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diff --git a/1994-h/1994-h.htm b/1994-h/1994-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2aea12d --- /dev/null +++ b/1994-h/1994-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,7396 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>Adventures among Books</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4 { + text-align: left; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h2> +<a href="#startoftext">Adventures among Books, by Andrew Lang</a> +</h2> +<pre> +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Adventures among Books, by Andrew Lang + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Adventures among Books + + +Author: Andrew Lang + +Release Date: May 10, 2005 [eBook #1994] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS*** +</pre> +<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p> +<p>Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David +Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p> +<h1>ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS<br /> +by Andrew Lang</h1> +<p>Contents:</p> +<p>Preface<br /> +Adventures Among Books<br /> +Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson<br /> +Rab’s Friend<br /> +Oliver Wendell Holmes<br /> +Mr. Morris’s Poems<br /> +Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels<br /> +A Scottish Romanticist of 1830<br /> +The Confessions of Saint Augustine<br /> +Smollett<br /> +Nathaniel Hawthorne<br /> +The Paradise of Poets<br /> +Paris and Helen<br /> +Enchanted Cigarettes<br /> +Stories and Story-telling<br /> +The Supernatural in Fiction<br /> +An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher<br /> +The Boy</p> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> +<p>Of the Essays in this volume “Adventures among Books,” +and “Rab’s Friend,” appeared in <i>Scribner’s +Magazine</i>; and “Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson” +(to the best of the author’s memory) in <i>The North American +Review</i>. The Essay on “Smollett” was in the <i>Anglo-Saxon</i>, +which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as “The +Confessions of Saint Augustine,” in a periodical styled <i>Wit +and Wisdom</i>. For “The Poems of William Morris” +the author has to thank the Editor of <i>Longman’s Magazine</i>; +for “The Boy,” and “Mrs. Radcliffe’s Novels,” +the Proprietors of <i>The Cornhill Magazine</i>; for “Enchanted +Cigarettes,” and possibly for “The Supernatural in Fiction,” +the Proprietors of <i>The Idler</i>. The portrait, after Sir William +Richmond, R.A., was done about the time when most of the Essays were +written—and that was not yesterday.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS</h2> +<h3>I</h3> +<p>In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of +a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about +people? I have often wondered that a <i>Biographia Literaria</i> +has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a +man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, +gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose +into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly +bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of +reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. +In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot +fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common. +It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it +unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found +in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), +and what consolations.</p> +<p>In beginning an <i>autobiographia literaria</i>, an account of how, +and in what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever +above all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for +the sin of egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which +the author knows so much as of his own. <i>On n’a que soi</i>, +as the poor girl says in one of M. Paul Bourget’s novels. +In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself. This +author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the convent of literature +from the strife of the world, rather he was born to be, from the first, +a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the poems which +I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton’s song, in +the “Bride of Lammermoor”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Look not thou on beauty’s charming,<br /> +Sit thou still when kings are arming,<br /> +Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,<br /> +Speak not when the people listens,<br /> +Stop thine ear against the singer,<br /> +From the red gold keep thy finger,<br /> +Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,<br /> +Easy live and quiet die.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves +to me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of +ten, probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for +a kind of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the <i>fallentis semita +vitæ</i>. This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it +must be confessed.</p> +<p>“It takes all sorts to make a world,” some are soldiers +from the cradle, some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of +books was the gift given to me by the fairies. It was probably +derived from forebears on both sides of my family, one a great reader, +the other a considerable collector of books which remained with us and +were all tried, persevered with, or abandoned in turn, by a student +who has not blanched before the <i>Epigoniad</i>.</p> +<p>About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. +I had heard the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked +out the letters and words which compose that classic till I could read +it for myself. Earlier than that, “Robinson Crusoe” +had been read aloud to me, in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I +remember the pictures of Robinson finding the footstep in the sand, +and a dance of cannibals, and the parrot. But, somehow, I have +never read “Robinson” since: it is a pleasure to come.</p> +<p>The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy +tales, and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. +At that time these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. +I can still see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing +across a burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldier’s horse into +the stream. They did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; +a boy of five is more at home in Fairyland than in his own country. +The sudden appearance of the White Cat as a queen after her head was +cut off, the fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of +crocodile eggs and millet seed which the mother of the Princess Frutilla +made for the Fairy of the Desert—these things, all fresh and astonishing, +but certainly to be credited, are my first memories of romance. +One story of a White Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, +I neglected to secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted +it ever since. One never sees those chap books now. “The +White Serpent,” in spite of all research, remains <i>introuvable</i>. +It was a lost chance, and Fortune does not forgive. Nobody ever +interfered with these, or indeed with any other studies of ours at that +time, as long as they were not prosecuted on Sundays. “The +fightingest parts of the Bible,” and the Apocrypha, and stories +like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read in +a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales +to Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way—for there must +have been stages—is a thing that memory cannot recover. +A nursery legend tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on +six chairs, and go from one to the others, perusing them by turns. +No doubt this was what people call “desultory reading,” +but I did not hear the criticism till later, and then too often for +my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid than most, of a +small boy reading the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” by +firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the +piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare +was a volume of Kenny Meadows’ edition; there are fairies in it, +and the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare’s dream into +the music and the firelight. At that moment I think that I was +happy; it seemed an enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing +resembling it remains with me, out of all the years.</p> +<p>We went from the border to the south of England, when the number +of my years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating +library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare +and of the “Arabian Nights.” How their stained pages +come before the eyes again—the pleasure and the puzzle of them! +What did the lady in the Geni’s glass box want with the Merchants? +what meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and <i>Ford</i>, +in the “Merry Wives”? It was delightful, but in parts +it was difficult. Fragments of “The Tempest,” and +of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings: <i>Ferdinand</i> +and <i>Miranda</i> at chess, <i>Cleopatra</i> cuffing the messenger, +the asp in the basket of figs, the <i>Friar</i> and the <i>Apothecary</i>, +<i>Troilus</i> on the Ilian walls, a vision of <i>Cassandra</i> in white +muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this +or that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy +the magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful +visions, half realised. In the Egyptian wizard’s little +pool of ink, only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare’s +magic mirror children see only what is pure. Among other books +of that time I only recall a kind of Sunday novel, “Naomi; or, +The Last Days of Jerusalem.” Who, indeed, could forget the +battering-rams, and the man who cried on the battlements, “Woe, +woe to myself and to Jerusalem!” I seem to hear him again +when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest “disaster.”</p> +<p>We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it +were, to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott’s +country, within four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard +nothing of it. I remember going with one of the maids into the +cottage of a kinsman of hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where +there was sawdust, where our first fishing-rods were fashioned. +Rummaging among the books, of course, I found some cheap periodical +with verses in it. The lines began—</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,<br /> + He spurred his courser on,<br /> +Without stop or stay, down the rocky way<br /> + That leads to Brotherstone.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not +to be neglected. But they <i>were</i> neglected till we had learned +how—</p> +<blockquote><p>“The sable score of fingers four<br /> + Remains on that board impressed,<br /> +And for evermore that lady wore<br /> + A covering on her wrist.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>We did not know nor ask the poet’s name. Children, probably, +say very little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, +Sir Richard of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the +east, and the moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever +since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at “The Eve of +St. John.”</p> +<p>Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, +how good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and +he wore his heart away for honour’s sake. And we were given +the “Lay,” and “The Lady of the Lake.” +It was my father who first read “Tam o’ Shanter” to +me, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to take +witches and bogies with great seriousness. It seemed as if Burns +were trifling with a noble subject. But it was in a summer sunset, +beside a window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren’s +Cairn, that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how—</p> +<blockquote><p>“The stag at eve had drunk his fill<br /> +Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,<br /> +And deep his midnight lair had made<br /> +In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the +chase, till—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Few were the stragglers, following far,<br /> +That reached the lake of Vennachar,<br /> +And when the Brig of Turk was won,<br /> +The foremost horseman rode alone.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of +Scott in one’s pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection +of a boy’s treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk +seriously, and the Mauth Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to +a small boy in wakeful hours. <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a> +After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one’s +first lessons in history from the “Tales of a Grandfather,” +nobody, one hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner +of Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an +author like another, but our earliest known friend in letters; for, +of course, we did not ask who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the +private history of Madame d’Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us +the rivers and burnsides with his reivers; the Fairy Queen came out +of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh; at Newark Tower we saw “the +embattled portal arch”—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Whose ponderous grate and massy bar<br /> +Had oft rolled back the tide of war,”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage +whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at +Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.</p> +<p>Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story +was “Jane Eyre.” This tale was a creepy one for a +boy of nine, and Rochester was a mystery, St. John a bore. But +the lonely little girl in her despair, when something came into the +room, and her days of starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs. +Rochester, were not to be forgotten. They abide in one’s +recollection with a Red Indian’s ghost, who carried a rusty ruined +gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.</p> +<p>I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded +my lessons, and satisfied my teachers—I know I was reading Pinnock’s +“History of Rome” for pleasure—till “the wicked +day of destiny” came, and I felt a “call,” and underwent +a process which may be described as the opposite of “conversion.” +The “call” came from Dickens. “Pickwick” +was brought into the house. From that hour it was all over, for +five or six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. +I read “Pickwick” in convulsions of mirth. I dropped +Pinnock’s “Rome” for good. I neglected everything +printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was understood to prepare +for one’s classes in the school whither I was now sent, in Edinburgh. +For there, living a rather lonely small boy in the house of an aged +relation, I found the Waverley Novels. The rest is transport. +A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar, and a constitutional +dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leather strap urged me to +acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition. But, for a year, +I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the “Waverleys” +and the “Border Minstrelsy,” with Pope, and Prior, and a +translation of Ariosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and +Charles O’Malley, Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, +with every kind of light literature that I could lay my hands upon. +Carlyle did not escape me; I vividly remember the helpless rage with +which I read of the Flight to Varennes. In his work on French +novelists, Mr. Saintsbury speaks of a disagreeable little boy, in a +French romance, who found Scott <i>assommant</i>, stunningly stupid. +This was a very odious little boy, it seems (I have not read his adventures), +and he came, as he deserved, to a bad end. Other and better boys, +I learn, find Scott “slow.” Extraordinary boys! +Perhaps “Ivanhoe” was first favourite of yore; you cannot +beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the tournament. +No other tournament need apply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly +daring, has attempted to enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the +Hospitaller. Next, I think, in order of delight, came “Quentin +Durward,” especially the hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray +could not remember, Quentin’s uncle. Then “The Black +Dwarf,” and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister. I could not read +“Rob Roy” then, nor later; nay, not till I was forty. +Now Di Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of fiction, the peerless, +the brave, the tender, and true.</p> +<p>The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more +novels, but, as an observer remarked, “I don’t see what +is the use of preventing the boy from reading novels, for he’s +just reading ‘Don Juan’ instead.” This was so +manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitly withdrawn, +or was permitted to become a dead letter. They were far more enjoyable +than Byron. The worst that came of this was the suggestion of +a young friend, whose life had been adventurous—indeed he had +served in the Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks—that I should master +the writings of Edgar Poe. I do not think that the “Black +Cat,” and the “Fall of the House of Usher,” and the +“Murders in the Rue Morgue,” are very good reading for a +boy who is not peculiarly intrepid. Many a bad hour they gave +me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely buried, +and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. +Of all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom +I wish I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously +recommend to children.</p> +<p>I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in +“Vanity Fair,” about the Battle of Waterloo. It was +not like Lever’s accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. +However, “Vanity Fair” was under a taboo. It is not +easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom +he found reading “Vanity Fair” under the table, that he +had better read something else. What harm can the story do to +a child? He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little +George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy +and unharmed.</p> +<p>Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very +disagreeable world of a master’s house, I was lucky enough to +find a charming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, +and Thackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says, +a boy reads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think +that the mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and +the Marquis of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. +Ethel was a mystery, and not an interesting mystery, though one used +to copy Doyle’s pictures of her, with the straight nose, the impossible +eyes, the impossible waist. It was not Ethel who captivated us; +it was Clive’s youth and art, it was J. J., the painter, it was +jolly F. B. and his address to the maid about the lobster. “A +finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen. Does not this solve +the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the French sense?” +Then “The Rose and the Ring” came out. It was worth +while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written +by Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of “The Rose and the +Ring,” I know, and of the “Christmas Carol,” when +they were damp from the press. King Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica +were even more delightful than Scrooge, and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. +One remembers the fairy monarch more vividly, and the wondrous array +of egg-cups from which he sipped brandy—or was it right Nantes?—still +“going on sipping, I am sorry to say,” even after “Valoroso +was himself again.”</p> +<p>But, of all Thackeray’s books, I suppose “Pendennis” +was the favourite. The delightful Marryat had entertained us with +Peter Simple and O’Brien (how good their flight through France +is!) with Mesty and Mr. Midshipman Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray’s +favourite), and with Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run +away to sea. That did not seem to be one’s vocation. +But the story of Pen made one wish to run away to literature, to the +Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous reviewer, might be seen walking +with his wife and umbrella. The writing of poems “up to” +pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the suppers in the +back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society, and Lady +Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has run away to literature +since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where is the back-kitchen? +Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have never met them +in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated reviewer, is familiar +to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. +Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale in the +life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond. +But one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no +longer the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They +do not give those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional; +Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg +does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, +in London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes +of genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so +desirable as it seems in Marryat’s novels: so many a lad whom +he tempted into the navy has discovered. The best part of the +existence of a man of letters is his looking forward to it through the +spectacles of Titmarsh.