went, and the men workin' away
cheerful, with the footboards of the expresses whizzin' by close
over their heads, so 's it felt like havin' your hair brushed by
machinery. By the time we knocked off for dinner I felt
pretty easy in mind, knowin' we 'd broke the back o' the job.
Pipes in Arcady 223
'Well, we touched pipe and started again. Bein' so close to
the line I 'd posted a fella with a flag Bill Martin it was to
keep a look out for the down- trains ; an' about three o'clock or
a little after he whistled one comin'. I happened to be in the
:ulvert at the time, but stepped out an' back across the brook,
ust to fling an eye along the embankment to see that all was
:lear. Clear it was, an' therefore it surprised me a bit, as the
train hove in sight around the curve, to see that she had her
brakes on, hard, and was slowin' down to stop. My first
thought was that Bill Martin must have taken some scare an'
showed her the red flag. But that was a mistake; besides she
must have started the brakes before openin' sight on Bill.'
'Then why on earth was she pulling up?' I asked. 'It
:ouldn't be signals.'
'There ain't no signal within a mile of Treba meadow, up
Dr down. She was stoppin' because but just you let me tell
it in my own way. Along she came, draggin' hard on her
brakes an' whistlin'. I knew her for an excursion, and as
she passed I sized it up for a big school-treat. There was five
:oaches, mostly packed with children, an' on one o' the coaches
was a board "Exeter to Penzance." The four front coaches
bad corridors, the tail one just ord'nary compartments.
'Well, she dragged past us to dead-slow, an' came to a
standstill with her tail coach about thirty yards beyond where
[ stood, and, as you might say, with its footboard right over-
hangin' the pool. You mayn't remember it, but the line just
there curves pretty sharp to the right, and when she pulled up,
the tail coach pretty well hid the rest o' the train from us. Five
or six men, hearin' the brakes, had followed me out of the
culvert and stood by me, wonderin* why the stoppage was.
The rest were dotted about along the slope of th' embankment.
And then the curiousest thing happened about the curiousest
thing I seen in all my years on the line. A door of die tail
coach opened and a man stepped out. He didn't jump out,
you understand, nor fling hisself out; he just stepped out into
224 Pipes in Arcady
air, and with that his arms and legs cast themselves anyways
an* he went down sprawlin' into the pool. It 's easy to say
we ought t' have run then an* there an* rescued him; but for
the moment it stuck us up starin' an', Wait a bit! You han't
heard the end.
'I hadn't fairly caught my breath, before another man stepped
out! He put his foot down upon nothing, same as the first,
overbalanced just the same, and shot after him base-over-top
into the water.
* Close 'pon the second man's heels appeared a third. . . .
Yes, sir, I know now what a woman feels like when she 's
goin' to have the scritches. 1 I 'd have asked someone to pinch
me in the fleshy part o' the leg, to make sure I was alive an'
awake, but the power o' speech was taken from us. We just
stuck an' stared.
* What beat everything was the behaviour of the train, so to
say. There it stood, like as if it 'd pulled up alongside the pool
for the very purpose to unload these unfort'nit' men; an' yet
takin' no notice whatever. Not a sign o' the guard not a
head poked out anywheres in the line o' windows only the
sun shinin', an' the steam escapin', an' out o' the rear com-
partment this procession droppin' out an' high-divin' one after
another.
* Eight of 'em! Eight, as I am a truth-speakin' man but
there ! you saw 'em with your own eyes. Eight ! and the last
of the eight scarce in the water afore the engine toots her
whistle an' the train starts on again, round the curve an'
out o' sight.
'She didn' leave us no time to doubt, neither, for there the
poor fellas were, splashin' an* blowin', some of 'em bleatin' for
help, an* gurglin', an* for aught we know drownin* in three-
to-four feet o' water. So we pulled ourselves together an' ran
to give 'em first aid.
'It didn' take us long to haul the whole lot out and ashore;
1 Hysterics.
Pipes in Arcady 225
and, as Providence would have it, not a bone broken in the
party. One or two were sufferin* from sprains, and all of 'em
from shock (but so were we, for that matter), and between 'em
they must ha' swallowed a bra' few pints o' water, an' muddy
water at that. I can't tell ezackly when or how we discovered
they was all blind, or near-upon blind. It may ha* been from
the unhandiness of their movements an* the way they clutched
at us an' at one another as we pulled 'em ashore. Hows'ever,
blind they were ; an' I don't remember that it struck us as any-
ways singular, after what we 'd been through a'ready. We
fished out a concertina, too, an' a silver-mounted flute that was
bobbin* among the weeds.
'The man die concertina belonged to a tall fresh-com-
plexioned young fella he was, an' very mild of manner
turned out to be a sort o' leader o' the party; an' he was the
first to talk any sense. " Th-thank you,' he said. "They told
us Penzance was the next stop."
' "Hey? "says I.
'"They told us," he says again, plaintive-like, feelin' for
his spectacles an' not finding 'em, "that Penzance was the
next stop."
'"Bound for Penzance, was you?" I asks.
"'For the Land's End," says he, his teeth chatterin'. I set
it down the man had a stammer, but 'twas only the shock an'
the chill of his duckin'.
'"Well," says I, "this ain't the Land's End, though I dessay
it feels a bit like it. Then you wasn' thrown out ? " I says. ,
"'Th-thrown out?" says he. "N-no. They told us
Penzance was the next stop."
'"Then," says I, "if you got out accidental you 've had a
most providential escape, an' me an' my mates don't deserve
less than to hear about it. There 's bound to be inquiries after
you when the guard finds your compartment empty an' the
door open. Maybe the train '11 put back; more likely they'll
send a search-party; but anyways you 're all wet through, an*
i
226 Pipes in Arcady
the best thing for health is to off wi' your clothes an' dry 'em,
this warm afternoon."
'"I dessay," says he, "you'll have noticed that our eye-
sight is affected."
'"All the better if you 're anyways modest," says I. 'You
couldn' find a retirededer place than this not if you searched :
an' we don't mind."
'Well, sir, the end was we stripped 'em naked as Adam, an'
spread their clothes to dry 'pon the grass. While we tended
on 'em the mild young man told us how it had happened. It
seems they 'd come by excursion from Exeter. There 's a blind
home at Exeter, an' likewise a cathedral choir, an' Sunday school,
an' a boys' brigade, with other sundries; an' this year the good
people financin' half a dozen o' these shows had discovered
that by clubbin' two sixpences together a shillin' could be made
to go as far as eighteenpence ; and how, doin' it on the co-op,
instead of an afternoon treat for each, they could manage a two
days' ourin' for all Exeter to Penzance an' the Land's End,
sleepin' one night at Penzance, an' back to Exeter at some
ungodly hour the next. It 's no use your askin' me why a man
three-parts blind should want to visit the Land's End. There 's
an attraction about that place, an* that 's all you can say. Every-
body knows as 'tisn' worth seein', an' yet everybody wants to
see it. So why not a blind man?
'Well, this Happy Holiday Committee (as they called them-
selves) got the Company to fix them up with a special excursion ;
an' our blind friends bein' sensitive, or maybe a touch above
mixin' wi' the school-children an' infants had packed them-
selves into this rear compartment separate from the others.
One of 'em had brought his concertina, an' another his flute,
and what with these an' other ways of passin' the time they got
along pretty comfortable till they came to Gwinear Road : an'
there for some reason they were held up an' had to show their
tickets. Anyways, the staff at Gwinear Road went along the
train collectin* the halves o' their return tickets. "What 's the
Pipes in Arcady 227
name o' this station?" asks my blind friend, very mild an*
polite. "Gwinear Road," answers the porter; "Penzance next
stop." Somehow this gave him the notion that they were
nearly arrived, an' so, you see, when the train slowed down a
few minutes later an' came to a stop, he took the porter at
his word, an' stepped out. Simple, wasn't it? But in my
experience the curiousest things in life are the simplest of all,
once you come to inquire into 'em.'
'What I don't understand,' said I, 'is how the train came to
stop just there.'
Mr. Tucker gazed at me rather in sorrow than in anger.
'I thought,' said he, "twas agreed I should tell the story in
my own way. Well, as I was saying, we got those poor fellas
there, all as naked as Adam, an' we was helpin' them all we
could some of us wringin* out their underlinen an' spreading
it to dry, others collectin* their hats, an' try in' which fitted
which, an' others even dredgin' the pool for their handbags an'
spectacles an' other small articles, an' in the middle of it some-
one started to laugh. You '11 scarce believe it, but up to that
moment there hadn't been so much as a smile to hand round;
an' to this day I don't know the man's name that started it
for all I can tell you, I did it myself. But this I do know, that
it set off the whole gang like a motor-engine. There was a
sort of "click," an' the next moment
' Laugh ? I never heard men laugh like it in my born days.
Sort of recoil, I s'pose it must ha' been, after the shock.
Laugh ? There was men staggerin' drunk with it and there was
men rollin' on the turf with it; an' there was men cryin' with it,
holdin' on to a stitch in their sides an' beseechin' every one also
to hold hard. The blind men took a bit longer to get going ;
but by gosh, sir! once started they laughed to do your heart
good. O Lord, O Lord! I wish you could ha' see that
mild-mannered spokesman. Somebody had fished out his
spectacles for 'en, and that was all the clothing he stood
in that, an' a grin. He fairly beamed; an' the more he
228 Pipes in Arcady
beamed the more we rocked, callin' on 'en to take pity an*
stop it.
'Soon as I could catch a bit o* breath, "Land's End next
stop!" gasped I. "O, but this is the Land's End! This is
what the Land's End oughter been all the time, an' never was
yet. O, for the Lord's sake," says I, "stop beamin', and pick
up your concertina an' pitch us a tune!"
'Well, he did too. He played us "Home, sweet home" first
of all 'mid pleasures an' palaces an' the rest o' the young
men sat around 'en an' started clappin' their hands to the tune ;
an' then some fool slipped an arm round my waist. I 'm only
thankful he didn't kiss me. Didn't think of it, perhaps;
couldn't ha' been that he wasn't capable. It must ha' been
just then your train came along. An' about twenty minutes
later, when we was gettin' our friends back into their outfits,
we heard the search-engine about half a mile below, whistlin'
an' feelin' its way up very cautious towards us.
'They was sun-dried an' jolly as sandhoppers all the eight
of 'em as we helped 'em on board an' wished 'em ta-ta ! The
search-party couldn' understand at all what had happened in
so short a time, too to make us so cordial ; an' somehow we
didn' explain neither we nor the blind men. I reckon the
whole business had been so loonatic we felt it kind of holy.
But the pore fellas kept wavin' back to us as they went out
o' sight around the curve, an* maybe for a mile beyond. I
never heard,' Mr. Tucker wound up meditatively, 'if they ever
reached the Land's End. I wonder?'
'But, excuse me once more,' said Ij, 'How came the train
to stop as it did?'
'To be sure. I. said just now that the curiousest things in
life were, gen'rally speakin', the simplest. One o' the school-
children in the fore part of the train a small nipper of nine
had put his head out o' the carriage window and got his cap
blown away. That 's all. Bein' a nipper of some resource,
he wasted no time, but touched off the communicatin' button
Pipes in Arcady 229
an' fetched the whole train to a standstill. George Simmons,
the guard, told me all about it last week, when I happened across
him an* asked the same question you Ve been askin'. George
was huntin' through the corridors to find out what had gone
wrong ; that 's how the blind men stepped out without his
noticin'. He pretended to be pretty angry wi' the young
tacker. "Do 'ee know," says George, "it's a five-pound
fine if you stop a train without good reason?" "But I had a
good reason," says the child. "My mother gave 'levenpence
for that cap, an' 'tis a bran' new one.'"
LECTURE ON JARGON
CAMBRIDGE, i MAY 1913
I ASK leave this morning to interpose some words upon a kind
of writing which, from a superficial likeness, commonly passes
for prose in these days, and by lazy folk is commonly written
for prose, yet actually is not prose at all ; my excuse being the
simple practical one that, by first clearing this sham prose out
of the way, we shall the better deal with honest prose when we
come to it. The proper difficulties of prose will remain : but
we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at any rate
what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heard
somewhere of a religious body in the United States of America
which had reason to suspect one of its churches of accepting
spiritual consolation from a coloured preacher an offence
against the laws of the Synod and dispatched a Disciplinary
Committee with power to act; and of the Committee's return-
ing to report itself unable to take any action under its terms
of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured had
undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from
it in the Committee's presence, the performance could be brought
within no definition of preaching known or discoverable. So
it is with that infirmity of speech that flux, that determination
of words to the mouth, or to the pen which, though it be
familiar to you in parliamentary debates, in newspapers, and
as the staple language of Blue Books, Committees, Official
Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prose which is not
prose and under its real name of Jargon.
*You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called
Journalese. The two overlap, indeed, and have a knack of
assimilating each other's vices. But Jargon finds, maybe, the
most of its votaries among good douce people who have never
written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never
230
Lecture on Jargon 23 1
talk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad
weather'; who have never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess/
'recrudesce/ 'envisage/ 'adumbrate/ or with phrases such as
'the psychological moment/ 'the true inwardness/ 'it gives
furiously to think.' Jargon dallies with Latinity ' sub silentio/
'de die in diem/ 'cui bono?' (always in the sense, unsuspected
by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?') but not for the sake of
style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he
daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal ;
the more flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pig-
ment, the happier is his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all
the while to embellish our poor language, to make it more
floriferous, more poetical like the Babu for example who,
reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you,
the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'
There is metaphor: there is ornament: there is a sense of
poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealized. No such
gusto marks no such zeal, artistic or professional, animates
the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat),
douce respectable persons. Caution is its father: the instinct
to save everything and especially trouble : its mother, Indolence.
It looks precise, but is not. It is, in these times, safe : a thousand
men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been
prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in Chicago,
Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming the
language of Parliament: it has become the medium through
which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates,
Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well
as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of
their being.
Has a Minister to say 'No' in the House of Commons?
Some men are constitutionally incapable of saying 'no': but
the Minister conveys it thus 'The answer to the question is
in the negative.' That means 'no.' Can you discover it to
mean anything else, or anything more except that the speaker is
232 Lecture on Jargon
a pompous person? which was no part of the information
demanded.
That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. But as a rule
Jargon is by no means accurate, its method being to walk
circumspectly around its target; and its faith, that having
done so it has either hit the bull's-eye or at least achieved
something equivalent, and safer.
Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that
In the case of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin provided was of
the usual character.
Now this is not accurate. 'In the case of John Jenkins de-
ceased/ for whom a coffin was supplied, it was wholly superfluous
to tell us that he is deceased. But actually John Jenkins never
had more than one case, and that was the coffin. The Clerk
says he had two a coffin in a case: but I suspect the Clerk
to be mistaken, and I am sure he errs in telling us that the
coffin was of the usual character: for coffins have no character,
usual or unusual.
For another example (I shall not tell you whence derived) :
In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class
[So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as well as a first class. He
might be a stuffed animal: perhaps he is] the class-list will show by
some convenient mark (i) the Section or Sections for proficiency
in which he is placed in the first class and (2) the Section or Sections
(if any) in which he has passed with special distinction.
'The Section or Sections (if any)' But, how, if they are not
any, could they be indicated by a mark however convenient?
The Examiners will have regard to the style and method of the
candidate's answers, and will give credit for excellence in these respects.
Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon ? The
first is that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight
speech. It says 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased, the
coffin* when it means 'John Jenkins's coffin': and its yea is not
yea, neither is its nay nay : but its answer is in the affirmative or
Lecture on Jargon 233
in the negative, as the foolish and superfluous 'case* may be.
The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woolly
abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. I shall have some-
thing to say by and by about the concrete noun, and how you
should ever be struggling for it whether in prose or in verse.
For the moment I content myself with advising you, if you
would write masculine English, never to forget the old tag of
your Latin Grammar:
Masculine will only be
Things that you can touch and see.
But since these lectures are meant to be a course in First Aid
to writing, I will content myself with one or two extremely
rough rules: yet I shall be disappointed if you do not find them
serviceable.
The first is : Whenever in your reading you come across one
of these words, case, instance, character, nature, condition,
persuasion, degree whenever in writing your pen betrays you
to one or another of them pull yourself up and take thought.
If it be 'case* (I choose it as Jargon's dearest child 'in Heaven
yclept Metonymy') turn to the dictionary, if you will, and
seek out what meaning can be derived from casus, its Latin
ancestor: then try how, with a little trouble, you can extricate
yourself from that case.
Here are some specimens to try your hand on :
(1) All those tears which inundated Lord Hugh Cecil's head were
dry in the case of Mr. Harold Cox.
Poor Mr. Cox! left gasping in his aquarium!
(2) [From a cigar-merchant] In any case, let us send you a case
on approval.
(3) It is contended that Consols have fallen in consequence: but
such is by no means the case.
'Such? by the way, is another spoilt child of Jargon, especially
in Committee's Rules 'Co-opted members may be eligible
234 Lecture on Jargon
as such; such members to continue to serve for such time as*
and so on.
(4) Even in the purely Celtic areas, only in two or three cases do
the Bishops bear Celtic names.
For * cases' read * dioceses.'
Instance. In most instances the players were below their form.
But what were they playing at? Instances?'
Character Nature. There can be no doubt that the accident was
caused through the dangerous nature of the spot, the hidden character
of the by-road, and the utter absence of any warning or danger
signal.
Mark the foggy wording of it all! And yet the man hit
something and broke his neck! Contrast that explanation
with the verdict of a coroner's jury in the west of England
on a drowned postman 'We find that deceased met his death
by an act of God, caused by sudden overflowing of the river
Walkham and helped out by the scandalous neglect of the
way- wardens.'
The Aintree course is notoriously of a trying nature.
On account of its light character, purity and age, Usher's whisky
is a whisky that will agree with you.
Order. The mesalliance was of a pronounced order.
Condition. He was conveyed to his place of residence in an
intoxicated condition.
'He was carried home drunk.'
Quality and Section. Mr. , exhibiting no less than five works,
all of a superior quality, figures prominently in the oil section.
This was written of an exhibition of pictures.
Degree. A singular degree of rarity prevails in the earlier editions
of this romance.
That is Jargon. In prose it runs simply 'The earlier editions
of this romance are rare' or 'are very rare' or even (if you
Lecture on Jargon 23 5
believe what I take to doubt) 'are singularly rare'; which
should mean that they are rarer than the editions of any other
work in the world.
Now what I ask you to consider about these quotations is
that in each the writer was using Jargon to shirk prose, palming
off periphrases upon us when with a little trouble he could
have gone straight to the point. 'A singular degree of rarity
prevails/ 'the accident was caused through the dangerous
nature of the spot/ 'but such is by no means the case.' We
may not be capable of much ; but we can all write better than
that, if we take a little trouble. In place of, 'the Aintree course
is of a trying nature' we can surely say 'Aintree is a trying
course' or 'the Aintree course is a trying one' just that and
nothing more.
Next, having trained yourself to keep a look out for these
worst offenders (and you will be surprised to find how quickly
you get into the way of it), proceed to push your suspicions out
among the whole cloudy host of abstract terms. ' How excellent
a thing is sleep,' sighed Sancho Panza; 'it wraps a man round
like a cloak' an excellent example, by the way, of how to say
a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that 'among
the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the
human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate
circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least re-
markable.' How vile a thing shall we say? is the abstract
noun! It wraps a man's thoughts round like cotton wool.
Here is a pretty little nest of specimens, found in The Times
newspaper by Messrs. H. W. and E. G. Fowler, authors of
that capital little book The King's English :
One of the most important reforms mentioned in the rescript is
the unification of the organization of judicial institutions and the
guarantee for all the tribunals of the independence necessary for
securing to all classes of the community equality before the law.
I do not dwell on the cacophony; but, to convey a straight-
236 Lecture on Jargon
forward piece of news, might not the Editor of The Times as
well employ a man to write:
One of the most important reforms is that of the Courts, which
need a uniform system and to be made independent. In this way
only can men be assured that all are equal before the law.
I think he might.
A day or two ago the musical critic of the Standard wrote this :
MR. LAMOND IN BEETHOVEN
Mr. Frederick Lamond, the Scottish pianist, as an interpreter of
Beethoven has few rivals. At his second recital of the composer's
works at Bechstein Hall on Saturday afternoon he again displayed
a complete sympathy and understanding of his material that ex-
tracted the very essence of aesthetic and musical value from each
selection he undertook. The delightful intimacy of his playing and
his unusual force of individual expression are invaluable assets,
which, allied to his technical brilliancy, enable him to achieve an
artistic triumph. The two lengthy Variations in E flat major (Op. 3 5)
and in D major, the latter on the Turkish March from 'The Ruins of
Athens,' when included in the same programme, require a master
hand to provide continuity of interest. To say that Mr. Lamond
successfully avoided moments that might at times, in these works, have
inclined to comparative disinterestedness, would be but a moderate way
of expressing the remarkable fascination with which his versatile playing
endowed them, but at the same time two of the sonatas given included
a similar form of composition, and no matter how intellectually
brilliant may be the interpretation, the extravagant use of a certain
mode is bound in time to become somewhat ineffective. In the
Three Sonatas, the E major (Op. 109), the A major (Op. 2, No. 2),
and the C major (Op. in), Mr. Lamond signalized his perfect insight
into the composer's varying moods.
Will you not agree with me that here is no writing, here is no
prose, here is not even English, but merely a flux of words to
thp pen ?
Here again is a string, a concatenation say, rather, a tiara
Lecture on Jargon 237
of gems of purest ray serene from the dark unfathomed caves
of a. Scottish newspaper:
The Chinese viewpoint, as indicated in this letter, may not be
without interest to your readers, because it evidently is suggestive
of more than an academic attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect
of things which, if allowed to materialize, might suddenly culminate
in disaster resembling the Chang-Sha riots. It also ventures to
illustrate incidents having their inception in recent premature en-
deavours to accelerate the development of Protestant missions in
China; but we would hope for the sake of the interests involved that
what my correspondent describes as 'the irresponsible ruffian element*
may be known by their various religious designations only within
very restricted areas.
Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! and are asking
the Christians as to-day's newspapers inform us to pray
for them. Do you wonder ? But that is, or was, the Chinese
'viewpoint* and what a willow-pattern viewpoint! Observe
its delicacy. It does not venture to interest or be interesting;
merely to be 'not without interest.' But it does 'venture to
illustrate incidents' which, for a viewpoint, is brave enough:
and this illustration 'is suggestive of more than an academic
attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if
allowed to materialize, might suddenly culminate.* What
materializes? The unpleasant aspect? or the things? Gram-
mar says the 'things,* 'things which if allowed to materialize.'
But things are materialized already, and as a condition of their
being things. It must be the aspect then, that materializes.
But, if so, it is also the aspect that culminates, and an aspect,
however unpleasant, can hardly do that, or at worst cannot culmi-
nate in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots. ... I give it up.
Let us turn to another trick of Jargon : the trick of Elegant
Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without
needing to attend these lectures, the undergraduate detects it
for laughter:
Hayward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling, which appaiently
238 Lecture on Jargon
had no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however,
took some time in settling to work. . . .
Yes, you all recognize it and laugh at it. But why do you
practise it in your essays? An undergraduate brings me an
essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron I expect, nay exact, that
Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But my under-
graduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on
one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as
Byron, in the second sentence turns into ' that great but unequal
poet' and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as
ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his
proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes 'the gloomy
master of Newstead': overleaf he is reincarnated into 'the
meteoric darling of society' : and so proceeds through successive
avatars 'this arch-rebel,' 'the author of Childe Harold? 'the
apostle of scorn/ 'the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally
sensitive of his club-foot,' 'the martyr of Missolonghi,' 'the
pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.' Now this again is
Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of lazi-
ness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse. In litera-
ture as in life he makes himself felt who not only calls
a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and
re-double.
For another rule just as rough and ready, but just as useful:
Train your suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon
'as regards,' 'with regard to,' 'in respect of,' 'in connection
with,' 'according as to whether,' and the like. They are all
dodges of Jargon, circumlocutions for evading this or that
simple statement : and I say that it is not enough to avoid them
nine times out often, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred.
You should never use them. Though I cannot admire his
style, I admire the man who wrote to me, ' Re Tennyson your
remarks anent his In Memoriam make me sick': for though re
is not a preposition of the first water, and 'anent' has enjoyed
Lecture on Jargon 239
its day, the finish crowned the work. But here are a few
specimens far, very far, worse:
The special difficulty in Professor Minocelsi's case [our old friend
'case* again] arose in connection with the view he holds relative to
the historical value of the opening pages of Genesis.
That is Jargon. In prose, even taking the miserable sentence
as it stands constructed, we should write 'the difficulty arose
over the view he holds about the historical value,' etc.
From a popular novelist :
I was entirely indifferent as to the results of the game, caring
nothing at all as to whether / had losses or gains
Cut out the first 'as* in 'as to,' and the second 'as to' altogether,
and the sentence begins to be prose 'I was entirely indifferent
to the results of the game, caring nothing at all whether I had
losses or gains.'
But why, like Dogberry, have ' had losses ' ? Why not simply
'lose.' Let us try again. 'I was entirely indifferent to the
results of the game, caring nothing at all whether I won
or lost.'
Still the sentence remains absurd : for the second clause but
repeats the first without adding one jot. For if you care not
at all whether you win or lose, you must be entirely indifferent
to the results of the game. So why not say 'I was careless if
I won or lost,' and have done with it?
A man of simple and charming character, he was fitly associated
with the distinction of the Order of Merit.
I take this gem with some others from a collection made three
years ago, by the Oxford Magazine ; and I hope you admire it
as one beyond price. 'He was associated with the distinction
of the Order of Merit' means 'he was given the Order of Merit.'
If the members of that Order make a society then he was
associated with them; but you cannot associate a man with a
240 Lecture on Jargon
distinction. The inventor of such fine writing would doubtless
have answered Canning's Needy Knife-grinder with :
I associate thee with sixpence ! I will see thee in another association
first!
But let us close our florileglum and attempt to illustrate Jargon
by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English
(say Hamlet's soliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in
this fashion:
To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be
preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion ; the
answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative
character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to
mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree,
or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect
of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep
is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death ; and with
the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with
the latter : so that in this connection it might be argued with regard
to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be
put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to men-
tion a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity,
and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.
That is Jargon : and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling
around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms ; to be for
ever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the
Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the
air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the tiling.
The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use
of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write
in the active voice, 'They gave him a silver teapot/ you write
as a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a
silver teapot/ you write Jargon. But at the beginning set even
higher store on the concrete noun. Somebody I think it was
FitzGerald once posited the question 'What would have be-
come of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing
Lecture on Jargon 241
of the Parables?' Without pursuing that dreadful inquiry I
ask you to note how carefully the Parables those exquisite
short stories speak only of * things which you can touch and
see* 'A sower went forth to sow/ 'The kingdom of heaven
is like unto leaven, which a woman took' and not the Parables
only, but the Sermon on the Mount and almost every verse of
the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear
to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says,
'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's' not 'Render
unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.'
The Gospel does not say 'Consider the growth of the lilies/
or even ' Consider how the lilies grow.' It says, ' Consider the
lilies, how they grow.'
Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English
so constantly chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase
forcing you to touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches
the general through the particular. He does it even in Venus
and Adonis (as Professor Wendell, of Harvard, pointed out in
a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare, published some
few years ago). Read any page of Venus and Adonis side by
side with any page of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and you
cannot but mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite,
particular, visualized image, in Marlowe the beautiful generali-
zation, the abstract term, the thing seen at a literary remove.
Take the two openings, both of which start out with the sun-
rise. Marlowe begins:
Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds :
Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds,
And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,
All headlong throws herself the clouds among,
Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but
gets to his hero and to business without ado :
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
(You have the sun visualized at once),
242 Lecture on Jargon
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh* d to scorn.
When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite
he is :
Round-hoof d, short- join ted, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong ;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.
Or again, in a casual simile, how definite :
Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.
Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first
meeting with Leander :
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate . . .,
and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last
meeting with Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:
Or as the snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there all smother'd up in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again,
So, at his bloody view
I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole
passage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to
be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that
whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms,
Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he
learned to pack into such verse as :
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care.
Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then
let us take Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of
Lecture on Jargon 243
genius or of something very like it, and commonly praised by
the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, and what I may
call solidified sensation. Let us take this admired passage from
his Duchess of Malfi:
Ferdinand. How doth our sister Duchess bear herself
In her imprisonment?
Bosola. Nobly : I '11 describe her.
She 's sad as one long used to 't, and she seems
Rather to welcome the end of misery
Than shun it : a behaviour so noble
As gives a majesty to adversity. 1
You may discern the shape of loveliness
More perfect in her tears than in her smiles;
She will muse for hours together ; 2 and her silence
Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.
Now set against this the well-known passage from Twelfth
Night where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question
about someone unknown to him and invented by her a
mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more definite
is the language:
Viola. My father had a daughter lov'd a man ;
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
/ should your lordship.
Duke. And what 's her history ?
Viola. A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed ?
Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when
Shakespeare has to use the abstract noun 'concealment,' on
an instant it turns into a visible worm 'feeding* on the visible
1 Note the abstract terms.
1 Here we first come on the concrete : and beautiful it is.
244 Lecture on Jargon
rose; how, having to use a second abstract word 'patience/ at
once he solidifies it in tangible stone.
Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men
who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our
maxim to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the parti-
cular to the general, the definite to the vague as a canon of
rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The late Mr. E. J.
Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too
little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship
hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by setting
a passage from Burke's speech On Conciliation with America
alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's
Inquiry into the Policy of the European Powers. Here is the
deadly parallel :
BURKE
In large bodies the circulation
of power must be less vigorous at
the extremities. Nature has said
it. The Turk cannot govern
./Egypt and Arabia and Curdistan
as he governs Thrace; nor has he
the same dominion in Crimea
and Algiers which he has at Brusa
and Smyrna. Despotism itself
is obliged to truck and huckster.
The Sultan gets such obedience
as he can. He governs with a
loose rein, that he may govern at
all; and the whole of the force
and vigour of his authority in his
centre is derived from a prudent
relaxation in all his borders.
You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought
to his own page; but will you not also perceive how pitiably,
BROUGHAM
In all the despotisms of the
East, it has been observed that
the farther any part of the
empire is removed from the
capital, the more do its inhabi-
tants enjoy some sort of rights
and privileges: the more in-
efficacious is the power of the
monarch; and the more feeble
and easily decayed is the or-
ganization of the government.
Lecture on Jargon 245
by dissolving Burke's vivid particulars into smooth generalities,
he has enervated its hold on the mind?
'This particularizing style/ comments Mr. Payne, 'is the
essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck
with the energy it produces. Brougham's passage is excellent
in its way: but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke's
sentences/ The best instances of this energy of style, he adds,
are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth
century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the
rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Para-
dise," he communicates more effectually the notion of the
difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity
than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.'
You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this
passage is expounding a fallacy; but you will agree with Mr.
Payne and me that he utters it vividly.
Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of
writing, a passage from Dr. John Donne far beyond and above
anything that ever lay within South's compass:
The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak,
to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what
flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell.
The dust of great persons' graves is speechless, too ; it says nothing,
it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou
wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will
trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither ; and when a whirlewind
hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man
sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will
undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the
Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], and this the yeomanly, this
die Plebeian bran ? So is the death of lesabel (lesabel was a Queen)
expressed. They shall not say This is lesabel; not only not wonder
that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall
not know, This is lesabel.
Carlyle noted of Goethe 'his emblematic intellect, his never-
failing tendency to transform into shape, into life, the feeling
246 Lecture on Jargon
that may dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual
excellence: the poet's imagination bodies forth the forms of
things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.'
Consider this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter
set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May
morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you
upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice
between abstract and definite words.
A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than
language ; for language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach
to you) is your reason, your Aoyoj. So long as you prefer
abstract words, which express other men's summarized con-
cepts of things, to concrete ones which lie as near as can be
reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material
for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at
second hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if
not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond.
Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the diffi-
culties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm
hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. For the Style
is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and
his brain, and his writing, will be also.
LIEUTENANT LAPENOTIERE
THE night-porter at the Admiralty had been sleeping in his
chair. He was red-eyed and wore his livery coat buttoned
at random. He grumbled to himself as he opened the great
door.
He carried a glass-screened candle, and held it somewhat
above the level of his forehead which was protuberant and
heavily pock-marked. Under the light he peered out at the
visitor, who stood tall and stiff, with uniform overcoat buttoned
to the chin, between the Ionic pillars of the portico.
'Who's there?'
'Lieutenant Lapenotiere, of the Pickle schooner with
dispatches.'
'Dispatches?' echoed the night-porter. Out beyond the
screen of masonry that shut off the Board of Admiralty's fore-
court from Whitehall, one of the tired post-horses started
blowing through its nostrils on this foggy night.
' From Admiral Collingwood Mediterranean Fleet off Cadiz
sixteen days,' answered the visitor curtly. 'Is every one
abed?'
'Admiral Collingwood? Why Admiral Collingwood?' The
night-porter fell back a pace, opening the door a trifle wider.
'Good God, sir! You don't say as how '
'You can fetch down a Secretary or someone, I hope?' said
Lieutenant Lapenotiere, quickly stepping past him into the long
dim hall. ' My dispatches are of the first importance. I have
posted up from Falmouth without halt but for relays.'
As the man closed the door, he heard his post-boy of the
last relay slap one of the horses encouragingly before heading
home to stable. The chaise wheels began to move on the
cobbles.
247
248 Lieutenant Lapenottire
'His Lordship himself will see you, sir. Of that I make no
doubt/ twittered the night-porter, fumbling with the bolt.
* There was a terrible disturbance, back in July, when Captain
Bettesworth arrived not so late as this, to be sure, but towards
midnight and they waited till morning, to carry up the dis-
patches with his Lordship's chocolate. Thankful was I next
day not to have been on duty at the time. ... If you will
follow me, sir '
Lieutenant Lapenottere had turned instinctively towards a
door on the right. It admitted to the Waiting Room, and there
were few officers in the service who did not know and only
too well that Chamber of Hope Deferred.
'No, sir ... this way, if you please,' the night-porter
corrected him, and opened a door on the left. 'The Captains'
Room,' he announced, passing in and steering for the chimney-
shelf, on which stood a pair of silver sconces each carrying three
wax candles. These he took down, lit and replaced. 'Ah,
sir! Many 's the time I 've showed Lord Nelson himself into
this room, in the days when he was Sir Horatio, and even after.
And you were sayin' '
'I said nothing.'
The man moved to the door ; but halted there and came back,
as though in his own despite.
'I can't help it, sir. . . . Half a guinea he used to give me,
regular. But the last time and hard to believe 'twas little
more than a month ago he halts on his way out, and says he,
searchin' awkward-like in his breeches' pocket with his left
hand, "Ned," says he, "my old friend" aye, sir, his old friend
he called me "Ned," says he, pulling out a handful o' gold,
"my old friend," says he, "I'll compound with you for two
guineas, this bein' the last time you may hold the door open
for me, in or out. But you must pick 'em out," says he,
spreadin' his blessed fingers with the gold in 'em: "for a man
can't count money who 's lost his right flapper." Those were
his words, sir. " Old friend," he called me, in that way of his.'
Lieutenant Lapenotiere 249
Lieutenant Lapenotiere pointed to his left arm. Around the
sleeve a black scarf was knotted.
'Dead, sir?' The night-porter hushed his voice.
'Dead,' echoed Lieutenant Lapenotiere, staring at the Turkey
carpet, of which the six candles, gaining strength, barely illu-
mined the pattern. 'Dead, at the top of victory; a great
victory. Go: fetch somebody down.'
The night-porter shuffled off. Lieutenant Lapenotiere, erect
and sombre, cast a look around the apartment, into which he had
never before been admitted. The candles lit up a large painting
a queer bird's-eye view of Venice. Other pictures, dark and
bituminous, decorated the panelled walls portraits of dead
admirals, a sea-piece or two, some charts. . . . This was all he
discerned out in the dim light; and in fact he scanned the walls,
the furniture of the room, inattentively. His stomach was
fasting, his head light with rapid travel; above all, he had a
sense of wonder that all this should be happening to him. For,
albeit a distinguished officer, he was a modest man, and by
habit considered himself of no great importance. Albeit a
brave man, too, he shrank at the thought of the message he
carried a message to explode and shake millions of men in a
confusion of wild joy or grief.
For about the tenth time in those sixteen days it seemed to
burst and escape in an actual detonation, splitting his head
there, as he waited in the strange room where never a curtain
stirred. ... It was a trick his brain played him, repeating,
echoing the awful explosion of the French seventy-four Achille^
which had blown up towards the close of the battle. When
the ship was ablaze and sinking, his own crew had put off in
boats to rescue the Frenchmen, at close risk of their own lives,
for her loaded guns, as they grew red hot, went off at random
among rescuers and rescued. . . .
As had happened before when he felt this queer shock, his
mind travelled back and he seemed to hear the series of dis-
charges running up at short intervals to the great catastrophe.
250 Lieutenant Lapenoti&re
... To divert his thoughts, he turned to study the view of
Venice above the chimneypiece . . . and on a sudden faced
about again.
He had a sensation that someone was in the room someone
standing close behind him.
But no. ... For the briefest instant his eyes rested on
an indistinct shadow his own perhaps, cast by the candle-
light? Yet why should it lie lengthwise there, shaped like
a coffin, on the dark polished table that occupied the middle
of the room?
The answer was that it did not. Before he could rub his
eyes it had gone. Moreover, he had turned to recognize a
living being . . . and no living person was in the room, unless
by chance (absurd supposition) one were hidden behind the
dark red window curtains.
'Recognize' may seem a strange word to use; but here had
lain the strangeness of the sensation that the someone standing
there was a friend, waiting to be greeted. It was with eagerness
and a curious warmth of the heart that Lieutenant Lapenotire
had faced about upon nothing.
He continued to stare in a puzzled way at the window curtains,
when a voice by the door said :
'Good evening! or perhaps, to be correct, good morning!
You are Mr. '
'Lapenottere,' answered the Lieutenant, who had turned
sharply. The voice a gentleman's and pleasantly modulated
was not one he knew; nor did he recognize the speaker a
youngish, shrewd-looking man, dressed in civilian black, with
knee-breeches. 'Lapenottere of the Pickle schooner.'
'Yes, yes the porter bungled your name badly, but I
guessed. Lord Barham will see you personally. He is, in
fact, dressing with all haste at this moment. ... I am his
private secretary,' explained the shrewd-looking gentleman in
his quiet, business-like voice. 'Will you come with me
upstairs?'
Lieutenant Lapenottire 25 1
Lieutenant Lapenoti&re followed him. At the foot of the
great staircase the Secretary turned.
'I may take it, sir, that we are not lightly disturbing his
Lordship who is an old man.'
' The news is of great moment, sir. Greater could scarcely be/
The Secretary bent his head. As they went up the staircase
Lieutenant Lapenotiere looked back and caught sight of the
night-porter in the middle of the hall, planted there and gazing
up, following their ascent.
On the first-floor landing they were met by a truly ridiculous
spectacle. There emerged from a doorway on the left of the
wide corridor an old gentleman clad in night-cap, night-shirt,
and bedroom slippers, buttoning his breeches and cursing
vigorously ; while close upon him followed a valet with dressing-
gown on one arm, waistcoat and wig on the other, vainly
striving to keep pace with his master's impatience.
'The braces, my lord your Lordship has them fore-part
behind, if I may suggest '
' Damn the braces ! ' swore the old gentleman. ' Where is he ?
Hi, Tylney!' as he caught sight of the Secretary. * Where are
we to go? My room, I suppose?*
'The fire is out there, my lord. . . . 'Tis past three in the
morning. But after sending word to awake you, I hunted
round and by good luck found a plenty of promising embers
in the Board Room grate. On top of these I 've piled
what remained of my own fire, and Dobson has set a lamp
'You 've been devilish quick, Tylney. Dressed like a buck
you are, too!'
'Your Lordship's wig,' suggested the valet.
'Damn the wig!' Lord Barham snatched it and attempted
to stick it on top of his night-cap, damned the night-cap, and,
plucking it off, flung it to the man.
'I happened to be sitting up late, my lord, over the Aeolus
papers/ said Mr. Secretary Tylney.
252, Lieutenant Lapenoti&re
'Ha?' Then, to the valet: 'The dressing-gown there!
Don't fumble! ... So this is Captain '
'Lieutenant, sir: Lapenotire, commanding the Pickle
schooner/
The Lieutenant saluted.
'From the Fleet, my lord off Cadiz; or rather, off Cape
Trafalgaro.'
He drew the sealed dispatch from an inner breast-pocket and
handed it to the First Lord.
'Here, step into the Board Room. . . . Where the devil
are my spectacles?' he demanded of the valet, who had sprung
forward to hold open the door.
Evidently the Board Room had been but a few hours ago the
scene of a large dinner-party. Glasses, dessert-plates, dishes of
fruit, decanters empty and half empty, cumbered the great
mahogany table as dead and wounded, guns and tumbrils, might
a battlefield. Chairs stood askew; crumpled napkins lay as
they had been dropped or tossed, some on the floor, others
across the table between the dishes.
'Looks cosy, eh?' commented the First Lord. 'Maggs, set
a screen around the fire, and look about for a decanter and
some clean glasses.'
He drew a chair close to the reviving fire, and glanced at the
cover of the dispatch before breaking its seal.
' Nelson's handwriting ? ' he asked. It was plain that his old
eyes, unaided by spectacles, saw the superscription only as a blur.
'No, my lord: Admiral Collingwood's,' said Lieutenant
Lapenotiere, inclining his head.
Old Lord Barham looked up sharply. His wig set awry, he
made a ridiculous figure in his hastily donned garments. Yet
he did not lack dignity.
'Why Collingwood?' he asked, his fingers breaking the seal.
'God! you don't tell me '
'Lord Nelson is dead, sir.'
'Dead dead? . . . Here, Tylney you read what it says.
Lieutenant Lapenotikre 253
Dead? . . . No, damme, let the captain tell his tale. Briefly,
sir.'
'Briefly, sir Lord Nelson had word of Admiral Villeneuve
coming out of the Straits, and engaged the combined fleets off
Cape Trafalgaro. They were in single line, roughly; and he
bore down in two columns, and cut off their van under Duma-
noir. This was at dawn or thereabouts, and by five o'clock
the enemy was destroyed.'
'How many prizes?'
'I cannot say precisely, my lord. The word went, when
I was signalled aboard the Vice-Admiral's flagship, that either
fifteen or sixteen had struck. My own men were engaged, at
the time, in rescuing the crew of a French seventy- four that had
blown up; and I was too busy to count, had counting been
possible. One or two of my officers maintain to me that our
gains were higher. But the dispatch will tell, doubtless.'
'Aye, to be sure. . . . Read, Tylney. Don't sit their clear-
ing your throat, but read, man alive! ' And yet it appeared that
while the Secretary was willing enough to read, the First Lord
had no capacity, as yet, to listen. Into the very first sentence
he broke with:
'No, wait a minute. "Dead," d'ye say? ... My God!
. . . Lieutenant, pour yourself a glass of wine and tell us first
how it happened.'
Lieutenant Lapenottere could not tell very clearly. He had
twice been summoned to board die Royal Sovereign the first
time to receive the command to hold himself ready. It was
then that, coming alongside the great ship, he had read in all
the officers 1 faces an anxiety hard to reconcile with the evident
tokens of victory around them. At once it had occurred to
him that the Admiral had fallen, and he put the question to one
of the lieutenants to be told that Lord Nelson had indeed
been mortally wounded and could not live long; but that he
must be alive yet, and conscious, since the Victory was still
signalling orders to the Fleet.
254 Lieutenant Lapenoti&re
'I think, my lord,' said he, 'that Admiral Collingwood must
have been doubtful, just then, what responsibility had fallen
upon him, or how soon it might fall. He had sent for me to
"stand by" so to speak. He was good enough to tell me the
news as it had reached him '
Here Lieutenant Lapenotiere, obeying the order to fill his
glass, let spill some of the wine on the table. The sight of the
dark trickle on the mahogany touched some nerve of the brain :
he saw it widen into a pool of blood, from which, as they picked
up a shattered seaman and bore him below, a lazy stream crept
across the deck of the flagship towards the scuppers. He
moved his feet, as he had moved them then, to be out of
the way of it : but recovered himself in another moment and
went on:
'He told me, my lord, that the Victory after passing under
the Bucentaures stern, and so raking her that she was put out
of action, or almost, fell alongside the Redoutable. There was
a long swell running, with next to no wind, and the two ships
could hardly have cleared had they tried. At any rate, they
hooked, and it was then a question which could hammer the
harder. The Frenchman had filled his tops with sharp-shooters,
and from one of these the mizen-top, I believe a musket-
ball struck down the Admiral. He was walking at the time to
and fro on a sort of gangway he had caused to be planked
over his cabin skylight, between the wheel and the ladder-
way. . . . Admiral Collingwood believed it had happened
about half-past one . . .'
'Sit down, man, and drink your wine,' commanded the First
Lord as the dispatch-bearer swayed with a sudden faintness.
'It is nothing, my lord '
But it must have been a real swoon, or something very like
it: for he recovered to find himself lying in an arm-chair. He
heard the Secretary's voice reading steadily on and on. ...
Also they must have given him wine, for he awoke to feel the
warmth of it in his veins and coursing about his heart. But
Lieutenant Lapenotiere 255
he was weak yet, and for the moment well content to lie still
and listen.
Resting there and listening, he was aware of two sensations
that alternated within him, chasing each other in and out of his
consciousness. He felt all the while that he, John Richards
Lapenotiere, a junior officer in His Majesty's service, was
assisting in one of the most momentous events in his country's
history; and alone in the room with these two men, he felt it
as he had never begun to feel it amid the smoke and roar of the
actual battle. He had seen the dead hero but half a dozen
times in his life: he had never been honoured by a word from
him : but like every other naval officer, he had come to look up
to Nelson as to the splendid particular star among commanders.
There was greatness: there was that which lifted men to such
deeds as write man's name across the firmament ! And, strange
to say, Lieutenant Lapenottere recognized something of it in
this queer old man, in dressing-gown and ill-fitting wig, who
took snuff and interrupted now with a curse and anon with a
'Bravo!' as the Secretary read. He was absurd: but he was
no common man, this Lord Barham. He had something of
the ineffable aura of greatness.
But in the Lieutenant's brain, across this serious, even awful
sense of the moment and of its meaning, there played a curious
secondary sense that the moment was not that what was
happening before his eyes had either happened before or was
happening in some vacuum in which past, present, future, and
the ordinary divisions of time had lost their bearings. The
great twenty-four-hour clock at the end of the Board Room,
ticking on and on while the Secretary read, wore an unfamiliar
face. . . . Yes, time had gone wrong, somehow : and the events
of the passage home to Falmouth, of the journey up to the doors
of the Admiralty, though they ran on a chain, had no intervals
to be measured by a clock, but followed one another like
pictures on a wall. He saw the long, indigo-coloured swell
thrusting the broken ships shoreward. He felt the wind
256 Lieutenant Lapenoti&re
freshening as it southered and he left the Fleet behind: he
watched their many lanterns as they sank out of sight, then the
glow of flares by the light of which d<?ad-tired men were
repairing damages, cutting away wreckage. His ship was
wallowing heavily now, with the gale after her and now dawn
was breaking clean and glorious on the swell off Lizard Point.
A Mount's Bay lugger had spied them, and, lying in wait, had
sheered up close alongside, her crew bawling for news. He
had not forbidden his men to call it back, and he could see the
fellows' faces now, as it reached them from the speaking-
trumpet: 'Great victory twenty taken or sunk Admiral
Nelson killed!' They had guessed something, noting the
Pickles ensign at half-mast : yet as they took in the purport of
the last three words, these honest fishermen had turned and
stared at one another; and without one answering word, the
lugger had been headed straight back to the mainland.
So it had been at Falmouth. A ship entering port has a
thousand eyes upon her, and the Pickle 's errand could not be
hidden. The news seemed in some mysterious way to have
spread even before he stepped ashore there on the Market
Strand. A small crowd had collected, and, as he passed through
it, many doffed their hats. There was no cheering at all no,
not for this the most glorious victory of the war outshining
even the Nile or Howe's First of June.
He had set his face as he walked to the inn. But the news
had flown before him, and fresh crowds gathered to watch him
off. The post-boys knew . . . and they told the post-boys at
the next stage, and the next Bodmin and Plymouth not to
mention the boatmen at Torpoint Ferry. But the country-
side did not know: nor the labourers gathering in cider apples
heaped under Devon apple-trees, nor, next day, the sportsmen
banging off guns at the partridges around Salisbury. The slow,
jolly life of England on either side of the high road turned
leisurely as a wagon-wheel on its axle, while between hedge-
rows, past farm hamlets, church-towers and through the cobbled
Lieutenant Lapenotiere 257
streets of market towns, he had sped and rattled with Colling-
wood's dispatch in his sealed case. The news had reached
London with him. His last post-boys had carried it to their
stables, and from stable to tavern. To-morrow to-day, rather
in an hour or two all the bells of London would be ringing
or tolling! . . .
'He's as tired as a dog/ said the voice of the Secretary.
'Seems almost a shame to waken him.'
The Lieutenant opened his eyes and jumped to his feet
with an apology. Lord Barham had gone, and the Secretary
hard by was speaking to the night-porter, who bent over the
fire, raking it with a poker. The hands of the Queen Anne
clock indicated a quarter to six.
'The First Lord would like to talk with you . . . later in
the day,' said Mr. Tylney gravely, smiling a little these last
words. He himself was white and haggard. 'He suggested
the early afternoon, say half-past two. That will give you
time for a round sleep. . . . You might leave me the name
of your hotel, in case he should wish to send for you before
that hour.'
'"The Swan with Two Necks," Lad Lane, Cheapside,' said
Lieutenant Lapenotiere.
He knew little of London, and gave the name of the hostelry
at which, many years ago, he had alighted from a west country
coach with his box and midshipman's kit. ... A moment later
he found himself wondering if it still existed as a house of
entertainment. Well, he must go and seek it.
The Secretary shook hands with him, smiling wanly.
'Few men, sir, have been privileged to carry such news as
you have brought us to-night.'
'And I went to sleep after delivering it,' said Lieutenant
Lapenotiere, smiling back.
The night-porter escorted him to the hall, and opened the
great door for him. In the portico he bade the honest man
good night, and stood for a moment, mapping out in his mind
K
258 Lieutenant Lapenoti&re
his way to 'The Swan with Two Necks.' He shivered slightly,
after his nap, in the chill of the approaching dawn.
As the door closed behind him he was aware of a light
shining, out beyond the screen of the fore-court, and again a
horse blew through its nostrils on the raw air.
'Lord!' thought the Lieutenant. 'That fool of a post-boy
cannot have mistaken me and waited all this time!'
He hurried out into Whitehall. Sure enough a chaise was
drawn up there, and a post-boy stood by the near lamp, conning
a scrap of paper by the light of it. No, it was a different
chaise, and a different post-boy. He wore the buff" and black,
whereas the other had worn the blue and white. Yet he stepped
forward confidently, and with something of a smile.
'Lieutenant Lapenoti&re?' he asked, reaching back and
holding up his paper to the lamp to make sure of the syllables.
'That is my name,' said the amazed Lieutenant.
'I was ordered here five forty-five to drive you down to
Merton,'
'To Merton?' echoed Lieutenant Lapenoti&re, his hand going
to his pocket. The post-boy's smile, or so much as could be
seen of it by the edge of the lamp, grew more knowing.
'I ask no questions, sir.'
'But but who ordered you?'
The post-boy did not observe, or disregarded, his bewilder-
ment.
'A Briton 's a Briton, sir, I hope? I ask no questions,
knowing my place. . . . But if so be as you were to tell me
there 's been a great victory ' He paused on this.
'Well, my man, you 're right so far, and no harm in telling
you.'
'Aye,' chirruped the post-boy. 'When the maid called me
up with the order, and said as how he and no other had called
with it '
'He?'
The fellow nodded.
Lieutenant Lapenotiere 259
'She knew him at once, from his portraits. Who wouldn't?
With his right sleeve pinned across so. ... And, said I : "Then
there 's been a real victory. Never would you see him back,
unless." And I was right, sir!' he concluded triumphantly.
'Let me see that piece of paper.'
'You '11 let me have it back, sir? for a memento,' the post-
boy pleaded. Lieutenant Lapenotiere took it from him a
plain half-sheet of note-paper roughly folded. On it was
scribbled in pencil, back-handwise, ' Lt. Lapenotiere. Admiralty,
Whitehall. At 6.30 a.m., not later. For Merton, Surrey.'
He folded the paper very slowly, and handed it back to the
post-boy.
'Very well, then. For Merton.'
The house lay but a very little distance beyond Wimbledon.
Its blinds were drawn as Lieutenant Lapenotiere alighted from
the chaise and went up to the modest porch.
His hand was on the bell-pull. But some pressure checked
him as he was on the point of ringing. He determined to wait
for a while and turned away towards the garden.
The dawn had just broken; two or three birds were singing.
It did not surprise at any rate, it did not frighten Lieutenant
Lapenoti^re at all, when, turning into a short pleached alley,
he looked along it and saw him advancing.
Yes, him, with the pinned sleeve, the noble, seamed, eager
face. They met as friends. ... In later years the Lieutenant
could never remember a word that passed, if any passed at all.
He was inclined to think that they met and walked together in
complete silence, for many minutes. Yet he ever maintained
that they walked as two friends whose thoughts hold converse
without need of words. He was not terrified at all. He ever
insisted, on the contrary, that there, in the cold of the breaking
day, his heart was light and warm as though flooded with first
love not troubled by it, as youth in first love is wont to be
260 Lieutenant Lapenotiere
but bathed in it; he, the ardent young officer, bathed in a glow
of affection, ennobling, exalting him, making him free of a
brotherhood he had never guessed.
He used also, in telling the story, to scandalize the clergy-
man of his parish by quoting the evangelists, and especially
St. John's narrative of Mary Magdalen at the sepulchre.
For the door of the house opened at length ; and a beautiful
woman, scarred by knowledge of the world, came down
the alley, slowly, unaware of him. Then (said he), as she
approached, his hand went up to his pocket for the private
letter he carried, and the shade at his side left him to face her
in the daylight.
VOICES ON THE BANK
The May Races at Cambridge, 1913
VENATOR. Good Master, did you not promise me fish in this
river?
PISCATOR. Methinks, Scholar, we tarried too long at the Pike
and Eel. But since the fish have given over biting, what say
you to stretching our limbs beneath yonder hawthorn?
where, while the many sweet-smelling flowers hold a credit-
able contention with the gas-works, I will teach you the best
way to angle for the chavender or chub. . . . But what
comes here ? A boat ! marry and rowed by eight personable
young men, with a ninth looking the other way and steering.
A COACH. Ea sy, all I
PISCATOR. Well met, honest sir! . . . Will you tell me, who
are these lads whose labours you compassionate?
COACH. (Shortly.} L.M.B.C.
PISCATOR. (Pulled.} L.M.B.C.? . . . Ahlaclavender, or club!
And this crowd that I see approaching?
COACH. [Yet more shortly.} Usual May binge. Forward, all!
Look here, and remember your legs when you 're paddling.
YOUNG AMERICAN LADY. [First as usual.] Say, poppa?
AMERICAN FATHER. [Second as usual.] He refers to their limbs,
Sadie: they're going to paddle^ didn't you hear? . . .
Pleased to make your acquaintance, professor. [To Piscator.
This, sir, is my first visit to Oxford.
SADIE. [Correcting.} Cambridge, poppa.
AMERICAN FATHER. Sure!
Chorus of Aunts and Cousins approaching on towpath
as other boats come down-stream.
STROPHE. Yon 's
John's.
ANTISTROPHE. These
Are Caius.
FULL CHORUS. And that *s
CAT'S!
261
262 Voices on the Bank
SOCRATES. But it seems to me, Adeimantus, that the best boat
on these occasions is the boat that goes fastest?
ADEIMANTUS. It seems so, indeed.
SOCRATES. And the boat which goes, or is propelled, faster
than another boat, must necessarily overtake that other boat.
ADEIMANTUS. Most probably.
SOCRATES. But is not the 'head' boat, as you call it, presumably
the fastest of all ?
ADEIMANTUS. That is presumed, at least, until the contrary be
proved.
SOCRATES. Then it would follow, O friend! that in a well-
ordered state, having taken the gods into council and made
ready our guns, and charged for admission and what-not, we
should annually start our best boat at the bottom of the river,
that so it might cover itself with glory by making the greatest
possible number of bumps.
[He goes off to argue with a policeman.
STRANGER IN MOTOR LAUNCH. [Drawing alongside the bank to
Piscator.] I hope, sir, we do not disturb your fishing ? The
fact is, we have left our tea-basket behind. Could you direct
us to the nearest provender where we might get some pub
or, I should rather say, to the nearest pub, where we can
get some provender?
PISCATOR. If, sir, you mean gravender or grub
Aunts and Cousins interrupting :
STROPHE. These
Are Caius :
ANTISTROPHE. There
Goes Clare:
FULL CHORUS. And that 's
Cat's!
PRAXINOE. My! what a crush!
GORGO. And the bicycles don't run me down, my good man!
They oughtn't to be allowed.
Voices on the Bank 263
PRAXINOE. My new hat will be crushed to a jelly, at this rate.
Do let us go on! [She addresses a STRANGER.] Could you tell
us, sir, where we can get across to Ditton?
THE STRANGER. \Who happens to be a Professor of Icelandic^
Fiskr gekk oss at 6skom eitrs sem ver haeofum leithath.
PRAXINOE. Thank you kindly, sir.
THE STRANGER. Gud-guthragud! Don't mention it.
PRAXINOE. [Moving on.] As I was saying, dear, parlour-maids
you can replace, but a cook
GORGO. [Catching her arm.] Do but look, though, at this boat
approaching in the Lydian mode. How majestically it moves
and how realistically the crew swing to and fro the while!
One would say they were practising for the Royal Barge.
PRAXINOE. Why, have you not heard? They do say His
Majesty is coming next year, and this is the King's boat.
They will be in plenty of time, by the look of it.
GORGO. You don't say so! [Sighs .] And this year we have
only Mr. Chesterton : though, to be sure, they are widening
the Chesterton Road at the lower end. Is that necessary?
PRAXINOE. It is a compliment, at any rate, dear: and we in
Cambridge like to be on the safe side.
GORGO. Yes, but look at that poor dear gentleman such a
fine figure too ! in his shirt-sleeves, trailing his coat behind
him. Oughtn't we to draw his attention to it?
PRAXINOE. No, dear. That 's the Professor of Archaeology,
and it 's his way of keeping cool.
A Rag-boat comes by, the crew singing :
I wish I was in Dixie,
Where the hens lay eggs in the stra-aw . . .
[Or words to that effect.}
AMERICAN PARENT. [Slowly.] 'Might be better, now you men-
tion it.
STILL, SMALL VOICE OF PUBLIC OPINION. And so say all of us.
[Rag-boat moves off, to annoy somebody else.
264 Pokes on the Bank
A CAMBRIDGE POET :
The sort of grass they grow at Grassy
Is esculent but hardly classy:
The sort of grass they grow at Ditton
Is classier, but vile to sit on.
Beware the men who work the grinds!
They '11 pelt you with banana rinds. . . .
A PROFESSOR OF JARGON. [Instructively.] The races at Oxford
and at Cambridge, while partaking in general of a similar
character, are rowed under somewhat diverse conditions
respectively. In the case of the former University the boats
in all cases are of a uniform nature : in that of the latter a
distinction is observed, those of the first division being rowed
in boats of carvel construction, while the second is identified
rather with the clinker build, in which the strakes have an
overlapping tendency. Cases have occurred in which a so-
called sandwich boat, having won its way to superior rank,
finds itself matched against boats appertaining to that rank
which owing to their construction are ipso facto of a speedier
character. In that case the C.U.B.C. . . .
A Band plays :
The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra, la,
Have nothing to do with the CASE. . . .
DR. JOHNSON. [Lifting his hat.] Sir! Yours per varios casus.
. . . The proficiency of this present age, as it is built on the
slow labours of the past, should by privilege be elevated above
concourse of the pert and upstart. Let the dogs sweat!
... I remember at Oxford the young gentlemen of Christ
Church challenged us of Pembroke to a rowing-match, and
that I contributed somewhat to the losing of it half-way by
drawing in my oar and honestly saying that I was tired.
BOSWELL. That, sir, showed great independence of spirit.
Voices on the Bank 265
DR. JOHNSON. No, sir: stark insensibility!
[Noise of distant guns: sporadic explosion of suffragette bombs.
Everybody cries: 'They're off!' except a Don in a
Researcher's Hat, who says 'Votes for Women!'
instead.
GORGO. Are they really bumping, Praxinoe?
PRAXINOE. How silly of you, dear! Can't you hear them.
A LADY'S VOICE. [Says equably but distinctly.] And so, as the
Colonel ab-solutely refused to extend his leave, dear Reggie
had to go back. They are very strict in the Rifles; and he
being only a savender
{Noise of pistols. Several dull concussions are heard as the
boats change places. Crowd shouts delirious : even the
unoccupied houses take fire.
A PHOTOGRAPHER. [As two boats go by with a foot of daylight
between them.] One moment, gentlemen please! If you
could manage to smile
[Tumultuous cheering. 'Well rowed, all!' 'Well rowed,
Hall ! ' ' Well rowed, everybody in general and Hall
in particular!'
GORGO. And in this hot weather, too! [As Lady Margaret's
rows by.} Look at those poor dears! positively scarlet!
Chorus of Aunts and Cousins
(Tune : 'Johnny Crow's Garden 9 )
So we 've done the Colleges, and done the Mays,
We 've lunched seriatim off the same mayonnaise;
But before we go our several ways,
Let 's all join together in a hearty vote of praise
HERODOTUS, OF HALICARNASSUS. [Button-holing a Pro-Proctor.}
Can you inform me, sir, in which direction this river happens
to be flowing at the present moment? For amid much that
is happening of equal or greater importance, this alone I am
unable to detect.
266 Voices on the Bank
PRO-PROCTOR. You have arrived, nevertheless, in a fortunate
hour, O stranger. For on 361 days of the year it cannot
be confidently asserted to flow in any direction, albeit some
say one thing and some another. But on these four days
alone, under the propulsion you have witnessed, it makes a
definite move in the direction of Ely, and even (so report
goes) may ultimately reach the sea. There are indeed who
assert that for this purpose and no other our May festival
was instituted.
THE POET.
Th' inhabitants of local inns
Commit unmentionable sins :
The Ordinances of Long Reach
Are mostly honoured in the breach.
The plants that in Glass Houses mate
Cryptogamously propagate :
Beneath the Bridge rot the remains
Of old unhappy railway trains :
But when we reach the Pike and Eel,
O let me kneel! O let me kneel!
NOT HERE, O APOLLO!
A CHRISTMAS STORY HEARD AT MIDSUMMER
WE sat and talked in the Vicarage garden overlooking
Mount's Bay. The long summer day lingered out its
departure, although the full moon was up and already touching
with a faint radiance the towers on St. Michael's Mount 'the
guarded Mount' that rested as though at anchor in the silver-
grey offing. The land-breeze had died down with sunset; the
Atlantic lay smooth as a lake below us, and melted, league
upon league, without horizon into the grey of night. Between
the Vicar's fuchsia-bushes we looked down on it, we three
the Vicar, the Senior Tutor, and I.
I think the twilit hour exactly accorded with our mood, and
it did not need the scent of the Vicar's ten- week stocks, wafted
across the garden, to touch a nerve of memory. For it was
twenty years since we had last sat in this place and talked, and
the summer night seemed to be laden with tranquil thoughts,
with friendship and old regard. . . . Twenty years ago I had
been an undergraduate, and had made one of a reading-party
under the Senior Tutor, who annually in the Long Vacation
brought down two or three fourth-year men to bathe and boat
and read Plato with him, for no pay but their friendship: and,
generation after generation, we young men had been made
welcome in this garden by the Vicar, who happened to be an
old member of our College and (as in time I came to see)
delighted to renew his youth in ours. There had been
daughters, too, in the old days. ... But they had married,
and the Vicarage nest was empty long since.
The Senior Tutor, too, had given up work and retired upon
his Fellowship. But every summer found him back at his old
haunts ; and still every summer brought a reading-party to the
Cove, in conduct now of a brisk Junior Fellow, who had read
267
268 Not here, Apollo !
with me in our time and achieved a 'first.' In short, things
at the Cove were pretty much the same after twenty years,
barring that a small colony of painters had descended upon it
and made it their home. With them the undergraduates had
naturally and quickly made friends, and the result was a cricket
match a grand Two-days' Cricket Match. They were all
extremely serious about it, and the Oxford party at their
wits' end, no doubt, to make up a team against the Artists
had bethought themselves of me, who dwelt at the other end
of the Duchy. They had written they had even sent a two-
page telegram to me, who had not handled a bat for more
years than I cared to count. It is delicious to be flattered by
youth, especially for gifts you never possessed or possess no
longer. I yielded and came. The season was Midsummer, or
a little after; the weather golden and glorious.
We had drawn stumps after the first day's play, and the
evening was to be wound up with a sing-song in the great tent
erected a marvel to the * Covers,' or native fishermen on
the cricket-field. But I no longer take kindly to such enter-
tainments; and so, after a bathe and a quiet dinner at the inn,
it came into my mind to take a stroll up the hill and along the
cliffs, and pay an evening call on the old Vicar, wondering if
he would remember me.
I found him in his garden. The Senior Tutor was there too
'the grave man, nicknamed Adam' and the Vicar's wife,
seated in a bee-hive straw chair, knitting. So we four talked
happily for a while, until she left us on pretence tliat die dew
was falling; and with that, as I have said, a wonderful silence
possessed the garden fragrant with memories and the night-
scent of flowers. . . .
Then I let fall the word that led to the Vicar's story. In old
rambles, after long mornings spent with Plato, my eyes (by
mirage, no doubt) had always found something Greek in the
curves and colour of this coast; or rather, had felt the want of it.
What that something was I could hardly have defined : but the
Not here, Apollo / 269
feeling was always with me. It was as if at each bend of the
shore I expected to find a temple with pillars, or a column
crowning the next promontory; or, where the coast- track
wound down to the little haven, to happen on a votive tablet
erected to Poseidon or to * Helen's brothers, lucent stars'; nay,
to meet with Odysseus' fisherman carrying an oar on his
shoulder, or even, in an amphitheatre of the cliffs, to surprise
Apollo himself and the Nine seated on a green plat whence a
waterfall gushed down the coomb to the sandy beach. . . .
This evening on my way along the cliffs perhaps because I
had spent a day bathing in sunshine in the company of white-
flannelled youths the old sensation had returned to haunt me.
I spoke of it.
'"Not here, O Apollo "' murmured the Senior Tutor.
'You quote against your own scepticism/ said I. 'The coast
is right enough; it is
Where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea.
It was made to invite the authentic gods only the gods never
found it out.'
'Did they not?' asked the Vicar quietly. The question took
us a little aback, and after a pause his next words administered
another small shock. 'One never knows,' he said, 'when, or
how near, the gods have passed. One may be listening to us
in this garden, to-night. ... As for the Greeks '
'Yes, yes, we were talking of the Greeks,' the Senior Tutor
(a convinced agnostic) put in hastily. 'If we leave out Pytheas,
no Greeks ever visited Cornwall. They are as mythical
hereabouts as' he hesitated, seeking a comparison 'as the
Cornish wreckers; and they never existed outside of pious
story-books.'
Said the Vicar, rising from his garden-chair: 'I accept the
omen. Wait a moment, you two.' He left us and went across
the dim lawn to the house, whence by and by he returned
270 Not here, Apollo /
bearing a book under his arm, and in his hand a candle, which he
set down unlit upon the wicker table among the coffee-cups.
'I am going,' he said, 'to tell you something which, a few
years ago, I should have scrupled to tell. With all deference
to your opinions, my dear Dick, I doubt if they quite allow you
to understand the clergy's horror of chancing a heresy; indeed,
I doubt if either of you quite guess what a bridle a man comes
to wear who preaches a hundred sermons or so every year to
a rural parish, knowing that nine-tenths of his discourse will
assuredly be lost, while at any point in the whole of it he may
be fatally misunderstood. . . . Yet as a man nears his end he
feels an increasing desire to be honest, neither professing more
than he knows, nor hiding any small article of knowledge as
inexpedient to the Faith. The Faith, he begins to see, can
take care of itself : for him, it is important to await his marching-
orders with a clean breast. Eh, Dick?'
The Senior Tutor took his pipe from his mouth and nodded
slowly.
'But what is your book?' he asked.
'My Parish Register. Its entries cover the years from 1660
to 1827. Luckily I had borrowed it from the vestry box, and
it was safe on my shelf in the Vicarage on the Christmas Eve
of 1870, the night when the church took fire. That was in
my second year as incumbent, and before ever you knew
these parts/
'By six months,' said the Senior Tutor. 'I first visited the
Cove in July 1871, and you were then beginning to clear the
ruins. All the village talk still ran on the fire, with speculations
on the cause of it.'
'The cause,' said the Vicar, 'will never be known. I may
say that pretty confidently, having spent more time in guessing
than will ever be spent by another man. . . . But since you
never saw the old church as it stood, you never saw the Heathen
Lovers in the south aisle.'
'Who were they?'
Not here, O Apollo ! 271
'They were a group of statuary, and a very strange one:
executed, as I first believed, in some kind of wax but, pushing
my researches (for the thing interested me), I found the material
to be a white soapstone that crops out here and there in
the crevices of our serpentine. Indeed, I know to a foot
the spot from which the sculptor took it, close on two hundred
years ago/
'It was of no great age, then?'
'No: and yet it bore all the marks of an immense age. For
to begin with, it had stood five-and-twenty years in this very
garden, exposed to all weathers, and the steatite (as they call it)
is of all substances the most friable is, in fact, the stuff used
by tailors under the name of French chalk. Again, when, in
1719, my predecessor, old Vicar Hichens, removed it to the
church and set it in the south aisle or, at any rate, when he
died and ceased to protect it the young men of the parish
took to using it for a hatstand, and also to carving their own
and their sweethearts' names upon it during sermon-time. The
figures of the sculpture were two; a youth and a maid, recum-
bent, and naked but for a web of drapery flung across their
middles; and they lay on a roughly carved rock, over which
the girl's locks as well as the drapery were made to hang limp,
as though dripping with water. . . . One thing more I must
tell you, risking derision; that to my ignorance the sculpture
proclaimed its age less by these signs of weather and rough
usage than by the simplicity of its design, its proportions, the
chastity (there 's no other word) of the two figures. They
were classical, my dear Dick what was left of them ; Greek
and of the best period.'
The Senior Tutor lit a fresh pipe, and by the flare of the
match I saw his eyes twinkling.
'Praxiteles,' he jerked out, between the puffs, 'and in the age
of Kneller! But proceed, my friend.'
'And do you wait, my scoffer!' The Vicar borrowed the
box of matches, lit the candle which held a steady flame in the
272 Not here, O Apollo !
still evening air opened the book, and laid it on his knee
while he adjusted his spectacles. 'The story is here, entered
on a separate leaf of the Register and signed by Vicar Hichens's
own hand. With your leave for it is brief I am going to
read it through to you. The entry is headed :
'Concerning a group of Statuary now in the S. aisle of Le^ardew Pish
Church : set there by me in witness of God's Providence in operation,
as of the corruption of man s hearty and for a warning to sinners to
amend their ways.
'In the year 1694, being the first of my vicariate, there lived in
this Parish as hind to the farmer of Vellancoose a young man exceeding
comely and tall of stature, of whom (when I came to ask) the people
could tell me only that his name was Luke, and that as a child he
had been cast ashore from a foreign ship ; they said, a Portugal ship.
[But the Portugals have swart complexions and are less than ordinary
tall, whereas this youth was light-coloured and only brown by sun-
burn.] Nor could he tell me anything when I questioned him con-
cerning his haveage ; * which I did upon report that he was courting
my housemaiden Grace Pascoe, an honest good girl, whom I was
loath to see waste herself upon an unworthy husband. Upon inquiry
I could not discover this Luke to be any way unworthy, saving that
he was a nameless man and a foreigner and a backward church-goer.
He told me with much simplicity that he could not remember to have
had any parents; that Farmer Lowry had brought him up from the
time he was shipwrecked and ever treated him kindly; and that, as
for church-going, he had thought little about it, but would amend in
this matter if it would give me pleasure. Which I thought a strange
answer. When I went on to hint at his inclination for Grace Pascoe,
he confused me by asking, with a look very straight and good-
natured, if the girl had ever spoken to me on the matter; to which
I was forced to answer that she had not. So he smiled, and I could
not further press him.