</p> +<p>One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a +friend of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself +a graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic +and humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the “Day +Dreams of a Schoolmaster,” Mr. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, +to whom, in this place, I am glad to confess my gratitude after all +these many years. While we were deep in the history of Pendennis +we were also being dragged through the Commentaries of Caius Julius +Cæsar, through the Latin and Greek grammars, through Xenophon, +and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing play of Euripides, the +“Phœnissæ.” I can never say how much I +detested these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, +from being attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes +to have nothing to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious +manner. Then Cowper’s “Task,” or “Paradise +Lost,” as school-books, with notes, seems arid enough to a school-boy. +I remember reading ahead, in Cowper, instead of attending to the lesson +and the class-work. His observations on public schools were not +uninteresting, but the whole English school-work of those days was repugnant. +One’s English education was all got out of school.</p> +<p>As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented +for one’s self all the current arguments against “compulsory +Greek.” What was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who +could find any sense in it, or any interest? A language with such +cruel superfluities as a middle voice and a dual; a language whose verbs +were so fantastically irregular, looked like a barbaric survival, a +mere plague and torment. So one thought till Homer was opened +before us. Elsewhere I have tried to describe the vivid delight +of first reading Homer, delight, by the way, which St. Augustine failed +to appreciate. Most boys not wholly immersed in dulness felt it, +I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real beginning of study. +One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope, and had been baffled +by Pope, and his artificial manner, his “fairs,” and “swains.” +Homer seemed better reading in the absurd “crib” which Mr. +Buckley wrote for Bohn’s series. Hector and Ajax, in that +disguise, were as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the +younger Tarquin. Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious +and consistent Legitimist. In reading the “Lays of Ancient +Rome,” my sympathies were with the expelled kings, at least with +him who fought so well at Lake Regillus:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Titus, the youngest Tarquin,<br /> + Too good for such a breed.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Where—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Valerius struck at Titus,<br /> + And lopped off half his crest;<br /> +But Titus stabbed Valerius<br /> + A span deep in the breast,”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy’s hand, +the words “Well done, the Jacobites!” Perhaps my politics +have never gone much beyond this sentiment. But this is a digression +from Homer. The very sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable +roll of the most various music, was enough to win the heart, even if +the words were not understood. But the words proved unexpectedly +easy to understand, full as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, +all courage, courtesy, and romance. The “Morte d’Arthur” +itself, which about this time fell into our hands, was not so dear as +the “Odyssey,” though for a boy to read Sir Thomas Malory +is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter haunted chapels +where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely mountain meres +the magic boat of Sir Galahad.</p> +<p>After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, +the work at Greek was no longer tedious. Herodotus was a charming +and humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of the +Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things in +literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one’s +eyes. Few passages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously +discrepant. The first book that ever made me cry, of which feat +I was horribly ashamed, was “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with +the death of Eva, Topsy’s friend. Then it was trying when +Colonel Newcome said <i>Adsum</i>, and the end of Socrates in the <i>Phaedo</i> +moved one more than seemed becoming—these, and a passage in the +history of Skalagrim Lamb’s Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of +the Athenians in the Syracusan Bay. I have read these chapters +in an old French version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation +of Thucydides. Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps +its pathos; the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn +away by much handling, by long time, by the many changes of human speech. +“Others too,” says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when—</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>All was done that men may do</i>,<br /> +<i>And all was done in vain</i>,”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“having achieved what men may, have borne what men must.” +This is the very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. +For now all is vain: courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, +the goodness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, +all wasted, nothing of that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, +and death. No play not poem of individual fortunes is so moving +as this ruin of a people; no modern story can stir us, with all its +eloquence, like the brief gravity of this ancient history. Nor +can we find, at the last, any wisdom more wise than that which bids +us do what men may, and bear what men must. Such are the lessons +of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in the morning of +the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in words which +are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph, hope and +despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the same +round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and +failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.</p> +<p>One’s school-boy adventures among books ended not long after +winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. +One’s application was far too desultory to make a serious and +accurate scholar.</p> +<p>I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by +accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly imperfect +accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind and +my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and +“The Moor and the Loch,” were my holiday reading, and I +do not regret it. Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made +so, but you can, in no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate +intelligence. The true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much +as I respect him; but there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where +accents and verbal niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened +into true scholarship. Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, +and with the malady of being “idle, careless little boys,” +the ancient classics have a value for which there is no substitute. +There is a charm in finding ourselves—our common humanity, our +puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men severed from us +by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of historical time—which +no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there is to be added, +as the university preacher observed, “the pleasure of despising +our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek.” Doubtless in +that there is great consolation.</p> +<p>It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion +of people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to +them, and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern +poets whom one meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. +Byron’s Murray ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson +and Browning were striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray +was wise in his generation. But it is also likely that many persons, +even now, are attached to poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary +verse. How did the passion come to them? How long did it +stay? When did the Muse say good-bye? To myself, as I have +remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott, for one read Shakespeare +as a child, rather in a kind of dream of fairyland and enchanted isles, +than with any distinct consciousness that one was occupied with poetry. +Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow, who pleased one as more reflective +and tenderly sentimental, while the reflections were not so deep as +to be puzzling. I remember how “Hiawatha” came out, +when one was a boy, and how delightful was the free forest life, and +Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis. One did not then know +that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to meet one +later, in the “Kalewala.” But, at that time, one had +no conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse +as Scott’s, and Campbell’s in his patriotic pieces. +The pleasure and enchantment of style first appealed to me, at about +the age of fifteen, when one read for the first time—</p> +<blockquote><p>“So all day long the noise of battle rolled<br /> +Among the mountains by the winter sea;<br /> +Until King Arthur’s Table, man by man,<br /> +Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name. When +a child I was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands +where we chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson. “Is he a +poet like Sir Walter Scott?” I remember asking, and was told, +“No, he was not like Sir Walter Scott.” Hearing no +more of him, I was prowling among the books in an ancient house, a rambling +old place with a ghost-room, where I found Tupper, and could not get +on with “Proverbial Philosophy.” Next I tried Tennyson, +and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music was audible, +a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be dethroned. +“Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is,” Shelley says. +I am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson +is; use has made him too familiar. The same hand has “raised +the Table Round again,” that has written the sacred book of friendship, +that has lulled us with the magic of the “Lotus Eaters,” +and the melody of “Tithonus.” He has made us move, +like his own Prince—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Among a world of ghosts,<br /> +And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut +and reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused +our patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion +but he has purged it and ennobled it, including “this of love.” +Truly, the Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most +exquisite, the most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, +and we may pity the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.</p> +<p>Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood. +It was not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one’s +self. But those exercises were seldom even written down; they +lived a little while in a memory which has lost them long ago. +I do remember me that I tried some of my attempts on my dear mother, +who said much what Dryden said to “Cousin Swift,” “You +will never be a poet,” a decision in which I straightway acquiesced. +For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite another. A good +deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and maidens only +kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity and their +ambition.</p> +<p>In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and +religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots +of the pen, I got no harm from “The Shorter Catechism,” +of which I remember little, and neither then nor now was or am able +to understand a single sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians +comprehended and stood aghast at justification, sanctification, adoption, +and effectual calling. These, apparently, were necessary processes +in the Scottish spiritual life. But we were not told what they +meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that we had not passed through +them. From most children, one trusts, Calvinism ran like water +off a duck’s back; unlucky were they who first absorbed, and later +were compelled to get rid of, “The Shorter Catechism!”</p> +<p>One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. +Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend +“a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! +People who really care for books <i>read all of them</i>. There +is no other course. Let this be a reply. No other answer +shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.</p> +<h3>II</h3> +<p>People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. +One may venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, +or her, first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books +there can be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of +all; after boyhood the bloom is off the literary rye. The first +parcel of these garrulities ended when the author left school, at about +the age of seventeen. One’s literary equipment seems to +have been then almost as complete as it ever will be, one’s tastes +definitely formed, one’s favourites already chosen. As long +as we live we hope to read, but we never can “recapture the first +fine careless rapture.” Besides, one begins to write, and +that is fatal. My own first essays were composed at school—for +other boys. Not long ago the gentleman who was then our English +master wrote to me, informing me he was my earliest public, and that +he had never credited my younger brother with the essays which that +unscrupulous lad (“I speak of him but brotherly”) was accustomed +to present for his consideration.</p> +<p>On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard’s Hall, +in the University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch +universities, and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard’s +Hall, after having been a <i>hospitium</i> for pilgrims, a home for +old ladies (about 1500), and a college in the University, was now a +kind of cross between a master’s house at school, and, as before +1750, a college. We had more liberty than schoolboys, less than +English undergraduates. In the Scotch universities the men live +scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at St. Andrews, have they +begun to dine together in hall. We had a common roof, common dinners, +wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket clubs, and started, +of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It was only a manuscript +affair, and was profusely illustrated. For the only time in my +life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my +work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor’s duty was +to write most of the magazine—to write essays, reviews (of books +by the professors, very severe), novels, short stories, poems, translations, +also to illustrate these, and to “fag” his friends for “copy” +and drawings. A deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, +to have been the chief characteristic of the periodical—flippancy +and an abundant use of the supernatural. These were the days of +Lord’ Lytton’s “Strange Story,” which I continue +to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord Lytton, +and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, +Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus and Plotinus.</p> +<p>These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became +evident enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, +that the philosopher’s stone was beyond the reach of the amateur. +Iamblichus is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young beginner +I would recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate and gruesome +of the school, for “real deevilry and pleesure,” while in +the wilderness of Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and lofty +speculations. Two winters in the Northern University, with the +seamy side of school life left behind, among the kindest of professors—Mr. +Sellar, Mr. Ferrier, Mr. Shairp—in the society of the warden, +Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear old friends, are the happiest time in +my life. This was true literary leisure, even if it was not too +well employed, and the <i>religio loci</i> should be a liberal education +in itself. We had debating societies—I hope I am now forgiven +for an attack on the character of Sir William Wallace, <i>latro quidam</i>, +as the chronicler calls him, “a certain brigand.” +But I am for ever writing about St. Andrews—writing inaccurately, +too, the Scotch critics declare. “Farewell,” we cried, +“dear city of youth and dream,” eternally dear and sacred.</p> +<p>Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning, guided to his +works by a parody which a lady wrote in our little magazine. Mr. +Browning was not a popular poet in 1861. His admirers were few, +a little people, but they were not then in the later mood of reverence, +they did not awfully question the oracles, as in after years. +They read, they admired, they applauded, on occasion they mocked, good-humouredly. +The book by which Mr. Browning was best known was the two green volumes +of “Men and Women.” In these, I still think, is the +heart of his genius beating most strenuously and with an immortal vitality. +Perhaps this, for its compass, is the collection of poetry the most +various and rich of modern English times, almost of any English times. +But just as Mr. Fitzgerald cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote +after 1842, so I have never been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm +for Mr. Browning’s work after “Men and Women.” +He seems to have more influence, though that influence is vague, on +persons who chiefly care for thought, than on those who chiefly care +for poetry. I have met a lady who had read “The Ring and +the Book” often, the “Lotus Eaters” not once. +Among such students are Mr. Browning’s disciples of the Inner +Court: I dwell but in the Court of the Gentiles. While we all—all +who attempt rhyme—have more or less consciously imitated the manner +of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. +Browning are uncommonly scarce. He is lucky enough not to have +had the seed of his flower stolen and sown everywhere till—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Once again the people<br /> +Called it but a weed.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough, who has many undergraduate +qualities. But his peculiar wistful scepticism in religion had +then no influence on such of us as were still happily in the ages of +faith. Anything like doubt comes less of reading, perhaps, than +of the sudden necessity which, in almost every life, puts belief on +her trial, and cries for an examination of the creeds hitherto held +upon authority, and by dint of use and wont. In a different way +one can hardly care for Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come +under the influence of Oxford. So Mr. Browning was the only poet +added to my pantheon at St. Andrews, though Macaulay then was admitted +and appeared to be more the true model of a prose writer than he seems +in the light of later reflection. Probably we all have a period +of admiring Carlyle almost exclusively. College essays, when the +essayist cares for his work, are generally based on one or the other. +Then they recede into the background. As for their thought, we +cannot for ever remain disciples. We begin to see how much that +looks like thought is really the expression of temperament, and how +individual a thing temperament is, how each of us must construct his +world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer and a synthesis +“in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.” +So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a “masterless +man” swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial Stoic +of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.