* Yet in my mind they would have made a good match; for the girl
too was passing well featured, and this Luke had notable gifts. He
could read and write. The farmer spoke well of him, saying: "He
1 Lineage, descent.
Not here, Apollo ! 273
has rewarded me many times over. Since his coming, thanks to the
Lord, my farm prospers: and in particular he has a wonderful way
with the beasts. Cattle or sheep, fowls, dogs, the wild things even,
come to him almost without a call." He had also (the farmer told
me) a wonderful knack of taking clay or mud and moulding it with
his hands to the likeness of living creatures, of all sorts and sizes.
In the kitchen by the great fire he would work at these images by
hours together, to the marvel of every one: but when the image
was made, after a little while he always destroyed it ; nor was it ever
begged by any one for a gift, there being a belief that, being fashioned
by more than a man's skill, such things could only bring ill-luck to
the possessors of them.
'For months then I heard no more of Grace Pascoe's lover: nor
(though he now came every Sunday to church) did I ever see looks
pass between the Vicarage pew (where she sat) and the Vellancoose
pew (where he). But at the end of the year she came to me and told
me she had given her word to a young farmer of Goldsithney, John
Magor by name. In a worldly way this was a far better match for
her than to take a nameless and landless man. Nor knew I anything
against John Magor beyond some stray wildness natural to youth.
He came of clean blood. He was handsome, almost as the other;
tall, broad of chest, a prize-winner at wrestling-matches ; and of an
age when a good wife is usually a man's salvation.
'I called their banns, and in due time married them. On the
wedding-day, after the ceremony, I returned from church to find the
young man Luke awaiting me by my house door; who very civilly
desired me to walk over to Vellancoose with him, which I did.
There, taking me aside to an unused linhay, he showed me the sculp-
ture, telling me (who could not conceal my admiration) that he had
meant it for John and Grace Magor (as she now was) for a wedding-
gift, but that the young woman had cried against it as immodest
and, besides, unlucky. On the first count I could understand her
rejecting such a gift; for the folk of these parts know nothing of
statuary and count all nakedness immodest. Indeed, I wondered that
the bridegroom had not taken Luke's freedom in ill part, and I said
so : to which he answered, smiling, that no man ever quarrelled with
him or could quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my appren-
ticeship is up, and I am going on a long journey. Since you find my
274 Not here, O Apollo !
group pleasing I would beg you to accept it, or if you had liefer
to keep it for me until I come again, as some day I shall." "I do
not wonder," said I, "at your wish to leave Lezardew Parish for the
world where, as I augur, great fortune awaits you." He smiled
again at this and said that, touching his future, he had neither any
hope nor any fear: and again he pressed me to accept the statuary.
For a time I demurred, and in the end made it a condition that he
altered the faces somewhat, concealing the likeness to John and
Grace Magor: and to this he consented. "Yet," said he, "it will
be the truer likeness when the time comes."
'He was gone on the morrow by daybreak, and late that afternoon
the farmer brought me the statuary in his hay-wagon. I had it set
in the garden by the great filbert-tree, and there it has stood for near
five-and-twenty years. (I ought to say that he had kept his promise
of altering the faces, and thereby to my thinking had defaced their
beauty : but beneath this defacement I still traced their first likeness.)
'Now to speak of the originals. My way lying seldom by Gold-
sithney, I saw little of John and Grace Magor during the next few
years, and nothing at all of them after they had left Goldsithney
(their fortunes not prospering) and rented a smaller farm on the coast
southward, below Rosudgeon : but what news came to me was ever
of the same tenor. Their marriage had brought neither children
nor other blessings. There were frequent quarrels, and the man had
yielded to drinking; the woman, too, it was reported. She, that
had been so trim a serving-maid, was become a slut with a foul
tongue. They were cruelly poor with it all; for money does not
always stick to unclean hands. I write all this to my reproach as
well as to theirs, for albeit they dwelt in another parish it had been
my Christian duty to seek them out. I did not, and I was gready
to blame.
'To pass over many years and come to the 2nd of December last
(1718). That night, about n o'clock, I sat in my library reading.
It was blowing hard without, the wind W.N. W. ; but I had forgotten
the gale in my book, when a sound, as it were a distant outcry of
many voices, fetched me to unbar the shutters and open the window
to listen. The sound, whatever it was, had died away : I heard but
the wind roaring and the surf on the beaches along the Bay : and I
was closing the window again when, close at hand, a man's voice
Not here, Apollo ! 275
called to me to open the front door. I went out to the hall, where a
lamp stood, and opened to him. The light showed me the young
man Luke, on whom I had not set eyes for these four-and-twenty
years: nor, amazed and perturbed as I was, did it occur to me as
marvellous that he had not aged a day. "There is a wreck," said he,
"in the Forth below here; and you, sir, are concerned in it. Will
you fetch a lantern and come with me?" He put this as a question,
but in his tone was a command : and when I brought the lantern he
took it from me and led the way. We struck across the Home Pare
southward, thence across Gew Down and the Leazes, and I knew
that he was making for the track which leads down to the sea by
Prah Sands. At the entry of the track he took off his coat and
wrapped the lantern in it, though just there its light would have been
most useful, or so I thought. But he led the way easily, and I
followed with scarce a stumble. "We shall not need it," he said;
"for see, there they are!" pointing to a small light that moved on
the sands below us. "But who are they?" I asked. He strode
down ahead of me, making swiftly for the light, and coming upon
them in the noise of the gale we surprised a man and a woman, who
at first cowered before us and then would have cast down their light
and run. But my companion, unwrapping the lantern, held it high
and so that the light shone on their faces. They were John Magor
and his wife Grace.
'Then I, remembering what cry of shipwrecked souls had reached
to my library in the Vicarage, and well guessing what work these
wretches had been at, lifted my voice to accuse them. But the
young man Luke stepped between us, and said he to them gently:
"Come, and I will show what you seek." He went before us for
maybe two hundred yards to the northern end of the beach, they
behind him quaking, and I shepherding them in my righteous wrath.
"Behold you," said he, and again lifted the lantern over a rock dark
with seaweed (and yet the weed shone in the light) "Behold you,
what you have wrecked."
'On their backs along the flat of the rock lay two naked bodies,
of a youth and a maid, half clasped one to another. He handed me
the lantern for a better look, and in the rays of it the two wretches
peered forward as if drawn against their will. I cannot well say if
they or I first perceived the miracle; that these corpses, as they lay
276 Not here, O Apollo /
in the posture, so bore the very likeness of the two lovers on my
sculptured slab. But I remember that, as John and Grace Magor
screamed back and clung to me, and as by the commotion of them
clutching at my knees the lantern fell and was extinguished, I heard
the young man Luke say: "Yourselves, yourselves!'
'I called to him to pick up the lantern; but he did not answer,
and the two clinging wretches encumbered me. After a long while
the clouds broke and die moon shone through them; and where he
had stood there was no one. Also the slab of rock was dark, and the
two drowned corpses had vanished with him. I pointed to it; but
there was no tinder-box at hand to light the lantern again, and in
the bitter weather until the dawn the two clung about me, confessing
and rehearsing their sins.
'I have great hopes that they are brought to a better way of life;
and because (repent they never so much) no one is any longer likely
to recognize in these penitents the originals upon whom it was
moulded these many years ago, I am determined to move the statuary
to a place in the S. aisle of our parish church, as a memorial, the
moral whereof I have leave of John and Grace Magor to declare to
all the parish. I choose to defer making it public, in tenderness,
while they live: for all things point as yet to the permanent saving
of their souls. But, as in the course of nature I shall predecease them,
I set the record here in the Parish Register, as its best place.
4 (Signed) MALACHI HICHENS, B.D.
'list Jan., 1719.'
' And is that all?' I asked.
'Yes and no,' said the Vicar, closing the book. 'It is all that
Mr. Hichens has left to help us: and you may or may not
connect with it what I am going to relate of my own experience.
. . . The old church, as you know, was destroyed by fire in the
morning hours of Christmas Day 1870. Throughout Christ-
mas Eve and for a great part of the night it had been snowing,
but the day broke brilliantly, on a sky without wind or cloud;
and never have my eyes seen anything so terribly beautiful
ay, so sublime as the sight which met them at the lych-gate.
The old spire which served as a sea-mark for the fishermen,
Not here, Apollo ! 277
and was kept regularly whitewashed that it might be the more
conspicuous glittered in the morning sunshine from base to
summit, as though matching its whiteness against that of the
snow-laden elms : and in this frame of pure silverwork, burning
without noise and with scarcely any smoke this by reason of
the excessive dry ness of the woodwork the church stood one
glowing vault of fire. There was indeed so little smoke that
at the first alarm, looking from my bedroom window, I had
been incredulous; and still I wondered rather than believed,
staring into this furnace wherein every pillar, nook, seat, or
text on the wall was distinctly visible, the south windows being
burnt out and the great door thrown open and on fire.
'There was no entrance possible here, or indeed anywhere:
but, being half distraught, I ran around to the small door of
the north aisle. This, too, was on fire or, rather, was already
consumed; and you will say that I must have been wholly
distraught when I tell you what I saw, looking in through
the aperture through which it would have been death to pass.
I saw him.'
'You saw the young man Luke?' I asked, as he paused,
inviting a word.
'He was standing by the stone figures within the porch. . . .
And they crumbled crumbled before my eyes in the awful
heat. But he stood scatheless. He was young and comely;
the hair of his head was not singed. He was as one of the
three that walked in the midst of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.
. . . When the stone slab was crumbled to a handful of dust,
he moved up the aisle and was gone. . . . That is all: but, as
you accept your friend for a truthful man, explain, O sceptic!'
And again there fell a silence in the garden.
O MATRE PULCHRA
Cambridge May Races 1914
NEVER shaded
Lovelier hand more lovely-ardent
Eyes than hers, my Ditton puntress,
Resting on her pole and gazing
Up the waterway.
On the cushions
I her guardian loll recumbent,
While the transitory tumult
Shouts and shots and straining galleys-
Tears me past, to fade.
Eve composes
Soon again and smoothes a mirror
Low to which the swallow dips her
Daulian wound. Yet Sweet-and-twenty
Shades her lovely eyes.
Tense her brow as
Dian's bow! The leading galley
Holds a youth, and ah! were wishes
Arrows, they would shoot him safely
Past the Pike and Eel!
Fair-and-twenty !
Feebly middle age expostu-
lates, in sorrow not in anger,
'Here 's but water in the teapot!
I demanded Tea ! '
278
O Matre Pulchra 279
Fair-and-twenty!
Four-and-twenty years agone as
Lovely hand as lovely eyebrow
Shaded, and your mother trembled
As you tremble now.
Trust me truly;
Ere he passed, the race was over;
All was over bar the shouting . . .
Happy he shall steer you happy
Through the dance to-night :
You triumphing
In his prowess tread the pavement.
So your mother, so your father
To Die guten alten Zeiten
Heard the violins
Throb and tremble ;
Heard their passion wake the nested
Bird and thrill a waking garden,
Whence, of three, one stole and sadly
Left the twain to bliss . . .
Moor we softly
Cross the haunted, scented meadows
Thither where her secret prelude,
Darkling in the grove of Jesus,
Throats the nightingale,
As the Danube
Gurgling through a waltz of Strauss's
Brims a heart no longer hopeful,
Minds it of the merry, merry
Days when it was young.
TO THE FRONT FROM THE BACKS
1915
TV /f Y DEAR DICK,
-*" * -* ... I must now try to answer your questions about
'the old place/ as you call it with true Cambridge affection and
true Cambridge accuracy. 'What is it like in these days?'
Well, I will start by annoying you. It is still very much like
Oxford, and like no other place in the world.
At the same time it is curiously unlike Cambridge, even un-
like the Cambridge of last term. We came up in October to
find the streets desolate indeed. The good soldiers who had
swarmed in upon town and college in August a commander
of cavalry occupied my rooms ; too busy, I hope, to curse the
dull contents of my shelves had all departed for France. Nay,
already many of them slept in French earth. They had left an
historical piece of plate to the high table; and some photo-
graphic groups in Steam's window. A head of a house halted
me before one of these groups and ticked off the cheerful reso-
lute faces of those fallen, by the Marne or the Aisne, since he
had entertained them a few weeks ago. In one row of a dozen
West Yorks he could find two survivors only.
These had come and gone like a summer cloud : and October
in Cambridge might have passed for the Long Vacation turned
chilly. In the courts and around the Backs the gardeners were
sweeping up the leaves, as ever ; but no men passed on their way
to lecture 'with the wind in their gowns.' The University, one
heard, was 'functioning' still: the bell of Great St. Mary's still,
on degree days, suggested the hand of the ancient mother
smitten upon her chest mourning for her fee-paying children,
because they were not. In college one seldom met, never
heard, an undergraduate. A few would gather to hall, the
280
To the Front from the Backs 281
most of them in their O.T.C. uniforms after a strenuous after-
noon out by Madingley. The scholar read grace with an un-
wonted reverence. 'Sic Deus in nobis et nos maneamus in
Illo' and we took our seats to a meal decently frugal. As I
looked down the hall, this one undergraduates' table reminded
me of a road in the west country I had followed a few days
before, with the telegraph running beside it and on the wires
the swallows gathering, discussing flight: the fire burning
variously in each separate heart, but with the same call, to
cross the Channel. . . . We in Combination Room talked of
our depleted numbers as a matter for pride (very creditably too
if you understand college finance). One, who had been
lecturing at die Examination Schools, likened the theatre there
to the Pool of Bethesda.
I have to talk of it lightly, my dear Dick, because your letters,
so constantly and undefeatedly cheerful, impose this tone. You
must not suppose, however, that we do not think and think
all the while of what the young are doing and suffering for
us. ... Well, thus it was in the Michaelmas Term; a suspended
Cambridge ; for which we were, on the whole, pretty well pre-
pared. The Belgian refugees from their universities had found
harbour with us. On the King's and Clare cricket ground
lines of hospital sheds were growing up almost as silently as the
Temple of Solomon in Bishop Heber's Newdigate; and the
almost incomparable turf was selling (I am told) to some
fortunate purchaser for incredible sums.
A notice-board at the entrance of BurrelPs Walk advertised
the ist Eastern General Hospital, and on any afternoon you
might see the Red Cross motor ambulances bringing in the
wounded. A whole block of King's had been handed over to
house the nurses. But here, as at the Research Hospital, the
work had been so quietly and thoroughly organized that you
had to go out of your way to find anything strange. For the
rest, Cambridge life had merely been arrested. Youth had,
for once, refused to revisit her with autumn, and was busy
z82 To the Front from the Backs
elsewhere. We, whom age or infirmity obliged to abide, laid our
account with the war and settled down to the dull streets, the
>hort unbrightened days, evenings without talk, the long nights
:>n depopulated staircases, our own heavy thoughts. You will
Jiink it queer, but the feeling of the change first broke on me
Dne day when, stepping incautiously off the pavement into the
road-way on this side of Magdalene Bridge, I recollected myself,
:ast the old horrified glance behind, and found not a single
notor-cycle, not even a bicycle, in sight.
We returned in January to a vastly different Cambridge.
She had become a garrison town. . . .
At this point I was proposing to start a description of it all :
>f the lines of artillery horses beside the Trumpington Road,
Vdams Road, Jesus ditch ; of the mud (but that is indescribable)
n which the poor brutes stand fetlock deep, each mournfully
:hewing his neighbour's head-rope. (You reported that head-
opes wore out at a terrible rate in your brigade; and now I
understand, as you will understand, why the price of bitter aloes
las become prohibitive in Cambridge not that I want to pur-
:hase any) ; of the mud on Midsummer Common, and the worse
nud on the road to the rifle butts, where the M.A. warriors
)f the C.U.O.T.C. drill and improve their waists, though they
nay never serve their country; of WhewelPs Buildings occupied
>y the Monmouths, who take it for an elementary school, and
\rchdeacon C for its chairman of managers, faithful to
lis post; of most wonderful spectacle of all the crowds of
Tommies navigating the Backs in Canadian canoes and other
Bounding shallops. The Welsh for it is the Welsh Division
Territorials) we have here would seem to have lost some of
heir celebrated skill with the coracle. ... I was going, I say,
o attempt a picture of all this, when the happy thought seized
ne that I could convey it far more vividly by sending you a set
>f photographs. So forth I fared, and to my amazement was
old that no one had taken any photographs. 'It was a notion,
rtainly: but, so far as was known, it had not occurred to any
To the Front from the Backs 283
one/ 'The omission should be repaired. . . . No, the military
authorities would not refuse leave.' I hope the University
Librarian will make a note of this. A bound volume of photo-
graphs, complete as his well-known enthusiasm can make it,
would be at small cost a /cr^xa ey dei, priceless in times
to come, when the familiar streams flow again, antiques subter-
labentia muros; priceless as the Mercurius Aulicus or Aubrey's
Gossip concerning Oxford in the Civil War.
The curfew no longer tolls the knell of parting day. It is
not permitted. But when dusk has fallen and the Mayor and
Corporation leave the world to darkness and to me, I walk in
the Fellows' Garden, carefully hiding the ardent tip of my
cigarette (lest it should attract a Zeppelin), and think upon
those streams. . . . For who doubts they will flow again?
'Not the same/ . . . No, my dear Dick, I sincerely trust 'not
the same!' In your last letter you observed brightly that 'it
looks as if, before long, folks would be scrapping in every
corner of this blessed planet.' Well, our wise men are already
at it here, in corners of the Cambridge Review. They are con-
cerned to regulate what is going to happen when the war is
over. Well, I do not much believe in cooking an eagle before
you have shot him. But suppose him shot. . . . Do these my
reverend co-seniors actually believe that it will be left to us to
put things right? What, to us? who in our generation, in
England and France and Germany, have allowed this thing to
come to pass? No, my dear child: that responsibility, with
the honour of it, must be yours. It is a heavy one (as a while
ago we should have said distrustfully, but now say in solicitude,
for the time it will steal from the natural joys of youth) : but
we left you youngsters to wipe up the mess, and you must
restore the garden in which we shall walk humbly with you,
ancients, musical at close of day.
You will come back, and those who return to the University
will claim for youth a far larger measure of freedom, as they
284 To the Front from the Bach
have earned it ten times over. But as you have always agreed
with me that Oxford and Cambridge are two of the loveliest
things in the world each, but for the other, peerless I can
trust you to deal reverently with this one; for she is yopr
mother, after all.
'THE TEMPEST'
'HpHE TEMPEST' is the first play in the First Folio of
JL 1623; and this, for aught anybody knows indeed almost
certainly was its first appearance in print. The Folio, at any
rate, supplies our only text. Chronologically it is almost the
last, if not the very last, that Shakespeare wrote. The Folio
editors, Heminge and Condell, old friends of his and fellow-
actors, may have given it pride of place for this pious reason, or
possibly because it had won a striking success at Court when
presented there in the winter of 1612-13, among many enter-
tainments that graced the betrothal and nuptials of the Princess
Elizabeth with the Prince Palatine Elector. John Heminge, as
foreman of Shakespeare's old company, was paid by Lord
Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber of King James I, * upon
the councells warrant, dated at Whitehall xx die Mai, 1613* his
bill for producing 'foureteene severall playes' in the course of
these festivities which were numerous and so costly as to
embarrass His Majesty's exchequer. The entry (Vertue MSS.)
specifies these plays, and The Tempest comes sixth on the list.
It is pleasant and certainly not impossible to believe that, as
Heminge and Condell have preserved it for us, this play was
written-up expressly for the betrothal and presented on
2yth December 1612, the betrothal night of the incomparable
Queen of Hearts whose name in story is Elizabeth of Bohemia,
design'd
Th' eclipse and glory of her kind.
For 'beauty vanishes, beauty passes,' but the charm of this
woman still fascinates the imagination almost as in her life-
time it won and compelled the souls of men to champion her
sorrowful fortunes. That it did this that it laid on the nobler
285
286 'The Tempest 9
spirits of her time a spell potent to extravagance and yet so
finely apportioned as almost to serve us now for a test and
gauge of their nobility no reader of early seventeenth-century
biography will deny. The evidence is no less frequent than
startling. It would almost seem that no 'gentleman* could
come within the aura but he knelt to Elizabeth of Bohemia, her
sworn knight: that either he followed thenceforth to the last
extremity, proud only to serve, or, called away, he departed
as one who had looked upon a vision which changed all the
values of life, who had beheld a kingdom of the soul in which
self and this world were well lost for a dream. We may see
this strange conversion in Wotton; we may trace it in the
careers of Donne, of Dudley Carleton and (with a postscript of
morose disillusion) Lord Herbert of Cherbury. We may read
it, youthfully and romantically expressed in this well-authenti-
cated story:
A company of young men of the Middle Temple met together for
supper; and when the wine went round the first man rose, and
holding a cup in one hand and a sword in the other, pledged the health
of the distressed Princess, the Lady Elizabeth ; and having drunk, he
kissed the sword, and laying hand upon it, took a solemn oath to live
and die in her service. His ardour kindled the whole company.
They all rose, and from one to another the cup and sword went
round till each had taken the pledge.
We may see this exuberance carried into steady practice by
Lord Craven, a Lord Mayor's son, who, having poured blood
and money in her service, laid his last wealth at her feet to pro-
vide her a stately refuge and a home. Through all the story
she granddaughter of Mary of Scotland, mother of Rupert
of the Rhine rides reckless, feckless, spendthrift, somehow
ineffably great; conquering all hearts near her, that
Enamour'd do wish so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side
Thoro' swords, thoro* seas, whither she would ride,
'The Tempest' 287
lifting all those gallant hearts to ride with her, for a desperate
cause, despising low ends, ignoble gain ; to ride with her down
and nobly over the last lost edge of the world.
We may take it almost for a certainty that in whatever
previous form or forms presented this play as we have it was
the play enacted at Court to grace the Princess Elizabeth's
betrothal. No argument from internal evidence conflicts with
this. Gonzalo's description of his ideal Commonwealth
(n. i. i^6etseqq.) comes out of Florio's translation of Montaigne,
first published in 1603: and the name 'Caliban* suggests the
essay 'Of the Canniballes' from which Gonzalo derived his
wisdom. Ben Jonson most likely has a side thrust at The
Tempest (and at The Winter's Tale) in his Introduction to
Bartholomew Fair (acted in October 1614): 'If there be never
a Servant-monster i' the Fayre, who can help it, he sayes : nor
a nest of Antiques? Hee is loth to make nature afraid in his
Playes, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like
Drolleries' Further, we can easily allow the play to contain
many passages suggested by the misadventure of the Virginian
voyage of 1609, when a fleet of nine ships and five hundred
colonists under command of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George
Somers was dispersed by a gale and the flagship, the Sea-
Adventure, went ashore on the coast of Bermudas, her crew
wonderfully escaping. That Shakespeare used at least one or
two out of several pamphlets dealing with this wreck (by
Silvester Jourdain, by William Strachey, and by 'advise and
direction of the Councell of Virginia* to mention no others)
stands above question. But nothing of this is inconsistent
either with the play's having been presented by the King's
Players on Hallowmas, 1611, or with its having been recast and
'revived* for the festivities of the Princess Elizabeth's betrothal.
Nothing forbids our imagination to repeople the banqueting
house and recall this bride, this paragon, to seat her in the
front rank of the ghostly audience : to watch her, a moment
before the curtain opens, a little reclined, her jewelled wrists,.
288 'The Tempest 9
like Cassiopeia's, laid along the arms of her chair; or still to
watch her as the play proceeds and she affianced and, by
admission, in love with her bridegroom leans forward with
parted lips to follow the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda.
Those who must always be searching for a * source* of every
plot of Shakespeare's (as though he could invent nothing!) will
be disappointed in The Tempest. Thomas Warton (or rather,
Warton misunderstood by Malone) started one false hare by a
note in his History of English Poetry, vol. iii (1781), that he
had been 'informed by the late Mr. Collins of Chichester'
that is, Collins the poet that Shakespeare's Tempest was formed
on a 'favourite romance,' Aurelio and Isabella^ printed in 1586
(one volume) in Italian, French, and English, and again in 1588
in Italian, Spanish, French, and English; the Spanish of Flores
being the original. But Collins's mind was darkening towards
madness at the time: and Aurelio, when found, contained
nothing in common with The Tempest. Others have followed
the clue of a German play, Die Schone Sidea, written by one
Jacob Ayrer, a notary of Nuremberg, who died in 1605. There
is a magician in this drama who is also a prince Prince Ludolph :
he has a demon or familiar spirit : he has an only daughter too.
The son of Ludolph's enemy becomes his prisoner, his sword
being held in sheath by the magician's art. Later, the young
man is forced to bear logs for Ludolph's daughter. She falls
in love with him, and all ends happily. The resemblances to
The Tempest are obvious : and that there was some actual thread
of connection appears the likelier when we note that 'mountain'
and 'silver,' two names of the spirit hounds which Prospero
and Ariel set upon the 'foul conspiracy' (iv. i. 256), occur in
an invocation of Prince Ludolph's in the German play. It
may be that Shakespeare used Ayrer's play; for the English
Comedians were at Nuremberg in 1604, where they may have
seen Die Schone Sidea^ to bring home the story. But it is just
as likely that Ayrer's is a version of one they took from England
to Germany. And, after all, what fairy-tale or folk-tale is
'The Tempest* 289
commoner, the world over, than that which combines a witch,
or wizard, an only daughter, an adventurous prince caught and
bound to carry logs, etc., with pity and confederate love to
counteract the spell and bring all right in the end ?
When we turn to Shakespeare's handling of this story, we
first admire that which all must admire, the enchantment wherein
he clothes it, the poetic feeling wherewith he suffuses it. Magic
and music meet in The Tempest and are so wedded that none
can put them asunder.
That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew ;
The farther going, more to dwell
And wing our green to wed our blue ;
But whether note of joy, or knell,
Not his own Father-singer knew ;
Nor yet can any mortal tell,
Save only that it shivers through ;
The breast of us, a sounded shell,
The blood of us a lighted dew.
But when we have paid homage to all this, on second thoughts
we may find the firm anatomy beneath the robe the mere crafts-
manship scarcely less wonderful. For The Tempest accepts
and masters an extreme technical difficulty. No one can react
Shakespeare's later plays in a block without recognizing that
the subject which constantly engaged his mind towards the
close of life was Reconciliation, with pardon and atonement for
the sins or mistakes of one generation in the young love of the
children and in their promise. This is the true theme o
Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, succes-
sively. But the process of reconciliation especially when
effected through the appeal of sons and daughters is naturally
a slow one, and therefore extremely difficult to translate into
drama, which handles 'the two hours' traffic of our stage' and
therefore must almost necessarily rely on the piling of circum-
stance and character upon one crisis and its swiftest possible
L
290 'The Tempest 9
resolution. In attempting to condense such 'romantic' stories
of reconciliation as he had in his mind, Shakespeare was in fact
taking up the glove thrown down by Sir Philip Sidney in his
pretty mockery of bad playwrights.
Now of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is that
two young Princes fall in love. After many traverses she is got with
child, delivered of a faire boy, he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love,
and is ready to get another child, and all this in two hours* space;
which how absurd it is in sence, even sence may imagine, and Arte
hath taught, and all ancient examples justified.
The time supposed to be occupied by the action of Pericles
is about sixteen years. The Winter's Tale has an interval of
about sixteen years between its third and fourth acts. The
chronology of Cymbeline is baffling and in places absurd ; yet it
must cover many months. The once famous Unity of Time is
certainly no 'law' : but it is a grace of drama. And after falling
back on such makeshifts as ancient Gower in Pericles and
Father Time himself in The Winter's Tale, of a sudden in The
Tempest our artist triumphantly 'does the trick.' The whole
action of the play, with the whole tale of ancient wrong un-
folded, the whole company of injuring and injured gathered
into a knot, the whole machinery of revenge converted to for-
giveness all this is managed in about three hours of imagined
time, or scarcely more than the time of its actual representation
on the stage.
The clou of this feat of stagecraft lies in the famous protasis
of the second scene, where Prospero so naturally unfolds all the
preliminaries to his daughter. For exquisite use of protasis
this may be compared with the second scene of Hamlet. Many
critics have praised it : but we hope that by a few simple stage
directions we have managed to suggest a beauty which the most
of them have missed the abstracted mind of Miranda as she
listens with a kind offeyness to the story so important on which
her father, having chosen and prepared the moment, so im-
'The Tempest* 291
patiently insists. It is, to our thinking, most necessary to
realize that Miranda is all the while less absorbed by this
important story than by the sea, out of which her fairy prince
is surely coming, though his coming be scarcely surmised as
yet. We shall not understand this play, lacking to understand
how young impulse forestalls and takes charge, outrunning our
magician's deliberate contrivance. When Ferdinand and
Miranda actually meet
At the first sight
They have changed eyes.
For another point, not over-subtle, which the critics would
seem to have overlooked : It is clear to us that the enchantment
of the island purposely makes its appearance correspond with
the several natures of the shipwrecked men who come ashore.
Gonzalo, the 'honest old councillor,' finds 'our garments rather
new dyed than stained with salt water.' But Antonio and
Sebastian cannot see them so. To him 'how lush and lusty
the grass looks! how green!' Antonio, the total jaundiced
villain, sees it 'tawny,' the half-corrupt Sebastian detects 'an
eye of green in V and so on throughout. Gonzalo indeed
is one of Shakespeare's minor triumphs. He is not left as
Antigonus, his counterpart in The Winter's Tale was left to
perish after his kind deed. It was done long ago : but he sur-
vives, still in his character of loyal-hearted servant, still active
in loyalty, which in its turn advances the action of the play.
Is it not a delicate stroke that, when Miranda first hears the story
of her casting away, of all the shipwrecked company near at
hand, though she knows it not, this old councillor is the man
she (being heart-whole yet) most desires to see ? So in the end
he is not only one of the company that awakes Miranda's cry of
O wonder I
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!
292 'Tie Tempest 9
But for him is reserved the final blessing,
Look down you gods,
And on this couple drop a blessed crown!
so unmistakably echoing Hermione's invocation in The Winter s
Tale,
You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head!
Caliban has been over - philosophized by the critics (with
Renan and Browning to support them). The truth would seem
to be that Shakespeare, like a true demiurge, had a tendency to
love his creations, and none the less those whom he shows us
as gross, carnal, earthy. If it be not unfair to drag Falstaff into
the comparison, then even as none of us can help loving Falstaff,
so few of us shall we say? if Caliban came fawning about
our legs, would be disinclined to pat him on the head with a
'Good dog! Good monster!' Our sense of justice, too, helps
this instinct : for, after all, Caliban has the right of it when he
snarls,
I must eat my dinner.
This island 's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me :
and we must remind ourselves that in 1611 and thereabouts
this dispossession of the aborigine was a very present event,
however feebly it might touch the imagination, to trouble the
conscience, of our valorous circumnavigators and colonists.
Shakespeare, as we conceive him, differed from Rousseau in
most ways, and not least in immunity from any temptation to
construct an ideal portrait of the 'noble savage/ But no man
can be catholic as Shakespeare was without being fair, and so
(as Hazlitt noted) while the nature of Caliban is the essence of
grossness, there is not a particle of vulgarity in it. Few have
remarked how admirably significant as a set-off to Caliban is
Stephano, type of his predestined conquerors, the tarry, racy,
''The Tempest 9 293
absolute British seaman, staggering through this isle of magic
with a bottle, staring, hiccoughing back against Ariel's invisible
harp :
The master, the swabber, the bos'n and I ...
in extremity to be counted on for the fine confused last word of
our mercantile marine, 'Every man shift for all the rest.' It is
hard to over-estimate the solidarity of Stephano and the 'value*
it gives to the whole fairy picture.
Many critics have lost their hearts to Miranda and no one has
excelled Coleridge's praise in delicacy of insight. Let us add
but this Shakespeare has contrived to mould her of frank
goodness and yet present her as fascinating, captivating by
touches so noble that one can hardly conceive the part ade-
quately rendered save by a princess in real life as noble as she
an Elizabeth of Bohemia, for example. She moves to her
appointed happiness with fairies and music about her; but she
sees no fairies, sings no song, simply walks straight as the
dictate of her heart directs, and, so walking, steps straight
beyond the magic her father has woven. This incomparable
play contains nothing more subtly simple than her unconscious,
quite fearless, outstripping of all Prospero's premeditated art.
He has drawn around the island a magic circle as that which
Ferdinand cannot step across. The play, like A Midsummer
Night's Dream, plainly celebrates a betrothal and marches to the
fruition of marriage joy. There is much music in both: in
both the fairies are made abetters. But whereas in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream the fairies were Warwickshire elves,
playing their pranks anarchically, at their own sweet fancy, to
befool mortals, the more rarefied spirits of The Tempest obey,
under threat, a mortal's compulsion. But Miranda is for the
world, gently but fearlessly; on the primal instinct that makes
homes, builds and populates cities, recreates and rules the race.
Some have objected that this play does not develop ; that within
Prospero's charmed circle, for die space of three hours, all stands
294 'The Tempest 9
still. In truth a great deal happens, and the ease of its
happening is a trick of most cunning preparation.
Who is Prospero? Is he perchance Destiny itself; the
master-spirit that has brooded invisible and moved in the deep
waters of the greater tragedies, and now comes to shore on a
lost nest of the main to sun himself; laying by his robe of
darkness to play, at his great ease, one last trick before following
the way of the old gods ? Is he (as Campbell the poet was the
first to suggest) Shakespeare himself, in this last of his plays
breaking his wand and drowning his book 'deeper than did
ever plummet sound'? The lights in the banqueting house
are out: the Princess Elizabeth is dust: and as for the island
conjured out of the sea for a night's entertainment:
From that day forth the Isle has been
By wandering sailors never seen.
Ariel has nestled to the bat's back and slid away following
summer or else 'following darkness like a dream/ But still
this play abides, after three hundred years, eloquent of Shake-
speare's slow sun-setting through dream after dream of recon-
ciliation; forcing tears, not by 'pity and terror* but by sheer
beauty ; with a royal sense of the world, how it passes away,
with a catch at the heart surmising hope in what is to come.
And still the sense is royal : we feel that we are greater than we
know. So in the surge of our emotion, as on the surges
rounding Prospero's island, is blown a spray, a mist. Actually
it dims our eyes: and as we brush it away, there rides on it a
rainbow; and its colours are chastened wisdom, wistful charity;
\uth forgiveness, tender ruth for all men and women growing
older, and perennial trust in young love.
AN ADDRESS AT THE OPENING OF
KEATS HOUSE, HAMPSTEAD
May 9th, 1925
Mr. Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I
BECAUSE this occasion is, for 'a little clan,' a monumental
one : and because the memory of Keats seems to me in some
danger of being over-laboured just now: I shall try to recall
you to some of those simplicities which always best become a
simple monument.
But first let me congratulate you, Mr. Mayor, upon the
occasion :
There may be cities that refuse
To their own child his honours due.
But Hampstead is not one of these. Always in Hampstead,
going by its walks or on the edge of its heath, any man of letters
must be haunted by thoughts which seem to him almost
memories: of a great literary tradition merging still please
Heaven! into a great literary future. Still of the town, yet
not of the town but fragrant, on the country's rim these
ghosts, thoughts, memories, accompany or tread close on the
musing mind. A statue or an obelisk were an offence to the
genius loci ; which pursues rather along the shade of a paling or
under a tree that in a time before ours once
in a drear-nighted December
showed a part of its frosted branches to the lamp-light, or in
spring budded to arrest a poet's step on your pathways or
broke into leaf and held, on this verge over London, an immortal
nightingale captive.
295
296 An Address at the Opening of Keats House
ii
And so, sir, it is surely to Hampstead's credit, that you have
chosen, instead of obelisk or statue, to preserve this simple
house in perpetuity for a memorial of John Keats. In this
house he agonized with love and despondency: on a bed in a
chamber above us he read in a drop of blood his death warrant:
from the door beyond that passage he departed on his last
journey brave and hopeless as Henry Fielding on his last
voyage. In the dim garden outside yonder pane of glass he
heard die Hampstead nightingale and translated that song 'not
born for death' into human speech as near to heavenly as any
we can dare to snatch out of this transitory life to call immortal.
. . . Still on the edge and shadow of that trench untimely
digged we invoke that genius, fleet as water, 'writ in water/
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake :
For Death he taketh all away: but them he cannot take!
'Men are we and must mourn.' Mentem mortalia tangunt. But
here, sir, in this room in this house you preserve almost all
that a decent, necessary piety can preserve.
in
Let me say frankly that your guest, whom you over-compli-
ment by standing him here, could do very well without any
memorials beyond the poems themselves beyond the great
odes (say), some sonnets, La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Eve
of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and lines of Endymion chanted in the ear
of his own youth. These and such things are to me the pure,
the mere, the miraculous, the only considerable Keats.
I assert this in face of a most formidable company, far more
learned than I : and I assert it in this haunted house. Through
its chamber walks and now must walk the shade of Fanny
An Address at the Opening of Keats House 297
Brawne, by the favour of whose granddaughter, present to-
night, many mementoes have been bestowed as its treasure.
I shall say but a word of Fanny Brawne. She was young,
sprightly (as she had, by virtue of her graces, a right to be),
and as Touchstone said to Jaques
if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it.
That Keats tortured himself over his passion for her is, of
course, evident from his published letters. But one guesses
that he would, in his febrile breaking health, have tortured him-
self almost equally in any passionate flame. She was not (if
you will) the woman for him. But ask yourselves, of your
experience of life, Who could have been ? The few words she
discreetly left of him in her later married life are sensible and
most tender. Let us leave it at that. I wish, for my part,
that the letters had never been exhumed. But they were : and
they do her no harm.
IV
For we know do we not? that to any actual Keats any
Fanny Brawne can never be the woman we criticize as sprightly
or worldly or of breeding and self-possession, but is always an
ideal creation in a lover's brain. Oh, believe me, ladies and
gentlemen, you can as soon explain a play of Shakespeare's by
imagining him in search along his shelves for his next plot, as
you can explain Keats by Fanny Brawne, Fanny Brawne by
Keats, or Dulcinea del Toboso by any process but that of Don
Quixote's brain. There is a little of the poet in every man
here : and if we did not all, rough men, poetize somewhat our
selected mates, I ask you, How could the world go on ? Who,
above all, is to select mates for poets? What expert? What
official? No, they must do it for themselves, and unhappily
when they don't at first succeed they too often try, try again.
298 An Address at the Opening of Keats House
Edward FitzGerald, to my thinking the best critic of his
Victorian contemporaries, took up the love-letters of Keats
straight after a study of Catullus: and (wrote he) to James
Russell Lowell but let me pause upon that name to regret
that Miss Amy Lowell, whose two erudite massive volumes
on Keats almost make me afraid to speak, weighing ' as an ox
on my tongue/ cannot be here to-night as she intended. Let
us all wish her a happy and speedy recovery!
To resume Edward FitzGerald wrote (February 18, 1878) :
When Keats came, I scarce felt a change from Catullus, both such
fiery Souls as wore out their Bodies early; and I can even imagine
Keats writing such filthy Libels against any one he had a spite against,
even Armitage Brown, had Keats lived 2,000 years ago.
Yes, and for two other reasons I connect always in my mind
these two Thalia's sons Keats with Catullus: these two who
died in their prime, died at apparently such spendthrift irreparable
waste of the god's promise ; died early because forsooth the gods
loved them. For the first reason (which may seem trivial, but
is not when searched) both passionately loved their family, their
brothers. Catullus's Prater ave atque vale has come sighing to
us down the ages, to be taken up and continued by Keats's
devotional tears and lament over 'poor Tom': and who can
forget that picture of little John Keats, aged seven or there-
abouts, posting himself sentry in his night-shirt with a sword
outside his mother's sick-room that picture which FitzGerald
so often and urgently begged Millais to paint?
VI
But records of children and brothers wildly devoted are
common enough, you will say. Well then, for my second
point of likeness, I say that of these two poets, when all the
dross of their work has been sifted out, the residue is absolute
An Address at ine Opening oj Keats House 299
gold, pure and proof against whatever touchstone brought.
And therefore can any one name two stars in literature over
whom we more wonder at even though we upbraid not
the gods for slaying their darlings young, over whose twin
trench we stretch more yearning impotent hands ? Says Robert
Bridges :
If one English poet might be recalled to-day from the dead to
continue the work which he left unfinished on earth, it is probable
that the crown of his country's desire would be set on the head of
John Keats.
An idle regret, on an idle speculation! True: as all regrets,
all speculations, wander around the foreknowing path of the
gods as Keats himself, for example, wanders in the maze of
Endymion.
VII
An idle speculation! It might have been that, relieved of
personal disease and selfish torment (a part of it), Keats had
opened the door wider on that larger vision revealed in Hyperion.
' High Prophetess/ said I, ' purge off
Benign, if so it please tliee, my mind's film*
'None can usurp this height,' return'd that Shade,
* But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.'
As idle the regret!
There are no voices, O Rhodope! that are not soon mute, how-
ever tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate
love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.
Catullus is dead : Keats is dead : and the ghost of the girl he
idealized has gone out, somewhere, to dance and wear away, if
she can, 'the everlasting flint.' But here is the house inhabited,
out yonder the tree, the garden, the listener to that song not
born for death while poetry lasts.
300 An Address at the Opening of Keats House
VIII
I have personal reason to know, sir, the domesticity which
guards and respects, for the mere sake, even quite modest
literature in Hampstead. I have real reason to know how far
from this clearer height over London even a faint invalid voice
can travel for the good of an uncounted many. Hampstead is
not a parade-ground of authors, nor a campo santo for tall
monuments. It is and has been, in gentle pre-eminence and
dignity, a home of genius. I like, sir, to think it our way to
celebrate even our most illustrious poets in this modest, homely
fashion: that as, a few days ago, Englishmen gathered in a
country churchyard to honour Gray, so we to-night have
gathered to this house of Keats as a shrine in your city.
A TOAST TO THE MEMORY OF
SIR WALTER SCOTT
Given at the Twenty-seventh Annual Dinner of the Edinburgh
Sir Walter Scott Club, Nov. 26, 1926
My Lord Provost, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I
YOU have cast far for a President this year, though you
might of course have found many nearer and more eminent
better able certainly to acknowledge the honour which, at
this moment, naturally oppresses the heart and tongue. But
you could not (and this must be my justification), though you
flung your net in waters far remoter than the caves of Cornwall
where lies my home, have dragged up a more inveterate (shall
I say a more crustacean ?) lover of that great man whose memory
an admitted Southron must presently, by the privilege of invita-
tion, invite you to honour.
ii
You know by report that I lecture at Cambridge and there
have sometimes to lecture upon Shakespeare. That is a career
to which, as few Professors can escape it, some evolutionary
instinct of self-protection has taught us to adapt ourselves.
But sometimes, dealing with Shakespeare, I have harked back
upon Scott; and have pondered upon the different ways which
history has chosen to assign her record of the two greatest
imaginative writers in our literature.
To Shakespeare, she has left 'a local habitation and a name/
What else? Truly we know nothing apart from a very few
constated facts and a vast deal of trumpery gossip.
301
302 A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott
But of Scott, that other inspired charmer of souls, we know
far more (probably) than has ever been recorded of any writer
in history. Apart from his own industrious prefaces and notes
and appendixes, we have not only the monumental Life by his
son-in-law Lockhart perhaps next to BoswelPs Johnson the
finest biography in our language (you Scots hold the palm in
biography anyway) but letters and journals, etc., line upon
line, revelation upon familiar revelation of the actual man.
in
And there is the difference. Theoretically would you really
wish ought any of us really to wish to know more of
Shakespeare than we do? I ask, would you confidently wish
it? I know this is a bold question. But I would ask you the
like of Homer. Do we really want more for our image of
Homer than the words of the hymn attributed to him?
'Farewell, O maidens of Delos, and hereafter if any stranger
landing on your beach should inquire "Who was the sweetest
singer ever sung to you?" make answer to him modestly
"Sir, he was just a blind man and came (he said) from rocky
Chios."' All the * Lives' of Shakespeare when the pot is
skimmed boil down to this that there was a boy in Stratford
who left it to try his fortune with the London theatre-people,
learned to write superbly but still hankered after his native banks
of Avon, and ended as a neighbour respected by his neighbours
a man not forgetting his roots. As Bagehot remarks in effect,
of the passage in Venus and Adonis describing the tremors of a
hare aroused at sound of his pursuers, 'Who says, after this,
that we know nothing of Shakespeare ? We know that he had
once been after a hare.'
Now what I come to, my Lord Provost, is this, that of Scott
apart from the operation of genius, which is always a mystery
we are left with no mystery at all, and we want none.
A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott 303
We know that this Wizard of the North wore no Prospero's
mantle, that he drew no cabalistic circle save that of the writing-
lamp under which his figures Di' Vernon or Jeanie Deans,
Marmion or Richard of England, Edie Ochiltree or Dugald
Dalgetty weave their dance at his call. We know that he,
too, had been after a hare : after a salmon too, and the running
deer. But we see this man, alike in his poems and novels and
in his own life so amply recorded, as almost the sincerest figure
of a great Scots gentleman c the Shirra' totus teres : a figure so
vivid, so sincere and simple, that only certain great simple
characters in fiction Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar
of Wakefield, Mr. Pickwick occupy in our affection a place
comparable with this actual man, who rode Ettrick and survives
to us, himself as romantic as any of the characters he created.
IV
A month or two since, sir your Club's invitation giving me
excuse to satisfy an old craving, one of those which conceived
in boyhood are so often deferred to the lazier daily task which
nevertheless must be done I made pious pilgrimage through a
good part of the Border. The weather was perfect, the sky
clear blue above those enfolding hills ; the hillsides were sheeted
down in such green enchantment as ever ringed Thomas the
Rymer beneath Eildon Tree. And I tell you, sir, that at every
lap of the hills under circuitous Tweed I could see the Shirra
riding down on his grey pony a figure held somehow in the
imagination of one's boyhood, inseparable even then between
adoration of his writings and love of their author. On a return
from some of these pilgrimages there followed a Sunday night o
thunderstorm, memorable (I was told) even in these parts, and
next day, visiting Lasswade for the site of his early farm-
steading, I learned what Esk could do in spate, and knew again
this younger man with his lame leg pressed to the saddle-flap
daring (as Lockhart tells) the fords.
304 A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott
They tell us nowadays that Romance is dead and Scott
neglected. Romance is never dead. As our greatest living
Romantic puts it, Romance brings up the 9.15 ; and she always
will. But there has been some neglect of Scott among lecturers
and school masters, who still talk indefatigably of the Romantic
Movement or a Romantic Revival, of which he and Byron were
the tallest champions. Some while ago your new President,
Professor Grierson, gave us a most vivifying lecture on the word
'Romantic' and I had shamefacedly to confess, when thanking
him for it afterwards, I did quite recently advise my pupils that
for a time we should give the words 'Romantic* and 'Classical*
a rest. Of course I was wrong. We can never give even the
word 'Romantic' a rest; but I was thinking of an admired
lecturer who came to Cambridge and advertised a series of
lectures on the Romantic Revival. Some of my pupils came
to me to read some of the poetry of the early nineteenth century,
and when I asked what passages of Byron had been recom-
mended to them they admitted that Byron had not been included
in the syllabus. I forget if Scott was. But Byron! 'God
shield us, a lion among ladies!'
Nay, I regret to say that, but yesterday, I had read to me a
chapter of my old friend Sir Walter Raleigh On Writing and
Writers the chapter was entitled On the Decline and Fall of
Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Now as they used
to say at Oxford 'Raleigh was a prince'; he was at any rate a
man of his hands; above all Professors the man who despised
lecturing, as he put it, 'for the school ma'am'; and although he
had much to say for the impetus which made the Romantic
Movement, I sought in vain for the name of Scott. Burns was
mentioned. Many years ago I found myself in very hot water
through asking innocently in a weekly paper why Scotsmen
spent such a disproportionate amount of enthusiasm on Burns
as compared with Scott. I shall not revive that controversy
A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott 305
to-night, for fear of physical violence, save to say that had I the
honour to be one of Scott's countrymen I would beat the racial
tomtom in his honour above all other men of your jealous race.
But, sir, I remember here, that I am a Professor, and as such,
perhaps, have my only justification for the honour of addressing
you if I can find it.
Well, to begin with, I do not see how any professorial talk
consorts with an occasion like this, at so many of which Scott
himself assisted and (according to Hogg) could out-toast all
compotators, for the final toast standing with one leg on his
chair the other (lame) on the table, after what I understand to
have been a laudable national custom. It still is, maybe: but
I hope to be excused presently from that challenge. 1
VI
But of Scott as a writer let me just say three words and those
very briefly:
In the first place few men, I think, unless or until their business
obliges them to follow some way into English (I hardly dare
add Scottish) literature, can realize how much this man had
read, digested and known; in a word what a scholar he was,
how careless in grace, yet how profound. I can only bring my
own tribute of testimony to this, for what it is worth. But it
happens that for some years I have been working on the
comedies of Shakespeare, and always I am finding, in stray
footnote or recollection or hint, that Scott somehow, somewhere,
has been there before. It is not, as it is with Johnson, always
a definite pronouncement of common-sense. I should com-
pare it rather with Dante's search for a literary language among
the Italian dialects of his time. Always ahead of us, as Dante
says, is ' the panther of our quest ' ; in no province his abiding
lair. So, in early literature, nowhere is Scott's abiding lair, yet
1 The speaker was himself temporarily a cripple, through an accident.
306 A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott
always Scott has been that way always in reading Scott, in
almost any dozen pages, say of the Talisman or of Nigel, we are
haunted by undertones, overtones of Shakespeare : so, reading
Shakespeare, you catch, borne back out of somewhere on a
whisper, the horn of elfland blowing, the music of the leading
hound :
Long I follow'd happy guides,
I could never reach their sides ;
Their step is forth and, ere the day
Breaks, up their leaguer and away . . .
On eastern hills I see their smokes
Mix'd with mist by distant lochs.
So it is with any one who has once surrendered his mind to
these two, our most imaginative writers.
VII
He had, we know, an incomparable gift of verbal memory :
comparable only in the next generation with that of your other
countryman, Macaulay. All records attest it, even if we dis-
count those of that egregious Shepherd (if in this company I
may call him so) whose effigy to-day sits, as somebody ordained
it to be, on a brae over sweet St. Mary's Loch, irremoveable as
the Shepherd himself was when for the best part of two days
and nights he sat attendant upon the conversation of Scott and
John Murray, the publisher. But this gift of memorizing, while
a respectable mystery to me, can be shared by any ' Calculating
Boy.' The real mystery to me, sir, is the understanding that
went with it, and communicated itself all over Europe.
Here was a man, intensely and actively conservative : a hater
of the French Revolution and all it meant : a close clannish Scot,
moreover to whom his family ties and Tweed were Jordan
and meant more than any Abana or Pharpar, rivers of Damascus.
And yet from the circle of his writing-lamp radiated a something
that made all European literature different. Even as, from a
A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott 307
little monastery in Jarrow, Bede's candle cast its beam across
fen marsh and channel fog to the Continent and Charlemagne's
court, so the Waverley novels reached our dear enemy France
and (more than ever Byron did, the more admired) rekindled
romance over Europe. That is my second wonder who talk
to you as a man of letters : and I must leave it at that.
But let me fetch back the recollections from the far away
nineties to which I suppose I must date myself. In those days
our dear enemy France was getting back, as they say, something
of her own, by opposing new Realism to the old Romance and
uniting it with the anxious cultivation of style, the search for
the exact word le mot juste. Flaubert and de Maupassant
were models in those days; with Tourguenieff, who was a
Russian, but spent his life in exile in Paris. We sought back
to Balzac and Stendhal too. But a man there was, to rescue us
from the desert of Realism one gallant Scotsman, the adored
of us all, hopeless beyond our imitation, who kept the flag of
Scott flying and carried it till he fell. I mean of course Robert
Louis Stevenson.
My Lord Provost, while Scotland stands where it did it
is impossible that Romance should die: this very gathering
to-night testifies that it yet fervently lives.
VIII
For my third and last point of remark, I must (how shall I
put it?) hitch up an old shooting-jacket between two wizard
robes that of the younger Scott, the poet, and the mature
Scott of the novels (prolific, strong, then wearied, broken,
but yet carrying through with honour, to the end). And I
find, or try to find, some reconciliation of the two literary
Walter Scotts in this
All readers of all records, letters, anecdotes, must wonder,
in these times, at the boisterous animal spirits of the man. He
had always a fund of them let me put it more than sufficient
308 A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott
for his immediate purposes, or for those of his friends over
whose misadventures in his company he would laugh till the
tears ran down his cheeks, whether he or they took a toss off
horseback into a bog, or were sunk in a coracle at salmon-
spearing and must swim for it in the perilous dark. So he
would have rocked with laughter at the spectacle of a man
pursuing his hat down the Canongate. There is a Homeric
simplicity in all Scott's laughter; and to that same Homeric
simplicity we owe and, criticizing, yet bless the rush and spate
of his verse in The Lay y and in Marmion. Monckton Milnes,
Lord Houghton, doubted in verse if our forefathers were really
finer fellows than the best of later years : but he noted in verse
one gallant difference:
To them was life a simple art
Of duties to be done,
A game where each man took his part,
A race where all must run ;
A battle whose great scheme and scope
They little cared to know,
Content as men-at-arms to cope
Each with his fronting foe.
Man now his Virtue's diadem
Puts on and proudly bears :
Great thoughts, great feelings came to them
Like instincts, unawares.
Blending their soul's sublimest needs
With tasks of every day,
They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play.
And I suggest to you that this same store of Homeric (or if
you prefer it) of Sabine vigour carried Scott through. It is
nonsense to say that in the novels he is no artist. Beginning
with a wayward loose rein in Waverley^ he runs loose again in
Guy Mannering, and then, in The Antiquary, finds himself.
A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott 309
Who will say that The Antiquary is not great constructive art?
Or that Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, Redgauntlet
are not master-works? Those prosperous happy years, by
Lockhart with how delicate a familiarity described ! Thenafter
the tale of ruin, of 'all lost save honour' and still of honour
winning through. I shall not touch on this, sir, save to suggest
that even the bravest knight, not carried through on the almost
spent tide of Scott's amazing vitality, must have gone down
under the waves.
IX
At the very close almost broken and near spent he came
to his native city, to make his will. A spell of most violent
weather immured him, and his good friend Mr. Cadell persuaded
him to remove to the hospitable house in Atholl Crescent,
where for several days he wrote manfully at Count Robert of
Paris. There, pestered by his publisher Ballantyne for an
omitted motto, he moved to the window, gazed out on the
whirl of the storm, and invented the few lines, subscribed The
Deluge, that form the motto of Chapter V :
The storm increases ; 'tis no sunny shower
Fostered in the moist breath of March or April,
Or such as parched Summer cools his lips with.
Heaven's windows are flung wide; the inmost deeps
Call in hoarse greeting one upon another;
On comes the flood in all its foaming horrors,
And where 's the dike shall stop it ?
My Lord Provost, I have seen (I say) and could not help
seeing the solid vision of this full-blooded high-mettled man
riding down to dangerous fords by Tweed and Esk and Yarrow:
I have heard the ripple of his river under Abbotsford and walked
back up the meadow to assure myself that what Lockhart tells is
not fable : it may well have been the last quiet music lulling him.
But here, in the story I have quoted, is Mr. Valiant-for-Truth
3io A Toast to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott
riding down to the last wildest ford of all, always the great man,
bequeathing his sword to any that can deserve it, his great bow
to any that can bend it.
And I say speaking from my heart, and from my know-
ledge, such as it is that no writer of this island has left at once
so much of his genius abiding in the world for its clean delight,
so much invention to entrance so many young and old, so
gallant and good an example of good living, as has this exemplar
of a great Scottish gentleman whose most noble memory I now
ask you, mesdames and sirs, rising to pledge.
My Lord Provost, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, I lift my
glass with you to the well-beloved memory of Walter Scott.
A SEXAGENARIAN'S APOLOGIA
1928
I HAVE a knack, perhaps an ungrateful one, of forgetting my
stories almost as soon as they are written ; with an incurable
habit of persisting on my own line, careless if my audience
dwindle or no. I have still and at my time of life it may be
pardonably asserted the assurance that I have been able, in
various ways, to touch many hearts, and am still able to
touch some.
They are few, perhaps, just now; and may yet dwindle, while
professors talk of ' the Romantic Movement ' as though a spirit
enjoyed a period, to pass into a dead thing, to be classified.
It is not a dead thing. In the race that has bred Drake,
Wotton, Peterborough, Scott, Gordon, it must ever revive and
recur. And I ask to be remembered for no more than this
that, while he lived through a time of unpopularity, one man
held on his way in that faith.
I might plead many things on behalf of romance, but will
confine myself to one plea, taking Scott for my illustration
or Dickens, if you will. The worlds they drew were kindly
worlds, if extravagant ; worlds in which, as in the quieter worlds
of Jane Austen or Trollope, it was a privilege to live. They,
as did Goldsmith and Fielding before them, took our span of life
as companionable, humorous, on the whole making for good.
Now to drive at practice any clever fellow can pull faces
at humanity and deride it; as any one with little expense can
invent mishaps and misunderstandings. A novelist who traffics
with sex and suicide, domestic bickerings and disillusions, is
playing the very easiest game in the world. Any illiterate can
make a 'hit* with such a theme, if his mind be of the sort to
descend to it. But to people a wide stage with characters at
311
312 A Sexagenarians Apologia
once good (as most are) and brave, in patience or adventure
that is the artist's test, as it seems to me. It means that in
growing he has learnt to judge his fellow-sinners charitably,
and to help them, before he leaves a world of all sorts in which
it has been worth while to live.
LECTURE ON W. S. GILBERT
I HAD parted, at the Cambridge Post Office, with a young
friend of parts who 'deplores* (as he puts it) our whole
heritage of English poetry and holds with reason that it ought
to make a fresh start. Musing on this assurance of his, on
my way to the Botanic Garden, and resigning myself, as my
custom is, to grieving
when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away,
I encountered two long lines of men on opposite sides of the
thoroughfare; the one drawing, or seeking to draw, unem-
ployment pay; the other taking, or seeking to take, tickets
for Gilbert-and-Sullivan Opera.
'Ah, there,' thought I, 'after all, the last enchantment of the
Victorian age has captured you, my lads, and holds you by
the Achilles' tendon!' For I recognize your faces. You are
the same that, the other day, were affecting to despise
Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height
or
O lyric love, half angel and half bird!
But as soon as it comes to 'Tit- willow!' or 'The Policeman's
lot is not a happy one,' you are held and ' laid by the heel.'
Now I wish to inquire into this and the reason of it; and,
believe me, not sardonically. My first introduction to Gilbert-
and-Sullivan Opera dates back to an amateur performance of
H.M.S. Pinafore that enchanted a child. The first play I ever
saw in a London theatre was Patience, in the course of its first
run at the Ope"ra Comique. As an undergraduate I have taken
as much trouble as any of you to listen to The Sorcerer, Princess
Ha, The Mikado ; and my own two favourites, lolanthe and
The Gondoliers, still conjure up by association all manner of
314 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
happy memories. I yet can surrender myself (at intervals) to
Gilbert-and-Sullivan with an abandon you may ascribe to the
natural gaiety of declining years, or to sentimentality which
you will. Let that pass: for, with your leave, the question
affects not me but you. Why do you who expend so much
cleverness .in deriding the more serious contemporaries of
W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, yet experimentally confess
to this one most typically late- Victorian enthusiasm which binds
your spiritual contemporaries with your fathers and grandfathers ?
You at any rate will not plead you, who follow so eagerly
all the many experiments of our Festival Theatre in substituting
mechanics for drama that you cling to a tradition of the
provinces. That provincial audiences flock to these operas
even as you do ; that amateurs throughout England spend their
winters in rehearsing one and another of them ; that regularly,
in the week following Easter, the railways convey down baskets
of regulation wigs and costumes from Covent Garden to remote
towns and Village Institutes all this is certain.
II
Now this, when we consider how typically late- Victorian these
operas are how limited in range of idea, even of invention
how much of their quiddity (in Patience, for example) belongs
to its hour in a past era; may well give us a shock. It might
also give me occasion to ask, why some of you, and those not
the least intelligent, haunt these operas, although in clever
debate you think it not unseemly to deride Meredith for a
mountebank and Tennyson for a maiden aunt.
But I seem to know you too well to believe that in your
heart of hearts you cherish any such foolish opinions, at any
rate ineradicably, or truly believe Gilbert and Sullivan to be the
lone Dioscuri of our late- Victorian night. Let us start on the
plain common ground that, after fifty years or so, their work
continues to delight young and old, and try to account for it.
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 315
in
The appeal of music being, by virtue of its indefiniteness, so
much more elusive of date than the spoken or written word,
and especially if the subject be at all * topical/ shall we hold that
Gilbert survives mainly through Sullivan's music? Vaguely
we may feel Sullivan's melody to be as Victorian as are Gilbert's
plots and tricks and whole theatrical concept; but these, having
to be framed in words and on lines of logic and topsy-turvy
logic is yet logic and the basis of Gilbert's wit can be brought
to tests which music airily eludes. They are written in words
and can be attacked in words; and must continue to suffer this
comparative disadvantage until critics of music find a method of
expressing their likes and dislikes by musical notation.
But no; this explanation will not serve. For Gilbert, very
much of his period and exposed to all the perils which must
beset any man who would attract a theatrical audience by wit
and song, was yet (if you will search his libretti) extremely wary
of topical allusions that might date him. In Patience^ to be
sure (one of his earliest), he shot at, and winged, a passing
mode. But save for a passing allusion to the late Captain Shaw
of London's Fire Brigade and a somewhat pointed one in
Utopia, Limited to the light refreshment provided for debutantes
at Queen Victoria's Dfawing-Rooms, you will seek his work
in vain for topical references. To be sure, in H.M.S. Pinafore
(his earliest success) he poked obvious fun at Mr. W. H. Smith,
First Lord of the Admiralty : but there exists a most illuminating
letter of his in which he hopes he has removed all suspicion of
personal offence by indicating that the victim was a Liberal
a letter which should be a locus classicus for research into the
ultimate obtuseness of wit. Dealing with his times as he knew
them, he could not of course foresee that events would in time
blunt the application of one of his neatest shafts the sentry's
song in lolanthe. But I think we may agree that in this slow-
moving country of ours Gilbert's raillery has worn as well as
316 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
the absurd institutions against which he not too seriously aimed.
They are accustomed to that sort of thing, and have allowed him
to wear just as well as they have worn.
I suggest that if you mark and note this avoidance of topical
allusion in Gilbert, you will come to the conclusion with me
that, the man considered himself as one writing for posterity,
as carefully at least as Horace Walpole did in composing his
familiar letters to Horace Mann. But on this point I shall
presently have more evidence to bring. For the moment let
his many years' survival stand for presumptive evidence that
Gilbert wrote with intent to last.
This intention apart, it were unjust to hold that Gilbert lives
by the grace of Sullivan. Offenbach's music was as tunable as
Sullivan's and belonged to its age as closely. But Offenbach
lacked good librettists, and for this reason you do not stand in
long files to buy tickets for Offenbach. You may say that
you do not for the more obvious reason that his operas are
never presented in England nowadays; but the true reason, if
you search for it, is that Offenbach never found his poet, his
twin mind. Now Gilbert and Sullivan lived each by the grace
of the other. Habitually, in actual practice, Gilbert wrote first,
plot and lyric, and Sullivan followed; which is the only right
order in the making of an opera, and was convincingly the
right order in the making of these men's operas. For the
contribution which Sullivan brought was not only his genius
for melody, nor a wit that jumped with Gilbert's, nor a separate
and musical wit which revelled in parody. Priceless as these
gifts undoubtedly were, above them all (I think) we must reckon
the quite marvellous sense of words in all his musical settings.
You may examine number after number of his, and the more
closely you examine the more will you be convinced that no
composer ever lived with an exacter appreciation of words, their
meaning, their due emphasis, their right articulation. A singer
must be a fool indeed if you do not hear through Sullivan's
notes the exact language of any song. Take, for example, the
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 317
well-known Sentry Song in lolanthe and attempt to unwed the
wit of the air from the wit of the thought and words; or take
the Lord Chancellor's song in the same play :
The law is the true embodiment
Of everything that 's excellent,
It has no kind of fault or flaw
And I, my Lords, embody the law,
and note how Sullivan subdues the air to something almost
commonplace and almost silly, but just so as to bring out the
intention of demure absurdity, with allowance for every syllable
and room for the gesture in the fourth line. Yet should you
think he is subduing himself to anything but his artistry, turn
to the great duet in The Sorcerer, or to the robust Handelian
burlesque that winds up * He remains an Englishman J in H.M.S.
Pinafore, and mark how riotously his own wit takes charge
when Gilbert's gives it the rein.
IV
Gilbert had the advantage of setting the themes and domi-
nating the stage-management of the operas. But before we
call his the master-spirit (which by no means implies that it was
the more valuable) in the combination, let us take a little evi-
dence from the actors and singers they commanded. Remind
yourselves that these two men, when they started at the old
Opra Comique, off the Strand, had to work with the cheapest
material. The 'brassiness* of the orchestra during the first run
of Pinafore the combined incompetence in Patience of the
vocalists as actors and of the actors as vocalists would be
incredible to-day even if faithfully reproduced to eye and ear.
In that first run of Patience one or two of the cast could act a
little, one or two could sing a little; Miss Rosina Brandram alone,
asserting that there would be too much of her in the coming
by and by, could do both.
But these two men, combining upon an idea, turned even
318 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
shortness of means to their service. They found themselves in
the position long and vainly required by a neighbour of mine, a
great gardener *I want an intelligent fellow ready to plant
a cabbage upside down without questioning.' Having at first
a stage so inexpensive, a cast which had to listen and obey,
they imposed their idea, or ideas, with a tyranny to which
countless anecdotes bear witness.
The most of these anecdotes are of Gilbert : but Sullivan, if
less irascible in rehearsal, appears to have been almost as
ruthless. Here is the musical procedure, as related by George
Grossmith who knew it if any man did :
The music is always learned first. The choruses, finales, etc., are
composed first in order; then the quartets, the trios; the songs last.
Sometimes, owing to changes and re-writing, these are given out to
the singers very late (so late that the singer sometimes found less
difficulty in learning the new tune than in unlearning the old one).
The greatest interest is evinced by all as the new vocal numbers
arrive . . . Sullivan will come suddenly, a batch of MS. under his
arm, and announce that there is something new. He plays ovei the
new number the vocal parts only are written. The conductor
listens and watches and, after hearing them played over a few times,
contrives to pick up all the harmonies, casual accompaniments, etc.
Sullivan is always strict in wishing that this music shall be sung
exactly as he has written it. One of the leading performers was
singing an air at rehearsal, not exactly dividing the notes as they were
written, giving the general form as it were. * Bravo ! ' said Sullivan,
*that is really a very good air of yours. Now, if you have no
objection, I will ask you to sing mine.'
But the little finger of Gilbert at rehearsal would be thicker
than Sullivan's loins. He kept at home a small model stage,
made to scale, and a box or boxes of tiny bricks varying in
height and colour. These he would group ,and re-group in
endless patient stage-management until satisfied just where and
just how at any given moment any actor should be standing.
Then he would come to the theatre and, moving everybody
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 319
about as on a chessboard, start to bully them into speaking
to his exact wish. To quote Grossmith again:
The music rehearsals are child's play in comparison with the stage
rehearsals. Mr. Gilbert is a perfect autocrat, insisting that his words
shall be delivered, even to an inflexion of the voice, as he dictates.
He will stand on the stage and repeat the words, with appropriate
action, over and over again until they are delivered as he desires.
Add that Gilbert, on top of a detestable temper, had a tongue
like a whip-lash : and well, you see, as any of you who wish
to be artists must learn in some way, sooner or later, that there
is not only a pleasure in poetic pains but a tax upon human
pains for poetic pleasure.
If I have established that Gilbert's is a dominant, even tyranni-
cal, brain in these plays which you find so delightful, let us go
on to deal with them a little after the manner of Aristotle.
Obviously they obey Aristotle in preferring plot to character,
even though by inversion: for, his plots being always legal
rather than moral in their topsy-turviness (Gilbert, you know,
was a barrister and made his first success as a playwright in
Trial by Jury\ his characters behave always on a topsy-turvy
legal logic a logic as mad as Lewis Carroll's or madder; they
transfer their affections, or reverse their destinies, by insane
rational process:
Quiet peaceful contemplation
Disentangles every knot.
A captain in the Royal Navy turns out to have been changed at
birth with a common seaman: it follows that, the revelation
made, they change places and stations. A promising lad has,
by a lapse of terminological exactitude, been apprenticed to a
pirate instead of to a pilot; a love-philtre works the wrong way
(as it did in A Midsummer Night's Dream) ; a drummer ascends
the throne of Barataria oi\ the affidavit of a foster-mother in
eight lines of recitative.
320 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
Within these limits of absurdity you will notice that all the
operas have limits also in ethic, and are built on an almost
rigid convention of design. There is usually an opposition of
the Victorian real against the fanciful : of a House of Peers, for
example, in robes, against a chorus of fairies under Westminster
clock-tower: of a body of Heavy Dragoons against Bunthorne
and his lackadaisy maidens. There is almost always a baritone
singer, more or less loosely connected with the story, introduced
with some sort of patter-song the First Lord's song in Pinafore
(which, by the way, started its success), the Major-General's in
The Pirates, the Lord Chancellor's in lolanthe, and so on.
There is also a lady with a contralto voice, who deplores her
mature years. The more you examine the operas to compare
them, the closer you will get to a severe and narrow model.
And the model in its ethical content is no less straitly laced.
It invites you to laugh at the foibles of kings, soldiers, lawyers,
artists, and faddists of all sorts. But it touches no universal
emotion, no universal instinct even (such as conviviality). Still
less does it allow us to think of the base on which society is
built, or admit a thought on it to intrude in any way upon our
tomfooling. We all belong to the upper or upper middle
class, or to the class which apes these two. We are all con-
scious of class distinctions, are a little too consciously snobbish
even while we enjoy the exposure of snobbery. The general
moral, in fact, is that of the song which he characteristically
entitled King Goodheart:
There lived a King, as I 've been told,
In the wonder-working days of old,
When hearts were twice as good as gold
And twenty times as mellow.
Good temper triumphed in his face,
And in his heart he found a place
For all the. erring human race
And every wretched fellow.
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 321
When he had Rhenish wine to drink
It made him very sad to think
That some, at junket or at jink,
Must be content with toddy :
He wished all men as rich as he
(And he was rich as rich could be),
So to the top of every tree
Promoted everybody. . . .
That King, although no one denies,
His heart was of abnormal size,
Yet he 'd have acted otherwise
If he had been acuter.
The end is easily foretold,
When every blessed thing you hold
Is made of silver, or of gold,
You long for simple pewter.
When you have nothing else to wear
But cloth of gold and satins rare,
For cloth of gold you cease to care
Up goes the price of shoddy :
In short, whoever you may be,
To this conclusion you '11 agree,
When every one is somebody,
Then no one 's anybody!
VI
That, you may say, is all very well or would be well enough
if Gilbert could be cleared as a writer who genuinely sym-
pathized with some things, or with one class, and just happened
not to sympathize with others. That is common enough with
authors, and especially with comedians and writers of light
verse. Their business being to apply the touch of common
sense to human affairs, one may even allow a certain hardness
M
322 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
to be a part of their outfit (I am ungrateful enough even to find
a certain hardness of surface in that favourite of us all, C. S.
Calverley). But Gilbert had a baddish streak or two in him;
and one in particular which was not only baddish but so
thoroughly caddish that no critic can ignore or, in my belief,
extenuate it. The man, to summarize, was essentially cruel,
and delighted in cruelty. I lay no heavy stress on his addiction
already glanced at to finding fun in every form of torture
and capital punishment. This indeed persists in his work from
The Bab Ballads right through the plays :
Oh! listen to the tale of little Annie Protheroe;
She kept a small post office in the neighbourhood of Bow,
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day
A gentle executioner whose name was Gilbert Clay.
I think I hear you say, *A dreadful subject for your rhymes!*
O reader, do not shrink he didn't live in modern times!
He lived so long ago (the sketch will show it at a glance)
That all his actions glitter with the limelight of Romance.
In busy times he laboured at his gentle craft all day
'No doubt you mean his Cal-crafV you amusingly will say
But, no he didn't operate with common bits of string,
He was a Public Headsman, which is quite another thing.
And when his work was over, they would ramble o'er the lea,
And sit beneath the frondage of an elderberry tree;
And Annie's simple prattle entertained him on his walk,
For public executions formed the subject of her talk.
And sometimes he'd explain to her, which charmed her very
much,
How famous operators vary very much in touch,
And then, perhaps, he 'd show how he himself performed the
trick,
And illustrate his meaning with a poppy and a stick.
Lecture on W. $. Gilbert 323
It persists (I repeat) through The Bab Ballads and into play
after play; until, if you are tired and seek a terminus ad quern,
I suggest this, from The Mikado, where an artless maiden sings :
He shivered and shook as he gave the sign
For the stroke he didn't deserve;
When all of a sudden his eye met mine,
And it seemed to brace his nerve.