</p> +<p>Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about “masters” +of thought like the history of philosophy. The professor of moral +philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar. +His lectures on “The History of Greek Philosophy” were an +admirable introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original +authorities, at Oxford. Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men’s +ideas so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we +had discovered the secret. We were physicists with Thales and +that pre-Socratic “company of gallant gentlemen” for whom +Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admiration. We were now Empedocleans, +now believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle. +In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently disintegrated +him in the next. “Amurath to Amurath succeeds,” as +Mr. T. H. Green used to say at Oxford. He himself became an Amurath, +a sultan of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that +bewildered clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere. At Oxford, when one +went there, one found Mr. Green already in the position of a leader +of thought, and of young men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured +on Aristotle, and of him eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, +“<i>He knows</i>! <i>he knows</i>!” What was it that +Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind already +sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from the tutor’s +noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack of translating +St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we then believed +to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not in the original German, but +in lectures and in translations. Reasoning from these inadequate +premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr. +Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in evolution, +the something within the wheels. But this was only a personal +impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations +in general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr. Green’s +pupils could generally write in his own language, more or less, and +could “envisage” things, as we said then, from his point +of view. To do this was believed, probably without cause, to be +useful in examinations. For one, I could never take it much more +seriously, never believed that “the Absolute,” as the <i>Oxford +Spectator</i> said, had really been “got into a corner.” +The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often has escaped +from that situation. Somewhere in an old notebook I believe I +have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with +Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps +he was the last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun +with Wycliffe, among whom Newman’s is a famous name, that were +successively accepted at Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing +a shrewd guess at the secret.</p> +<blockquote><p> “None the less<br /> +I still came out no wiser than I went.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their +hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar +views of theology and philosophy. Doubtless it was the same with +Socrates, with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe with them, +is the thing needful. But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, +we see this clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there is some mystery +in these men’s possession, some piece of knowledge, some method +of thinking which will lead us to certainty and to peace. Alas, +their secret is incommunicable, and there is no more a philosophic than +there is a royal road to the City.</p> +<p>This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the Book +of Human Life. But while much of education is still orally communicated +by lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found in +books, Greek or German, reach us through the hearing. There are +many pupils who can best be taught in this way; but, for one, if there +be aught that is desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if +I could, to go to the book for it.</p> +<p>Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one’s undergraduate +readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics, which +might not be escaped. Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in +moral thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression. +Probably politicians are the last people who read Aristotle’s +“Politics.” The work is, indeed, apt to disenchant +one with political life. It is melancholy to see the little Greek +states running the regular round—monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, +democracy in all its degrees, the “ultimate democracy” of +plunder, lawlessness, license of women, children, and slaves, and then +tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power. In politics, +too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for all. +There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal. +This is the lesson which Aristotle’s “Polities” impresses +on us, this and the impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on +mankind.</p> +<p>“Whate’er is best administered is best.” +These are some of the impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the +schools, the more or less inevitable “curricoolum,” as the +Scotch gentleman pronounced the word. But at Oxford, for most +men, the regular work of the schools is only a small part of the literary +education. People read, in different degrees, according to their +private tastes. There are always a few men, at least, who love +literary studies for their own sake, regardless of lectures and of “classes.” +In my own time I really believe you could know nothing which might not +“pay” in the schools and prove serviceable in examinations. +But a good deal depended on being able to use your knowledge by way +of literary illustration. Perhaps the cleverest of my own juniors, +since very well known in letters, did not use his own special vein, +even when he had the chance, in writing answers to questions in examinations. +Hence his academic success was much below his deserts. For my +own part, I remember my tutor saying, “Don’t write as if +you were writing for a penny paper.” Alas, it was “a +prediction, cruel, smart.” But, “as yet no sin was +dreamed.”</p> +<p>At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English +and Latin. This might have been good literary training, but I +fear the essays were not taken very seriously. The chief object +was to make the late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes. +But nobody ever succeeded. He was experienced in trash. +As for what may be called unacademic literature, there were not many +essays in that art. There have been very literary generations, +as when Corydon and Thyrsis “lived in Oxford as if it had been +a great country house;” so Corydon confessed. Probably many +of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr. Swinburne’s +early works were undergraduate poems. A later generation produced +“Love in Idleness,” a very pleasing volume. But the +gods had not made us poetical. In those days I remember picking +up, in the Union Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, “Atalanta +in Calydon,” by A. C. Swinburne. Only once had I seen Mr. +Swinburne’s name before, signing a brief tale in <i>Once a Week</i>. +“Atalanta” was a revelation; there was a new and original +poet here, a Balliol man, too. In my own mind “Atalanta” +remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr. Swinburne’s +many poems. He instantly became the easily parodied model of undergraduate +versifiers.</p> +<p>Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success. +As yet we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold’s verses. I fell +in love with them, one long vacation, and never fell out of love. +He is not, and cannot be, the poet of the wide world, but his charm +is all the more powerful over those whom he attracts and subdues. +He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford, and his “Scholar Gypsy” +is our “Lycidas.” At this time he was Professor of +Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just at the hour when wickets were pitched +on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at his humorous +prophecies of England’s fate, which are coming all too true. +So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be “cut,” +that we abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak. +For the rest there was no “literary movement” among contemporary +undergraduates. They read for the schools, and they rowed and +played cricket. We had no poets, except the stroke of the Corpus +boat, Mr. Bridges, and he concealed his courtship of the Muse. +Corpus is a small college, but Mr. Bridges pulled its boat to the proud +place of second on the river. B. N. C. was the head boat, and +even B. N. C. did Corpus bump. But the triumph was brief. +B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the foaming +grape, and bumped Corpus back. I think they went head next year, +but not that year. Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was +doing noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.</p> +<p>There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody +knew anybody who wrote in it. A comic journal was started; I remember +the pride with which when a freshman, I received an invitation to join +its councils as an artist. I was to do the caricatures of all +things. Now, methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits of whom I +have read. But the wits were unutterably disappointing, and the +whole thing died early and not lamented. Only one piece of academic +literature obtained and deserved success. This was <i>The Oxford +Spectator</i>, a most humorous little periodical, in shape and size +like Addison’s famous journal. The authors were Mr. Reginald +Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a +great athlete, who died early. There have been good periodicals +since; many amusing things occur in the <i>Echoes from the Oxford Magazine</i>, +but the <i>Spectator</i> was the flower of academic journals. +“When I look back to my own experience,” says the <i>Spectator</i>, +“I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon ‘the +mindful tablets of my soul.’ And yet not a scene, but a +fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought. The +wonderful scent of the meadow air just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, +and the gay colours of twenty boats along the shore, the poles all stretched +out from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of +‘ten seconds more,’ all down from the green barge to the +lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment is only typical of all +the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure are concentrated +there.”</p> +<p>Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure. +Things go wrong somehow. Life drops her happy mask. But +this has nothing to do with books.</p> +<p>About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care +to make. A man’s old self is so far away that he can speak +about it and its adventures almost as if he were speaking about another +who is dead. After taking one’s degree, and beginning to +write a little for publication, the topic has a tendency to become much +more personal. My last undergraduate literary discoveries were +of France and the Renaissance. Accidentally finding out that I +could read French, I naturally betook myself to Balzac. If you +read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to learn a good +many words. The literature of France has been much more popular +in England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat neglected. +There does seem to be something in French poetry which fails to please +“the German paste in our composition.” Mr. Matthew +Arnold, a disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appreciate French poetry. +A poet-critic has even remarked that the French language is nearly incapable +of poetry! We cannot argue in such matters, where all depends +on the taste and the ear.</p> +<p>Our ancestors, like the author of the “Faery Queen,” +translated and admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our +own time this taste seems a modish affectation. For one, I have +ever found an original charm in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken +great delight in Hugo’s amazing variety of music, in the romance +of Alfred de Musset, in the beautiful cameos of Gautier. What +is poetical, if not the “Song of Roland,” the only true +national epic since Homer? What is frank, natural verse, if not +that of the old <i>Pastourelles</i>? Where is there <i>naïveté</i> +of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in <i>Aucassin et Nicolette</i>? +In the long normally developed literature of France, so variously rich, +we find the nearest analogy to the literature of Greece, though that +of England contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more winningly +on the ear. France has no Shakespeare and no Milton; we have no +Molière and no “Song of Roland.” One star differs +from another in glory, but it is a fortunate moment when this planet +of France swims into our ken. Many of our generation saw it first +through Mr. Swinburne’s telescope, heard of it in his criticisms, +and are grateful to that watcher of the skies, even if we do not share +all his transports. There then arose at Oxford, out of old French, +and old oak, and old china, a “school” or “movement.” +It was æsthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris’s +wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public +“caught on,” as they say, to these delights. But, +except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at æsthetics, +and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than +fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped +about more than enough.</p> +<p>To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am specially bound in +gratitude—the late Mr. J. F. M’Lennan. Mr. M’Lennan +had the most acute and ingenious of minds which I have encountered. +His writings on early marriage and early religion were revelations which +led on to others. The topic of folklore, and the development of +custom and myths, is not generally attractive, to be sure. Only +a few people seem interested in that spectacle, so full of surprises—the +development of all human institutions, from fairy tales to democracy. +In beholding it we learn how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to +the people and to genius. The natural people, the folk, has supplied +us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: +and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, +nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic +mummery into gorgeous ritual. The world has been educated, but +not as man would have trained and taught it. “He led us +by a way we knew not,” led, and is leading us, we know not whither; +we follow in fear.</p> +<p>The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way +behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning +sands. He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where +the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many +of them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable. +But the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the +ways to that city whither mankind is wandering, and which it may never +win. We have a foreboding of a purpose which we know not, a sense +as of will, working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden end.</p> +<p>This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, +which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull. It may become +the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich +in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered +and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis. I am not +likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and +the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity. +But the poetry and the significance of them are apt to be hidden by +the enormous crowd of details. Only late we find the true meaning +of what seems like a mass of fantastic, savage eccentricities. +I very well remember the moment when it occurred to me, soon after taking +my degree, that the usual ideas about some of these matters were the +reverse of the truth, that the common theory had to be inverted. +The notion was “in the air,” it had already flashed on Mannhardt, +probably, but, like the White Knight in “Alice,” I claimed +it for “my own invention.”</p> +<p>These reminiscences and reflections have now been produced as far +as 1872, or thereabouts, and it is not my intention to pursue them further, +nor to speak of any living contemporaries who have not won their way +to the classical. In writing of friends and teachers at Oxford, +I have not ventured to express gratitude to those who still live, still +teach, still are the wisest and kindest friends of the hurrying generations. +It is a silence not of thanklessness, but of respect and devotion. +About others—contemporaries, or juniors by many years—who +have instructed, consoled, strengthened, and amused us, we must also +be silent.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER II: RECOLLECTIONS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</h2> +<blockquote><p>TUSITALA</p> +<p>We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he<br /> + Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of +the west<br /> +Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,<br /> + Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaëa crest.</p> +<p>Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,<br /> + Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world’s +delight,<br /> +Looks o’er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the +sails<br /> + Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and +the night.</p> +<p>Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow,<br /> + Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,<br /> +Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,<br /> + Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.</p> +<p>Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea,<br /> + Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent +tides<br /> +Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,<br /> + When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Before attempting to give any “reminiscences” of Mr. +Stevenson, it is right to observe that reminiscences of him can best +be found in his own works. In his essay on “Child’s +Play,” and in his “Child’s Garden of Verse,” +he gave to the world his vivid recollections of his imaginative infancy. +In other essays he spoke of his boyhood, his health, his dreams, his +methods of work and study. “The Silverado Squatters” +reveals part of his experience in America. The Parisian scenes +in “The Wrecker” are inspired by his sojourn in French Bohemia; +his journeys are recorded in “Travels with a Donkey” and +“An Inland Voyage”; while his South Sea sketches, which +appeared in periodicals, deal with his Oceanic adventures. He +was the most autobiographical of authors, with an egoism nearly as complete, +and to us as delightful, as the egoism of Montaigne. Thus, the +proper sources of information about the author of “Kidnapped” +are in his delightful books.</p> +<p>“John’s own John,” as Dr. Holmes says, may be very +unlike his neighbour’s John; but in the case of Mr. Stevenson, +his Louis was very similar to my Louis; I mean that, as he presents +his personality to the world in his writings, even so did that personality +appear to me in our intercourse. The man I knew was always a boy.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the lad was never +“gone.” Like Keats and Shelley, he was, and he looked, +of the immortally young. He and I were at school together, but +I was an elderly boy of seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of +“gytes,” as the members of the lowest form are called. +Like all Scotch people, we had a vague family connection; a great-uncle +of his, I fancy, married an aunt of my own, called for her beauty, “The +Flower of Ettrick.” So we had both heard; but these things +were before our day. A lady of my kindred remembers carrying Stevenson +about when he was “a rather peevish baby,” and I have seen +a beautiful photograph of him, like one of Raffael’s children, +taken when his years were three or four. But I never had heard +of his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the interests +of my health. Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the British +Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson. He looked as, in my eyes, +he always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, +smooth oval face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common, +large lucid eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot remember, if brown, +certainly light brown. On appealing to the authority of a lady, +I learn that brown <i>was</i> the hue. His colour was a trifle +hectic, as is not unusual at Mentone, but he seemed, under his big blue +cloak, to be of slender, yet agile frame. He was like nobody else +whom I ever met. There was a sort of uncommon celerity in changing +expression, in thought and speech. His cloak and Tyrolese hat +(he would admit the innocent impeachment) were decidedly dear to him. +On the frontier of Italy, why should he not do as the Italians do? +It would have been well for me if I could have imitated the wearing +of the cloak!</p> +<p>I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly favourable. +“Here,” I thought, “is one of your æsthetic +young men, though a very clever one.” What the talk was +about, I do not remember; probably of books. Mr. Stevenson afterwards +told me that I had spoken of Monsieur Paul de St. Victor, as a fine +writer, but added that “he was not a British sportsman.” +Mr. Stevenson himself, to my surprise, was unable to walk beyond a very +short distance, and, as it soon appeared, he thought his thread of life +was nearly spun. He had just written his essay, “Ordered +South,” the first of his published works, for his “Pentland +Rising” pamphlet was unknown, a boy’s performance. +On reading “Ordered South,” I saw, at once, that here was +a new writer, a writer indeed; one who could do what none of us, <i>nous +autres</i>, could rival, or approach. I was instantly “sealed +of the Tribe of Louis,” an admirer, a devotee, a fanatic, if you +please. At least my taste has never altered. From this essay +it is plain enough that the author (as is so common in youth, but with +better reason than many have) thought himself doomed. Most of +us have gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown +such a wise and gay acceptance of the apparently inevitable? We +parted; I remember little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty +piece of encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much +more of life than his senior will ever do. For he ran forth to +embrace life like a lover: <i>his</i> motto was never Lucy Ashton’s—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,<br /> +Easy live and quiet die.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford. I make +no hand of reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said, +with one exception, which is not going to be published. I heard +of him, writing essays in the <i>Portfolio</i> and the <i>Cornhill</i>, +those delightful views of life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so +vivid, so wise, so exquisite, which all should know. How we looked +for “R. L. S.” at the end of an article, and how devout +was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young one!</p> +<p>About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received +a brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, +in his essay on his old college magazine, he called “Glasgow Brown.” +What his real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never +knew. G. B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper. Would +I contribute? G. B. came to see me. Mr. Stevenson has described +him, <i>not</i> as I would have described him: like Mr. Bill Sikes’s +dog, I have the Christian peculiarity of not liking dogs “as are +not of my breed.” G. B.’s paper, <i>London</i>, was +to start next week. He had no writer of political leading articles. +Would I do a “leader”? But I was <i>not</i> in favour +of Lord Lytton’s Afghan policy. How could I do a Tory leader? +Well, I did a neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes! +I found presently some other scribes for G. B.</p> +<p>What a paper that was! I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls +of gold, in handfuls of bank-notes. Nobody ever read <i>London</i>, +or advertised in it, or heard of it. It was full of the most wonderfully +clever verses in old French forms. They were (it afterwards appeared) +by Mr. W. E. Henley. Mr. Stevenson himself astonished and delighted +the public of <i>London</i> (that is, the contributors) by his “New +Arabian Nights.” Nobody knew about them but ourselves, a +fortunate few. Poor G. B. died and Mr. Henley became the editor. +I may not name the contributors, the flower of the young lions, elderly +lions now, there is a new race. But one lion, a distinguished +and learned lion, said already that fiction, not essay, was Mr. Stevenson’s +field. Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say whether I +would be more sorry to lose <i>Virginibus Puerisque</i> and “Studies +of Men and Books,” or “Treasure Island” and “Catriona.” +With the decease of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, +<i>London</i> struggled and disappeared.</p> +<p>Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Saville Club, +in Saville Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking-rooms. +Here, or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was +Two Men. I said “‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Poe,” +and declared that it would never do. But his “Brownies,” +in a vision of the night, showed him a central scene, and he wrote “Jekyll +and Hyde.” My “friend of these days and of all days,” +Mr. Charles Longman, sent me the manuscript. In a very commonplace +London drawing-room, at 10.30 P.M., I began to read it. Arriving +at the place where Utterson the lawyer, and the butler wait outside +the Doctor’s room, I threw down the manuscript and fled in a hurry. +I had no taste for solitude any more. The story won its great +success, partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be), more by +its terrible, lucid, visionary power. I remember Mr. Stevenson +telling me, at this time, that he was doing some “regular crawlers,” +for this purist had a boyish habit of slang, and I <i>think</i> it was +he who called Julius Cæsar “the howlingest cheese who ever +lived.” One of the “crawlers” was “Thrawn +Janet”; after “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (but +certainly <i>after</i> it), to my taste, it seems the most wonderful +story of the “supernatural” in our language.</p> +<p>Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey, Montépin, +and, of course, Gaboriau. There was nothing of the “cultured +person” about him. Concerning a novel dear to culture, he +said that he would die by my side, in the last ditch, proclaiming it +the worst fiction in the world. I make haste to add that I have +only known two men of letters as free as Mr. Stevenson, not only from +literary jealousy, but from the writer’s natural, if exaggerated, +distaste for work which, though in his own line, is very different in +aim and method from his own. I do not remember another case in +which he dispraised any book. I do remember his observations on +a novel then and now very popular, but not to his taste, nor, indeed, +by any means, impeccable, though stirring; his censure and praise were +both just. From his occasional fine efforts, the author of this +romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of brushwood, of ineffectual +matter. It was so, no doubt, as the writer spoken of would be +ready to acknowledge. But he was an improviser of genius, and +Mr. Stevenson was a conscious artist.</p> +<p>Of course we did by no means always agree in literary estimates; +no two people do. But when certain works—in his line in +one way—were stupidly set up as rivals of his, the person who +was most irritated was not he, but his equally magnanimous contemporary. +There was no thought of rivalry or competition in either mind. +The younger romancists who arose after Mr. Stevenson went to Samoa were +his friends by correspondence; from them, who never saw his face, I +hear of his sympathy and encouragement. Every writer knows the +special temptations of his tribe: they were temptations not even felt, +I do believe, by Mr. Stevenson. His heart was far too high, his +nature was in every way as generous as his hand was open. It is +in thinking of these things that one feels afresh the greatness of the +world’s loss; for “a good heart is much more than style,” +writes one who knew him only by way of letters.</p> +<p>It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque +story together. There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.</p> +<p>“We’ll extract information from him,” I said.</p> +<p>“How?”</p> +<p>“With corkscrews.”</p> +<p>But the mere suggestion of such a process was terribly distasteful +to him; not that I really meant to go to these extreme lengths. +We never, of course, could really have worked together; and, his maladies +increasing, he became more and more a wanderer, living at Bournemouth, +at Davos, in the Grisons, finally, as all know, in Samoa. Thus, +though we corresponded, not unfrequently, I never was of the inner circle +of his friends. Among men there were school or college companions, +or companions of Paris or Fontainebleau, cousins, like Mr. R. A. M. +Stevenson, or a stray senior, like Mr. Sidney Colvin. From some +of them, or from Mr. Stevenson himself, I have heard tales of “the +wild Prince and Poins.” That he and a friend travelled utterly +without baggage, buying a shirt where a shirt was needed, is a fact, +and the incident is used in “The Wrecker.” Legend +says that once he and a friend <i>did</i> possess a bag, and also, nobody +ever knew why, a large bottle of scent. But there was no room +for the bottle in the bag, so Mr. Stevenson spilled the whole contents +over the other man’s head, taking him unawares, that nothing might +be wasted. I think the tale of the endless staircase, in “The +Wrecker,” is founded on fact, so are the stories of the <i>atelier</i>, +which I have heard Mr. Stevenson narrate at the Oxford and Cambridge +Club. For a nocturnal adventure, in the manner of the “New +Arabian Nights,” a learned critic already spoken of must be consulted. +It is not my story. In Paris, at a café, I remember that +Mr. Stevenson heard a Frenchman say the English were cowards. +He got up and slapped the man’s face.</p> +<p>“<i>Monsieur, vous m’avez frappé</i>!” said +the Gaul.</p> +<p>“<i>A ce qu’il parait</i>,” said the Scot, and +there it ended. He also told me that years ago he was present +at a play, I forget what play, in Paris, where the moral hero exposes +a woman “with a history.” He got up and went out, +saying to himself:</p> +<p>“What a play! what a people!”</p> +<p>“<i>Ah, Monsieur, vous êtes bien jeune</i>!” said +an old French gentleman.</p> +<p>Like a right Scot, Mr. Stevenson was fond of “our auld ally +of France,” to whom our country and our exiled kings owed so much.</p> +<p>I rather vaguely remember another anecdote. He missed his train +from Edinburgh to London, and his sole portable property was a return +ticket, a meerschaum pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne’s poems. +The last he found unmarketable; the pipe, I think, he made merchandise +of, but somehow his provender for the day’s journey consisted +in one bath bun, which he could not finish.</p> +<p>These trivial tales illustrate a period in his life and adventures +which I only know by rumour. Our own acquaintance was, to a great +degree, literary and bookish. Perhaps it began “with a slight +aversion,” but it seemed, like madeira, to be ripened and improved +by his long sea voyage; and the news of his death taught me, at least, +the true nature of the affection which he was destined to win. +Indeed, our acquaintance was like the friendship of a wild singing bird +and of a punctual, domesticated barn-door fowl, laying its daily “article” +for the breakfast-table of the citizens. He often wrote to me +from Samoa, sometimes with news of native manners and folklore. +He sent me a devil-box, the “luck” of some strange island, +which he bought at a great price. After parting with its “luck,” +or fetish (a shell in a curious wooden box), the island was unfortunate, +and was ravaged by measles.</p> +<p>I occasionally sent out books needed for Mr. Stevenson’s studies, +of which more will be said. But I must make it plain that, in +the body, we met but rarely. His really intimate friends were +Mr. Colvin and Mr. Baxter (who managed the practical side of his literary +business between them); Mr. Henley (in partnership with whom he wrote +several plays); his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson; and, among other +<i>literati</i>, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr Walter +Pollock, knew him well. The best portrait of Mr. Stevenson that +I know is by Sir. W. B. Richmond, R.A., and is in that gentleman’s +collection of contemporaries, with the effigies of Mr. Holman Hunt, +Mr. William Morris, Mr. Browning, and others. It is unfinished, +owing to an illness which stopped the sittings, and does not show the +subject at his best, physically speaking. There is also a brilliant, +slight sketch, almost a caricature, by Mr. Sargent. It represents +Mr. Stevenson walking about the room in conversation.</p> +<p>The people I have named, or some of them, knew Mr. Stevenson more +intimately than I can boast of doing. Unlike each other, opposites +in a dozen ways, we always were united by the love of letters, and of +Scotland, our dear country. He was a patriot, yet he spoke his +mind quite freely about Burns, about that apparent want of heart in +the poet’s amours, which our countrymen do not care to hear mentioned. +Well, perhaps, for some reasons, it had to be mentioned once, and so +no more of it.</p> +<p>Mr. Stevenson possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power +of making other men fall in love with him. I mean that he excited +a passionate admiration and affection, so much so that I verily believe +some men were jealous of other men’s place in his liking. +I once met a stranger who, having become acquainted with him, spoke +of him with a touching fondness and pride, his fancy reposing, as it +seemed, in a fond contemplation of so much genius and charm. What +was so taking in him? and how is one to analyse that dazzling surface +of pleasantry, that changeful shining humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness; +beneath which beat the most kind and tolerant of hearts?</p> +<p>People were fond of him, and people were proud of him: his achievements, +as it were, sensibly raised their pleasure in the world, and, to them, +became parts of themselves. They warmed their hands at that centre +of light and heat. It is not every success which has these beneficent +results. We see the successful sneered at, decried, insulted, +even when success is deserved. Very little of all this, hardly +aught of all this, I think, came in Mr. Stevenson’s way. +After the beginning (when the praises of his earliest admirers were +irritating to dull scribes) he found the critics fairly kind, I believe, +and often enthusiastic. He was so much his own severest critic +that he probably paid little heed to professional reviewers. In +addition to his “Rathillet,” and other MSS. which he destroyed, +he once, in the Highlands, long ago, lost a portmanteau with a batch +of his writings. Alas, that he should have lost or burned anything! +“King’s chaff,” says our country proverb, “is +better than other folk’s corn.”</p> +<p>I have remembered very little, or very little that I can write, and +about our last meeting, when he was so near death, in appearance, and +so full of courage—how can I speak? His courage was a strong +rock, not to be taken or subdued. When unable to utter a single +word, his pencilled remarks to his attendants were pithy and extremely +characteristic. This courage and spiritual vitality made one hope +that he would, if he desired it, live as long as Voltaire, that reed +among oaks. There were of course, in so rare a combination of +characteristics, some which were not equally to the liking of all. +He was highly original in costume, but, as his photographs are familiar, +the point does not need elucidation. Life was a drama to him, +and he delighted, like his own British admirals, to do things with a +certain air. He observed himself, I used to think, as he observed +others, and “saw himself” in every part he played. +There was nothing of the <i>cabotin</i> in this self-consciousness; +it was the unextinguished childish passion for “playing at things” +which remained with him. I have a theory that all children possess +genius, and that it dies out in the generality of mortals, abiding only +with people whose genius the world is forced to recognise. Mr. +Stevenson illustrates, and perhaps partly suggested, this private philosophy +of mine.</p> +<p>I have said very little; I have no skill in reminiscences, no art +to bring the living aspect of the man before those who never knew him. +I faintly seem to see the eager face, the light nervous figure, the +fingers busy with rolling cigarettes; Mr. Stevenson talking, listening, +often rising from his seat, standing, walking to and fro, always full +of vivid intelligence, wearing a mysterious smile. I remember +one pleasant dark afternoon, when he told me many tales of strange adventures, +narratives which he had heard about a murderous lonely inn, somewhere +in the States. He was as good to hear as to read. I do not +recollect much of that delight in discussion, in controversy, which +he shows in his essay on conversation, where he describes, I believe, +Mr. Henley as “Burley,” and Mr. Symonds as “Opalstein.” +He had great pleasure in the talk of the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin, +which was both various and copious. But in these <i>noctes coenaeque +deum</i> I was never a partaker. In many topics, such as angling, +golf, cricket, whereon I am willingly diffuse, Mr. Stevenson took no +interest. He was very fond of boating and sailing in every kind; +he hazarded his health by long expeditions among the fairy isles of +ocean, but he “was not a British sportsman,” though for +his measure of strength a good pedestrian, a friend of the open air, +and of all who live and toil therein.</p> +<p>As to his literary likings, they appear in his own confessions. +He revelled in Dickens, but, about Thackeray—well, I would rather +have talked to somebody else! To my amazement, he was of those +(I think) who find Thackeray “cynical.” “He +takes you into a garden, and then pelts you with”—horrid +things! Mr. Stevenson, on the other hand, had a free admiration +of Mr. George Meredith. He did not so easily forgive the <i>longueus</i> +and lazinesses of Scott, as a Scot should do. He read French much; +Greek only in translations.</p> +<p>Literature was, of course, his first love, but he was actually an +advocate at the Scottish Bar, and, as such, had his name on a brazen +door-plate. Once he was a competitor for a Chair of Modern History +in Edinburgh University; he knew the romantic side of Scottish history +very well. In his novel, “Catriona,” the character +of James Mohr Macgregor is wonderfully divined. Once I read some +unpublished letters of Catriona’s unworthy father, written when +he was selling himself as a spy (and lying as he spied) to the Hanoverian +usurper. Mr. Stevenson might have written these letters for James +Mohr; they might be extracts from “Catriona.”</p> +<p>In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a forgotten romance +of Prince Charles’s hidden years, and longed that Mr. Stevenson +should retell it. There was a treasure, an authentic treasure; +there were real spies, a real assassin; a real, or reported, rescue +of a lovely girl from a fire at Strasbourg, by the Prince. The +tale was to begin <i>sur le pont d’Avignon</i>: a young Scotch +exile watching the Rhone, thinking how much of it he could cover with +a salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or Beauly. To him enter another +shady tramping exile, Blairthwaite, a murderer. And so it was +to run on, as the author’s fancy might lead him, with Alan Breck +and the Master for characters. At last, in unpublished MSS. I +found an actual Master of Ballantrae, a Highland chief—noble, +majestically handsome—and a paid spy of England! All these +papers I sent out to Samoa, too late. The novel was to have been +dedicated to me, and that chance of immortality is gone, with so much +else.</p> +<p>Mr. Stevenson’s last letters to myself were full of his concern +for a common friend of ours, who was very ill. Depressed himself, +Mr. Stevenson wrote to this gentleman—why should I not mention +Mr. James Payn?—with consoling gaiety. I attributed his +depression to any cause but his own health, of which he rarely spoke. +He lamented the “ill-staged fifth act of life”; he, at least, +had no long hopeless years of diminished force to bear.</p> +<p>I have known no man in whom the pre-eminently manly virtues of kindness, +courage, sympathy, generosity, helpfulness, were more beautifully conspicuous +than in Mr. Stevenson, no man so much loved—it is not too strong +a word—by so many and such various people. He was as unique +in character as in literary genius.