For he nodded his head and kissed his hand,
And he whistled an air did he,
As the sabre true
Cut cleanly through
His cervical vertebrae!
When a man 's afraid
A beautiful maid
Is a charming sight to see.
And it 's O, I 'm glad
That moment sad
Was soothed by sight of me!
To sit in solemn silence, in a dull dark dock,
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock,
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp, shock
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.
On this cheap and chippy chopper business I merely observe
that Gilbert revelled in it; as any one else may, so long as I am
not asked to join the party.
But Gilbert's cruelty took an uglier twist upon one incurable
and unforgivible vice that of exposing women to public
derision on the stage just because they are growing old and
losing their beauty. We can forgive Horace or Catullus (if
hardly) for venom against their cast-off mistresses. We should
all think the better of them had they refrained. But the revul-
sion, even the vituperation, of a wearied amorist unpleasant
as one may think it consists with our experience of men and
women. It is humanly vile. What disgusts one in Gilbert,
from the beginning to the end, is his insistence on the physical
324 Lecture on W* S. Gilbert
odiousness of any woman growing old. As though, great
Heaven! themselves did not find it tragic enough the very and
necessary tragedy of their lives ! Gilbert shouts it, mocks it,
apes with it, spits upon it. He opens with this dirty trump card
in Trial by Jury, where the Judge tells how, as a briefless Barrister,
I soon got tired of third-class journeys,
And dinners of bread and water;
So I fell in love with a rich attorney's
Elderly, ugly daughter.
The rich attorney, he wiped his eyes,
And replied to my fond professions :
* You shall reap the reward of your enterprise,
At the Bailey and Middlesex Sessions.
4 You '11 soon get used to her looks,* said he,
'And a very nice girl you '11 find her
She may very well pass for forty-three
In the dusk, with a light behind her!'
He follows it with 'Little Buttercup' in Pinafore, in Patience
with
Fading is the taper waist
Shapeless grows the shapely limb,
And, although securely laced,
Spreading is the figure trim I
Stouter than I used to be,
Still more corpulent grow I
There will be too much of me
In the coming by and by!
in The Mikado with
The flowers that bloom in the Spring, tra la,
Have nothing to do with the case :
I *ve got to take under my wing, tra la,
A most unattractive old thing, tra la,
With a caricature of a face.
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 325
and so he proceeds until the end, in The Mountebanks, to a
scene which almost drove one from the theatre in nausea.
But I dare say the best rebuke of this was the gentle one
administered by his favourite actress, Miss Jessie Bond. When
she told Gilbert she was going to marry, he burst out, * Little
fool!' 'I have often,' she answered, * heard you say you don't
like old women. I shall be one soon. Will you provide for
me? You hesitate. Well, I am going to a man who will.'
VII
Mr. Rudyard Kipling has observed somewhere that in the
life of every happily married man there must come a moment
when the sight of his wife at the head of the table suggests the
appalling thought that this must go on for ever. Without
going so far as this, one may say that even in the happiest
marriage one or both of the partners has an occasional sense
of some ambition missed. So it happened, we know, in the
immensely successful partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, and
it led to frequent quarrels, endeavours on Sullivan's part to
break away, finally to estrangement, though happily to no such
deadly feud as closed the almost equally successful partnership
of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian. Sullivan dreamed that he was
capable of High Opera; and so perhaps he was, had he attempted
it sooner. But few men can usefully resolve to embrace a new
and higher career on their silver wedding-day, and when
Sullivan produced Ivanhoe at the Royal English Opera House
in 1891 it was evident that his resolve had come too late.
But Gilbert, who had bound him to his task, in latter days
so sorely against his protestations, also cherished a soaring
dramatic ambition. Of men so irascible as he it may usually
be observed that they have a bee in their bonnet. (I may use
that expression because Gilbert once wore a bonnet as officer
in the Gordon Highlanders Militia and had a photograph taken
reproduced in his Biography in the full costume of that gay
326 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
regiment.) And the very queer bee in Gilbert's bonnet was a
violent antipathy against the name and fame of Shakespeare,
particularly against the public appreciation of Hamlet. It
sounds incredible, but there it was. He not only lampooned
the great tragedy in a play, Rosencranti and Guildenstern: he
never could get away from Hamlet and Ophelia; he had to go
on and befool their story, as in The Mountebanks, in a silly
dumb show and again to drag the very weeds and the mud
out of Ophelia's end :
When she found he wouldn't wed her,
In a river, in a medder,
Took a header, and a deader
Was Oph-e-li-a!
Levity, vulgar and blatant! Yes, and almost we might call it
incredible in the man, even if explicable by that same strain of
insensitiveness which deadened him to all charity for women past
their first youth. It has indeed a like suggestion of impotence.
But insensitiveness will not cover this fault, which actually
lay very near the raw. Reading his * Life ' and his plays together,
we perceive that this neat rhymer, neat wit, neat barrister, neat
stage-manager, nursed at the back of his head a conception of
himself as a great and serious dramatist even as Sullivan, with
better excuse, nursed the conception of himself as a great com-
poser in oratorio. Nor did Gilbert fail to realize this concep-
tion for want of trying. He has left a number of 'serious*
dramas behind him dramas in prose and verse all more or
less unsuccessful on the stage. He even essayed one on the
Faust theme, fated to allure and defeat all but great souls. He
could not see that, whilst genius may be versatile and many-
sided, there are certain talents which naturally exclude greatness.
In his workshop, maybe, he was happy to deem himself possessed
of high seriousness. When his efforts came to be produced,
the public quite accurately divined that he was not. The
discovery cost a not very critical generation of audiences no
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 327
great effort; but it bit into Gilbert's self-esteem, and he bit
upon the wound.
Most of us in ordinary life have known men who, apt to make
fun of others' foibles, show extreme anger or sulkiness when
the slightest fun is retorted upon their own. Gilbert was such
a man : a professional cynic and ruthless (as almost all reported
anecdotes attest) in wounding with a jest, but extremely touchy
nay, implacably vindictive when his own withers were
wrung, however lightly.
VIII
But before he turned to libretto Gilbert in his lighter plays,
unrewarded by applause, did perhaps as much as his friend
Robertson, and more than his friend Byron, to break up by
solvent the turgid tradition of mid-Victorian drama and expose
its theatricalities. It is usual to ascribe the revolution to
Robertson. But Robertson, although he showed a glimmering
light towards such reality as exists in * realism,' did not being
himself a sentimentalist probe the real disease of sentimentality.
It was Gilbert who probed it and applied the corrosive; and the
corrosive proved too strong at first for the public taste : perhaps
because it confined itself to destroying the fatty tissue without
any promise of healing. At any rate his satirical comedies,
deliberately intended to provoke mirth, fell flat; and this no
less to their author's bewilderment than to his exasperation.
Let us take Engaged^ to my mind the best of these, and any-
how characteristic; and let us select one short typical passage.
The heroine (or one of them), Miss Treherne, is speaking :
'Cheviot, I have loved you madly, desperately, as other woman
never loved other man. This poor inexperienced child* a second
heroine 'who clings to me as the ivy clings to the oftk, also loves
you as a woman never loved before. Even, that poor cottage maiden,
whose rustic heart you so heedlessly enslaved* a third heroine
328 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
'worships you with a devotion which has no parallel in the annals of
the heart. In return for all this unalloyed affection, all we ask of
you is that you will recommend us to a respectable solicitor.'
In those few lines we detect the Gilbertian imbroglio, with
the Gilbertian treatment which afterwards served him so well.
Yet the public took Engaged coldly. To its mind the play
wanted a 'something.'
What? . . . But already we have the answer. Venables
anticipated it when he congratulated Thackeray on the success
of the The Four Georges, delivered as lectures in Willis's Rooms,
'Capital, my dear Thack! But you ought to have a piano.*
Later on, in Sullivan, Gilbert found his piano, and something
more.
But I doubt if, in his own development, he ever progressed
an inch deeper in meaning than anything you can find implicit
in the passage I have quoted, or (stagecraft apart) any technical
skill in lyric or even in plot that he had not anticipated in The
Bab Ballads. I find since we talk of pianos some symbolic
truth in the vignette drawn by his own hand and reprinted in
successive editions on the title-page of those lays. It represents
an infant thumping a piano. You may even read some
prophecy in the title of his first real operatic success Pinafore.
IX
At any rate you may assure yourselves, by examination of the
libretti, that Gilbert, having found his piano, stuck to variations
upon a few themes of the Ballads and to the end of his career
returned to them for his plot. By deft rehandling of their
themes, with their originally conceived topsy-turvies and logical
reductions to absurdity, he won his success in the partnership;
and it is at least some vindication of your elders' intelligence,
gentlemen, that they delighted in this play of mock logic, as
they had already fallen to it genially, in their nurseries, over
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 329
Alice in Wonderland, a province of it in which all had been
kindly.
For The Bab Ballads if you are wise, you will treat them as
wise men treat Tristram Shandy. You will not argue, but either
like them or leave them alone. I do not compare them as
achievements, but simply as they are unsusceptible to criticism ;
and, however wrong I may be about Gilbert, I have read enough
miss-the-mark criticism of Sterne by eminent persons, from
Thackeray down, to assert that there are some writings for
which criticism has found little guidance between 'I Like It'
and 'I Like It Not/
For my part I rejoice in The Bab Ballads, and find them on the
whole considerably superior to the lyrics with which Gilbert
diversified the operas. Nor can I easily believe that, being
the man he was, he deliberately and artistically keyed down his
wit to the requirements of the music and of stage-presentation.
He may have done so half consciously. The possibility, how-
ever, suggests a question on which we may conclude.
x
An examination of Gilbert's and Sullivan's success in some-
times wedding, sometimes alternating, words with music to
produce a genuine, if narrow, form of light opera may be of
some use to those who accept, as to those who on its results
feel a little doubtful about accepting, the Wagnerian and post-
Wagnerian claims for grand opera. I feel some timidity in
advancing so much as a foot over this ground ; since of all
hierophants those of music are the most scornful of intruders
who would ally their pet art with others that make life enjoy-
able. I observe also that the majority of these apostles of
harmony are as intense in vendetta as incapable of explaining
what it is all about; so that one wavers in amaze between the
'interpretations' in the programme of any symphony concert
*M
330 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
and the Billingsgate in which these critics pursue their sacerdotal
loves and hates.
But I suppose that, after all, it works out to this :
(1) Grand opera, like any other opera, is an artificial thing;
a lovely form of art if its components of drama, words, and
music be intelligently blended, yet always so artificial that
the audience's imagination and intelligence must be invited
together to assist in their own captivation.
(2) If these three elements (to omit scenery) of drama, words,
and music could be captured, each at its highest, and perfectly
blended, we should have perfection in one combined form of art.
(3) But this combination implies that each contributory has
its due place, each giving its best and yet subduing it to the
others' best, at the right moment: that suppose, for example,
one could enlist Shakespeare and Beethoven together for an
opera of Lear, or Moltere and Mozart for a Don Giovanni, still
the composing authors must each submit his genius to the
total result.
(4) Now the trouble is that such things don't happen in
this world.
(5) But suppose the theory sound. Of all men of genius
Wagner was perhaps the worst equipped with those con-
comitants which his theory demanded. Therefore, being one
of the most arrogant of men, he put music in supreme com-
mand and tortured our divinest of gifts the modulated speak-
ing voice for which Sophocles and Shakespeare wrote to speak
through music; which is to say, largely against it. It is not for
me to do more than marvel at the genius for orchestration
which stunned or mesmerized sensible men into accepting a
megalomaniac theory. The temperate voice of the eighteenth
century may whisper something salutary at this point: for,
after all, Joshua Reynolds could paint.
I believe [says Reynolds] it may be considered as a general rule,
that no art can be grafted with success on another art. For although
they all profess the same origin, and to proceed from the same stock,
Lecture on W. S. Gilbert 331
yet each had its own peculiar mode of imitating nature and of deviating
from it, each for the accomplishment of its own particular purpose.
These deviations, more especially, will not bear transplantation to
another soil.
Now Reynolds may easily be wrong if we apply this obser-
vation to opera in general, as presumably Hazlitt would have
applied it. 'The opera,' says Hazlitt, 'is the most artificial of
all things ... it is an illusion and a mockery. ... A head-
ache may be produced by a profusion of sweet smells or sweet
sounds; but we do not like the headache the more on that
account. Nor are we reconciled to it, even at the opera.'
But the Attic Theatre proved, centuries ago, that speech and
music, with dancing and scenery, could be brought together to
produce one of the very highest forms of art, provided that
each of the contributors were kept in its proper place. Aristotle
recognized this, of course; and, to use our immediate subject
for an illustration, Gilbert and Sullivan prove that the difficulty
of bringing together accomplished pedestrian speech and
accomplished music can be solved ambulando, if the rule of
keeping them in their proper places be observed more or less
as die Greeks observed it. As I have said, a combination of
supreme poetry with supreme music and a variety of the other
arts at their very best is not granted by the gods to the genera-
tions of men ; but it seems evident that in some happy moments
the co-operation of poet and musician, neither of the first
eminence, may almost chemically produce a new thing which,
if not transcendent, is extremely pleasing, at once novel and
reasonably permanent in its appeal. Opera is an artificial
thing. It is not made less artificial on a theory of 'realism*
which disguises nature under a new artificiality such as the
leit-motif, this leit-motif being actually as much of a convention
as the label enclosing words which primitive painters and
caricaturists drew as issuing from the mouths of their figures.
It is, I suggest, greatly to Sullivan's credit that with his in-
comparable talent for articulating speech in music, he resisted
332 Lecture on W. S. Gilbert
all temptation of that talent to obscure or deafen by music the
spoken words which must be the backbone of all drama since
they carry and advance the plot.
And for a last word it may even be that your delight in
Gilbert and Sullivan testifies to a natural unconscious revolt
against the theory of opera so prevalent in our time. We know
from the history of the theatre from the tyranny, for example,
laid upon it so long by the theories of Castelvetro and his
followers that a barbarous mistake can be ferociously en-
forced by pedantry. Against such pedantry a childlike instinct
may sometimes usefully assert itself, insisting ' But the Emperor
has no clothes!'
TWO EPIGRAMS
i
TO CYNTHIA
THE sculptor's chisel slid askance
And dinted Aphrodite's cheek:
But ah! the blemish woke a glance
So lively-lovelier than the Greek
That Nature, copying, forebore
The smooth perfection to restore
And left the dimple I adore.
II
THE CHRYSALIS
Cupid, in letters yet untaught,
Captured a scroll in a cobweb caught
And duteous to his Mother brought.
His face upturning for a kiss,
'Mother,' he panted, 'read me this!'
His clasp unclosed a chrysalis :
From which escaped, as fell apart
The two halves of a broken heart,
An aria Capture it, Mozart!
333
LECTURE ON
TRADITION AND ORTHODOXY
CAMBRIDGE, 16 MAY, 1934
i
IN February last we in England had our first opportunity of
reading under the title After Strange Gods : A Primer of
Modern Heresy ', a series of three 'Page-Barbour* Lectures given
by Mr. T. S. Eliot before the University of Virginia. Anything
written or spoken by Mr. Eliot is eagerly awaited : and because
his conclusions, if I accepted the premises, would strongly
enforce, or by selected quotation might be used to enforce,
some warnings I addressed to you the other day (and, as it
happens, while he was speaking some thousands of miles away)
against the prevalent individualism in modern writing, and the
worship of originality for its own sake, as of an idol ; I could
be grateful for support so powerful, as in a degree I am. But
the subject is to me a serious one; so serious that I should hate
to invoke the support of any rhetorical enthymemes which seem
unsound to me, or to use such for my purpose on any man's
ipse dixit, whatever my esteem for the man himself. And so
I shall take leave, this morning, to question some two or three
of Mr. Eliot's pronouncements.
II
He, to be sure, in his Preface very frankly disclaims and
rejects argument.
'I am not arguing or reasoning,' he says, 'or engaging in contro-
versy with those whose views are radically opposed to such as mine.
In our time controversy seems to me, on really fundamental matters,
to be futile. It can only usefully be practised where there is a
common understanding. It requires common assumptions, and per-
haps the assumptions that are only felt are more important than those
334
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 335
that can be formulated. The acrimony which accompanies much
debate is a symptom of difference so large that there is nothing to
argue about. We experience such profound differences with some of
our contemporaries that the nearest parallel is the difference between
one epoch and another. In a society like ours, worm-eaten with
Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person of strong convictions
is to state a point of view and leave it at that/
Now this, reduced to plain terms, amounts to no more than
'I am not arguing with you: I am just telling you.' It takes
up an attitude which, however politely assumed, I find hard to
differentiate from that of Thrasymachus in the Republic ; who
(if you remember) having drenched his audience with a pailful
of his own opinions on Justice, was for 'leaving it at that' and
walking off, when Socrates plucked him by the sleeve : ' O Thrasy-
machus, excellent man, how suggestive are your remarks! And
are you really going to move away before you have fairly taught
or learned whether they are true or not?' Mr. Eliot's is, at any
rate, the attitude of a dogmatist : and in one who is addressing
(as he announces) the 'possibly convertible ' about the least likely
to succeed: since, the 'convertible' being by hypothesis un-
regenerate as yet ; and since in my experience the unregenerate,
if intelligent at all, are prone to ask questions; any claim or
suspicion of a claim that you have access to wells of
inspiration denied to the rest of mankind is apt to repel at
the start.
I am particularly sorry that a critic so finely equipped as
Mr. Eliot, and just now possessed of so much influence,
should be in successive books so evidently hardening into this
oracular attitude, because I feel sure that it can only end in
ossification. Already, while elaborately endeavouring to define
tradition and orthodoxy, to separate them, in practice he is
mixing them up, and confusing both with religion and politics.
And I am the sorrier over these lectures of his because, when
talking of tradition, he sharpens and betters many points I
tried to put to you, gentlemen, in a couple of lectures last
336 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
Michaelmas Term on 'The Poet as Citizen/ Up to a point
I am greatly his debtor for the improvement: and if at that
point I must part company with him I shall, before we part
to-day, submit my reasons.
in
Since his concept of Orthodoxy concerns me less than his
concept of Tradition though it puzzles me more let us, for
our present purpose, first get that conception cleared out of the
way, if we can.
It puzzles me more because while careful, and even more
than careful, to define what he means by Tradition, when he
comes to Orthodoxy he seems to me to wander around the word
without fixing it at all until we come to his third and last lecture.
In the first he gives it a 'similar inclusiveness* with Tradition,
and proceeds 'though of course I believe that a right tradition
for us must be also a Christian tradition, and that Orthodoxy
in general implies Christian orthodoxy, I do not propose to
lead the present series of lectures to a theological conclusion/
Yet after a dozen words he dives off into an attack on liberalism
in Church and politics with illustrative quotations, the worth
of which I shall presently examine.
The interposed sentence, or half-sentence, runs : 'The relation
between tradition and orthodoxy in the past is evident enough.'
But 'the past/ so used, is surely the vaguest of terms. For
example, Orthodoxy in the past, before and after the Council of
Trent before and after 1563, its last sitting carried for
Catholic Europe two very different meanings: the newer one
restricting it in sundry ways and fencing the restrictions with
anathema. Up to that date the Medieval Church had been
moving. For a single instance Many of its churchmen hitherto
allowed as orthodox did not receive as canonical all the Apocrypha
or accept with an equal devotion the Second Book of Maccabees
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 337
with St. Mark's Gospel. As my friend Mr. Bernard Manning
has put it:
The Roman Church after the sixteenth century was less corrupt,
freer from scandals, more devoted to its spiritual work, more efficient
in its administration; but it was less free intellectually, less bold, in
all its uses of the Christian tradition, more fearful of exploring into
the unsearchable riches of Christ, than it had been before the Council
of Trent. It definitely refused to carry with it into modern times
some part of its ancient and medieval heritage. This happened
partly from reaction against Protestantism.
Well, after the Reformation what happens to Orthodoxy under
Protestantism ? We find one Orthodoxy narrowing itself into
the Lutheran, another (fiercely) in the Calvinistic Church. A
third, through the polemics of the seventeenth century, despite
the gentle efforts and gentle examples in living of such men as
Herbert, Jeremy Taylor and the Cambridge Platonists, econo-
mized its allowance of Orthodoxy to the Church of England
in the eighteenth century an Orthodoxy in part political, in
part asleep on formularies, in spirit inert, in daily practice lazy,
choleric only when some intrusive evangelist rang the bell dis-
turbing the afternoon doze: while to infringe with respect
upon Mr. Eliot's native soil scarcely had the Pilgrim Fathers
landed on Plymouth Rock before they started to build an
Orthodoxy of their own at least as repressive and rigidly
tyrannous as anything they had fled from. Escaping across
the Atlantic for liberty of conscience, they found a New
England, cast there the anchor of their souls, landed, and
ran to and fro burning 'witches.'
I am sorry to have been led even so far as this into ecclesiastical
story: but Mr. Eliot's method so far compels me. For in my
search after what he means by Orthodoxy in literature I find
him continually sliding off into theology. Pursuing, I learn
that a Tradition, in so far as it differs from Orthodoxy, is a way
of feeling and acting which characterizes a group throughout
generations ; and that it must largely be, or that many of the
338 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
elements in it must be, unconscious and here I do not think
Mr. Eliot will quarrel with me if I interpret this a little more
definitely as c good manners inherited through breeding/
'manners' as a term carrying just that moral significance which
William of Wykeham intended and bequeathed in his noble motto
'Manners makyth Man \ 'whereas/ Mr. Eliot proceeds, 'the
maintenance of Orthodoxy is a matter which calls for the exercise
of all our conscious intelligence.' The maintenance^ then, will
be conscious; but Orthodoxy itself ' exists, whether realized in
any one's thought or not.' Orthodoxy, again, is 'continuous';
and yet, in Mr. Eliot's words, 'a whole generation might con-
ceivably pass without orthodox thought, or, as by Athanasius,
Orthodoxy may be upheld by one man against the world.'
These sayings, dropped in the course of a spoken lecture, must
have puzzled his audience somewhat; and merely dropped and
'left at that* they are puzzling, though not irreconcilable. Still
pursuing, I come, in his third and last lecture, to a pronounce-
ment clear enough. ' What I have been leading up to,' he says,
'is the following assertion : that when morals cease to be a matter
of tradition and orthodoxy that is, of the habits of the com-
munity formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous
thought and direction of the Church and when each man is
to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of
alarming importance.'
(But has it ever been less, in human history?)
IV
Now let me be equally definite in taking up the separate
pans of the above composite assertion. I agree, of course,
that 'when morals cease to be a matter of tradition . . . and
when each man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes
a thing of alarming importance.' It was this, and just this,
I was trying to preach to you in my lectures before Christmas
on 'The Poet as Citizen'; and if Mr. Eliot uses the tone of
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 339
authority while I can only attempt persuasion, I must be the
more indebted to authority for his backing.
But when he goes on to insist that Tradition requires to be
'formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought
and direction of the Church/ I must cry halt.
To begin with, I doubt if the tradition of any community
can ever be ' formulated ' if even its minor unconscious habits
can be 'formulated* save in books of etiquette, the rules of which
for one generation tend to be a laughing-stock for the next.
(Should a man for example wear his hat at table when dining
with the King?) But tradition more vital tradition in matters
which deeply concern the moral, physical, intellectual health of
a society is at once too various and too delicate a thing to be
caught, constricted within formulas or creeds by any Church.
Take, for instance, poetry; with which and its traditions we
have been specially concerned. When, as a historical fact, have
the traditions of poetry been usefully formulated, or even, with
the great exception of Dante, considerably directed, by any
Church? Elevated by religious fervour poetry may be, of
course, and often has been; as by other passionate convictions
theologically orthodox or unorthodox in their day. The real
answer to Mr. Eliot's question 'Why is most religious verse so
bad ? ' is, I should contend, precisely in so far as it has submitted
to his own theory. He accounts for it by the ingenious sug-
gestion that people who write devotional verse are usually
writing as they want to feel rather than as they do feel. I rather
believe the great mass of what is called in editorial offices
'Vicarage Verse* to be quite sincere, and bad only because the
people who write it are not poets. Poetry in short is poetry:
it has known many creeds and survived them all. One after
another they have discredited and cast down his altars, but
Apollo survives. Whoso would recruit him from one category
into another is mixing up things that differ: whoso would
enslave him to any flock, be it of Admetus or of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, is weaving nets for the wind.
34 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
But to pass over many questions raised by this claim that
"the Church* should exercise control over our literature, and
over poetry in particular as for example the question put to
Dogberry 'How if a will not?' and if so, how punishable,
and by whom? We come to the fatal question ' What and
which Church?'
Well, we know from previous declarations of his creed or
creeds in religion and politics how Mr. Eliot would like this to
be answered. And here I must simply say that, as I read it,
literature in England has never in fact submitted to a control
so narrow, and (in my hope and belief) never will.
I am sorry, I repeat, to have been dragged by him even so
far into the confines of dogmatic theology : but his views of
right literature and his illustrations constantly slide off into
that; as, to do him justice, they logically must. And, if I may
say it without acrimony, those views seem to be largely coloured
by a particular hatred of what he calls Liberalism : and I must
most seriously protest against the device by which, to present
the Liberalism of a century ago, he imposes upon a foreign
audience, presumably unacquainted with the story he is telling,
a passage of inventive by a writer whose name, if not wholly
forgotten, any serious critic to-day would either pass over as
negligible among the great antagonists, or select only as a
curiosity of forgotten spite. This is how Mr. Eliot adduces
his testimony 'There was certainly (he says), a hundred years
ago, a relation between the Liberalism which attacked the Church
and the Liberalism which appeared in politics/ According to
a contemporary, William Palmer, the former group of Liberals
Were eager to eliminate from the Prayer Book the belief in the
Scriptures, the Creeds, the worship of Christ. They called for
the admission of Unitarian infidels as fellow-believers. They
would eviscerate the Prayer Book, reduce the Articles to a few
deistic formularies, and reduce religion to a state of anarchy and
confusion, etc.
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 341
'It is well to remember/ adds Mr. Eliot, 'that this sort of
Liberalism was flourishing a century ago; it is also well to
remember that it is flourishing still.'
VI
But fair and softly! Who was this William Palmer, whose
denunciation of the Liberals in 1843 Mr. Eliot tosses before an
audience in Virginia, U.S.A., as true contemporary description,
capped by his own ipse dixit that 'this sort of Liberalism is
flourishing still '? The short footnote in his printed lecture
says merely ' Quoted in Northern Catholicism^ p. 9.' I look up
that work (a collection of Anglo-Catholic papers) and find on
p. 9 the passage just quoted as testimony, and again 'left at
that.' Pursuing, I get at the works of William Palmer, and
some contemporary evidence concerning him. He was, ad-
mittedly, a very learned man, an Irishman, a violent Anti-papist:
who, coming across to Oxford, latish, considerably helped the
beginnings of what is called the Oxford Movement by his
liturgical information. 'But,' says Newman after a tribute to
his gifts, 'he was deficient in depth, and besides' you must
forgive me, gentlemen the words are Newman's, not mine
'coming from a distance, he had never really grown into an
Oxford man.' In brief he was impracticable, positive, irascible
as a bull at a hint of the Scarlet Woman : and his methods of
controversy invited rebuke for themselves in a pamphlet attri-
buted to M. Renouf and politely, beyond their worth, conde-
scended to by Hurrell Froude. I have studied the work from
which Mr. Eliot took his quotation at second hand (Narrative
of Events connected with 'Tracts for the Times'}, and, if you
have not guessed it from the very style of die quotation, can
only add that his arguments strike me as those of a learned but
rather vulgar disputant, originally by nature, provincially by
habit, deficient in self-control.
342 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
Now had it not been fairer if Mr. Eliot, addressing in Virginia,
U.S.A., an audience presumably unacquainted with the story of
this eccentric cleric, had quoted against the Liberalism of a
hundred years ago the testimony of its foremost contemporary
opponent; a voice infinitely more authoritative, a book not only
accessible, but now classical ? I mean, of course, Newman and
his Apologia. It had surely been more to his right purpose to
take the famous note on 'Liberalism' towards the end of that
book. I invite you, gentlemen, to read the whole of New-
man's note, the manner of which I have here but time to
illustrate by a few sentences.
When [says Newman] in the beginning of the present century
[that is, the last century] after many years of moral and intellectual
declension, the University of Oxford woke up to a sense of its duties,
and began to reform itself, the first instruments of this change, to
whose zeal and courage we all owe so much, were naturally thrown
together for mutual support, against the numerous obstacles which
lay in their path, and soon stood out in relief from the body of resi-
dents, who, though many of them men of talent themselves, cared
little for the object which the others had at heart. These Reformers,
as they may be called, were for some years members of scarcely more
than three or four Colleges ; and their own Colleges, as being under
their direct influence, of course had the benefit of those stricter views
of discipline and teaching, which they themselves were urging on
the University. They had, in no long time, enough of real progress
in their several spheres of exertion, and enough of reputation out
of doors, to warrant them in considering themselves die tlite of the
place.
Thus was formed an intellectual circle or class in the University
men, who felt they had a career before them, as soon as the pupils,
whom they were forming, came into public; men, whom non-
residents, whether country parson or preachers of the Low Church,
on coming up from time to time to the old place, would look at,
partly with admiration, partly with suspicion, as being an honour
indeed to Oxford, but withal exposed to the* temptation of ambitious
views, and to the spiritual evils signified in what is called the 'pride
of reason.'
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 343
Nor was this imputation altogether unjust; for, as they were
following out the proper idea of a University, of course they suffered
more or less from the moral malady incident to such a pursuit. The
very object of such great institutions lies in the cultivation of the
mind and the spread of knowledge: if this object, as all human
objects, has its dangers at all times, much more would these exist in
the case of men, who were engaged in a work of reformation, and
had the opportunity of measuring themselves, not only with those
who were their equals in intellect, but with the many who were
below them. In this select circle or class of men, in various Colleges,,
the direct instruments and the choice fruit of real University Reform,
we see the rudiments of the Liberal party.
Now Newman's main argument may be right or may be wrong.
But I invite you, remembering that the above sentences were
penned by one who had already admitted to use his own
words that ' from the age of fifteen dogma has been the funda-
mental principle of my religion : I know no other sort of religion :
cannot enter into any other sort of religion* I invite you to
contrast that passage, simply as an example of style in contro-
versy with that other quotation from Mr. William Palmer, and
then turn to these few of Newman's own words from his
well-known 'Definition of a Gentleman':
If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect
preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, though less
educated, minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of
cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength
on trifles, and leave the question more involved than they found it.
He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed
to be unjust : he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is
decisive.
It is as a lawyer would say 'not for me to advise.' Yet
think, in Mr. Eliot's place and with his intention, I should
have chosen to prefer and present Newman before W. Palmer
as a descriptive writer.
344 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
VII
But when Mr. Eliot speaks of Tradition I am grateful to him ;
and the more beholden because, in a voice that carries far
beyond mind and in a tone I could not imitate, he was uttering
to his audience in Virginia the very caution that I was suggesting
here to you and, as it happened, at the very moment; a
warning, that is, and a protest, against the exploitation of self,
the intrusion of an author's 'personality* or 'individuality' upon
his work; an egoism of late years in fashion, accepted and
applauded by critics, by many if not most as a merit in itself,
by some as even the first of merits : my contention being rather
that in writing as in other arts as evidently as in social life
self-assertiveness almost infallibly suggests some defect of
breeding. In a familiar 'essay,' to be sure, a man may un-
bosom himself; the more pardonably in proportion as his con-
fessions are worth while. But the familiar essay is a delicate
business demanding a curious tact of its own : and success in it
carries no warrant for use in larger spheres of writing in epic,
tragedy, history, or the novel. In these the true writer (if I
may put it vulgarly) sticks to his job, is immersed in it, and lets
his 'personality' take care of itself which it will certainly do
whether he forget it or even, should he be writing history, take
pains to exclude it. Consider Thucydides, for example. He
begins: 'Thucydides, an Athenian, composed an account of the
war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. He con-
sidered from the beginning that such an account would be
valuable.' Thenceforward we have an austere narrative, bone-
bare even when he himself was mixed up in the events and con-
demned for failure. He allows no pause for justification or
self-excuse. Still in its stride the detailed unemotional inflexible
narrative moves on to the terrible climax in the caves of
Syracuse this, even, told austerely. Then we realize the
whole composition as at once true and a work of art; then the
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 345
power suppressed, the genius commanding it and at length dis-
closed, the man as characteristic, a giant among historians.
Holding this poor opinion of self-assertiveness obtruding
upon art, I was heartened, of course, on reading such passages
as these in Mr. Eliot's lectures :
The general effect in literature of the lack of any strong tradition
is twofold : extreme individualism in views, and no accepted rules or
opinions as to the limitations of the literary job.
That and :
It is true that the existence of a right tradition, simply but its
influence upon the environment in which the poet develops, will tend
to restrict eccentricity to managable limits : but it is not even by the
lack of this restraining influence that the absence of tradition is most
deplorable. What is disastrous is that the writer should deliberately
give rein to his individuality'; that he should even cultivate his
differences from others ; and that his readers should cherish the author
of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of
the race, but because of them.
Well, this passage might stand as text before some arguments
of mine. But there was one which lack of time compelled me
to shorten ; and I am glad of this opportunity to recall it with
a little more insistence: for it concerns a prevalent temper
among writers of to-day in most forms of creative work, and
in criticism too.
You may or may not remember my inviting your attention
to one trap among several baited for artists and critics by this
worm of personality this eidolon omphalou, as I may call it.
I mean the lure toward self-conceit; expressed in practice by
condescension, writing down to one's audience, or (worse)
choosing an ignoble subject and writing down to that. On
this pretentiousness in contemporary criticism I shall not here
dwell. Even when Delphi claimed to be the whole world's
navel the voice of Apollo disguised itself in ambiguity, through
smoke. With a score or two of Py thians each drawing inspira-
tion from the centre of his own unbelted personality, the hum
346 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
of the Oracles passes into a noise not less hideous because
confused and dissipated.
But for lack of time I must hasten past the critics and come
to writers engaged just now upon creative work, whether in
poetry or fiction : for these after all are the primary ones in any
important age. Whether it belong to post-war disillusionment,
or to a curious deflection of our old aristocratic tradition in
literature to adapt itself to democracy and instinctively to
patronize it more or less in the style of a grand lady opening a
Women's Institute I think that few students of contemporary
poems and novels will deny the almost universal tendency of
such writers as this generation has seriously taken, to choose
unheroic themes, sordid environments, characters to be dangled
as marionettes from aloft and condescendingly explained
through commentary.
I shall not ask you to take any assurance of mine about that
sort of thing as being about the easiest scamping of real art
and to that extent contemptible, however popular. I prefer
to quote a passage I came upon, a few weeks ago, in the
Spectator. A reviewer, Mr. H. E. Bates, wrote thus of a
certain novel:
[The writer] is not a great writer but a precious one. His attitude
throughout the book is one of superiority. Whereas the great writer
credits the reader with an intelligence equal to his own, the lesser
writer credits him with less ; the great writer keeps himself detached
and unseen, never stepping between himself and the picture ; but the
lesser writer keeps holding himself up, Sir Oracle fashion, with what he
considers are vital explanations or remarks of profound philosophical
importance.
It may seem pedantic to enforce this by going back to Aristotle
and his insistence on nobility of character (TO fitXriov) as a
necessary apanage of the true Tragic Hero. But consider
Shakespeare's tragic heroes, and how even their enemies salute
them, dead. Recall Antony's grand words over the corpse of
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 347
Brutus, with Octavius' echo of them: recall Antony's own
last claim:
a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquished
and Octavius' coda over him and Cleopatra:
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them : and their story *s
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented.
Even poor Timon ends as noble Timon; for Coriolanus the
drums are bidden to beat, the pikes to be trailed, for
the most noble corse that ever herald
Did follow to his urn.
So, of Hamlet:
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage ;
. . . and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
That is die accent by which great writers communicate their
magnanimity and teach the rest of us that 'we are greater than
we know.'
VIII
I have dwelt at some length on this particular tendency of
ego-worship; to belittle the author's theme, patronize his sub-
ject, parade what in himself is what an Athenian would have
called 'the idiotic/ and to hang (if I may adapt a phrase of
Henry James) our frail humanity as a beaten rag upon a clothes-
line : and have dwelt on this vice, among traps of egoism indi-
cated in my last lecture, because in proportion to its prevalence
348 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
just now we should thank Mr. Eliot alike for his vigour and his
opportuneness in denouncing it.