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER III: RAB’S FRIEND</h2> +<p>To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John Brown, a man should +have known him well and long, and should remember much of that old generation +of Scotchmen to whom the author of “Rab and his Friends” +belonged. But that generation has departed. One by one these +wits and scholars of the North, these <i>epigoni</i> who were not, indeed, +of the heroes, but who had seen and remembered Scott and Wilson, have +passed away. Aytoun and Carlyle and Dr. Burton, and last, Dr. +Brown, are gone. Sir Theodore Martin alone is left. In her +memoir of Dr. Burton—the historian of Scotland, and author of +“The Book-hunter”—Mrs. Burton remarks that, in her +husband’s later days, only Dr. John Brown and Professor Blackie +remained of all her husband’s ancient friends and coevals, of +all who remembered Lockhart, and Hogg, and their times. But many +are left who knew Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than the +author of this notice. I can hardly say when I first became acquainted +with him, probably it was in my childhood. Ever since I was a +boy, certainly, I used to see him at intervals, especially in the Christmas +vacations. But he seldom moved from Edinburgh, except in summer, +which he frequently passed in the country house of certain friends of +his, whose affection made much of the happiness of his latest years, +and whose unfailing kindness attended him in his dying hours. +Living always in Scotland, Dr. Brown was seen but rarely by his friends +who resided in England. Thus, though Dr. Brown’s sweetness +of disposition and charm of manner, his humour, and his unfailing sympathy +and encouragement, made one feel toward him as to a familiar friend, +yet, of his actual life I saw but little, and have few reminiscences +to contribute. One can only speak of that singular geniality of +his, that temper of goodness and natural tolerance and affection, which, +as Scotsmen best know, is not universal among the Scots. Our race +does not need to pray, like the mechanic in the story, that Providence +will give us “a good conceit of ourselves.” But we +must acknowledge that the Scotch temper is critical if not captious, +argumentative, inclined to look at the seamy side of men and of their +performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than on merits and +virtues. An example of these blemishes of the Scotch disposition, +carried to an extreme degree in the nature of a man of genius, is offered +to the world in the writings and “Reminiscences” of Mr. +Carlyle.</p> +<p>Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of feeling. He +had no mawkish toleration of things and people intolerable, but he preferred +not to turn his mind that way. His thoughts were with the good, +the wise, the modest, the learned, the brave of times past, and he was +eager to catch a reflection of their qualities in the characters of +the living, of all with whom he came into contact. He was, for +example, almost optimistic in his estimate of the work of young people +in art or literature. From everything that was beautiful or good, +from a summer day by the Tweed, or from the eyes of a child, or from +the humorous saying of a friend, or from treasured memories of old Scotch +worthies, from recollections of his own childhood, from experience of +the stoical heroism of the poor, he seemed to extract matter for pleasant +thoughts of men and the world, and nourishment for his own great and +gentle nature. I have never known any man to whom other men seemed +so dear—men dead, and men living. He gave his genius to +knowing them, and to making them better known, and his unselfishness +thus became not only a great personal virtue, but a great literary charm. +When you met him, he had some “good story” or some story +of goodness to tell—for both came alike to him, and his humour +was as unfailing as his kindness. There was in his face a singular +charm, blended, as it were, of the expressions of mirth and of patience. +Being most sensitive to pain, as well as to pleasure, he was an exception +to that rule of Rochefoucauld’s—“<i>nous avons tous +assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui</i>.” <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a></p> +<p>He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of +his own lot were heavy enough. They saddened him; but neither +illness, nor his poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so +unselfish. He appeared not to have lost that anodyne and consolation +of religious hope, which had been the strength of his forefathers, and +was his best inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen. Wherever +he came, he was welcome; people felt glad when they had encountered +him in the streets—the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every +one knows every one by sight—and he was at least as joyously received +by the children and the dogs as by the grown-up people of every family. +A friend has kindly shown me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown’s +love of dogs, his interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached +to him, was evinced in the very last hours of his life. But enough +has been said, in general terms, about the character of “the beloved +physician,” as Dr. Brown was called in Edinburgh, and a brief +account may be given, in some detail, of his life and ways.</p> +<p>Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking +little towns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland. These +towns have no great beauty that they should be admired by strangers, +but the natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached to +their “gray hills,” and to the Tweed, so beautiful where +man’s greed does not pollute it, that the Border people are all +in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer, loved the divine Enipeus. +We hold it “far the fairest of the floods that run upon the earth.” +How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown, and how well he knew +and could express its legendary magic, its charm woven of countless +ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorcery of old stories, +may be understood by readers of his essay on “Minchmoor.” +<a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a> The father +of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage of ministers of the sect called +Seceders. To explain who the Seceders were, it would be necessary +to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch ecclesiastical history. +The minister was proud of being not only a “Seceder” but +a “Burgher.” He inherited, to be brief, the traditions +of a most spiritually-minded and most spirited set of men, too much +bent, it may appear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of +opinions, but certainly most true to themselves and to their own ideals +of liberty and of faith. Dr. Brown’s great-grandfather had +been a shepherd boy, who taught himself Greek that he might read the +New Testament; who walked twenty-four miles—leaving his folded +sheep in the night—to buy the precious volume in St. Andrews, +and who, finally, became a teacher of much repute among his own people. +Of Dr. Brown’s father, he himself wrote a most touching and beautiful +account in his “Letter to John Cairns, D.D.” This +essay contains, perhaps, the very finest passages that the author ever +penned. His sayings about his own childhood remind one of the +manner of Lamb, without that curious fantastic touch which is of the +essence of Lamb’s style. The following lines, for example, +are a revelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, +with almost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking +at what is above them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, +its ‘red sodgers’ and lady-birds, and all its queer things; +<i>their world is about three feet high</i>, and they are more often +stooping than gazing up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or +cared to see, the ceilings of the rooms in the manse at Biggar.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like +in so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomena +of the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes—the +“queer things” of their low-lying world. In this essay +on his father, Dr. Brown has written lines about a child’s first +knowledge of death, which seem as noteworthy as Steele’s famous +passage about his father’s death and his own half-conscious grief +and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottish funeral—the funeral +of his own mother—as he saw it with the eyes of a boy of five +years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months—</p> +<blockquote><p>“leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight—the +crowding horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse +. . . Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers, +was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the unrolling +of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often enough seen +since. My father took the one at the head, and also another much +smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he had caused to +be placed there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand. I twisted +it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the burial men with +their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it rested at the bottom +it was too far down for me to see it. The grave was made very +deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might hold us all. +My father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed by the rest. +This was too much. I now saw what was meant, and held on and fixed +my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some difficulty in forcing +open my small fingers; he let the little black cord drop, and I remember, +in my misery and anger, seeing its open end disappearing in the gloom.” +<a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a></p> +</blockquote> +<p>The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender, +might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers +that way. He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying +and observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection +of fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways +not inferior to the romances of Scott. When the third volume of +Essays was published, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who +apparently had no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did +not write a novel. He was by that time over seventy years of age, +and, though none guessed it, within a few weeks of his death. +What he might have done, had he given himself to literature only, it +is impossible to guess. But he caused so much happiness, and did +so much good, in that gentle profession of healing which he chose, and +which brought him near to many who needed consolation more than physic, +that we need not forget his deliberate choice. Literature had +only his <i>horae subsecivae</i>, as he said: <i>Subseciva quaedam tempora +quae ego perire non patior</i>, as Cicero writes, “shreds and +waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost.”</p> +<p>The kind of life which Dr. Brown’s father and his people lived +at Biggar, the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on +the real aim of existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps +rare now, even in rural Scotland. We are less obedient than of +old to the motto of that ring found on Magus Moor, where Archbishop +Shairp was murdered, <i>Remember upon Dethe</i>. If any reader +has not yet made the acquaintance of Dr. Brown’s works, one might +counsel him to begin with the “Letter to John Cairns, D.D.,” +the fragment of biography and autobiography, the description of the +fountainheads from which the genius of the author flowed. In his +early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a man who, from +his son’s affectionate description, seems to have confined a fiery +and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and Burgher theology. +When the father received a call to the “Rose Street Secession +Church,” in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that ancient +Scottish seminary, the High School—the school where Scott was +taught not much Latin and no Greek worth mentioning. Scott was +still alive and strong in those days, and Dr. Brown describes how he +and his school companions would take off their hats to the Shirra as +he passed in the streets.</p> +<p>“Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power; +had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store +farmer, come of gentle blood—‘a stout, blunt carle,’ +as he says of himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man +of the hills—a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. +On his broad and stooping shoulders was set that head which, with Shakespeare’s +and Bonaparte’s, is the best known in all the world.” +Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street. I do not know whether +the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantly in the direction +of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of making pilgrimage to Castle +Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott’s “dear old friend,”—his +dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown’s schoolboy days, one knows little—days +when “Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the +High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only +lovers and boys know how or why.” Concerning the doctor’s +character, he has left it on record that he liked a dog-fight. +“‘A dog-fight,’ shouted Bob, and was off, and so was +I, both of us all hot, praying that it might not be over before we were +up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts, not Walton) says they +‘delight’ in it, and for the best of all reasons; and boys +are not cruel because they like to see the fight. This is a very +different thing from a love of making dogs fight.” And this +was the most famous of all dog-fights—since the old Irish Brehons +settled the laws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be done +if a child interfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man—for +this was the dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced to his historian.</p> +<p>Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical student +and a clerk at Minto Hospital. How he renewed his acquaintance +there, and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it is +superfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all has read that story, +and most readers not without tears. As a medical student in Edinburgh, +Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the famous surgeon—a +friendship only closed by death. I only saw them once together, +a very long time ago, and then from the point of view of a patient. +These occasions are not agreeable, and patients, like the old cock which +did not crow when plucked, are apt to be “very much absorbed”; +but Dr. Brown’s attitude toward the man whom he regarded with +the reverence of a disciple, as well as with the affection of a friend, +was very remarkable.</p> +<p>When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistant +to a surgeon in Chatham. It must have been when he was at Chatham +that a curious event occurred. Many years later, Charles Dickens +was in Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with +some Edinburgh people. Dickens began to speak about the panic +which the cholera had caused in England: how ill some people had behaved. +As a contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died, +deserted by every one except a young physician. Some one, however, +ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor +asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient’s +death, but quite untouched by the general panic. “Why, that +was Dr. John Brown,” one of the guests observed; and it seems +that, thus early in his career, the doctor had been setting an example +of the courage and charity of his profession. After a year spent +in Chatham, he returned to Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his +life, busy partly with his art of healing, partly with literature. +He lived in Rutland Street, near the railway station, by which Edinburgh +is approached from the west, and close to Princes Street, the chief +street of the town, separated by a green valley, once a loch, from the +high Castle Rock. It was the room in which his friends were accustomed +to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of interest it was. In his long +life, the doctor had gathered round him many curious relics of artists +and men of letters; a drawing of a dog by Turner I remember particularly, +and a copy of “Don Juan,” in the first edition, with Byron’s +manuscript notes. Dr. Brown had a great love and knowledge of +art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he had very many friends +among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray. Dr. +Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid little grotesques, rough +sketches of dogs and men. One or two of them are engraved in the +little paper-covered booklets in which some of his essays were separately +published—booklets which he was used to present to people who +came to see him and who were interested in all that he did. I +remember some vivacious grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers +when we were schoolboys. These little things were carefully treasured +by boys who knew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of sustaining +a conversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier and other mysteries +important to youth. He was a bibliophile—a taste which he +inherited from his father, who “began collecting books when he +was twelve, and was collecting to his last hours.”</p> +<p>The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was +kind enough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, “Poems,” +by Mr. Ruskin. Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his +old friend; in no other way were it easy to procure writings which the +author withdrew from publication, if, indeed, they ever were, properly +speaking, published. Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all men, +and to all boys. He “had a word for every one,” as +poor people say, and a word to the point, for he was as much at home +with the shepherd on the hills, or with the angler between Hollylea +and Clovenfords, as with the dusty book-hunter, or the doggy young Border +yeoman, or the child who asked him to “draw her a picture,” +or the friend of genius famous through all the world, Thackeray, when +he “spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things.”</p> +<p>Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way +of compositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage. His +studies are usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced +with singular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the tradition +of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who, themselves, +had listened attentively to those who went before them. Since +Scott, these ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no such +attentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown. His +paper called “Mystifications,” a narrative of the pranks +of Miss Stirling Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and +quaint society of Scotland sixty years ago. Scotland, or at least +Scottish society, is now only English society—a little narrower, +a little prouder, sometimes even a little duller. But old people +of position spoke the old Scotch tongue sixty years ago, and were full +of wonderful genealogies, full of reminiscences of the “’45,” +and the adventures of the Jacobites. The very last echoes of that +ancient world are dying now from memory, like the wide reverberations +of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on the day when Prince +Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all through Scotland.</p> +<p>The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these +old raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed +down, unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers. Scott reaped a +full, late harvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; +Dr. Brown came as a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales +of “A Jacobite Family” which are published in the last volume +of his essays. When he was an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. +Brown chiefly studied and best wrote of the following topics: passages +and characters of humour and pathos which he encountered in his life +and profession; children, dogs, Border scenery, and fellow-workers in +life and science. Under one or other of these categories all his +best compositions might be arranged. The most famous and most +exquisite of all his works in the first class is the unrivalled “Rab +and his Friends”—a study of the stoicism and tenderness +of the Lowland character worthy of Scott. In a minor way the little +paper on “Jeems,” the door-keeper in a Dissenting house +of the Lord, is interesting to Scotch people, though it must seem a +rather curious revelation to all others. “Her last Half-crown” +is another study of the honesty that survived in a starving and outcast +Scotch girl, when all other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue, had +gone before her character to some place where, let us hope, they may +rejoin her; for if we are to suffer for the vices which have abandoned +us, may we not get some credit for the virtues that we have abandoned, +but that once were ours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions unfulfilled? +“The Black Dwarf’s Bones” is a sketch of the misshapen +creature from whom Scott borrowed the character that gives a name to +one of his minor Border stories. The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie +he was called among men) was fond of poetry, but hated Burns. +He was polite to the fair, but classed mankind at large with his favourite +aversions: ghosts, fairies, and robbers. There was this of human +about the Black Dwarf, that “he hated folk that are aye gaun to +dee, and never do’t.” The village beauties were wont +to come to him for a Judgment of Paris on their charms, and he presented +each with a flower, which was of a fixed value in his standard of things +beautiful. One kind of rose, the prize of the most fair, he only +gave thrice. Paris could not have done his dooms more courteously, +and, if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, and lotus, as prizes, +he might have pleased all the three Goddesses; Troy still might be standing, +and the lofty house of King Priam.</p> +<p>Among Dr. Brown’s papers on children, that called “Pet +Marjorie” holds the highest place. Perhaps certain passages +are “wrote too sentimentally,” as Marjorie Fleming herself +remarked about the practice of many authors. But it was difficult +to be perfectly composed when speaking of this wonderful fairy-like +little girl, whose affection was as warm as her humour and genius were +precocious. “Infant phenomena” are seldom agreeable, +but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so kind, that we cease +to regard her as an intellectual “phenomenon.” Her +memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little +Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, +and who died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.</p> +<p>It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming; every +one knows about her and her studies: “Isabella is teaching me +to make simme colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c.” +Here is a Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness: +“‘Macbeth’ is a pretty composition, but awful one.” +Again, “I never read sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes +and my Bible.” “‘Tom Jones’ and Gray’s +‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ are both excellent, and +much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men.” Her +Calvinistic belief in “<i>unquestionable</i> fire and brimston” +is unhesitating, but the young theologian appears to have substituted +“unquestionable” for “unquenchable.” There +is something humorous in the alteration, as if Marjorie refused to be +put off with an “excellent family substitute” for fire and +brimstone, and demanded the “unquestionable” article, no +other being genuine, please observe trade mark.</p> +<p>Among Dr. Brown’s contributions to the humorous study of dogs, +“Rab,” of course, holds the same place as Marjorie among +his sketches of children. But if his “Queen Mary’s +Child Garden,” the description of the little garden in which Mary +Stuart did <i>not</i> play when a child, is second to “Marjorie,” +so “Our Dogs” is a good second to “Rab.” +Perhaps Dr. Brown never wrote anything more mirthful than his description +of the sudden birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly +mongrel, a cur of low degree.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones +in the small gardens before his own and the neighbouring doors. +Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man—<i>torvo +vultu</i>—was, by law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, +and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp +of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day, his gate being open, +in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had +two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which +on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, +and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with +his shovelling nose, when S. spied him through the inner glass door, +and was out upon him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific <i>gowl</i>. +I watched them. Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and +an eye more torve than Scrymgeour’s, who, retreating without reserve, +fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. +Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and, +returning, finished his bone-planting at his leisure; the enemy, who +had scuttled behind the glass door, glared at him. From this moment +Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all +. . . That very evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door’s dog, +a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To him Toby paid a visit that +very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say, +‘Come on, Macduff’; but Macduff did not come on.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change +of character on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that “no +one was ever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army.” +I am sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be very much +attached to cats. I never heard him say anything against cats, +or, indeed, against anybody; but there are passages in his writings +which tend to show that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far +from regarding cats as “the higher vermin.” He tells +a story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a victorious cat, which, entrenched +in a drain, defeated three dogs with severe loss, and finally escaped +unharmed from her enemies. Dr. Brown’s family gloried in +the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whose cousin (Auld +Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers. Dr. Brown was much interested +in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only matched by that of the +mother of Candide, and, at one time, threatened to result in the extinction +of this branch of the House of Pepper. Dr. Brown had remarked, +and my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is not game, his +apparent lack of courage arises “from kindness of heart.”</p> +<p>Among Dr. Brown’s landscapes, as one may call his descriptions +of scenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch scenery, +“Minchmoor” is the most important. He had always been +a great lover of the Tweed. The walk which he commemorates in +“Minchmoor” was taken, if I am not mistaken, in company +with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, +and author of one of the most beautiful of Tweedside songs, a modern +“Bush aboon Traquair:”—</p> +<blockquote><p> “And what saw ye there,<br /> + At the bush aboon Traquair;<br /> +Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?<br /> + I heard the cushie croon<br /> + Thro’ the gowden afternoon,<br /> +And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o’ Tweed.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which +Dr. Brown took in the summer afternoon. Within a few miles, many +places famous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by which +Montrose’s men fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House, with +the bears on its gates, as on the portals of the Baron of Bradwardine; +Williamhope, where Scott and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted +and went their several ways. From the crest of the road you see +all the Border hills, the Maiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, +the Dunion, the Windburg, and so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm +Tower, where Scott lay when a child, and clapped his hands at the flashes +of the lightning, <i>haud sine Dis animosus infans</i>, like Horace.</p> +<p>From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of +Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the “dowie dens,” +and so, “through the pomp of cultivated nature,” as Wordsworth +says, to the railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back +Tamlane from the queen of the fairies. All this country was familiar +to Dr. Brown, and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was +living at Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott’s +home while he was happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought +of building Abbotsford. At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had +long ceased to write, and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, +in which the world seemed very dark to him. I have been allowed +to read some letters which he wrote in one of these intervals of depression. +With his habitual unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, +and, though he did not care for society at such times, he said nothing +of his own condition that could distress his correspondent. In +the last year of his life, everything around him seemed to brighten: +he was unusually well, he even returned to his literary work, and saw +his last volume of collected essays through the press. They were +most favourably received, and the last letters which I had from him +spoke of the pleasure which this success gave him. Three editions +of his book (“John Leech, and Other Essays”) were published +in some six weeks. All seemed to go well, and one might even have +hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take up his pen again. +But his strength was less than we had hoped. A cold settled on +his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he grew rapidly +weaker. He had little suffering at the end, and his mind remained +unclouded. No man of letters could be more widely regretted, for +he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people who +only met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear and familiar.</p> +<p>In one of his very latest writings, “On Thackeray’s Death,” +Dr. Brown told people (what some of them needed, and still need to be +told) how good, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer—our +greatest master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott. Some +of the lines Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: +“He looked always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and +his young, almost infantile face”—a face very pale, and +yet radiant, in his last years, and mildly lit up with eyes full of +kindness, and softened by sorrow. In his last year, Mr. Swinburne +wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in which there seems something of the +poet’s prophetic gift, and a voice sounds as of a welcome home:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,<br /> + Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed<br /> + With joy’s bright raiment, and with love’s +sweet bread,—<br /> +The whitest flock of earth’s maternal fold,<br /> +None there might wear about his brows enrolled<br /> + A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,<br /> + Whose lovesome love of children and the dead<br /> +All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold<br /> + A dear dead hand that links us, and a light<br /> + The blithest and benignest of the night,—<br /> + The night of death’s sweet sleep, +wherein may be<br /> + A star to show your spirit in present sight<br /> + Some happier isle in the Elysian sea<br /> + Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie.”</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>CHAPTER IV: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES</h2> +<p>Never but once did I enjoy the privilege of meeting the author of +“Elsie Venner”—Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was +at a dinner given by Mr. Lowell, and of conversation with Dr. Holmes +I had very little. He struck me as being wonderfully erect, active, +and vivacious for his great age. He spoke (perhaps I should not +chronicle this impression)—he spoke much, and freely, but rather +as if he were wound up to speak, so to say—wound up, I mean, by +a sense of duty to himself and kindness to strangers, who were naturally +curious about so well-known a man. In his aspect there was a certain +dryness, and, altogether, his vivacity, his ceaselessness, and a kind +of equability of tone in his voice, reminded me of what Homer says concerning +the old men around Priam, above the gate of Troy, how they “chirped +like cicalas on a summer day.” About the matter of his talk +I remember nothing, only the manner remains with me, and mine may have +been a false impression, or the manner may have been accidental, and +of the moment: or, again, a manner appropriate for conversation with +strangers, each coming up one after the other, to view respectfully +so great a lion. Among his friends and intimates he was probably +a different man, with a tone other and more reposeful.</p> +<p>He had a long, weary task before him, then, to talk his way, ever +courteous, alert, attentive, through part of a London season. +Yet, when it was all over, he seems to have enjoyed it, being a man +who took pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect +me, for that one time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did—Mr. +Lowell, whom I knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, +kind, learned, friendly, and delightfully natural.</p> +<p>Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried +to make a sort of photographic “snap-shot” at him, in a +single casual moment, one of myriads of such moments. Turning +to Dr. Holmes’s popular, as distinct from his professional writings, +one is reminded, as one often is, of the change which seems to come +over some books as the reader grows older. Many books are to one +now what they always were; some, like the Waverley novels and Shakespeare, +grow better on every fresh reading. There are books which filled +me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of admiring rapture, and a delighted +wonder at their novelty, their strangeness, freshness, greatness. +Thus Homer, and the best novels of Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays +of Molière and Shakespeare, the poems of—well, of all the +real poets, moved this astonishment of admiration, and being read again, +they move it still. On a different level, one may say as much +about books so unlike each other, as those of Poe and of Sir Thomas +Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.</p> +<p>There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of +wonder, when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer. +I am not much surprised to find Charles Kingsley’s novels among +them.</p> +<p>In the case of Dr. Holmes’s books, I am very sensible of this +disenchanting effect of time and experience. “The Professor +at the Breakfast Table” and the novels came into my hands when +I was very young, in “green, unknowing youth.” They +seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies of wisdom and wit; the reflections +were such as surprised me by their depth, the illustrations dazzled +by their novelty and brilliance. Probably they will still be as +fortunate with young readers, and I am to be pitied, I hope, rather +than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Recapture<br /> +The first fine careless rapture.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents +of Dr. Holmes’s genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and +professional elements thereof. Now, it is the business of criticism +to search out and illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very +odd and unlucky thing, that the results of this knowledge when acquired, +should sometimes be a partial disenchantment. But we are not disenchanted +at all by this kind of science, when the author whom we are examining +is a great natural genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott. +Such natures bring to the world far more than they receive, as far as +our means of knowing what they receive are concerned. The wind +of the spirit that is not of this earth, nor limited by time and space, +breathes through their words, and thoughts, and deeds. They are +not mere combinations, however deft and subtle, of <i>known</i> atoms. +They must continually delight, and continually surprise; custom cannot +stale them; like the heaven-born Laws in Sophocles, age can never lull +them to sleep. Their works, when they are authors, never lose +hold on our fancy and our interest.</p> +<p>As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform me, Dr. Holmes, +though a most interesting and amiable and kindly man and writer, was +not of this class. As an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, +an unassuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he certainly +does not hold one as, for example, Addison does. The old <i>Spectator</i> +makes me smile, pleases, tickles, diverts me now, even more than when +I lay on the grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the trout +were sluggish, in the early afternoon. It is only a personal fact +that Dr. Holmes, read in the same old seasons, with so much pleasure +and admiration and surprise, no longer affects me in the old way. +Carlyle, on the other hand, in his “Frederick,” which used +to seem rather long, now entertains me far more than ever. But +I am well aware that this is a mere subjective estimate; that Dr. Holmes +may really be as great a genius as I was wont to think him, for criticism +is only a part of our impressions. The opinion of mature experience, +as a rule, ought to be sounder than that of youth; in this case I cannot +but think that it is sounder.</p> +<p>Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what he calls “the +Brahmin caste,” the class which, in England, before the sailing +of the <i>May Flower</i>, and ever since, had always been literary and +highly educated. “I like books; I was born and bred among +them,” he says, “and have the easy feeling, when I get into +their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses.” He +is fond of books, and, above all, of old books—strange, old medical +works, for example—full of portents and prodigies, such as those +of Wierus.</p> +<p>New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady +maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, +was, naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers. +These men—Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and +so many others—had all received the same sort of education as +Europeans of letters used to receive. They had not started as +printers’ devils, or newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the +stage, but were academic. It does not matter much how a genius +begins—as a rural butcher, or an apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer +to the Signet. Still, the New Englanders were academic and classical. +New England has, by this time, established a tradition of its literary +origin and character. Her children are sons of the Puritans, with +their independence, their narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, +their hardiness in doing without it, their singular scruples of conscience, +their sense of the awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition. +We can read of the later New Englanders in the making, among the works +of Cotton Mather, his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, +periwig-hating, doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and +atoned for his mistake about the Salem witches. These men, or +many of them, were deeply-learned Calvinists, according to the standard +of their day, a day lasting from, say, the Restoration to 1730. +Cotton Mather, in particular, is erudite, literary—nay, full of +literary vanity—mystical, visionary, credulous to an amusing degree.</p> +<p>But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent +and counterpart, Wodrow. The sons or grandsons of these men gained +the War of Independence. Of this they are naturally proud, and +the circumstance is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes’s +works. Their democracy is not roaring modern democracy, but that +of the cultivated middle classes. Their stern Calvinism slackened +into many “isms,” but left a kind of religiosity behind +it. One of Dr. Holmes’s mouthpieces sums up his whole creed +in the two words <i>Pater Noster</i>. All these hereditary influences +are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes’s writings, as +in Hawthorne’s. In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, +the old terror of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern +about conduct, converted into æsthetic sources of literary pleasure, +of literary effects.</p> +<p>As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge +of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular, analogies +and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his works. +Thus, in “Elsie Venner,” and in “The Guardian Angel,” +“heredity” is his theme. He is always brooding over +the thought that each of us is so much made up of earlier people, our +ancestors, who bequeath to us so many disagreeable things—vice, +madness, disease, emotions, tricks of gesture. No doubt these +things are bequeathed, but all in such new proportions and relations, +that each of us is himself and nobody else, and therefore had better +make up his mind to <i>be</i> himself, and for himself responsible.</p> +<p>All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly understood, Dr. Holmes +derives from science. But, in passing through his mind, that of +a New Englander conscious of New England’s past, science takes +a stain of romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an +experience of her mother’s, inherits the nature of the serpent, +so the novel is as far from common life as the tale of “Mélusine,” +or any other echidna. The fantasy has its setting in a commonplace +New England environment, and thus recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and +concentrated, but much more humorous. The heroine of the “Guardian +Angel,” again, exposes a character in layers, as it were, each +stratum of consciousness being inherited from a different ancestor—among +others, a red Indian. She has many personalities, like the queer +women we read about in French treatises on hysterics and nervous diseases. +These stories are “fairy tales of science,” by a man of +science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch of the poet, and of +the old fathers who were afraid of witches. The “blend” +is singular enough, and not without its originality of fascination.