But I do not thank him for the rhetorical sleight of hand or
series of ambiguities by which he palms off this ego-worship as
identical with 'Liberalism/ We must remember, of course
and the more vividly for his insistence upon the indelibility of
early training that he is a New Englander addressing an
audience in America's conservative South, whose prejudices on
a local issue he starts, as a converted missionary, to enlist for his
general attack on what he calls 'Liberalism.' What he means
by 'Liberalism,' except that it is something he dislikes, one must
use patience to discern, so dexterously he shuffles religion into
politics, politics into literature, tradition into dogma, to and
fro, until the reader let alone a listener can scarcely tell out
of what category the card (so to speak) is being dealt. Still, if
one keeps gripping, as Menelaus and his comrades did upon the
Old Man of the Sea, this may be squeezed out that 'Liberalism*
is anything which questions dogma : which dogma, to be right
dogma, is the priestly utterance of a particular offset of a
particular branch of a historically fissiparous Church.
IX
Well, as Mr. Eliot wisely hints in the course of his lectures,
we can none of us escape the shadow of what we learned at our
mother's knee. And as my own Alma Mater insisted (perhaps
too austerely) upon logic, I find it hard to call myself off from
such a roaring scent after the fallacy of the 'Undistributed
Middle' as he here puts up. But perhaps the simplest way to
go to work is to define what Liberalism means to me. Whether
you agree or not, we come to a point, and so our business is
advanced.
I define 'Liberalism,' then, first as a habit of mind. This at
once disengages it from formulas, party cries, vestments, or
'shirts' in religion or politics. It is neither a separate stick nor
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 349
a faggot of opinions out of which, if one be dropped, brand and
faggot be involved together and cast as heretical to the fire.
Further, it is a habit of mind which exercises, and claims to
exercise, man's right, on this planet in this mysterious universe,
surrounded on all hands of ignorance, to lift some veil of that
curtain if he can : in short, to think for himself. As I see it,
a man owes that effort to his own dignity as well as to the help
of his fellows. But at any rate that effort must find itself as
Columbus found it at Salamanca before he could start on dis-
covering the outpost of Mr. Eliot's nativity in direct opposi-
tion to dogmatic clerical assurance that there was not, nor
could be, any such place.
And yet further let me say that this claim for die free
operation of man's mind has been, if you will consider it, gentle-
men, the fount and inspiration of the greatest literature be-
queathed through centuries to civilized Europe and our in-
heritance yet to be nursed in increase, not for our sake alone
(since charity lies at its emotional base), but for others until die
comity of Europe recover its balance. Go farther back than
Plato if you will: but start, if you will, with Plato and the
dogmas upon which his thought operated for enlightenment.
Follow literature down But no ! What has Newman himself,
the fairest upholder of dogma, to admit of the Western world's
literature ?
He must confess, surveying it in a series of Lectures to the
Roman Catholic University of Ireland, that the contribution of
dogmatic writers to it has been negligible: in Italy, France,
England alike all but null. He faces die admission of England
that 'a literature, when it is formed, is a national and historical
fact; it is a matter of the past and the present, and can be as
little ignored as the present, as little undone as the past.' If
his co-religionists have to build a new literature upon dogma,
they must start upon a new one. And who, reviewing the great
names in our own literature, however curiously, can hold that
as a solid phalanx they do not stand for this free play of the
350 Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy
human mind? Chaucer, Langland, Spenser, Shakespeare (I
dare say I may claim through age and circumstance, to have
heard as much as any of you to Shakespeare's discredit, while
never yet that he was illiberal), Milton, Dryden, Blake, Coleridge,
Shelley, Byron, Landor; Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Newton,
Butler, Darwin ; Fielding, Johnson, Scott, Dickens. . . . Which
of these do we not connect, as part of our indebtedness to them,
with the unhampered play, imaginative or strictly ' scientific/ of
man's mind ?
And so and if we read the story right this 'Liberalism'
which Mr. Eliot arraigns as a worm, eating into the traditions
of our society, reveals itself rather as Tradition itself, through-
out literature (which is thought worth setting down and
recording) the organic spirit persisting, aerating, preserving,
the liberties our ancestors won and we inherit.
All great principles have their risks : else they were not worth
fighting for. No one disputes that a man's liberty to think his
own thoughts and express them in words can be abused, even as
the liberty of the Press is daily abused among us : that it may
be pleaded as condoning, if not justifying, much that is eccentric,
even frantic. Such is the price ; and in this world the inestimable
jewel of freedom can only be had at a price. For my part I
cannot see how any one can study our English literature for
six centuries now a 'glory of our blood and state' and yet a most
'substantial thing' without feeling that in his blood and state
this liberty of thought is not only a tradition but its dominant
tradition, web and woof; or mistrust the sleight that would pass
it off on us for bastard, as a sophism offending fact, repulsive
to intelligence. I turn to Milton:
Fool! he sees not the firm root out of which we all grow, though
into branches.
Lecture on Tradition and Orthodoxy 351
Here, in this your University, the field of our literature is
spread before you for your judgment. To that I leave it,
reminding you only that Milton and Wordsworth were her
sons who is now your mother : that Milton wrote this :
Lords and commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof
ye are and whereof ye are the governors ; a nation . . . not beneath
the reach of any point that human capacity can soar to.
And Wordsworth :
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake : the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held
Trite words: but as true to-day and imperative as when they
were written. For and to conclude what is the alternative ?
What the dirty trump card ever up dogma's sleeve is to be slid
down and sneaked, upon opportunity? It is suppression;
tyranny (as Pascal defined it 'the determination to get in that
way what you cannot in another'); in its final brutal word
force. Look around Europe to-day and consider under what
masks dogma is not feeling for, or openly shaking, this weapon
to cow the minds of free men ; and ask yourselves if it be not
the inherited duty of our race to vindicate the tradition of
that liberty which was the ark within the citadel of our
fathers' souls.
THE SCHOLARLY DON
T ET me start with the simple proposition that there is such
Jrf a thing in the world as a love of learning.
I suppose that a university in these days should serve two
main purposes. It should (i) be a seat of learning, and (2) it
should educate youth. On these apparently simple postulates
the friends and foes of Oxford and Cambridge usually agree to
start, and I shall take diem in their order.
For the first, then, I would meet any direct attack with a
straight challenge. If any man deny that Oxford and Cam-
bridge to-day are seats of learning nay of great learning one
can only suppose that he does not know what he is talking about.
In the matter of information alone (and information alone is but
a handmaid to culture) no two cities in this land or in any other
possess a larger stock ; and that not only stored in libraries, but
available from the lips of men variously eminent in knowledge
and generous to impart it: since the more a man knows the
tenderer he will be as a rule to ignorance, himself aware of the
little his own industry has won from the vast amount of ignorance
surrounding us all. * Knowledge/ says Bacon, * be it in quantity
more or less, if it be taken without the true corrective thereof,
hath in it some nature of venom or malignity ; and some effects
of that venom which is ventosity or swelling. The corrective
spice, the mixture whereof maketh knowledge so sovereign, is
charity.' A resident in Oxford or Cambridge must be either
exceptionally shy or exceptionally self-confident if he have
missed finding this chanty of knowledge at his service. ' Freely
ye have received; freely give.' It is one of the pleasures of
life in either place that, if you lack some information for your
purpose on any particular point, there is always a friend down
the next street to supply or help you to it.
The adversary, however, is usually too wise to risk a frontal
attack. He will grant the learning but assert (among other
objections presently to be considered) that the mass of it is
35*
The Scholarly Don 353
'useless'; that it deals with past history, dead languages, etc.,
that it 'doesn't pay' ; and he will point to the admitted fact that
a number of the most learned professors fail to fill their lecture
rooms. But this, to start with, begs the question. It assumes
the value of learning to correspond with its immediate market
price, whereas in the whole world there is no greater fallacy, or
string of fallacies, than can be hung round the question 'Does
it pay?' Even the blessed word 'efficiency' is a relative term,
at once inviting the question ' Efficiency for what ? ' A generous
mind (which, as I understand it, a university exists to cultivate)
knows that a number of the very best things in the world do
not pay for the simple reason that they are priceless. Tempted
to stray for a moment beyond my immediate subject, I
might ask if it paid Columbus to insist that the earth was
round, or Galileo that it rotated, or Harvey that the blood
circulates.
But I must confine myself here to the favourite object of
attack Greek and Latin, the 'Classics.' Now the most diffi-
cult assailant to meet on this ground is the self-made man who
proclaims, 'Sir, I had never a smattering of either, and look at
Me!' Well, you do; and precisely because a polite education
has given you a smattering (say) of both, your tongue is tied,
the argumentum ad hominem which he challenges is just what
a different training forbids.
To the wiser I would suggest that Greek and Latin have no
rivals in cultivating a certain habit of mind, which, being slow of
acquisition, cannot (any more than fine manners) be tied up
with string and delivered over the shop counter in a parcel.
It is not only not 'WoolworthV; it has nothing to do with
mass production or quick returns. No genuine work for man's
lasting health can ever be produced in that way. We may go
on amusing ourselves with cinematic sketches of civilization's
slow past and equally popular advice on making existence move
quicker and faster always faster, but to what end ? We may
employ a hundred specialists to vie in discovering the last
N
3 54 The Scholarly Don
refinement in poison gas. That again would be ' practical ' but
for what final purpose save to obliterate decent society? In
Greece, and in Athens especially, there happened to emerge a
habit of mind which, united with a disinterested curiosity in
the scheme of creation, has set the example to all European
'culture* ; in Rome there grew up two systems of jurisprudence
and of government which to-day enshrine all the principles of
law and order. No doubt the ancients knew less of astronomy,
of geometry, of mathematics than we knew, less of painting and
perhaps less of poetry. But I speak of the habit of mind which
laid the foundations.
Moreover, let no one contemn Greek and Latin as dead lan-
guages, spent and therefore not dangerous. Twice already in
what is labelled as 'Modern History,' Greek has revived, to
explode and blow, first a realm of Papacy and, next, a whole
chain of Bourbon dynasties sky-high. Let the simple narra-
tives of Plutarch, for example, once get out of control by the
educated and into the heads of the community as in the French
Revolution and the Italian risorgimento and you never can tell
what may happen.
But (continues the objector) your eminent Professors of Greek
and Latin do not spread their learning ; do not publish world-
compelling books; do not attract large classes; are not even
sociable in conversation. It were idle, perhaps, to refer one
who falls back upon this ground to Browning's A Grammarian s
Funeral as probably hinting a part at least of the answer. He
would be perplexed. So after pointing out that the ground has
been shifted away from the value of knowing for its own sake
to the vulgar presumption that universities exist not primarily
alone, but wholly for the instruction of youth I will take him
on this ground also. Be it admitted that the more deeply a man
explores his subject, the further he will be led to consider the
views of those who have studied and thought upon it before
him; the more conscious he will feel of his own fallibility in the
fog of ignorance encompassing us all. He will read on and on,
The Scholarly Don 355
and a growing modesty (weighted maybe with a touch of scorn)
will deter him from seeking such positive assertions as are made
by hastier, less-informed men. Be it further admitted that in
some the very weight of their knowledge induces timidity.
They start on a Preface or Introduction, and are forthwith
daunted by the crowd of pros and cons, through which the
argument has to cut its way, while yet accounting for them.
Moreover, in the pursuit of much reading they have missed the
knack of lucid writing, which can only be won by practice ; and
so many of our great scholars have died with the magnum opus
unwritten, left but in note-books, scraps, hieroglyphics, of which
their executors can make nothing.
But, as a fact, the * output' (as our critic would phrase it) ot
Classical scholarship by Oxford and Cambridge will stand
against that of any two universities in the world, and is con-
tinuous, as the critic might assure himself by a study of current
book-catalogues, together with listed reports and 'proceedings'
of learned societies. On top of these he might consider (say)
the New English Dictionary and ask himself how that monument
of our time could have been based or built save on the trained
judgment and patient industry of classical scholars: in which
industry, he might, if generous, detect also something of the
noblesse oblige of their order.
As for the sneer that few pupils attend the lectures of these
eminent ones, a brief reflection should tell him that the higher
the learning the narrower will shrink the number of those
qualified to listen to it with profit a rule of common sense that
applies, one might imagine, to most occupations in life. The
universities provide other lectures, diverse and plenty in-
formative or stimulating, as the subject requires or the student
needs. Waiving that simple but important fact, let me assure
the critic of my own young experience and later daily observa-
tion, that these eminent men are privately, constantly, at the call
of any undergraduate, however elementary his attainment, to
discuss, instruct, advise. A very few weeks ago, in a letter to
356 The, Scholarly Don
The Times i the present Master of Trinity, having to point out
a general proposition, modestly (as he would) disclosed 'let
out* as it were how he had once helped a pupil in mathematics.
One who came to us in his third year was described by his tutor
as idle, stupid, and very unlikely to get through his Tripos. I agreed
with his tutor until we began to study the mathematics of collisions
between spheres. I knew he was fond of billiards and I pointed out
to him that the mathematics we were doing gave reasons why he
should play certain shots in the way he did. The effect was re-
markable. He had never before had any conception that mathematics
could have any connection with anything that could interest a rational
being. He began to work like a nigger and in one year's work got
a good place among the Senior Optimes.
Now this is but a striking example of what in a less striking way
daily happens in every * School' or Faculty in Oxford and Cam-
bridge; and in it lies the familiar, though seldom advertised,
virtue of the tutorial system that easy intercourse connoted by
the phrase 'I am reading with So-and-so*; in either place a
habi^ a quiet system, in which old and young keep their places,
but meet in friendly understanding.
The dons naturally do not talk about this; seldom or never
trouble to defend themselves ; in fact, do not talk much, and are
consequently arraigned as dull fellows by the outside world.
This is a trifling matter ; but, having some experience of what
our most persistent denouncer can do when he shares our
hospitality, I can affirm that he at any rate has never given our
powers of conversation a chance; never allowing our grave
interest to stray from the fascinating theme of himself. To be
sure the play of talk at a table from which women are excluded
must, in the nature of things, lack much of civility and charm.
But we do our best: and Hazlitt's remark that 'You will hear
more good things in one day on the top of a coach, going and
coming from Oxford, than in one year from all the residents in
that learned seminary* seems to me, apart from its extravagance,
at once obvious and stupid so obvious, indeed, that its stupidity
The Scholarly Don 357
may be left without comment. As a pendant to it, equally
without comment, I will leave to my supposed adversary on
this point a small story as a present. Entertaining a distinguished
guest at my own present college, in Combination Room after
dinner the enior Fellow (an eminent classic, now defunct)
politely inquired, 'I suppose, Mr. Astronomer Royal, the old
notion prevalent in my youth, that the moon had some influence
on the tides, has in these days been quite exploded?'
Now, without going into details innumerable and not to be
embarked upon in a short paper of the training offered by
Oxford and Cambridge to their undergraduate members, I invite
the reader to draw some general conclusions with me.
First, it cannot be denied that Oxford and Cambridge are
venerable, were it but historically for the sake of the illustrious
host that have taught and learnt, resided in or passed through
them; on that the mind of a newcomer, so it be of any gentle
quality, will yield to this impression:
I could not print
Ground where the grass had yielded to the steps
Of generations of illustrious men
Unmoved. I could not always lightly pass
Through the same gateways, sleep where they had slept,
Wake where they waked, range that inclosure old,
That garden of great intellects undisturbed . . .
And this veneration is not merely retrospective. It and its
virtue continue alive and active, hospitable to each new genera-
tion. It was a proud thing (I must not speak of to-day) for a
boy to belong to a society which included a Thomas Hill Green,
a Robinson Ellis, an Ingram Bywater; or a Munro, a Westcott,
a Henry Maine, a Clerk-Maxwell. These men were as lanterns
attracting youth to receive the light and carry it on. Prestige
is a word open to unworthy connotation ; but no snobbery can
be attached to the prestige these conferred. Where would our
electricians be to-day but for Clerk-Maxwell ? In what measure
inconsiderable the influence of Jowett on minds that have ruled
358 The Scholarly Don
large dominions under the Crown? Or, to take a man who
neither knew nor courted publicity Who can count the many
diverse debts owed by students to Henry Bradshaw, some time
University Librarian of Cambridge of whom Mommsen said :
'If I'd had a shorthand-writer with me, I could have got in
half an hour's talk enough materials to have made an interesting
volume/
Of the beauty of the two gardened places and what it means
of what the Bodleian, for instance, or Magdalen Tower, or
King's College Chapel and the nigh river bridges, have meant
through life to those who have passed, during three years or so,
under their shadow, I need not speak. 'But they are medieval.'
Yes, as I put it once in a lecture: 'As they stand, Oxford and
Cambridge so alike while they play at differences and both so
unlike anything else in the world do by a hundred daily reminders
connect us with the Middle Ages, or, if you prefer Arnold's
phrase, "Whisper their lost enchantments." The cloister, the
grave grace in hall, the chapel choir, the men hurrying into their
surplices or to lectures "with the wind in their gowns," the stair-
case, the nest of chambers within the oak all these softly rever-
berate over our life here, as from belfries, the medieval mind.'
Yes, and transmuted through the medieval, the classical mind
also, to modern uses.
It is because these two universities are not devised institutions,
constructed by theorists or by politicians (Laud himself reformed
of inner knowledge, though he imposed his reforms from with-
out), but have grown and grown slowly with the national
character, that external interference, however well intended, has
so often defeated its own object.
Let me conclude with one instance of development by this
process of growth. Simply because men of eminent learning
set up their desks in these two places, young scholars flocked to
them from north and south and from all over Europe ; because
this young multitude was naturally turbulent, wise authority
used a model at hand, the monastic system, to separate it into
The Scholarly Don 359
colleges under rule. As the experiment succeeded, the colleges
multiplied; every poor scholar being assigned to a senior for
advice and supervision. All this, of course, is elementary : but
not everybody recognizes that out of this grew the flower of
university life, which is friendship.
For the dons (you say) are dumb fellows, and on this point
they certainly are. One has to live long and intimately
among them before realizing, and then with difficulty, their
innumerable acts of kindness, help over young troubles, self-
sacrifice, quiet and secret benevolence; and they are not rich
men. As for the undergraduates, let Bagehot speak, no
sparing critic:
There is nothing for young men like being thrown into close
neighbourhood with young men ; it is the age of friendship ; and every
encouragement should be given every opportunity enlarged for it.
Take an uncollegiate Englishman and you will generally find that he
has no friends. He has not the habit. He has his family, his business,
his acquaintances, and these occupy his time. He has not been
thrown during the breathing-time of human life into close connection
with those who are also beginning or thinking of beginning to enter
on its labours. School friendships are childish; after-life rarely
brings many ; it is in youth alone that we can engrave deep and wise
friendships on our close and stubborn texture. If there be romance
in them, it is a romance which few would tear aside.
Be it added as an advantage of university life over that of any
training college, that as this concourse of youth is taught in
various subjects and for different careers, its intercourse gives a
catholicity to its friendships and, albeit insensibly, a grasp on
one of the most useful truths in life that it takes all sorts to
make a world. In disputation and 'dialectic* has ever been
traditional at Oxford and Cambridge, once a serious academic
exercise, now a half-serious sport it is no bad thing for a
youngster to talk some folly, very good for him to have the
froth blown off by a cheerful exhortation not to make an ass of
himself, or 'Tell us something you know something about.'
360 The Scholarly Don .
But I am being tempted beyond my theme; and shall end by
asserting that if learning be valuable for its own sake and beyond
any price to be put in ledgers ; if it be a reward of life to live in
the affectionate remembrance of men whom he helped as youths,
and another to have spent his days in guarding a high tradition
while stewarding a beautiful estate ; then the Scholarly Don has
no call to answer for himself. But, though
The gratitude of men has oftener left him mourning, he and the
shades of many I have walked with beside the perpetual streams of
Isis and Granta will let pass this tribute with a smile.
SEA STORIES: A CHANCE CATALOGUE
r TpHE reader, at this time of year supposed to be on holiday,
JL is invited to visit a certain room overlooking the sea. It
served the family once on a time as day nursery.
He that hath found some fledg'd bird's nest may know
At first sight if the bird be flown . . .
The toys have gone some relegated upstairs to the attics, others
parted with (and, when it came to the tailless rocking-horse,
not without some natural tears) to endow the infants' depart-
ment of the elementary school up the hill. But the room keeps
its mementoes in pictures on the wall, some bits of pottery on
the mantelshelf and, specially, a plain table covered with a cloth
of check red-and-blue, its pattern by no means beautiful but
recovered, after a religious search through London, as ancestrally
'the proper one for the children* and since from time to time
renewed as their affection for it insisted.
But the real monument of this bared room remains : its long
and large bookcase, to which paterfamilias has, even yet, to
resort sometimes in desperate hunt after a book missing from
the library. Sometimes he discovers it, oftener not more than
once to interrupt the narrative for a moment he has been
caught, held up in his search, by a wild surmise a stab, so to
speak, of wonder at the mysteries of childhood, of contrition
perhaps for some thorn he might have extracted, some seated
inward trouble he should have guessed but did not. How or
why in the world, for instance, or when, did Law's Serious Call
to a Devout and Holy Life come to be wedged here between
The Three Musketeers and Mr. Midshipman Easy? Did it
mark some intermittent resolve ' to be good ' ? something, for
example, having happened with the catapult, as in the Nico-
machean Ethics ? No such hypothesis, at any rate, will account
for the close companionship of Epipsycludion and Mr. W. W.
Jacobs' s Many Cargoes admirable compositions both, but
*N 361
362 Sea Stories
seldom associated in the grown-up mind as next-door neighbours
or even as on visiting terms. Maternal suggestion its sagacity
admitted, its profundity not is that Miss X, late governess,
probably left it (Epipsychidion) behind her. Well, to be sure,
Miss X had her off moments, or so at least one was assured.
But so have children for that matter: mighty odd ones and
hours of them. As a rustic philosopher once remarked: 'You
can usually account for a cheeld afore he comes ; but once he 's
here good Lord!'
A boy's will is the wind's will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
It should have been announced earlier that the proprietors of
the bookcase came of old seafaring stock, its later blood tinged
not tainted, one hopes with some infusion of literature.
Therefore, of course, Longfellow is here, well thumbed. And
why not? 'A white man, but no poet' one has heard it said
of him. But surely it must be a superfoetation of culture (and
how Blake, for instance, would have scorned it!) which forbids
a poet to move the simple simply and denies the title to one
who can awake the young heart to romance with such a verse as
Sails of silk and ropes of sendal,
Such as gleam in ancient lore ;
And the singing of the sailors,
And the answer from the shore.
Mrs. Alice Meynell, including The Ancient Manner in her
anthology The Flower of the Mind^ added a note: 'This poem is
surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry the
complete flower of the mind, the most single magic than any
other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to
call the story silly.' He may also go a bit farther and hit on
the reflection that in this very 'silliness' lies no small part of the
secret of the poem, its essence, its 'poetry'; in short,
The silly buckets on the deck,
That had so long remained,
I dreamt that they were fill'd with dew.
Sea Stories 363
A certain divine foolishness belongs to the true sea-story, is as
proper to it as to a fairy-tale. Take up almost any story of
Marryat's, of Ballantyne's, and you find this the inspiration of
the young runaway, its hero. If romantic poetry sprang in
Coleridge's time from a * renascence of wonder,' here in observ-
able fact, in the person of 'the small apple-eating urchin whom
we know,' is renascence perpetual with the race; a restless
instinct often incurable by age, hardship, repeated disillusion;
seized upon and interpreted by many writers under many per-
sonifications Robinson Crusoe, Simon Danz, who, at home
among his tulips in a landscape dotted with water-mills,
thinks he shall take to the sea again,
For one more cruise with his buccaneers,
Ulysses (Tennyson's), Mr. Kipling's mariners in heaven ' pluck-
ing at their harps, and they plucked unhandily' to the Last
Chantey :
And the ships shall go abroad
To the Glory of the Lord
Who heard the silly sailor-folk and gave them back their sea.
'Wonder' would seem to be the nerve of it. 'They that go
down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great
waters, these men see the works of the Lord and his wonders
in the deep. . . . This great and wide sea also. . . . There go
the ships: there is that Leviathan. . . .'
This wonder, operating upon simplicity as in a fairy-tale, is
best served in a sea-story, as in a fairy-tale, by perfectly plain
straightforward narrative. The horizon lies straight, level,
open as the palm of your hand : the marvels begin over the
drawn line of it, and on that edge belief or disbelief will hang
suspended. For this reason, for some time to their parents'
surprise, the children declined to get excited over Conrad save
by Youth, that little masterpiece. They not only wanted more
sea and less psychology: they complained against a kind of story
that was always filling and backing ; as one of them observed
364 Sea Stories
idiomatically, it was like steering a monkey by the tail. Pater-
familias, skirting Conrad, surmised another snag ahead. Parents
are apt to take it for granted that the idols of their own youth
will be acceptable to their offspring, and to choose books for
birthday and Christmas presents accordingly. A little to the
left of Conrad lay a shoal of these with affectionate inscription
on their fly-leaves Tom Cringle's Log, The Cruise of the < Midge /
Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and others long-winded
yarns composed by seamen in days of long-winded voyages for
readers as patient as themselves in expectation of port. Would
the young of a hastier generation be as patient ? The worn
condition of the books is reassuring. ' Soiled copies,' too, are
the scattered Marryats Easy, Peter Simple, Snarleyyow, Frank
Mildmay, The King's Own (the tears of an aunt, long ago, had
bedewed an earlier copy of this last), and a few of Herman
Melville's, down to White Jacket. The belated 'discovery' of
Melville by our intelligentsia had not lacked comment at the
time in a household the head of which had lost in the early
nineties, by the toss of a coin with a friend, the delectable name
'Fayaway,' coveted by each for his own small yacht.
On evidence of the bindings, interest in Kingston's famous
tetralogy, passionate over The Three Midshipmen, declined
almost mathematically between it and The Three Admirals.
(But do not nine- tenths of us grow less interesting with advance-
ment, if not with age ? How could Dumas have achieved that
last triumph, the Vicomte de Bragelonne but by weaving incident
around a great heart which had lost its companions and missed
promotion?) In the works, too, of 'Ballantyne the Brave' a
like decline of interest becomes painfully convincing if one takes
them down from their haphazard jumble on the shelf and re-
arranges them in chronological order as they were written ; the
reason for it apparent even more painfully. Increasing doses
of pietism, of 'improvement,' of talky-talky; too, too much
powder in the jam! The clean, unconsciously cruel, instinct of
childhood rejected this as it had rejected Masterman Ready,
Sea Stories 365
and as it would have rejected any intrusion of the schoolmaster
upon a fairy-tale. But Ballantyne at his best, as in The Coral
Island \
In The Swiss Family Robinson this intrusion or infection by
the schoolmaster in guise of a papa capable of everything as
Habakkuk and in botany omniscient as Solomon, who 'spake of
trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop
that springeth out of the wall/ not to mention the rum shrub
of Burnand's parody had been confessedly deterrent to the
children's zest; in their language he was 'a whale': was, in fact,
very like a whale, and overpowering. Barring papa the book
had all the best ingredients the wreck, salvage, hunt for pro-
visions, carpenter's work with necessity mother to invention
the house in the tree, a superlative stroke. It was Defoe, of
course, who first discovered the fascination of carpentry in such
a tale, of improvising a hut with stockade complete. The Coral
Island, taking this over, raised the young mud-pie sand-castle-
building imagination to its proper nth by employing three boys
for its wrecked castaways. On top of this the story worked in
a ferocious pirate and an escape. What nearer to the real thing
was ever devised until Sir James Barrie came along and in
Peter Pan subtilized Scottish with Scottish, the rather heavy fun
of Ballantyne's Peterkin with his own wistful finer wit?
For a sustained narrative of castaway contrivance, with the
open boat business thrown in, Charles Reade's Foul Play can
be as highly commended, and to middle age more highly. One
can scarcely name a prose novelist superior to Reade when he
forgets for a while his fads, propaganda, petty squabbles, be-
setting vulgarities, and fairly lets his genius loose on a sustained
epic narrative, such as (among others) that of the homeward
voyage of the Agra in Hard Cash. Invention again, with
carpentry turned scientific and its tools beaten into piston-rods,
is the motive-power in Jules Verne: his special literary gift a
power over what Aristotle called the * probable impossible.' He
commands a vessel carefully equipped with every appliance for
366 Sea Stories
hunting the snark; with the latest thing in sextants he finds
the sun a trifle wide of due north at noon, reports this, and the
reader as chief officer 'makes it so* without a twinge; for the
ship's log has been forewarning this or something like it all
along, with entries of 'corroborative detail intended to give
artistic verisimilitude* to a narrative which, however, is neither
bald nor unconvincing, but rather so convincing in its logical
flow of detail that a young student of The English at the North
Pole from this bookcase did once, on hearing of its reported
discovery by a lot of Americans, stand up and indignantly pro-
test that it had been done some years before and it was a dirty
trick to sneak the credit of it off Captain Hatteras just because
he happened at present to be in a lunatic asylum and could not
contradict this rumour.
Jules Verne, then, is fairly well represented; and here are
Treasure Island, of course, The Master of Ballantrae, The
Cruise of the 'Cachalot'; a row of W. W. Jacobs, another of
Frank Stockton (blessings on Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine!),
another of Clark Russell headed by The Wreck of the ' GrosvenorJ
of which the legend is that one member of the family sat up all
night to finish it by the ray of a smuggled candle. Indeed you
will meet in it a thrill to match Crusoe's discovery of the
footprint a thrill conveyed in seven words:
At this moment I missed the carpenter.
The array of fiction on the shelves, it should be said, includes
many of the old and tried novelists (Dickens, for instance, in a
row almost complete, with, possibly to the visitor's surprise,
sets of Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, even Jane Austen ; nursery books,
'Lears,' 'Alices/ Miss Potters, Leslie Brookes, Andrew Lang's
multicolour fairy books, all in a right profusion and confusion.
But the sea-faring books predominate: and lest this chance
catalogue be held to have favoured fiction beyond all propor-
tion, let us hastily weigh in James's Naval History, Brassey's
index to the same, half a dozen oth&r volumes of the Navy Record
Sea Stories 367
Society, an Oppenheim or two, Captain Cook's Journals,
Dampier, Shelvocke, a Hakluyt condensed 'for the young';
and top these with a full armful of strictly practical The
Channel Pilot, Yachtsman's Guide, Textbook of Navigation and
Nautical Astronomy, The Sailing Boat, stray numbers of The
Mariner s Mirror, in publications of the old (now the Royal)
Cruising Club, Hints for Navigation : these and their like in
plenty to choose from.
Add to them a selection of * single-handed ' books, full of
practical stuff set down by solitaries who loved the sea, avoided
their fellows, and yet by exploring out-of-the-way creeks,
channels, havens, and charting them, have left, beneficently if
not benevolently, whole stacks of helpful soundings, with
hints and cautions. As notable among these we may choose
McMullen's Down Channel and five volumes of Sailing Tours,
by the late Frank Cowper ('Tom Allalone'). Internal evidence
hints broadly enough that McMullen could never get along with
any crew he shipped; while Cowper, as any one's shipmate,
would start with rancour and continue it ashore. But each was
a redoubtable man of his hands. Cowper closed his career as
a Beaufort Brother in the famous Hospital of St. Cross, juxta
Winchester; McMullen met an end more to his liking; he was
found, dead and cold, in mid-Channel, his hand still stiff on the
tiller of his boat Perseus, apparently holding her close up and
along the stairway of the moon :
for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.
But dearest, perhaps, of all the books in the case rich treasuries
of equal excitement for old and young have been Mr. Basil
Lubbock's epical yet scholarly books on the great sailing
clippers, The China Clippers, The Colonial Clippers, with The
Log of the * Cutty SarkJ and their great homeward races with
368 Sea Stories
their cargoes of tea or of wool. Could ever a finish be more
thrilling than that neck-and-neck one, all the way up the
Channel, between Taeping and Ariel, leaders of the China fleet
of eleven in 1866? All Mincing Lane and half the City had
bets on the result:
All day the two ships surged up Channel together going 14 knots,
with royal stunsails and all flying kites set, the wind being strong
from W.S.W.
The Lizard lights were abeam at 8 a.m. and Star Point at noon.
Towards 6 p.m., when off Portland both ships were compelled to
take in their Jamie Greens in order to get the anchors over. At
7.25 p.m. St. Catherines bore north one mile, and soon after mid-
night Beachy Head was abeam, distant five miles. All this time
there had been no alteration to speak of in the distance between the
two vessels Ariel kept her lead, gaining a little as the wind
freshened, and letting Taeping up again as it took off.
For the issue, suspended until the last moment, the reader of
this extract must go to the book itself, as also for details of the
Homeric rivalry between Thermopylae and Cutty Sark and their
great duel of 1872. Cutty Sark, after many and moving vicissi-
tudes, has come to anchor and honourable old age in Falmouth
Harbour. Thermopylae has passed into a name, a shade. The
youngsters know Cutty Sark, therefore, and worship every line
of her; but because the present writer has talked with survivors
from the service of both, as an elder he keeps up his end for
Thermopylae, with the gilt "Cock of the Sea* on her truck: the
pride of our Merchant Service, 'justly considered by most sea-
men,' says Mr. Lubbock, 'the fastest sailing ship ever launched* :
a witch in conjuring speed out of light airs. She has been
known to have gone along seven knots an hour when a man
could have walked round her decks with a lighted candle; in a
steady quartering breeze she would reach thirteen comfortably,
her helm amidships and a small boy steering:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
Sea Stories 369
Even the shades of these, of their Australian trade sisters, of the
Clyde-built rounders of the Horn, their last successors, have
passed the final death warrant dates back to the cutting of the
Panama Canal. A Dutch story, The Johanna Maria^ nobly
solemnizes the close of a noble era. It is a love story: the
beloved a ship, her life-long lover and pursuer a simple sail-
maker; and when at length he wins her and as a bridegroom
brings her home he is old and she a ' museum-piece ' :
With topmasts and yards struck the ship lay moored in the
Dijksgracht, near the place where she had first taken the water. Boys
from the training-ship and from the navigation school who came to
row stopped to look at her from bow to stern. . . . The people walk-
ing over the Mariniersborg stood still, pointed and said, 'a sailing
ship, the old days.' Rarely was any one seen on board, only two
grizzled men and a negro and sometimes in the evening there was
the sound of music.
Yet it remains a consolation for some of us to have known the
sailing ship as she trod the waters in that sunset of which the
last rays lie up her achieved perfection. Et vera incessu patuit
dea. . . . Even goddesses die, and many queens have gone to
execution : none more royally than this one in all her high-piled
pride.
TWO EPIGRAMS
A GARDEN SPEAKS
(After Arabius)
WATERS and orchards are mine, trellis of apple and vine
Ordered, and bordered below the sea caresses my wall ;
Plenty of all that I lack pours from the farm at my back,
Tribute of fish at my feet from the smack unlading her haul.
Ye that of me are possest nightly securely may rest
Lulled, with the song-weary bird in his nest, by the ferryman's
call.
ii
ON THE CNIDIAN VENUS
(App. Planud: Author unknown)
'Wretch!' by her statue in Cnidos soliloquized Aphrodite
'When did Praxiteles catch me without a chemise, or a nightie?'
370
OBITUARY OF GUSTAVE DAVID
1936
A^IONG vanished and fast vanishing features of the Cam-
bridge Market Hill, none will be searched for by habitual
eyes and missed with a keener sense of loss than he.
Gustave David was born in 1860 in Paris, where his father
kept a small antique-shop. Four years later the family of
French descent crossed with Hebrew moved to Switzerland,
where the child received his early education in three languages ;
thence in the seventies, under what mysterious direction is not
known, migrated to England, to start a book-trade in Gorleston.
'At that time,' says Boswell, writing of 1709, of Lichfield and
of Dr. Johnson's father, 'booksellers' shops in the provincial
towns of England were very rare "and might only earn with
assiduity" a reasonable share of wealth.' One may guess that
in one hundred and fifty years or more Gorleston had scarcely
overtaken Michael Johnson's Lichfield as a literary mart. At
any rate another move was made, this time to London; where
Gustave, now a grown man, set up in a small business of his own.
Whether it wilted, or a narrow street in the capital palled on him,
or (let us believe) urged by the daemon of his genius, one day
he put up his shutters, headed for Cambridge, and erected a stall ;
and there for many generations (as generations are counted here)
was a centre of his own amid ancient colleges, accepted as belong-
ing to a 'University' which, literally translated, means 'all of Us.'