</p> +<p>Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative +pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I +must quote a passage from “The Professor at the Breakfast Table,” +as peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting +the abnormally romantic—accepting just enough for pleasure, like +Sir Walter Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.</p> +<p>“I think I am a little superstitious. There were two +things, when I was a boy, that diabolised my imagination,—I mean, +that gave me a distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which +prowled round the neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The +first was a series of marks called the ‘Devil’s footsteps.’ +These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where +even the low-bush blackberry, the ‘dewberry,’ as our Southern +neighbours call it, in prettier and more Shakespearian language, did +not spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet +‘everlasting’ could not grow, but all was bare and blasted. +The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near my home,—the +college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor. I do not think +many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,—little having +been said about the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, +for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up. In the north-west +corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are signs +of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken. +A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away, from +within outward. It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not care +to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred +things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was +variously explained, took place. The story of the Appearance in +the chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to +the building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where +the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.</p> +<p>“The queer burnt spots, called the ‘Devil’s footsteps,’ +had never attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence +that they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., +a ‘Goody,’ so called, who was positive on the subject, but +had a strange horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought +to know something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little +boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, +with untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,—with +‘Devil’s footsteps’ in the fields behind the house, +and in front of it the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence +had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, +so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, +after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became +renowned for his ascetic sanctity.”</p> +<p>It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead +of hinting at it, for a similar tale is told at Brazenose College, and +elsewhere. Now take, along with Dr. Holmes’s confession +to a grain of superstition, this remark on, and explanation of, the +curious coincidences which thrust themselves on the notice of most people.</p> +<p>“Excuse me,—I return to my story of the Commonstable. +Young fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre +fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale +a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding +it, beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-time. +The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the +trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;—they +knew where to find one, if it was not in its place. Now the odd +thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this College +trick, I should hear it mentioned a <i>second time</i> within the same +twenty-four hours by a College youth of the present generation. +Strange, but true. And so it has happened to me and to every person, +often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts +or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.</p> +<p>“I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, +taking it as an unexplained marvel. I think, however, I will turn +over a furrow of subsoil in it. The explanation is, of course, +that in a great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and +these instantly arrest our attention. Now we shall probably never +have the least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass +through our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic +record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.</p> +<p>“Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, +and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you +had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is +it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of +all I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come? +Listen, then. The number of these living elements in our bodies +illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of +our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these +coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly +observe in the world of outward events.”</p> +<p>Now for the anecdote—one of Mark Twain’s.</p> +<p>Some years ago, Mark Twain published in <i>Harper’s Magazine</i> +an article on “Mental Telegraphy.” He illustrated +his meaning by a story of how he once wrote a long letter on a complicated +subject, which had popped into his head between asleep and awake, to +a friend on the other side of America. He did not send the letter, +but, by return of post, received one from his friend. “Now, +I’ll tell you what he is going to say,” said Mark Twain, +read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his friend’s +despatch, proved that they were essentially identical. This is +what he calls “Mental Telegraphy”; others call it “Telepathy,” +and the term is merely descriptive.</p> +<p>Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should +have explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, +and I rather incline to think that he would have been right. But +Mark Twain, in his article on “Mental Telegraphy,” cites +Dr. Holmes for a story of how he once, after dinner, as his letters +came in, felt constrained to tell, <i>à propos des bottes</i>, +the story of the last challenge to judicial combat in England (1817). +He then opened a newspaper directed to him from England, the <i>Sporting +Times</i>, and therein his eyes lighted on an account of this very affair—Abraham +Thornton’s challenge to battle when he was accused of murder, +in 1817. According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes was disposed to accept +“Mental Telegraphy” rather than mere chance as the cause +of this coincidence. Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to +have been a favourite of his. It occurs in, “The Professor,” +in the fifth section. Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably +that is why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little +staggered by the coincidence. There was enough of Cotton Mather +in the man of science to give him pause.</p> +<p>The form of Dr. Holmes’s best known books, the set concerned +with the breakfast-table and “Over the Teacups,” is not +very fortunate. Much conversation at breakfast is a weariness +of the flesh. We want to eat what is necessary, and then to go +about our work or play. If American citizens in a boarding-house +could endure these long palavers, they must have been very unlike the +hasty feeders caricatured in “Martin Chuzzlewit.” +Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast parties in the +Albany; but breakfast parties are obsolete—an unregrettable parcel +of things lost. The monologues, or dialogues, were published serially +in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, but they have had a vitality and a vogue +far beyond those of the magazine <i>causerie</i>. Some of their +popularity they may owe to the description of the other boarders, and +to the kind of novel which connects the fortunes of these personages. +But it is impossible for an Englishman to know whether these American +types are exactly drawn or not. Their fortunes do not strongly +interest one, though the “Sculpin”—the patriotic, +deformed Bostonian, with his great-great-grandmother’s ring (she +was hanged for a witch)—is a very original and singular creation. +The real interest lies in the wit, wisdom, and learning. The wit, +now and then, seems to-day rather in the nature of a “goak.” +One might give examples, but to do so seems ill-natured and ungrateful.</p> +<p>There are some very perishable puns. The learning is not so +<i>recherché</i> as it appeared when we knew nothing of Cotton +Mather and Robert Calef, the author of a book against the persecution +of witches. Calef, of course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive +him for refusing to see a lady, known to Mr. Mather, who floated about +in the air. That she did so was no good reason for hanging or +burning a number of parishioners; but, did she float, and, if so, how? +Mr. Calef said it would be a miracle, so he declined to view the performance. +His logic was thin, though of a familiar description. Of all old +things, at all events, Dr. Holmes was fond. He found America scarcely +aired, new and raw, devoid of history and of associations. “The +Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Ælius, +even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles, eddying round +the piles of West Boston Bridge.” No doubt this is a common +sentiment among Americans.</p> +<p>Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an historical atmosphere, +and then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, +and think Schenectady, New York, “a better place.” +It is not easy to understand what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was +extremely caustic in his writings about that continent, and discontented. +Our matrons were so stout and placid that they irritated him. +Indeed, they are a little heavy in hand, still there are examples of +agreeable slimness, even in this poor old country. Fond as he +was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes remained loyal to the historical +present. He was not one of those Americans who are always censuring +England, and always hankering after her. He had none of that irritable +feeling, which made a great contemporary of his angrily declare that +<i>he</i> could endure to hear “Ye Mariners of England” +sung, because of his own country’s successes, some time ago. +They were gallant and conspicuous victories of the American frigates; +we do not grudge them. A fair fight should leave no rancour, above +all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes’s withers would have been unwrung +by Campbell’s ditty.</p> +<p>He visited England in youth, and fifty years later. On the +anniversary of the American defeat at Bunker’s Hill (June 17), +Dr. Holmes got his degree in the <i>old</i> Cambridge. He received +degrees at Edinburgh and at Oxford, in his “Hundred Days in Europe” +he says very little about these historic cities. The men at Oxford +asked, “Did he come in the ‘One Hoss Shay’?” +the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein. The whole +visit to England pleased and wearied him. He likened it to the +<i>shass caffy</i> of Mr. Henry Foker—the fillip at the end of +the long banquet of life. He went to see the Derby, for he was +fond of horses, of racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing. +He had the great boldness once, <i>audax juventa</i>, to write a song +in praise of that comfortable creature—wine. The prudery +of many Americans about the juice of the grape is a thing very astonishing +to a temperate Briton. An admirable author, who wrote an account +of the old convivial days of an American city, found that reputable +magazines could not accept such a degrading historical record. +There was no nonsense about Dr. Holmes. His poems were mainly +“occasional” verses for friendly meetings; or humorous, +like the celebrated “One Horse Shay.” Of his serious +verses, the “Nautilus” is probably too familiar to need +quotation; a noble fancy is nobly and tunefully “moralised.” +Pleasing, cultivated, and so forth, are adjectives not dear to poets. +To say “sublime,” or “magical,” or “strenuous,” +of Dr. Holmes’s muse, would be to exaggerate. How far he +maintained his scholarship, I am not certain; but it is odd that, in +his preface to “The Guardian Angel,” he should quote from +“Jonathan Edwards the younger,” a story for which he might +have cited Aristotle.</p> +<p>Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes’s creations +as my favourite, it would be “a frequent correspondent of his,” +and of mine—the immortal Gifted Hopkins. Never was minor +poet more kindly and genially portrayed. And if one had to pick +out three of his books, as the best worth reading, they would be “The +Professor,” “Elsie Venner,” and “The Guardian +Angel.” They have not the impeccable art and distinction +of “The House of the Seven Gables” and “The Scarlet +Letter,” but they combine fantasy with living human interest, +and with humour. With Sir Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and—may +we not add Dr. Weir Mitchell?—Dr. Holmes excellently represents +the physician in humane letters. He has left a blameless and most +amiable memory, unspotted by the world. His works are full of +the savour of his native soil, naturally, without straining after “Americanism;” +and they are national, not local or provincial. He crossed the +great gulf of years, between the central age of American literary production—the +time of Hawthorne and Poe—to our own time, and, like Nestor, he +reigned among the third generation. As far as the world knows, +the shadow of a literary quarrel never fell on him; he was without envy +or jealousy, incurious of his own place, never vain, petulant, or severe. +He was even too good-humoured, and the worst thing I have heard of him +is that he could never say “no” to an autograph hunter.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER V: MR. MORRIS’S POEMS</h2> +<p>“Enough,” said the pupil of the wise Imlac, “you +have convinced me that no man can be a poet.” The study +of Mr. William Morris’s poems, in the new collected edition, <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a> +has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no middle-aged man, can +be a critic. I read Mr. Morris’s poems (thanks to the knightly +honours conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no ambiguity +as to ‘Mr. Morris’), but it is not the book only that I +read. The scroll of my youth is unfolded. I see the dear +place where first I perused “The Blue Closet”; the old faces +of old friends flock around me; old chaff, old laughter, old happiness +re-echo and revive. St. Andrews, Oxford, come before the mind’s +eye, with</p> +<blockquote><p> “Many a place<br /> + That’s in sad case<br /> +Where joy was wont afore, oh!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>as Minstrel Burne sings. These voices, faces, landscapes mingle +with the music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us +certain hours passed in the paradise of youth. A reviewer who +finds himself in this case may as well frankly confess that he can no +more criticise Mr. Morris dispassionately than he could criticise his +old self and the friends whom he shall never see again, till he meets +them</p> +<blockquote><p>“Beyond the sphere of time,<br /> + And sin, and grief’s control,<br /> +Serene in changeless prime<br /> + Of body and of soul.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>To write of one’s own “adventures among books” +may be to provide anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, +but, at least, it is to write historically. We know how books +have affected, and do affect ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and +tastes, of old impressions and revived sensations. To judge books +dispassionately and impersonally, is much more difficult—indeed, +it is practically impossible, for our own tastes and experiences must, +more or less, modify our verdicts, do what we will. However, the +effort must be made, for to say that, at a certain age, in certain circumstances, +an individual took much pleasure in “The Life and Death of Jason,” +the present of a college friend, is certainly not to criticise “The +Life and Death of Jason.”</p> +<p>There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the +nineteenth century. The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, +Scott, and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats. By 1822 the blossoming +time was over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with +young Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning. It broke forth again, in +1842 and did not practically cease till England’s greatest laureate +sang of the “Crossing of the Bar.” But while Tennyson +put out his full strength in 1842, and Mr. Browning rather later, in +“Bells and Pomegranates” (“Men and Women”), +the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris’s “Defence +of Guenevere,” and flowered till Mr. Swinburne’s “Atalanta +in Calydon” appeared in 1865, followed by his poems of 1866. +Mr. Rossetti’s book of 1870 belonged, in date of composition, +mainly to this period.</p> +<p>In 1858, when “The Defence of Guenevere” came out, Mr. +Morris must have been but a year or two from his undergraduateship. +Every one has heard enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. +Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old <i>Oxford and Cambridge +Magazine</i>, where Mr. Morris’s wonderful prose fantasies are +buried. Why should they not be revived, these strangely coloured +and magical dreams? As literature, I prefer them vastly above +Mr. Morris’s later romances in prose—“The Hollow Land” +above “News from Nowhere!” Mr. Morris and his friends +were active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediæval +and Catholic revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most +part. This revival is more “innerly,” as the Scotch +say, more intimate, more “earnest” than the larger and more +genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott. The painful +doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, +its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no less than its colour and passion, inform +Mr. Morris’s first poems. The fourteenth and the early fifteenth +century is his “period.” In “The Defence of +Guenevere” he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose narrative +manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires “The Life and +Death of Jason” and “The Earthly Paradise.” +In the early book the rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. +There are cockney rhymes, too, such as “short” rhyming to +“thought.” But, on the whole, Mr. Morris’s early +manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it. In the +first poem, “The Queen’s Apology,” is this passage:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Listen: suppose your time were come to die,<br /> +And you were quite alone and very weak;<br /> +Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily</p> +<p>“The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak<br /> +Of river through your broad lands running well:<br /> +Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:</p> +<p>“‘One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,<br /> +Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,<br /> +I will not tell you, you must somehow tell</p> +<p>“‘Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!’<br /> +Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,<br /> +At foot of your familiar bed to see</p> +<p>“A great God’s angel standing, with such dyes,<br /> +Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,<br /> +Held out two ways, light from the inner skies</p> +<p>“Showing him well, and making his commands<br /> +Seem to be God’s commands, moreover, too,<br /> +Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;</p> +<p>“And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,<br /> +Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;<br /> +No man could tell the better of the two.</p> +<p>“After a shivering half-hour you said,<br /> +‘God help! heaven’s colour, the blue;’ and he said, +‘Hell.’<br /> +Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,</p> +<p>“And cry to all good men that loved you well,<br /> +‘Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.’”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the +<i>bizarrerie</i> of a new thing in beauty. How far it is really +beautiful how can I tell? How can I discount the “personal +bias”? Only I know that it is unforgettable. Again +(Galahad speaks):—</p> +<blockquote><p> “I saw<br /> +One sitting on the altar as a throne,<br /> + Whose face no man could say he did not know,<br /> +And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,<br /> + With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.</p> +<p>Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially +sympathetic period—the gloom and sad sunset glory of the late +fourteenth century, the age of Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars. +To Froissart it all seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly +fortunes; he only murmurs a “great pity” for the death of +a knight or the massacre of a town. It is rather the pity of it +that Mr. Morris sees: the hearts broken in a corner, as in “Sir +Peter Harpedon’s End,” or beside “The Haystack in +the Floods.” Here is a picture like life of what befell +a hundred times. Lady Alice de la Barde hears of the death of +her knight:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“ALICE</p> +<p> “Can you talk faster, sir?