There it just was. And there he stood on all working days
save Thursday and Saturday ; always smoking but at your ser-
vice ; inscrutable with a subdolent smile which lit up something
like affection on the approach of some tried favourite among his
clients. (His greeting of the late Charles Whibley, for instance,
had to be witnessed to correct any one's estimate of his own
worth in the scale of David's.) On Saturdays, when the merry
costers invaded the market, like some grave Tyrian trader he
withdrew to the neighbouring eminence of Pease Hill, and there,
371
372 Obituary ofGustave David
among the fried-fish stalls, undid his corded bales. Also, if you
had hesitated over a purchase, or passed in too great a hurry to
snap it up, the odds were you would miss it for ever. It had
been swept back overnight into his shop, in which to recover
it was to search for a needle in a haystack. Legend even held
that he disposed each day's surplus stock under the hicjacets of
St. Edward's churchyard. On Thursdays he attended the book
sales in London. His method of bidding and buying there
must have obeyed some steady system into which it is no
business of ours to inquire. But his system of pricing and
selling, long tested, could be accepted as an honest conspiracy
of help between dealer and purchaser. It was based (if I under-
stand it) on the working out in the long run of a simple, modest,
and reasonable percentage. He must have been wise enough
to know the money's worth of many a trouvaille, but sacrificed
that knowledge to his noble reputation for probity.
A spice of vanity may have mixed itself into this, as into most
men's high purposes : but it once led to the defeat of a lower
one. A few years ago some friends and admirers planned a
luncheon in his honour, and would have decorated the front of
the menu card with a photogravure of David, singular and
familiar personification of something in the genius loci. Un-
happily, getting wind of this, he faced the photographer in a
'gent's boater,' frock coat, light trousers, and white spats. At
the subsequent luncheon in the hall of Trinity his emotion,
expressed in manner rather than in words, went straight to the
hearts of all the large company gathered.
An obituary notice in the Cambridge Daily News tells us that
'his great ambition was to retire and collect old books.' This
to many will suggest a possible parallel with Omar Khayyam's
wonder: vri .
What the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
May the stall he founded, and so curiously made his own and
the University's, long stand on Market Hill!
MONUMENTS
BY all means practise thou to live alone,
Hardening thy talent to a monument
On a high moor, impervious, a stone
Whereby the reverent pilgrim, pitching tent
Shall kneel to trace
The legend on its lichened northern face,
And say 'Here was a Master, by God's grace/
But in the valley, where thy brothers keep
And sisters, that in duty grow as trees
O'ercharging ladders where the salmon leap,
Or shading cattle, or sheltering cottages
Their temporal race
Continues in the plowman's steady pace
To grave a deeper legend, by God's grace.
373
FAITHFUL JANE
A CHRISTMAS STORY
JOHN BERRYCOMBE having crossed the public ferry (on
a Sunday twopence for foot passengers, there and back) took
a path which led up through and along the woods to descend
and join the high road by Reselda Creek, thereby shortening
his journey by half a mile.
Reselda Creek (locally Reselda *PylP) is actually a creek no
longer. Detritus from the mines inland began to choke its
navigable channel long years ago ; and what was once an estuary
is now a green level of apparent but treacherous pasture, through
which at low water a stream trickles to be met half-heartedly by
the neaps, and where a branch of it washes round the eyot a
pair of swans nest annually original ones or progeny, and
never more than one pair, forbidding the creek to intruders.
But stray herons come to fish there and at intervals whole flocks
of gulls will stud the level. Twice a year maybe, at the
equinoxes, a spring tide with a sou'wester behind it will flood
Reselda Pyll to cover the roadway and suck at the timbers of a
broken lock-gate, relic of a canal, planned in the eighteen-
thirties and abandoned on the threat of a mineral railway, which
in turn never came to birth. The high woodlands on either
side of Reselda belong legally to an impoverished landlord, but
towards nightfall the curlews claim tenantry, later the owls.
At a turn of the road on this Sunday afternoon the goal of
John Berrycombe's walk, as for twenty-five years it had been
one house stood solitary ; an inn : one-storeyed, thatched, cleanly
whitewashed, with a signboard 'The Norseman's Arms,' and
over the door lintel:
JANE TREWMAN, SHIPPING GAZETTE,
LICENSED TO SELL ALES, SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS
AND TOBACCOS
374
Faithful Jane 375
The explanation why a public-house, and one so oddly named,
should occupy this unlikely spot is simple enough. In the
earlier years of Queen Victoria's reign, while the mines worked
and before their refuse had silted up its channel, vessels of light
draught and strings of barges too, at times, had frequented
Reselda Pyll, unloading timber for mine-props. The vessels
with their cargoes and their skippers and quite often the
skipper's family for crew or part of it were all from Norway ;
and it was Jane Trewman's grandfather Christopher who had
planted an inn here as a house-of-call, run almost on domestic
lines, but without stint of drink. It had attracted the miners,
too, from 'up above* staid men for the most part, and
Methodists, whose wives (as they put it) 'didn't mind getting
a man out of the way for a bit, so long as one knows where
he 's to. 9 So Christopher had put by a tidy pile of money and
left it with the inn to his only child, Christopher the Second:
a cautious man, who, when the mining collapsed in the late
forties, and the young men emigrated to America, and the kindly
Norwegian timber-carriers came no more, resigned himself to
dwindled custom, lived sparingly on his income and left the
capital to his only child, Jane, then seventeen.
ii
As John Berrycombe took the woodland footpath the ferry-
man jerked a thumb after him :
'Sure as three o'clock strikes Sunday rain or shine.
'Wonder how long 'tis old Hardy 's been at it.'
Indeed neither he nor the other man, idling by the quay-
side, could tell; nor even why they spoke of John as 'old
Hardy.' Years ago some wag had put the nickname 'Hardy
Norseman* upon him, but the second word had dropped out of
memory.
'Before you and I were much better than christened, I reckon.
"Marry in haste," the saying is. Well, maybe the both of us
376 Faithful Jane
done it hi our hot days, and I 'm not askin' ; but seemin' to me
old Hardy 's trying of it t' other way about.
'And the trouble is' the ferryman lit his pipe slowly 'that
neither you nor me will likely see it out. . . . Well, soce, there 's
only one life to live, here below; and, Sunday or week, that's
a comfort.'
John Berrycombe, of course, heard nothing of this, nor if he
had would he have heeded. By habit he was one who took all
talk with his fellows as meaning just so much as 'Good day.'
No one ever called him surly, but his mind worked slowly, and,
unless sharply recalled, blind as a mole's, unobservant of any
but its own track. So this afternoon, whether the path changed
its carpet from moss to larch-needles under his large feet, or
his heavy shoulders brushed past yellowing beech, or the sun
rayed through gaps over and across patches of rhododendron,
no sense of any difference touched him. His mother, as always,
had provided an ample midday dinner : Selina had cooked and
served it well; and here was September, latish and the usual
sort of thing.
But where this footpath descended and met the road a sharp
musketry of sound fetched him to a standstill of children's
voices shrilling, and volleys of excited laughter. It came from
4 The Norseman's Arms,' too, not fifty yards ahead; and this
was Sunday afternoon.
John halted and pulled out his watch ; pocketed it slowly and
went forward.
Just beyond a point where the road turned up to the inn's
main door, and below its long back garden, there ran a 'hoist*
(raised footway), years ago built as a protection against the high
spring tides. A few yards beyond the inn's abutment a wicket-
gate gave access to the garden a gate John habitually used on
wet days, entering the house by its back door.
(It should be explained that at the date of our story the law
laid on public-houses a Sunday restriction against all customers
save 'bona fide travellers,' but no one not even the police
Faithful Jane 377
ever thought of measuring the distance of the 'Arms' from the
paper-mills where John lived and did his business; it being
understood that he came for purposes of courtship, and, more-
over, paid nothing for what he consumed.)
John Berrycombe, then, halted again at this wicket-gate and
stared upon the garden. On its stretch of turf, hands joined,
a circle of children danced wildly to the game of Kiss-in-the-
Ring, Jane Trewman, in the middle of the chain, directing it.
When the chain was broken for a boy to walk around to choose
his partner, peals of clapping and laughter greeted bride and
bridegroom as they stepped into the centre to be danced around.
In one of these intervals Jane caught sight of John at the gate.
'There! that will do. . . . Now run, all of you, and play tig
in the orchard. Twenty minutes, and then time for good-bye.'
She came towards John, flushed and panting a little; but
turned midway to call to a middle-aged woman busy at clearing
a set of deserted tea-tables aligned under the brick wall against a
border of hollyhocks, phloxes, Michaelmas daisies.
'Emma!'
'Yes, mistress.'
' Gather what 's left of the cake and splits anything left of
the cream, too, and hand 'em up to they Methody children
peekin* over the hedge there. No jam or treacle, mind or
their mothers will be crying out when they get home.'
She faced John and pointed to a low bench that, over a fence
of low-trimmed euonymus, overlooked pathway and creek.
'You can sit here with your back to it all.' As John settled
himself, she dropped, still panting, upon the bench beside him.
John slowly felt for his pipe.
'Oh, yes, I know what you're thinking. But I went to
Parson, and he approves. Being new to parish all things to
all men as yet, as you might say, he didn't turn up. But they
poor Methody children, forbidden, and hanging over the wall
with their tongues fairly watering well, come what may, I
hadn't the heart . . .'
378 Faithful Jane
John lit his pipe and puffed at it.
'It rained cats and dogs on Anniversary Day, and the poor
mites had to stay in the schoolroom, in their gay dresses, too.
So I took a fancy, and with Parson's leave and to-day turning
out so fine, thank God. . . . But you 're thinking I 'm over
fond of children.'
*I haven't said so.'
'But you were thinking so, John, and at that very moment.
Lord sakes! do you reckon I can't read your thoughts in all
this time, and you so slow of speech ? Well, I dote on children :
and all the more, maybe, because I 'm past having 'em.'
She rose up and called to Emma to run and boil up a fresh
pot of tea for Mister John.
'I didn't take your meaning,' said John as she came back to
her seat.
'I don't suppose you do,' she snapped, 'and wouldn't, if you
put it into your pipe and smoked it. But your mother would
understand, and glad enough of small mercies.'
She left him to kiss the returning children good night. While
they trooped away, and she saw them off to rejoin the small,
envious non-Anglicans in the road, Emma Peascod brought his
tea and set it beside him, with home-made bread, honey of
Jane's own hiving, cream of Jane's own dairying. John
absorbed it all, lit another pipe and sat ruminating, his gaze
upon the creek.
By and by (as he knew she would) Jane came and dropped
into the seat beside him. He had not stirred.
'Yes,' she said, 'but it won't interfere.'
'Eh?'
'That pole t' other side. The Post Office reckons to run the
wire across. They want to put up its pillar at the end of the
orchard. One-and-six way-leave, and I 've given permission
as it won't interfere.'
'I was just wonderin' . . . But how you guessed '
'Hasn't it ever struck you, John' she laid a hand on his
Faithful Jane 379
sleeve, to rest there 'how often I run ahead of your thoughts
and answer before you speak 'em?'
* Can't say I have.' John stirred at last, a trifle uneasy.
* Oh, it 's never anything to count leastway not much.
Because, John, I know them to be clean always, thank God.'
(There, however, half a sigh escaped her.) ' But about that
pole they got it up last Thursday, and I 'm glad you noticed
it. There 's a notion that folk living up in a place like this,
year in and year out, don't take heed of changes. But I do,
down to the teeniest- weeniest things birds' nests we '11 say,
and whether 'tis the old birds or a new pair mating. And so
with Emma Peascod. She woke me up at six o'clock to tell
me they were cutting a clearing across there : and when the pole
went up you *d have thought 'twas the end of the world come.
Naught but bad news, she holds, ever comes by telegraph.*
John made no answer. Yet this was the same oaken bench
on which they had exchanged their first kiss.
in
It had happened when John, rising twenty-two and always
slow of development, had fared up Reselda Creek on command
of his father, who owned and ran a prosperous paper-mill well
on the left shore above Ridmouth, and wellnigh in the narrows
above its wide harbour. Samuel Berrycombe, ageing but alert,
had received news of a trader due to discharge at the head of
Reselda Creek a cargo of limestone and nitrate with other
general cargo, including a truss or so of esparto grass, picked up
at Plymouth in a sample sent by some Algerine enterprise as
bait for a marker. Advertised of this and alert for a new line
in paper-making he had sent his son up to Reselda to bring
back a sample.
So John, always in terror of his father's temper, had risen
before cockcrow and sought the creek head, long ago, by the
path trodden by him this afternoon.
380 Faithful Jane
But then it happened to be May morning: a festival when
village maids are allowed (or were) to rise before daybreak,
fare to the meadows and dabble their naked feet in the dew,
afterwards to troop and eat clotted cream under hedges over
which the May sun rises.
So it happened at the bend where the footpath first joined
the road John found himself caught up in a swirl of young
women, naked legged, who, in all innocence but excited, sur-
rounded and chivvied him up the road to the ' Norseman,' where
tables heaped with splits and clotted cream awaited them in the
sunrise. And then John could never tell how the troop
had faded away into silence, and he had found himself on a
bench beside a girl who, stretching her ankles for the young
sun to dry, suddenly struck on his sense as the dearest
possession in the world. So somehow they had exchanged a
first kiss.
It need not be added that John, returning home with his
samples of esparto grass, reported nothing of this to his
parents.
Silence on the garden bench lasted until the September dusk
began to gather. Then, as if timed by clock, the two rose and
passed by the garden door into Jane's parlour, where Emma
Peascod had already lit the hanging lamp and set out decanter
and apparatus for brandy-grog, also a plate of apples with
finger bowl and napkin beside it, on a small table by the fire.
A brass kettle shone and sang gently on the hob.
John sank into his accustomed chair on the right of the hearth.
Jane moved the kettle from hob to fire, and set about peeling
an apple. He contemplated her this dark-haired woman,
broad of brow, deep of breast as she bent in the cross rays of
lamp and firelight. She was his, had been from first avowal
and plighting; secure as his money invested or in the bank,
to be drawn upon on Sundays with satisfying interest without
touching capital.
Jane, having peeled his apple, dipped and wiped her finger-
Faithful Jane 381
tips, then took off the steaming kettle and mixed his brandy-
grog for him. He took it with the plate. For a while they sat
by the hearth in the usual opposite chairs and in a silence broken
only by John's heavy breathing between bite and sup. Then
as he pulled out pipe for his final smoke: 'I doubt you were
annoyed this afternoon?' said Jane.
'Eh? Oh, then,' John answered between puffs, 'when I
came on you from the gate and you among them children
caperin' just like a a '
'Capering?'
' like as you was a fairy or wanted to be.' John, having
found his simile, was not to be put off.
Half a minute's silence followed. Then said she, looking
straight across under dark brows: 'Look here, John. Wasn't
it ever like that to you, not even to begin with? Well, it was
to me often. And now I '11 tell you something you won't
understand but you may tell it to your mother. A woman at
my time o' life takes fancies. Goes off the rails, as they say.
Sometimes it runs to bad temper, but easier when the ewe runs
lamb-like, for a bit. You may go home and tell that to your
mother if you choose.'
'Mother and I ' This after a pause.
' never mention me. Don't I know that? And well,
John, that's over. I've told you; and when 'tis over, 'tis
over, as Joan said by her wedding.'
She laughed, as John pulled out his watch. They rose
together and went to the front door, on their way passing the
glass window of the bar-room, within which, on a stool, Emma
Peascod sat with Bible open on the zinc counter. It was
Emma's custom of a Sunday evening, and (gossip said) with
the book upside down as often as not. Anyhow, Emma was
a teetotaller, and it may have been her vicarious sacrifice upon
this altar for the sins of the week.
In the porch John and Jane exchanged their customary kiss.
He did not feel how her lips trembled.
382 Faithful Jane
IV
John's mother awaited him at home, at the end of a long
dining table of the family house built alongside and here and
there into the paper factory, at every point so close that on
work-days the chant of its water-wheel droned through every
room. On Sunday, the wheel stayed, the sound changed to
that of a straight waterfall.
Religiously as Emma Peascod sat by the counter of 'The
Norseman's Arms/ old Mrs. Berrycombe (Honoria by name)
was sitting by her Bible open before her a copy of the last
issue but one of Debrett's Peerage. The bookseller at Rid-
mouth at due intervals sought these volumes for her 'a lady,
if ever there was one* and they lined almost a third of a shelf
in the * study' where her late husband had always room alongside
ledgers.
The explanation lies in her story; a strange one, only to be
summarized here. She came direct of high lineage eldest of
three daughters of a family rectory on the edge of a deer-
park, the acres of her uncle, no less a person than Earl of
Molton, in Devon, Baron Carminowe of Carminowe (a lost
estate in Cornwall), with some lesser titles. This good Earl's
eldest son, Lord Carminowe, had died young in the fifties,
hopelessly in debt which his father honourably shouldered,
living himself oh an income of scarce three hundred a year, and
leaving, when he died, the bulk of his estate intact but still
heavify encumbered. His second son, succeeding to the title
and upon it retiring from Her Majesty Queen Victoria's Guards,
was a dilettante who collected dubious masterpieces, and had
divorced his wife after begetting a son whose career in the
Army remained a question as dubious as the value his father set
upon the masterpieces he crowded into Berry Regis. The
third son, the Rev. the Hon. Eustace Carminowe, was a widower
with three daughters Honoria, Georgiana, and Charlotte.
Faithful Jane 383
They had to share a great part of the rectory housework and
to stitch their own dresses for the county balls.
Charlotte, the youngest, had a sharp tongue. One day as the
three sat sewing in the converted * nursery' she asked amiably :
'Honoria! When must we ask to tea the young man you
are walking out with?' a question for which Honoria never
in life forgave her.
(Charlotte, it may be explained, knew all the twists and
corners of a maze of clipped yew for which the rectory was
famous ; and also as the youngest daughter she occupied an attic
chamber which not only overlooked the maze but neighboured
on the servants' quarters and within earshot of backstairs gossip
incautiously and too loudly spoken.)
But die * young man' had proved a determined wooer. From
Honoria's surrender he straightway laid siege to the rector and
her father's poverty rather than his will consenting won
his bride and carried her off to the great house beside his
paper factory.
There she had borne him four children, three sons and a
daughter. With John he had his way from the first even to
choice of the child's name, and John must be bred and brought
up to the business. For Samuel Berrycombe showed himself
in those early days as dominating in wedlock as he had been
in courtship. With Radical notions, moreover, he nursed no
little resentment at the Carminowe airs and graces as he called
them which he had endured. He had won, but had been
wounded. He seldom revealed this to Honoria (though of
course she knew well enough), being in love with her, as she
with him, to the end ; she admiring his strength of brain, success,
and mastery among men, he secretly proud of the * noble con-
nection/ never confessedly, of possessing a wife with 'quality'
m her every word and movement. Therefore they agreed
perfectly in her keeping aloof from the other ladies of Rid-
mouth. But with the second and third son the mother's gentle
obstinacy had prevailed. Miles, the second, received a name
384 Faithful Jane
of frequent recurrence to the table of the Carminowe pedigree :
the third son had been christened Samuel Coningsby on a com-
promise; but, to save confusion, the 'Samuel' had always been
dropped, and ' Coningsby ' shortened (by his father) to 'Con.'
And whereas their elder brother had picked up his reading,
writing, and arithmetic as a day boy in the local academy, these
two had been wheedled off to a public school of repute : whence
Miles had proceeded to Oxford, Coningsby to Cambridge.
Matilda, the last-born, after a restless girlhood under governesses,
with aid from such instructors in music and water-colour as
Ridmouth provided, had accepted with joy her aunt Charlotte's
invitation to spend six weeks in London and be presented at
Court, and had there, making the best of her time, found
opportunity of betrothal and marriage to a prosperous young
ironmaster in the Midlands, much to her aunt's disgust and
every one's annoyance in the family except her father's.
Anyhow Matilda could now fend for herself, and did. Miles,
called to the Bar, had withered to a dry and pernickety Chancery
lawyer, domiciled in bachelor chambers within Lincoln's Inn.
Coningsby had taken orders, married, and was now vicar of
Bagworthy Regis, in Devon, a poor benefice under Exmoor.
For their two sons their father had made a passable allowance
of 240 apiece, which John maintained without question.
But on John himself, heir and successor to the business, from
childhood his father had expended little but abuse by way of
licking him into shape; obstinate in purpose, irascibly scolding
morning-to-night at a sloth of mind he could never understand.
For how could it have happened in a boy so begotten and yet
not corrigible ? As a result John grew up cowed, uncouth, all
filial love concentrated upon his mother, to whom he looked
up with a dumb, dog-like devotion; while she disappointed
too, yet preferring her first-born to the others and protectively
answering that dumb love in his eyes had as vainly striven to
correct his dress, bearing, speech, social manners, and mould
him to a gentleman of the Carminowe stamp. She never
Faithful Jane 385
realized that her own aloofness was in part responsible, cutting
him off from the rudiments that the despised social life of Rid-
mouth might have taught him. Into the petits soins of indoor
life she had patiently drilled him ; in other ways she had poorly
succeeded; but in all but one thing had enslaved him. From
his word once given John could never be turned.
Happily for her she had never learned the exact details of her
husband's end ; how that, after storming upon John for a round
two minutes, he had turned upon a dilatory workman, had been
seized with apoplexy, in the act of cursing, and had died betwixt
being lifted and carried into the house.
So when John this evening, having shed his boots for a pair
of shoes laid out within the front door, had gone through the
ritual of a wash and a brushing-up, he found his mother seated
at her end of the long mahogany table with Debrett open before
her at the page of ' Collateral Branches,' every word of which
he knew by heart. His Sunday supper, cold but ample, lay
spread at the other end. Two candles shone there. Selina,
having timed his footsteps, entered punctually with his jug of
beer, removed two candles from beside Debrett, set them to
make four for John's meal, and poked the fire to a blaze while
he helped his mother to a chair on his right. At seventy-eight
she yet enjoyed watching his good appetite.
The meal over, he armed her to her usual chair by the hearth
and took his own. Given the rooms' difference, their disposal
nearly resembled that of John's and Jane's a couple of hours
back. But here the candlelight shone, the firelight flickered,
upon over-tall walls, papered in dark crimson, decorated with
long engravings in maplewood frames 'The Waterloo Ban-
quet* (the Earl, Honoria's grandfather, had led his squadron of
the 1 6th Light Dragoons under Vandaleur at Waterloo, and
lost an arm in the final charge), 'The Meeting of the Duke and
o
386 Faithful Jane
Bliicher' at the 'Auberge Rouge/ an extended view of Berry
Regis and its surroundings (after Tintoretto and the farther the
longer) with a portrait in oils of Samuel Berrycombe over the
swing table at the far end.
' Coningsby came down this afternoon/ said Honoria, break-
ing the long silence, 'in that rattletrap car of his. He was in a
hurry. Of course, he was prepared not to find you at home/
John lit his pipe before answering. 'I '11 bet he was. Queer
day, Sunday, for him to leave his parish costing him two
guineas for a hired locum, if that 's the price . . . 'must be in
some hurry, too. . . . How much did he stick you for this
time?'
'I gave him another fifty pounds or rather I shall send it
to-morrow, for you know I never write cheques on Sunday.
He spoke of his two daughters growing up '
'Families commonly do, don't they?'
' and he does so need a new car for his rounds in that
scattered parish.'
'So he wore the old one out, eighty miles good, to raise fifty
pounds out of you. If you care to know, he raised a hundred
off me, scarce three months ago. Reason, maybe, why he
reckoned on finding me away from here, seeing as '
'Yes, John/
'Anything more ? '
'He thought well, he has been wishful for a long time,
as you know, to change that expensive barrack of a vicarage
for something, as he put it, more cosy and central. His sug-
gestion was that there 's an advowson for sale at I forget the
name of the parish, but somewhere nearer Exeter, more con-
venient for the girls' education, and with our help '
'Which he won't get ' John, for once, was quick o;
speech.
His mother dropped the subject. A long silence fell.
'John/
'Yes, mother/
Faithful Jane 387
*I want to speak to you very seriously. I am seventy-eight,
as you know, and in the nature of things could not count on
more than a very few years. But I saw Dr. Fleming yesterday,
and I must not count on months, even. Heart it is and a
long time since it woke me at night to read the warning. 'Tis
not about myself, though . . . John, you '11 want looking after
when I 'm gone, and what I 've done I thought to be for your
best, or so I persuaded myself. I doubt now there was selfish-
ness mixed up in it : for I loved you, John I couldn't help it,
right or wrong above the others, as you must have known;
and I wanted to keep you to myself. But now now that all
is slipping away you with it* she commanded her voice
* I want something for you that I cannot grudge ... I want
you to marry Jane Trewman.'
'Mother!' John's mouth opened wide. Between it and his
fingers his pipe slipped, fell, and clattered against the fender.
He bent as if to recover it.
'She's a wonderful housekeeper by all accounts for her
station '
But the great, clumsy fellow had dropped forward on his
knees, and his face was buried in her lap.
'As it was in the beginning . . .' Honoria murmured, stroking
his hair. 'And now, dear, rise and close the book over there,
and before Selina clears away you shall lift and carry me upstairs
as I used to carry you!'
VI
On a night less than three weeks later death took Honoria
Berrycombe in her sleep. In the afternoon John walked up to
Reselda and broke the news.
Jane heard it in silence, then went upstairs and put on her
hat. By consent she and John left the house and took the path
above the creek, alongside the deserted canal.
*I 'm sorry, of course for you, John.'
388 Faithful Jane
'It must have been quite sudden, and peaceful/ said John,
for the third time since his arrival. 'And now '
'And now, I suppose . . . Don't be harried, John, by what
comes at long last. 'Tisn't seemly/
'I don't take the meaning of that. I was going to tell what
my mother said to me about us two, scarce three weeks agone.'
They halted and he told her, while she stared at him.
'So now,' he wound up, 'we can feel easy about it. That 's
what I wanted to tell you no weight is on our minds ever
in that respect.'
'Thank you/ Jane managed to say, after choking down
something in her throat.
'It has been a long wait, of course,' he went on, 'and hard
on you, my dear. But that being her last wish almost, we can
be married this side of Christmas or just after and plenty of
time left us to be ' He hesitated.
'Comfortable/ suggested Jane. 'You was going to say
"happy." 'Tisn't quite the same thing, eh, is it?'
They walked on a short way, John pondering this nice
distinction. Jane turned round on him.
'If you think I '11 marry now, to go and housekeep in that
tall barrack as she did . . .'
'No need.' Whether by luck or good management John
had brought her to the very spot for his answer. 'I shall sell
up the business and retire I 've had offers good ones. And
you can keep on the "Norseman" or not, as you choose.
But see there.'
He pointed up to a thatched building, something larger than
a cottage, set in a clear glade of the woods, untenanted, with
boarded windows. It had served in its time as office and
miners' pay-house.
'Eh, Jane?'
'Sure I remember. But why? Mouldering, it must have
been, inside, for years and years/
'Fifteen/ said John triumphantly. 'Seventeen years back
Faithful Jane 389
I bought it, on the very next day after winding up father's
affairs. And the rest has been my secret, to surprise you when
the time came. Windows all blocked up, as you see : but plate
glass behind 'em; and all indoors clean as a pin, walls scraped
and two dozen rolls o' flock paper and my own make, and to
last for ever cupboarded up for your choosin' but some
other day, o' course.'
On their way back Jane asked : ' But parting from your business
will be a wrench, John?'
'Not a bit' success of his surprise still buoyant in him.
' Year by year I ' ve been drawing in and selling out all father's
investments at a tidy profit, too, being able to bide my time.
None so easy, though; for whatever the old man got he'd
search about to use, to add more.'
'Ay,' Jane agreed, 'and you, John, was always content to
possess.'
VII
Three Sundays later their banns were called.
The news thrilled Reselda parish, but agitated no breast so
violently as Emma Peascod's, whom Jane had been careful not
to warn.
'And next thing,' she broke out, 'you'll be shuttin' up the
place, and me turned out like a like a '
'Before you find the image to fit/ said Jane, 'perhaps you
might stop sobbing : sit down, and try not to behave like a fool.'
On the Saturday before the third calling of the banns John
arrived, his right pocket bulging.
'It's my will,' he announced, extricating a long envelope.
'You may read it, or else and I 'd rather put it aside until
afterwards.'
'I '11 put it aside in my desk,' said Jane.
'And now,' said he, pulling out a wad from an inner pocket,
'I reckon 'tis usual for the man to make a wedding present.
390 Faithful Jane
I 've thought it out, and here are two hundred in notes, to fare
and buy whatever suits you for the cottage furniture, fittings,
and kitchen gear, and such-like odds and ends.'
Jane's eyes brimmed of a sudden. 'Thank you, John. But
I was minded to do a bit on my own money/
'Then you mustn't,* said John firmly.
Next morning: 'You and me are going to Exeter, Tuesday
morning early,' Jane announced to Emma Peascod.
Emma's eyes widened. 'Good sakes! but what for?'
'To buy furniture and things. We can catch the first train
and put up for the night at some hotel, if pressed for time.'
'But but there's Truro handy and there's Plymouth,
full of shops. What 's put Exeter in your head ? And if it 's
an hotel, I was at Plymouth once mother took me to meet
father. That was coming home on the Formidable and we
waited in a bow- window of the "Globe." I can see it now
with the military passin' up and down Bedford Street, and each
with a little cane twiddling in his hand, and his girl tucked
under t' other arm.'
'The farther from here,' said Jane, 'the nearer to find some-
thing new/
VIII
They drove off by spring-cart at six o'clock next morning
and caught an early train, which landed them at St. David's,
Exeter, within half an hour of noon. Having deposited Jane's
antiquated valise and Emma's carpet bag in the cloak-room, they
walked up to view the city and the shops; these all gay with
Christmas shows and decorations. Emma Peascod would have
hung at heel for minutes before every one of them, babbling her
wonder as she had been babbling it since entering the train,
this being her second journey by rail and her first beyond
Plymouth. Indeed she had only stopped exclaiming at the size
of the world to scream and clutch at Jane's arm in the tunnels.
Faithful Jane 391
It was now Jane's turn lo clutch Emma's, which she did a dozen
times, pulling her forward.
'But you 're not taking in the half of it,' Emma protested.
'All these beautiful things and you scarce even looking!'
'Time enough, later on,' she was told. 'We must walk
around first.'
Jane, indeed, had been curiously silent all day and on the
journey, gazing down at her lap, rousing herself now and then,
as out of a brown study, to answer one of Emma's excited
questions for the most part curtly with a 'yes' or 'no.'
From the display of a jeweller's, with the electric lights at
full play on its diamonds, Emma required a deal of budging.
'It makes me feel all over like a Queen of Sheba! . . . But
I don't see no wedding rings. ... I wonder now, if Mr. John
will remember about the ring?'
'Come along, foolish woman!'
They reached the Close in time, and Jane had a fancy to
enter the Cathedral. Great sounds met them within, rolling,
reverberating along naves and aisles, evoked by unseen hands
at practice upon the grand organ above the screen. She seated
herself to listen, and sat while the music lasted and for many
minutes after, motionless, while Emma wandered about, vaguely
awed, but with growing impatience.
At length Jane rose and announced that it was time they
picked up lunch somewhere.
At the Royal Clarence, close by, they found a good meal ; of
which Emma ate ravenously, Jane little ; and again, after it, she
dallied, playing absently with her spoon while her coffee went
cold.
'It turns dark towards four,' Emma suggested.
Jane paid the bill, and they fared forth anew down High
Street and then into Queen Street. But not even in the furni-
ture shops, though Emma called her attention to each in turn,
could she awake Jane to any lively interest.
By the Market House steps, however, on which stood a
392 Faithful Jane
shapely little Christmas-tree about five feet in height, set in a
rub, Jane halted. * How much,' she asked the salesman, ' without
the tub?'
'Four and sixpence, madam.'
'I '11 take it at five shillings if you '11 have it wrapped up in
hessian within twenty minutes. Plenty of earth round the
roots, please, and damped, but not too much. It has to travel.'
She turned on Emma. 'Wasn't that a toy-shop we passed,
not twenty yards back?'
To this they retraced their steps and at once Jane started to
buy. Emma thought her demented as she plunged about from
counter to counter in a riot of spending dolls, drums, trumpets,
hobby-horses, golliwogs, toy guns ; boxes of bricks, of wooden
farmyards, a Noah's Ark, a miniature railway engine ; boxes also
of crackers, Christmas candles, glass danglers, tinsel. When
all this had been assembled in a pile, she demanded a large crate,
two crates. These packed, and the bill (some eighty-five
shillings) discharged, a four-wheeler was ordered and the load
hoisted on its roof by two obsequious attendants, who received
largess. A halt was made at the market, the Christmas-tree also
hoisted aboard, and the cabman told to drive to St. David's.
'And there, I reckon,' Emma guessed hopefully, 'we pick up
our traps, and go back to the Clarence. Where we '11 hope the
beds are aired . . .'
'We 're going home by next train.'
'What! . . . and not a stick nor stitch '
Without answer Jane led the way into the station; handed
their cloak-room tickets to Emma, and exchanged for two
first classes for Truro. They found an empty compartment,
twenty minutes later, in a westward-bound relief express.
All the journey homeward Emma Peascod had to solace her-
self with the plumpness of the cushions. For the night had
fallen pitch dark by now, and Jane sat obstinately taciturn,
with eyes turned to her corner window, fixed out upon the
rushing blackness as though probing it.
Faithful Jane 393
At Truro they loaded up the back of the spring-cart and
jogged in a drizzle for home. Jane who observed her own
interpretation of all victualling laws had put up a window
notice early to announce that 'The Norseman's Arms' would
be closed for two days. But nearing the foot of Reselda Hill
the travellers were surprised by a light ahead faintly crossing
the road. The * Norseman ' was lit within, and a group of dark
figures stood clustered by its porch. Another vehicle stood
drawn up a few yards below.
'I knew it,' said Jane. She handed the reins to Emma,
clambered down, and passed with set face through the hush of
the little crowd into the house.
In her parlour by the lamp-light stood a short white-haired
gentleman, kindly faced, grave; behind him the yet shorter
figure of the postmistress, who ran forward, twittering.
'I couldn't help it, Miss Jane! and all so concerned so
sorry!'
'Be quiet, woman,' commanded the short gentleman, and
held out an open telegram. 'I sent this early, Miss Trewman:
being anxious, I followed it up. Be very sure you have my
sympathy.'
Jane took the missive and read:
4 Deeply regret John Berrycombe passed away early hours this
morning suddenly and to all appearance peacefully. ATTLEY
& SON, SOLICITORS.'
While Jane perused this, brows bent and face inscrutable,
Emma having given over mare and trap to be stabled by
willing hands came bursting in and would have clung to her,
but was thrust back firmly into an arm-chair, where she curled
over, burying her face.
'And his own ch-chair, too, the poor dear!' she sobbed: then,
turning about fiercely on the postmistress: 'Which I said it
from the first, when I see'd that venom pole going up. Naught
ever but ill news from they tellygraphs.'
'Emma, get up at once!' Jane commanded, steady as a statue.
*o
394 Faithful Jane
'Fit and fetch the kettle, quick, Mr. Attley must have a glass
before he goes.'
'Which I made free to light the fire in the bar parlour, too,'
put in the postmistress, 'and the kettle near on the boil.'
While Mr, Attley sipped his grog in the bar-parlour Jane
slipped upstairs to her desk. She reappeared with a long
envelope in her hand and motioned him to bring his drink and
follow her back to the sitting-room.
'It's John's will.' She handed him the envelope. 'He
gave it to me on Saturday to keep/
'I know its contents, of course. Indeed I done it myself,
almost on his dictation/
'I doubt if you know it quite all. There 's a note at the end
in his own handwriting. It only says that 'twas his wish, when
his time came, to be buried at Reselda/
'Will it relieve you, Miss Trewman, if I make all the
arrangements?'
'It will indeed. Thank you, Mr. Attley/ He bowed.
'But there 's one thing if I can explain. I read it all through
last night: but not, Mr. Attley, because I was impatient, or
curious. Maybe 'twas the beginning of what 's been sitting at
my ear all day/ She passed a hand over her forehead. ' You
see, I 've been so used to thinking a bit ahead of John catching
up aforehand as one might say. . . /
IX
A post-mortem revealed that John Berrycombe had died of
fatty degeneration of the heart.
He was buried as he had wished, in Reselda churchyard.
Custom in Reselda parish forbade women, if related or nearly
concerned, to attend funerals. So Jane and Emma, having
pulled down the house blinds, sought the parlour at first note
from the tolling-bell, and sat the time out in silence.
Towards next afternoon (Christmas Eve) a hired vehicle
Faithful Jane 395
descended the steep hill to 'The Norseman's Arms.' At a bend
of the road below Reselda church it had passed the village
schoolhouse ablaze with lights and ringing with the indoor
noise and merriment of children.
At the 'Norseman's* porch it disgorged three passengers,
whom Emma Peascod ushered into the parlour, where Mr.
Attley sat with John's will open before him under the lamp.
He rose and, bowing, indicated chairs. Mrs. Burslade (nee
Matilda Berrycombe), a stoutish matron in flounces of black
crepe, sank upon the small sofa and lifted her veil upon a face in
which the very sharp eyes pierced a plaster of enamel. Miles
Berrycombe seated himself, with back stiff as a ramrod, on
Mr. Attley's right. The Reverend Coningsby Berrycombe,
after a glance around, settled himself beside his sister.
'I should apologize for Miss Trewman,' said the solicitor.
'She has just returned from a children's Christmas-tree, and
will be here in a minute or two. Here is a copy, Mr. Miles, of
the will, as promised when you called on me this morning.'
Miles Berrycombe took the copy, spread it, and adjusted his
glasses.
'A Christmas-tree, did you say?' shrilled Mrs. Burslade
from the sofa. 'And dear John scarcely cold in his grave!
Well, of all '
But at that moment Jane entered, dressed quietly in grey.
With an inclination of the head she comprehended the visitors,
and, moving to the fire-place, stood facing them.
'These gentlemen, Miss Trewman, and their sister desire a
talk with you respecting their brother's will. The relevant
sentence, Mr. Miles, is plain enough and concise?'
'Quite!'
'After a few legacies the testator leaves here are the words
"the residue of my worldly estate to my dear wife, Jane Berry-
combe, absolutely and at her sole use and disposition." Those
were his own words : he insisted on them.'
4 Yes, of course, of course no reflection at all upon you,
Faithful Jane
Mr. Attley. Every man his own lawyer, eh? But* pricking
the paper with his pencil 'here is the point, Miss Trewman.
Were you my brother's wife at the date of his signing?*
' Of course not/
Mr. Attley interposed. 'The Court, sir if that be your
ground, and I have suspected it since this morning would
almost certainly take account of plainly declared intentions.
And seeing that the parties' banns were out as recently as last
Sunday, I shall positively advise my client '
Jane broke in. 'Your pardon, dear Mr. Attley; but I shan't
take any one's advice in this. I knew John's intentions well
enough, though in these years never told. These people want
to dispute the will : but they have something at back of their
minds, and 'twill save time if they speak it out.'
'To come to the point, then,' said Miles Berry combe after a
pause, choosing his words, ' we are certainly inclined to question
the validity '
'Tut!' interposed Mr. Attley.
' but we have consulted. The estate will probably realize
seventy thousand pounds (I put this not too optimistically,
Mr. Attley). And if, in consideration of your natural dis-
appointment, one thousand down or perhaps an annuity '
Jane had turned to a small mirror above the chimneypiece,
and seemed to be studying the lines of her face in it while she
spoke to it, slowly:
'Mr. Attley, you are a gentleman, and would work for my
rights on your honour's sake. But there 's two sorts of pride
one that has ruined the best of John's life and mine, and an-
other that stamps on it and all such: and that sort happens to
be mine. The best service in life you can ever do me is here
and now; to show these people to the door.' She put a hand
in her bodice and pulled out a wad of notes. 'Tell them I '11
never touch a penny of Berrycombe money and let them take
this.' She put out her hand behind her. 'John gave it to me
to spend in setting up house. I haven't spent a penny of it.'
Faithful Jane 397
'Well, and that's over!' said Jane to Emma half an hour
later. 'Let 's fit and have a cup of tea/
'Highly satisfactory I call it, and a credit in a way to all con-
cerned,' said the Reverend Coningsby Berrycombe after dinner
that evening, as he held up a glass of John's forty-five port
against the candlelight.
'Though,' said his sister, 'I can never forget the impudent
way that woman carried it off. . . . Hark!'
Outside the lit windows, in the drive, a chorus of childish
voices had started to trill:
'Good Christian friends rejoice,
With heart and soul and voice. . . .'
SURSUM CORDA
1940
SULLEN against the east a cloud
Darkened the church from choir to nave,
O'er heads in supplication bowed,
O'er hearts that whispered, 'Heart, be brave.'
Then . . . framed amid Crusader shields,
Held in the space of one clear pane,
Acre on acre shone the fields
Our fathers ploughed and sowed again.
And lo ! the altar caught their shine :
The cross was hilt upon a sword
'Lift up your hearts! Accept the sign.'
We lifted them unto the Lord.
398
BYRON
A 5 generations are counted, more than a generation has
passed since Matthew Arnold made bold to prophesy, of
Wordsworth and Byron, that 'when the year 1900 is turned,
and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century
which has then just ended, the first names with her will be these.'
Even when we have consented with George Eliot that of all
forms of human error prophecy is the most gratuitous, and have
asked ourselves in vain what profit can come of constructing a
hierarchy among the poets of any given century (which, after
all, is no more than a conventional division of arithmetic), there
remains the question why Arnold should have chosen to hit
on two men rather than on one, or on three, or more. He had
no need to consider Westminster Abbey, where the space for
interment is limited, and where in fact neither Wordsworth
nor Byron reposes ; no need to practise any such frugal anxiety
as William Basse's for Shakespeare:
Renowned Spenser, lye a thought more nye
To learned Chaucer, and, rare Beaumont, lye
A little neerer Spenser, to make roome
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.
Poets live in memory, which neither calculates room nor assigns
marks for competition. For their corporal dust Words-
worth rests now in Grasmere churchyard, Byron at Missolonghi,
and Arnold himself by the Thames at Laleham avSp&v em
For the prophecy, it came true or, rather, remained true
of Wordsworth : but the year 1900 has long since been turned,
and yet where on the sea is die returning sail of Byron ?
He died in exile : and those of us who would bring Byron's
fame back among his countrymen must, first of all, recognize
their neglect of it for an obstinate neglect, a positive reluctance
to readmit him. For this we must give most honourable
acquittal to his English publishers. No publishers have ever
399
4OO Byron
done more for an author than John Murray, his sons, and his
grandsons have done for Byron : and, as though to be punctual
at the advent foretold by Arnold, they began to issue in 1898,
and completed in 1904, a magnificent edition of the Letters and
Journals as well as of the Poems. Moore's 'Life,' whatever
else may be said of it, was an ample monument: the literature
of personal curiosity has been copious, and from time to time
provokingly scandalous. Yet every attempt hitherto made to
bring Byron back from exile has been met, in his own country,
with no Prodigal Son's welcome.
This reluctance begins and ends at home. On the continent
of Europe, through which his poetry first ran as a flame, the
admiration it kindled has never died out. In the estimation of
all but his countrymen he ranks to-day as a greater poet than
Shelley. Execrated at home, he died at Missolonghi on the
1 9th of April 1824, and the Greek Provisional Government
closed all shops and proclaimed with salute of guns a public
mourning for twenty-one days. Over a hundred years later,
after British denunciation had long given place to neglect, one
opens a volume by an eminent foreign critic surveying the field
of nineteenth-century literature and finds him assigning 33 of
hispages to Words worth, no fewer than 1 19 to Byron. What,
then, is the matter with Byron, or with the faithful foreigner,
or with us? Easy talk about 'reaction' will not carry us
far; or will carry us in a direction clean contrary to the truth:
for any one who seeks to re-establish Byron's fame will find
himself not only forced to rely for his brief and to rely almost
exclusively on the later poems, but forced also to recognize
that Byron's true work took its start from the social disaster of
1815-16; that he fell then, in some ways like Lucifer, but, as a
poet, most certainly not like Lucifer, 'never to hope again.'
Indeed I believe it to be substantially true that if we take
25 April 1816 the day on which he sailed from England for ever
and set it in our 'Byron' for a book-marker, by that simple
expedient we can divide his false from his true contributions
Byron 401
to literature. Technically he never, to the end, took the
trouble to equip himself. He had abundance of wit, and
with the aid of it developed (as Don Juan throughout bears
witness) an amazing command over mere rhyme. But wit will
never teach rhythm to a naturally defective ear; and, set beside
Shelley's, for instance, Byron's rhythms are performances on
the banjo. Also he lacked sense of the poise and pause of
blank decasyllabic verse: while, strange to say, this revolu-
tionary, with his own amateurishness of scansion, chose to
parade himself as a true-blue disciple of Pope. At all these
joints Byron's poetical armour gaped to receive the barbed
arrows of Swinburne's later criticism, which have possibly
killed his claim to be an artist in song. Nor are these arrows
of Swinburne's criticism any the less deadly because foreigners
are congenitally doomed to miss the nuances of form in English
rhythm and diction, as we no doubt are as heavily handicapped
as critics of their native strains. I can only make what I believe
to be a fair statement that our national neglect of Byron to-day
has next to nothing to do with his life and opinions, everything
to do with his carelessness as an artist. It weighs not, at this
distance of time, that for three heady years Byron poured out
such tales as The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair,
Lara written 'while undressing after coming home from balls
and masquerades in the year of revelry 1814,' written and
admired for being written 'with the careless and negligent ease
of a man of quality.' Snobbery in criticism prevails in its day,
but nothing in criticism suffers more cruelly from exposure
to time and weather. As Crabbe gave warning Crabbe,
Byron's favourite in his preface to Tales of the Hall:
Our estimation of title also in a writer has materially varied from
that of our predecessors ; Poems by a Nobleman would create a very
different sensation in our minds from that which was formerly excited
when they were so announced.
For three years Byron enjoyed a wild popularity, and played
up to it with an insolence apparently negligent, actually self-
402 Byron
conscious, and in its carefulness of affectation artistically ignoble.
But when disaster fell, Byron found his soul. Abandoned by
the world on whose adulation he had floated, he caught at the
real thing valuable in his ancestry, its tradition of indomitable
courage, and, with that courage, the gift of sincerity, without
which no poetry can be better than flashy. 1 Genuine anguish
in the winter and spring of 1815-16 probed Byron and found
the man. The first two cantos of Childe Harold, on which
society had heaped applause, simply fade from our minds as
we open Canto III (read the exordium composed in the first
hours of disillusion with its anguish), pass the stirring account
of Brussels before Waterloo, and turn, with hearts swelled as
by a trumpet, back upon such a recessional as the stanza which
commemorates young Howard, killed and carried from the field :
There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,
And mine were nothing, had I such to give;
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,
Which living waves where thou didst cease to live
And saw around me the wide field revive
With fruits and fertile promise, and the spring
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
With all her reckless birds upon the wing,
I turn'd from all she brought to those she could not bring.
If that stanza be not poetry, I say, with all submission to his
critics, that neither they nor I know yet what poetry is. One
has but to turn back to Canto I and read
For who would trust the seeming sighs
Of wife or paramour?
Fresh feeres will dry the bright blue eyes
We late saw streaming o'er, (etc.)
to feel that the Rubicon of poetry has been crossed. Macaulay's
1 Compare the insincerity, e.g. of the poem to Thyrsa (1811) with the
real poignancy of 'So we '11 go no more a roving'; in which, moreover,
his heart dictates a true rhythm. Q.
Byron 403
famous passage appraises at their true worth the impulses on
which his countrymen denounced Byron and drove him into
exile. Yet the late M. Scherer was utterly mistaken in his dictum
that ' this beautiful and blighted being is at the bottom a cox-
comb. He posed all his life long.' It is, at any rate, far nearer
the truth to say that in its surgery the knife cut down through a
fop and found a man. He screamed under the operation as how
should he not, being Byron ? It converted him into the fiercest
of egoists, but a sincerer egoist can hardly be found in our litera-
ture. He was utterly, recklessly unrepentant as Manfred testifies,
if we recall the circumstances under which it was thrown at the pub-
lic. Tribulation and evil fame had not power to convert the spoilt
child, the ingrained self- worshipper and idolater of his own rank
and title ; no power to abase his disproportionate sense of his own
importance. Outcast from England, he ' trailed* through Europe
* the pageant of a bleeding heart.' But he had the ferocious power
to make a real pageant of it; and posterity cannot deny that the
heart bled proudly, or that it was quenched at last in a noble cause.
With his doom upon him he wrote, but did not live to finish,
Don Juan. Critics who frame their definition of an epic upon
a few specimens acknowledged as best, and demand conformity
to rules constructed upon these, may easily deny the title of
epic to this poem. Certainly it is extremely unlike Paradise
Lost or even the Odyssey. But it has the great undulating
flow which some of us recognize as the quality above qualities
in Homer and Milton; it flows because all things within his ken
are seized upon, liquefied, and made malleable by the combined
heat of indignation, wit, genius ; it belongs, heart and soul, to
its period in human history; and it paints that age with such
lively intensity, with such a sweep of power, that no generation
to come will ever be able to dispute the picture. As the late
Professor Nichol puts it, 'in writing Don Juan Byron attempted
something that had never been done before, and his genius so
chimed with his enterprise that it need never be done again.'
In face of their achievements in poetry huge in the mass,
404 Byron
frequent in eminence, with peaks super-eminent over all litera-
ture of the modern world the inhabitants of this small island
are often charged with a general indifference to verse, and in
particular with indifference to poetic artistry, concerning which
(I have heard it argued) our carelessness amounts almost to
proof of a congenitally defective ear. The charge is baseless
in fact: but it has a root in the very anxiety which accuses
us of lacking anxiety. Poetry in England, as in every other
nation, has always been the treasure of a few amid the populace.
These few do well to be anxious for it; but it might easily be
maintained, rather, that the countrymen of Shakespeare have
too often, in despite of his example, surrendered themselves to
the slavery of 'form/ of poetic 'laws' and 'rules.' We admit
this of the eighteenth century, and blame that century for its
formalism. Yet nine-tenths of Swinburne's depreciation of
Byron will be found, when examined, to resolve itself into cavil
against his technical faults, against his defect of ear. We allow
ourselves to be irritated by hasty workmanship which the
foreigner has no skill to detect. That is an error on the right
side; and yet it turns into a serious error when it blinds our
vision to the fine power in the man, or deadens our sense of the
daemonic brain out of which verses teemed like armed men and
stanzas in troops, a revolutionary host. Be it granted that to
the end he could never surely separate poetry from rhetoric.
Yet who can recite the roll Childe Harold, Chilian, The Dream,
Prometheus, Manfred, The Lament of Tasso, The Prophecy of
Dante, Cain, The Vision of Judgment, Heaven and Earth,
Beppo, and (feat above all) Don Juan and deny Byron the
title of 'maker,' a strong 'man of his hands'?
He himself, during those years, dreamed of action, of em-
battled war against the enemies of freedom :
And I will war, at least in words (and should
My chance so happen deeds), with all who war
With Thought: and of Thought's foes by far most rude
Tyrants and sycophants have been and are.
Byron 405
That chance came with the revolutionary uprising of Greece,
and he took it. For a brief while he shone as the bright
particular star of that dawn, until death quenched the light
with a miasma from the marshes by Missolonghi. His last
utterance was Atl pc vvv Kadevfeiv 'It is time for me to
sleep/ As Swinburne has written and no recantation can
cover the words 'With all things unfinished before him and
behind, he fell asleep after many troubles and triumphs. Few
can ever have gone wearier to the grave; none with less fear.
... He had seen and borne and achieved more than most men
on record. He was a great man, good at many things, and
now he had attained his rest/
A LIMERICK
was an old man of St. Omer
JL Who objected, 'This town 's a misnomer;
You 've no right to translate
And beatificate
A simple digamma in Homer/
A CLERIHEW
1942
E remarks of Alexander of Macedon
Would have been somewhat more than sub-acid on
An enemy that used wings
To drop things.
407
TO AN OLD LEADER
WHEN to the breach, across thy body spent
The rearward rush assured now to attain,
Leap over thee, to close on the event,
And tread thee unregarded 'mid the slain,
Neither accuse them nor the gods arraign.
Rise to thy knees; grope for the bugle bent,
Set it to lip, and sound the Charge amain!
So back. . . . Lace up the curtain of thy tent,
And lay thee down, too manly to lament,
Too careless to complain.
408
BASIC ENGLISH
A CHALLENGE TO INNOVATORS
I
A LIFE-LONG lover of English may be pardoned that his
suspicion awakes and takes alarm at any suggestion to
twist it to some new purpose. The purpose may be plausible
enough; but he will ask, as his first question: 'How is the
innovation likely to affect the future of this particular glory of
our blood and State ? ' I have written elsewhere :
Our fathers have, in die process of centuries, provided diis realm,
its colonies, and wide dependencies, with a speech malleable and pliant
as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural,
capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as
Spanish, and of captaining all these excellences to its service.
and (I might have added) of adapting itself to include with ease
the names for the new discoveries, inventions, processes, as they
occur, of modern science. I have quoted this simply to follow
it up with the assertion that precisely because we have so
wonderful a heritage, it behoves us to be jealous for it. We
may find it heavy, be restive under it, but the past has laid upon
us a burden of greatness obligatory almost as that of our free-
dom : and as great nations must deserve a language to fit high
deeds, high thoughts, high policies, or wither; as the fate of a
city may hinge on the watch at its postern gate; I hold that
under whatever new guise of English alternative or substitute
seek admittance, and whether on plea of expediency, con-
venience, barter, labour-saving, or religious propaganda, or
even all these together, it should be held up to give strict
account of itself.
The want of some common 'world language* is, I assume,
409
4io Basic English
pretty generally admitted : certainly it has been felt by educated
Europeans ever since Latin faded out as the common language
of churchmen, scholars, and diplomatists. But these men, being
educated, could to some extent fill up the void by learning other
tongues than their own; not without compensation and even
great profit to their own languages and literatures. But the
men who opened the waterways all over the world and the
venturers who followed these trade routes to plant factories in
Muscovy, China, the Indies, and Americas were not scholars
but travellers and merchants and so the demand for a world
language starts naturally upon the needs of travel and com-
merce, its urgency increasing as travel quickens its pace and
commerce multiplies. It has been primarily to meet this demand
that ingenious people at home have invented Esperanto, Ido,
Novial, and other vocabularies on which nothing need be said
here save they are all admittedly artificial, composed of various
'root- woods' in various foreign tongues.
H
Now, as I remember, Basic English also first came to us with
this as its primary and modest claim, the convenience of the
trader and traveller, but offering, as English, the great (and
flattering) advantage of being a form of our native speech.
Dr. I. A. Richards 'whom I name,' as Cicero might say, 'for
the sake of honour' in his Basic English and Its Uses, devotes
some pages to claiming (a) that for this reason it excels Esperanto
and other artificial experiments ; and (i) that it holds the victory
on many grounds over any other native language. Well, let
both these claims be granted, and, for the second, let the French
or Chinese protest as they will!
My own first objection to Basic English lies against its calling
itself 'Basic' while in its working it cuts out all but eighteen
verbs. Indeed, it amazes me that so capable a writer as Mr.
Basic English 411
Ogden and so philosophical a critic as Dr. Richards joint
authors, too, of The Meaning of Meaning should ignore the
plain fact that in all civilized speech the verb is the very nerve
of a sentence ; and for preference the active verb. Nouns and
adjectives are but dead haulage, prepositions and conjunctions
inert couplings, until the verb (yerbum^ die 'Word') comes
along, supplies the motive power, starts and keeps the whole
train going. Dr. Richards prefers to call his small handful of
verbs 'operatives,' and that is just what they are. He informs
us that ' the reduction of the verbs to eighteen was the key to
the discovery of Basic.' Very likely! Indeed, most probable,
had Basic confined itself to the purposes it first professed and
under which it first appealed to public suffrage; a few mere
nouns may serve for taking a railway ticket, or shortening an
advertisement, or clinching a bargain. But in matters of intel-
lectual or emotional persuasion the verb takes charge, insomuch
that, as a rough general rule for judging of a writer's style
whether it be forcible or feeble, one may usefully note if
by instinct or habit he uses active transitive verbs in pre-
ference to laying them on their passive backs and tying
his nouns and particles together with little auxiliary 'isV and
'was's.' By this kind of operation upon his 'operatives,' Dr.
Richards tells us, they can be made to 'translate adequately
more than 4,000 verbs of full English.' I take his word for their
number. I deny their adequacy.
Adequacy for what?
On page 20 of his book Dr. Richards admits: 'It is true that
if we go outside the field of general interests and into special
branches of the sciences, the arts, or the trades, we shall have
to use other words not listed among the 850. But the senses
of these other words may be made clear in footnotes, or by
teaching given through Basic English. Or they may be seen
in the General Basic English Dictionary, which, using only the
Basic words, gives the senses of twenty thousand other English
words/ Again I accept his figures, remarking on them only
412 Basic English
that a system designed for the help of mankind yet demanding
footnotes or specially trained teachers or a dictionary of its own
(or possibly all together) to clarify the meaning of some 20,000
extra words is on its way to be a trifle cumbrous in itself.
Further, be it noted, this new language has to be learnt not only
by the supposedly receptive foreigner but by the English speaker
on top of his own; so that the relief to him threatens to approach
vanishing point. While I stare at the assertion that Basic's
eighteen verbs 'in combination with other Basic words trans-
late adequately more than 4,000 verbs of full English,' and am
asking myself how this can be, if 'adequately' means the same to
Dr. Richards and to me, he backs it up with :
And they do it sometimes with gain in force and clarity. . . .
Students of the history of English knew, of course, that words like
make, take, put, get, and give had been extending their spheres of
influence in the language, but no one before Ogden's demonstrations
realized how vast a domain these unobtrusive little words had won.
Willing, serviceable little workers, they were less impressive than
the more literary verbs, but handier and safer. ... A public un-
blessed by and unprotected by a sound training in philology escaped
multiple dangers. So did the language itself. Every language is
under constant attack by the tongues of its less expert users. One
has only to watch in a Chinese university, for example the degra-
dation of such learned words, when used without awareness of their
implications, to see that they need protection. Basic English, by
providing invulnerable but adequate substitutes for these more
delicate instruments, can serve our language as a fender.
So the best protection for a nation's taste in music would be
to limit the number of violins and substitute saxophones!
Staggered for a while by Dr. Richards's argument I was closing
the book on the comforting reflection, 'Well, at any rate these
"willing, serviceable little workers" must leave our poetry un-
protected/ when an advertisement at the end caught my eye:
Julius Caesar (B.E.P.C.) Shakespeare 9 s tragedy with parallel
Basic Version and Notes. I have not yet been able to acquire
Basic English 413
a copy of this venture ; but hope, as soon as the paper shortage
permits, to discover what the editor has made (for example) of:
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream :
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council . . .
HI
But just here lies the trap for innovators, however well inten-
tioned. Flushed with first and speedy success they let the pace
get into their heads : they rush on, trusting in die same missionary
fervour, to involve themselves in new and other enterprises,
thereby, in Bacon's phrase, 'mixing up things that differ/
I remember passing a church in the East End on which some
enthusiast had chalked up in large capitals, * I do not care where
I go so long as I go forward. (Signed) David Livingstone,'
and a cynical companion suggesting that we might add, 'Agreed,
on behalf of the Gadarene Swine.'
The mischief of it is that the general public catches the in-
fection and with it the notion, quickly rooted, of Basic as a
substitute for true English. Mr. Churchill (himself having as
fine a command of our language as any man alive ; in writing
and speaking, if we take the two into account together, perhaps
the finest), having incautiously praised Basic for its right pur-
pose, and appointed a committee to consider and report on its
applicability for that, has now to protest vehemently: 'I have
tried to explain that people are quite purblind who discuss the
matter as if Basic English were a substitute for the English
language.' But while paying lip-service to his protest, the
promoters of Basic go far to nullify it in practice, and occa-
sionally in their theorizing. As for practice, Mr. Ogden soon
pushed on to produce a Basic version of a German novel (Cart
and Emma), Dr. Richards to abridge Plato's Republic; and, as
414 Basic English
we have seen, the B.E.P.C. to offer an alternative to Shake-
speare's Julius Caesar, presumably for the use of schools.
Finally, or finally so far, a new version of the New Testament
is perpetrated, advertised with loud trumpetings, and one of
the Old Testament promised for 1944. All this looks strange
beside a modest disclaimer of any intention to substitute, etc.
IV
But why attempt this Bible? If its purpose be merely to
facilitate commerce, travel, the pedestrian business of life, where
was the need of all this machinery? 'Working with the
Orthographical Institute, a committee under the direction of
Dr. S. H. Hooke, Professor of Old Testament Studies in the
University of London, has been responsible for a new form of
the Bible based on the Hebrew and the Greek . . . and- when
the Basic form was complete it was gone over in detail by a
committee formed by the Syndics of the Cambridge University
Press.' Or is the design a missionary effort to ease the con-
version of the savage? Does it help any one's intelligence to
be taught *I have knowledge' as a step towards saying 'I know*
or any one's grasp of a doctrine hallowed by centuries of faith
to alter the Virgin into 'unmarried woman' ('See, an unmarried
woman will be with child'), the two terms meaning quite
different things, as any heathen can tell his teacher?
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall receive; knock,
and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh
receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it
shall be opened.
Compare the Basic rendering:
Make a request and it will be answered; what you are searching
for you will get: give the sign and the door will be open to you
because to every one who makes a request it will be given, and he
who is searching will get his desire ; and to him who gives the sign
the door will be open.
Basic English 41 5
'Ask,' 'seek/ 'knock* how the imperative sinks, the
authority loses accent, the assurance fades out, in the Basic
version! with the whole further debilitated by the substitution
of 'will' for 'shall': 'shall' being superior or master wherever
authority speaks or a promise is affirmed.
Compare again the famous passage in Romans viii, A.V. :
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy
to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us. ...
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded
that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor
any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of
God ...
with the Basic:
I am of opinion that there is no comparison between the pain of
this present time and the glory which we will see in the future. . . .
Who will come between us and the love of Christ? . . . For I am
certain that not death, or life, or angels, or rulers, or things present,
or things to come, or powers, or things on high, or things under the
earth, or anything that is made, will be able to come between us and
the love of God . . .
and observe how the virtue has trickled out of it all ; out of the
strong 'shalls,' and out of the 'nots,' which, with their 'ns' as
hammers, nail the assurance.
I turn with relief to Basic's proper function, and will end with
a note or two on its practicability for that.
(1) To begin with, in my observation die foreigner's chief
trouble in learning English lies in its chaotic spelling and his
consequent puzzles with pronunciation. If English be chosen
for our international language I should put spelling reform well
ahead of any shortening of the dictionary. It would be a
mighty task and, unless entrusted to scholars, very dangerous :
but how well for us all if well dotie !
(2) If Basic English become trie international language, the
Englishman and the foreigner will each have to learn a ne*w
41 6 On Basic English
language: for it is just as 'artificial' as Esperanto actually, being
an invention, not a growth, using English words for material
but lacking native idiom, lacking also the life-giving virtue of
the verb.
(3) Whatever the plea, Basic should not be imposed on the
already overcrowded curriculum of our junior schools. This
would not only weigh intolerably on children and teachers, it
would directly menace the English of our tradition and pride.
For two languages would never keep their motion in so narrow
a sphere.
NOTES
Page 8. Old Aeson. This story was evidently inspired by the birth
of Q's first child (a son) in October 1890.
Page 18. The White Moth. The first stanza is supposed to be the
beginning of a poem that Annie's bereaved lover is writing about
her. Her return in the form of a moth is reminiscent of Psyche.
Page jz. 'Maarten Maartens' was the pseudonym adopted by the
Dutch novelist, Joost Marius Willem van der Poorten Schwartz
(1858-1915), in his English writings.
Pag* 33- The Looe Die-hards. This short story was first published
in The Illustrated London News, where it was entitled The Power
o Music. The Die-hards provide the theme of another of Q's
stories (Hi-spy-hi /) in his Merry Garden and Other Stories (1907).
Page 54. Alma Mater. In later versions Q changed flits (line 4) to
haunts, stonier faces (line 7) to other faces , and short laugh (line 17)
to poor laugh.
Page 56. Eckington Bridge. Eckington is a village on the Warwick-
shire Avon, down which Q made a journey in 1887 in the company
of Alfred Parsons, the artist. Their experiences were afterwards
recorded in Q's book, The Warwickshire Avon, published in 1892
with illustrations by Parsons. In this we find the prose original
of Q's Ode: 'A small discovery awoke us. As we rested our
elbows on the parapet, 'we noticed that many deep grooves or
notches ran across it. They were marks worn in the stone by the
tow-ropes of departed barges.
* These notches spoke to us, as nothing had spoken yet, of the
true secret of Avon. Kings and their armies have trampled its
banks from Naseby to Tewkesbury, performing great feats of war;
castles and monasteries have risen over its waters; yet none of
them has left a record so durable as are these grooves where the
bargemen shifted their ropes in passing the bridge. The fighting
reddened the river for a day; the building was reflected there for
p 417
41 8 Notes
a century or two; but the slow toil of man has outlasted them both.
And, looking westward over the homely landscape, we realized
the truth that Nature, too, is most in earnest when least dramatic;
that her most terrible power is seen neither in the whirlwind, nor
in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the catkins budding on the
hazel the still, small voice that proves she is not dead, but
sleeping lightly, and already dreaming of the spring.*
Page 58. Dolor Oogo (or Dollar Hugo) is a big cave in the ser-
pentine rock on the south coast of Cornwall near Ruan, a couple
of miles from Lizard Point.
Page 60. The Planted Heel. Polperro, where the Quillers and the
Couches lived for centuries, is a hamlet in the parish of Talland,
and a number of Q's ancestors consequently lie buried in Talland
churchyard.
Page 64. The Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup was afterwards
reprinted in From a Cornish Window, in which Q, wrote: 'The
following verses made their appearance some years ago in the
pages of The Pall Mall Magazine. Since then (I am assured)
they have put a girdle round the world, and threaten, if not to
keep pace with the banjo hymned by Mr. Kipling, at least to
become the most widely diffused of their author's works. I take
it to be of a piece with his usual perversity that until now they
have never been republished except for private amusement.
'They belong to a mood, a moment, and I cannot be at pains to
rewrite a single stanza, even though an allusion to "Oom Paul"
cries out to be altered or suppressed. But, after all, the allusion
is not likely to trouble President Kruger's massive shade as it
slouches across the Elysian fields ; and after all, though he became
an enemy, he remained a sportsman. So I hope we may glance
at his name in jest without a suspicion of mocking at the tragedy
of his fate/
Page 72. Chant Royal. Becrowns is Q's emendation of his original
beseems.
Page jj. Sir Patrick Spens. Isaac Todhunter (1820-84) and
Robert Potts (1805-85) were Cambridge mathematicians whose
Notes 419
textbooks were in great demand during Q's undergraduate
days.
Tod-hunting, fox-hunting.
Page $2. The Room of Mirrors tells the same story, in miniature, as
Q's last completed novel, Foe-Farrell, published in 1918.
Page i?8. The Mental Deficiency Bill attacked by Q in these three
open letters was withdrawn before it reached its third reading in
Parliament. It was reintroduced in the following year, but in a
different form.
Page 2oj. A. W. Verrall was the first King Edward VII Professor of
English Literature at Cambridge. He died in June 1912, after
only sixteen months in office.
Page 261. L.M.B.C. Lady Margaret (St. John's College) Boat Club.
Caius. The name of this college is always pronounced 'keys'
at Cambridge.
Rupert Brooke, whose poem, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester ,
is parodied on pages 264 and 266, had been approached by Q to
give a course of lectures on English literature, but the proposal
fell through owing to Brooke's foreign travels in 1913-14.
Page 27$. Thither where her secret prelude.
Darkling in the grove of Jesus,
Throats the nightingale.
This was written in 1914. In 1928 Q wrote: 'The nightingale no
longer sings in our grove; it has been driven out (one is told) by
the brown owl/
Page 282. Archdeacon C . William Cunningham, Fellow of
Trinity College, Archdeacon of Ely, and 'a pioneer in the teaching
and writing of economic history in Great Britain.'
Page 285. The Tempest. This is Q's condensed version of his three
lectures on The Tempest included in his Shakespeare's Workmanship.
Page 311. A Sexagenarian's Apology. The title is mine.
Page 368. Q has here fallen a victim to the modern amateur yachts-
man's stunt of omitting the definite article before the names of
Notes
ships. He knew better, but he was guilty on occasion of bowing
the knee to Baal.
Page 39$. Byron. This essay is Q's much shortened version of a
lecture that he delivered at Nottingham University College on
3ist January 1919 (printed in 1922 in Studies in Literature^ 2nd
Series). I have deleted from the sentence beginning at the bottom
of page 402 a reference to the volume for which Q wrote this
essay as an introduction.
INDEX
INDEX
Titles are in italics
Opening words of poems are in quotation marks
Address at Opening of Keats
House, 295
Alma Mater, 54
Arnold, Matthew, 141
Avon, River, 56
Barrie, J. M., 31-2
Basic English, 409
* Behold! I am not one that goes
to Lectures,' i
Brooke, Rupert, parody of, 264,
266
'By all means practise thou,'
373
Byron, 399
'By Talland Church as I did go/
60
Cambridge, x, xi, 203, 261-6, 278,
280-4, 352-60, 371-2
Carmen Hellestoniense, 154
Carol, 19
Chant Royal of High Virtue, 71
Chrysalis, The, 333
Clerihew, 407
Cnidian Venus, On the, 370
Coleridge, 156
Collaborators, The, no
' Confitemini/ 154
Cowper, parody of, 6
'Cupid, in letters yet untaught,'
333
Cynthia, To, 333
David, Gustave, 371
Dolor Oogo, 58
Eckington Bridge, Ode upon, 56
Eliot, T. S., x, 334
Eothen, 172
Epigrams, 333, 370
Exeter, Open Letters to Bishop
of, ix, 178
Faithful Jane, 374
Famous Ballad of the Jubilee Cup,
64
Feeble-minded, Care of die, ix,
178
Fire /, 3
' Fling out your windows wide,' 19
Fowey, vi-xi, 31-2, 90
Garden Speaks, A, 370
Gilbert, W. S., Lecture on, 313
Hampstead, Keats House, 295
Harbour of Fowey, The, 90
Helston, 154
423
424 Index
Homer, 83
Hudson, W. H., viii
'If a leaf rustled,' 18
Inaugural Lect lire, 203
'I saw Narcissus/ 63
Jargon, Lecture on, 230
Jenifer's Love, 193
Jubilee Cup, 64
Keats, 295
Kinglake, A. W., 172
'Know you her secret,' 54
Latin verses, 154
Laying up the Boat, 79
Lectures, 203, 230, 313, 334
Letter to M. Maartens, 3 1
Liberalism, viii-x, 184, 334
Lieutenant Lapenotiere, 247
Limerick, 406
Looe Die-hards, The, 33
Maartens, M., viii, 3 1
Macaulay, parody of, 5
May Races, 261, 278
Monuments, 373
'Never shaded,' 278
New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,
73
Newman, J. H., 206
Not here, O Apollo /, 267
'Not on the neck of prince or
hound,' 7
Obituary ofG. David, 371
OldAeson, 8
O matre pulchra, 278
'O pastoral heart of England,' 56
' O the harbour of Fowey,' 90
Oxford, vi-ix, 3, 54, 178, 284,
352-60
Parodies, i 6, 73, 261-6
Parody, The Art of, 194
Pater, Walter, 83
Paupers, The, 22
Pipes in Arcady, 218
Planted Heel, The, 60
Plato, 203
Psyche, 13
Room of Mirrors, The, 92
Ruan, 58
'St. Giles's Street,' 3
Scholarly Don, The, 352
Scillies, 63
Scott, Sir Walter, memory of,
301 ; parody of, 3
Sea Stories, 361
Sexagenarian s Apology, 311
Shakespeare, 285
Sir Patrick Spens, 73
* Small is my secret,' 193
Sonnet, 63
Splendid Spur, The, 7
Stanford, C. V., 19
Stories, short, 8, 13, 22, 33, 92,
110,218,247,267,374
'Sullen against the east,' 398
Sursum Cor da, 398
Index
425
Talland, 60
Tempest^ The, 285
'The King sits in Dunfermline
toun,' 73
'The remarks of Alexander of
Macedon/ 407
'There was an old man of St.
Omer,' 406
'The sculptor's chisel,' 333
'Thirteen men by Ruan Shore,' 58
Three Open Letters, ix, 178
"Tis evening,' 6
To an Old Leader, 408
Toast to the Memory of Scott,
301
To the Front from the Backs, 280
Treloar, Sir William, 154
Turner, J. M. W., 87
Twilight, 6
Verrall, A, W., 207
Voices on the Bank, 261
'Waters and orchards are mine
370
'When to the breach,' 408
White Moth, The, 18
Whitman, Walt, parody of, i
'Who lives in suit of armour pent/
7i
' "Wretch ! "by her statue,' 370
Yachting, 79
'You may lift me up,' 64
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