<br /> +Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes<br /> +On mine, I pray you, and whate’er you see<br /> +Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,<br /> +Or bid you stop.</p> +<p>“SQUIRE</p> +<p> “I pray your pardon then,<br /> +And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say<br /> +I am unhappy that your knight is dead.<br /> +Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.<br /> +We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,<br /> +And scant five hundred had he in that hold;<br /> +His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,<br /> +And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;<br /> +Yet for three days about the barriers there<br /> +The deadly glaives were gather’d, laid across,<br /> +And push’d and pull’d; the fourth our engines came;<br /> +But still amid the crash of falling walls,<br /> +And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,<br /> +The steady bow-strings flash’d, and still stream’d out<br /> +St. George’s banner, and the seven swords,<br /> +And still they cried, ‘St. George Guienne,’ until<br /> +Their walls were flat as Jericho’s of old,<br /> +And our rush came, and cut them from the keep.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in “Geffray +Teste Noire” is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal +ball, rather than like a picture suggested by printed words. “Shameful +Death” has the same enchanted kind of presentment. We look +through a “magic casement opening on the foam” of the old +waves of war. Poems of a pure fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge +and Poe, are “The Wind” and “The Blue Closet.” +Each only lives in fantasy. Motives, and facts, and “story” +are unimportant and out of view. The pictures arise distinct, +unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed +on our eyes between sleeping and waking. Fantastic, too, but with +more of a recognisable human setting, is “Golden Wings,” +which to a slight degree reminds one of Théophile Gautier’s +<i>Château de Souvenir</i>.</p> +<blockquote><p>“The apples now grow green and sour<br /> + Upon the mouldering castle wall,<br /> + Before they ripen there they fall:<br /> +There are no banners on the tower,</p> +<p>The draggled swans most eagerly eat<br /> + The green weeds trailing in the moat;<br /> + Inside the rotting leaky boat<br /> +You see a slain man’s stiffen’d feet.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>These, with “The Sailing of the Sword,” are my own old +favourites. There was nothing like them before, nor will be again, +for Mr. Morris, after several years of silence, abandoned his early +manner. No doubt it was not a manner to persevere in, but happily, +in a mood and a moment never to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris did +fill a fresh page in English poetry with these imperishable fantasies. +They were absolutely neglected by “the reading public,” +but they found a few staunch friends. Indeed, I think of “Guenevere” +as FitzGerald did of Tennyson’s poems before 1842. But this, +of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious, estimate. +Criticism may aver that the influence of Mr. Rossetti was strong on +Mr. Morris before 1858. Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris first +(as the world read the “Lay” before “Christabel”), +and my own preference is for Mr. Morris.</p> +<p>It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, +in 1866 or 1867, “The Life and Death of Jason.” Young +men who had read “Guenevere” hastened to purchase it, and, +of course, found themselves in contact with something very unlike their +old favourite. Mr. Morris had told a classical tale in decasyllabic +couplets of the Chaucerian sort, and he regarded the heroic age from +a mediæval point of view; at all events, not from an historical +and archæological point of view. It was natural in Mr. Morris +to “envisage” the Greek heroic age in this way, but it would +not be natural in most other writers. The poem is not much shorter +than the “Odyssey,” and long narrative poems had been out +of fashion since “The Lord of the Isles” (1814).</p> +<p>All this was a little disconcerting. We read “Jason,” +and read it with pleasure, but without much of the more essential pleasure +which comes from magic and distinction of style. The peculiar +qualities of Keats, and Tennyson, and Virgil are not among the gifts +of Mr. Morris. As people say of Scott in his long poems, so it +may be said of Mr. Morris—that he does not furnish many quotations, +does not glitter in “jewels five words long.”</p> +<p>In “Jason” he entered on his long career as a narrator; +a poet retelling the immortal primeval stories of the human race. +In one guise or another the legend of Jason is the most widely distributed +of romances; the North American Indians have it, and the Samoans and +the Samoyeds, as well as all Indo-European peoples. This tale, +told briefly by Pindar, and at greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, +and in the “Orphica,” Mr. Morris took up and handled in +a single and objective way. His art was always pictorial, but, +in “Jason” and later, he described more, and was less apt, +as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable +way.</p> +<p>In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the “Earthly +Paradise”: that vast collection of the world’s old tales +retold. One might almost conjecture that “Jason” had +originally been intended for a part of the “Earthly Paradise,” +and had outgrown its limits. The tone is much the same, though +the “criticism of life” is less formally and explicitly +stated.</p> +<p>For Mr. Morris came at last to a “criticism of life.” +It would not have satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy +Mr. Morris! The burden of these long narrative poems is <i>vanitas +vanitatum</i>: the fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human +existence, the dream “rounded by a sleep.” The lesson +drawn is to make life as full and as beautiful as may be, by love, and +adventure, and art. The hideousness of modern industrialism was +oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he was doing his best to +relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many arts and crafts in +which he was a master. His narrative poems are, indeed, part of +his industry in this field. He was not born to slay monsters, +he says, “the idle singer of an empty day.” Later, +he set about slaying monsters, like Jason, or unlike Jason, scattering +dragon’s teeth to raise forces which he could not lay, and could +not direct.</p> +<p>I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say this +much only to prove that Mr. Morris’s “criticism of life,” +and prolonged, wistful dwelling on the thought of death, ceased to satisfy +himself. His own later part, as a poet and an ally of Socialism, +proved this to be true. It seems to follow that the peculiarly +level, lifeless, decorative effect of his narratives, which remind us +rather of glorious tapestries than of pictures, was no longer wholly +satisfactory to himself. There is plenty of charmed and delightful +reading—“Jason” and the “Earthly Paradise” +are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we do miss a strenuous +rendering of action and passion. These Mr. Morris had rendered +in “The Defence of Guinevere”: now he gave us something +different, something beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic +vigour. Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary +writer of epic, in an age of Criticism. He dealt with the tale +of “Jason,” and conceivably he may have borrowed from older +minstrels. But the Medea of Apollonius Rhodius, in her love, her +tenderness, her regret for home, in all her maiden words and ways, is +undeniably a character more living, more human, more passionate, and +more sympathetic, than the Medea of Mr. Morris. I could almost +wish that he had closely followed that classical original, the first +true love story in literature. In the same way I prefer Apollonius’s +spell for soothing the dragon, as much terser and more somniferous than +the spell put by Mr. Morris into the lips of Medea. Scholars will +find it pleasant to compare these passages of the Alexandrine and of +the London poets. As a brick out of the vast palace of “Jason” +we may select the song of the Nereid to Hylas—Mr. Morris is always +happy with his Nymphs and Nereids:—</p> +<blockquote><p> “I know a little garden-close<br /> +Set thick with lily and with rose,<br /> +Where I would wander if I might<br /> +From dewy dawn to dewy night,<br /> +And have one with me wandering.<br /> + And though within it no birds sing,<br /> +And though no pillared house is there,<br /> +And though the apple boughs are bare<br /> +Of fruit and blossom, would to God,<br /> +Her feet upon the green grass trod,<br /> +And I beheld them as before.<br /> + There comes a murmur from the shore,<br /> +And in the place two fair streams are,<br /> +Drawn from the purple hills afar,<br /> +Drawn down unto the restless sea;<br /> +The hills whose flowers ne’er fed the bee,<br /> +The shore no ship has ever seen,<br /> +Still beaten by the billows green,<br /> +Whose murmur comes unceasingly<br /> +Unto the place for which I cry.<br /> + For which I cry both day and night,<br /> +For which I let slip all delight,<br /> +That maketh me both deaf and blind,<br /> +Careless to win, unskilled to find,<br /> +And quick to lose what all men seek.<br /> + Yet tottering as I am, and weak,<br /> +Still have I left a little breath<br /> +To seek within the jaws of death<br /> +An entrance to that happy place,<br /> +To seek the unforgotten face<br /> +Once seen, once kissed, once rest from me<br /> +Anigh the murmuring of the sea.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“Jason” is, practically, a very long tale from the “Earthly +Paradise,” as the “Earthly Paradise” is an immense +treasure of shorter tales in the manner of “Jason.” +Mr. Morris reverted for an hour to his fourteenth century, a period +when London was “clean.” This is a poetic license; +many a plague found mediæval London abominably dirty! A +Celt himself, no doubt, with the Celt’s proverbial way of being +<i>impossibilium cupitor</i>, Mr. Morris was in full sympathy with his +Breton Squire, who, in the reign of Edward III., sets forth to seek +the Earthly Paradise, and the land where Death never comes. Much +more dramatic, I venture to think, than any passage of “Jason,” +is that where the dreamy seekers of dreamland, Breton and Northman, +encounter the stout King Edward III., whose kingdom is of this world. +Action and fantasy are met, and the wanderers explain the nature of +their quest. One of them speaks of death in many a form, and of +the flight from death:—</p> +<blockquote><p> “His words nigh made me weep, +but while he spoke<br /> +I noted how a mocking smile just broke<br /> +The thin line of the Prince’s lips, and he<br /> +Who carried the afore-named armoury<br /> +Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low:<br /> +But the King smiled, and said, ‘Can it be so?<br /> +I know not, and ye twain are such as find<br /> +The things whereto old kings must needs be blind.<br /> +For you the world is wide—but not for me,<br /> +Who once had dreams of one great victory<br /> +Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,<br /> +And now, the victor in so many an one,<br /> +Find that in Asia Alexander died<br /> +And will not live again; the world is wide<br /> +For you I say,—for me a narrow space<br /> +Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.<br /> + Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fill<br /> +Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill<br /> +But fear of that fair rest I hope to win<br /> +One day, when I have purged me of my sin.<br /> + Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king<br /> +Shall be remembered but by this one thing,<br /> +That on the morn before ye crossed the sea<br /> +Ye gave and took in common talk with me;<br /> +But with this ring keep memory with the morn,<br /> +O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn<br /> +Remember me, who am of Odin’s blood.’”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>All this encounter is a passage of high invention. The adventures +in Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out +to find Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was +not remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. The tale of the +wanderers was Mr. Morris’s own; all the rest are of the dateless +heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now “softly breathed +through the flutes of the Grecians,” now told by Sagamen of Iceland. +The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, +where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed. Once more +literature has a narrator, on the whole much more akin to Spenser than +to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir Walter. Humour and action are not so +prominent as contemplation of a pageant reflected in a fairy mirror. +But Mr. Morris has said himself, about his poem, what I am trying to +say:—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Death have we hated, knowing +not what it meant;<br /> +Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,<br /> +Though still the less we knew of its intent;<br /> +The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,<br /> +Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,<br /> +Hung round about a little room, where play<br /> +Weeping and laughter of man’s empty day.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy +with the heroic sagas of Iceland. He had rendered one into verse, +in “The Earthly Paradise,” above all, “Grettir the +Strong” and “The Volsunga” he had done into English +prose. His next great poem was “The Story of Sigurd,” +a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the Tale +of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world. Mr. Morris took the +form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of +its savage origin—the version of the “Volsunga,” not +the German shape of the “Nibelungenlied.” He showed +extraordinary skill, especially in making human and intelligible the +story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf Andvari’s Hoard.</p> +<blockquote><p>“It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was +he waxen old,<br /> +And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,<br /> +And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,<br /> +And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might +be wrought.<br /> +Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,<br /> +And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail,<br /> +And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.</p> +<p>“But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net,<br /> +And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways +wet;<br /> +And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left alive<br /> +That hath cunning to match man’s cunning or might with his might +to strive.</p> +<p>“And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying +of ease?<br /> +Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future +sees;<br /> +And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;<br /> +And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart’s +desire;<br /> +And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never +done;<br /> +And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is won.</p> +<p>“Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;<br /> +Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.<br /> +But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:<br /> +We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our will<br /> +Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;<br /> +For belike no fixèd semblance we had in the days of old,<br /> +Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must take<br /> +That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But when we turn to the passage of the <i>éclaircissement</i> +between Sigurd and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most <i>modern</i> +moment in the ancient tragedy, the moment where the clouds of savage +fancy scatter in the light of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, +I prefer the simple, brief prose of Mr. Morris’s translation of +the “Volsunga” to his rather periphrastic paraphrase. +Every student of poetry may make the comparison for himself, and decide +for himself whether the old or the new is better. Again, in the +final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the +Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the “Odyssey,” or +the last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the +“Volsunga.” All these are the work of men who were +war-smiths as well as song-smiths. Here is a passage from the +“murder grim and great”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his +war-flame reared on high,<br /> +But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry<br /> +From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel<br /> +Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel<br /> +Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,<br /> +While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne<br /> +When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,<br /> +And the smitten wood-side roareth ’neath the driving thunder-wrack?<br /> +So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East<br /> +As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli’s feast,<br /> +There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his edges +stopped;<br /> +He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he +lopped;<br /> +There met him Atli’s marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred;<br /> +Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the +dead;<br /> +And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a throat +he thrust,<br /> +But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the ruddy +dust,<br /> +And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:<br /> +Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set;<br /> +Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell;<br /> +Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,<br /> +And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew,<br /> +And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through;<br /> +And man ’gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,<br /> +And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,<br /> +And there ran a river of death ’twixt the Niblung and his foes,<br /> +And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure of Odysseus +raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy of Roland when the blinded +Oliver smites him by mischance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair +by Umslopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous picture +of war. To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give his rendering of +part of the Slaying of the Wooers, from his translation of the “Odyssey”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“And e’en as the word he uttered, he drew +his keen sword out<br /> +Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout<br /> +Rushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let fly<br /> +And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,<br /> +And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell +the sword<br /> +From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,<br /> +And staggered; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered around,<br /> +And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the ground;<br /> +And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet spurning he +smote<br /> +The high-seat; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.</p> +<p>“And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword<br /> +And fell on, making his onrush ’gainst Odysseus the glorious lord,<br /> +If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent,<br /> +And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sent<br /> +Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,<br /> +And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead +smote.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is no need to say more of Mr. Morris’s “Odysseus.” +Close to the letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the +surge and thunder of Homer? Apparently we must accent the penultimate +in “Amphinomus” if the line is to scan. I select a +passage of peaceful beauty from Book V.:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming +wood,<br /> +Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good;<br /> +And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,<br /> +For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the sea,<br /> +And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a care<br /> +But round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fair<br /> +A vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad;<br /> +And four wells of the white water their heads together had,<br /> +And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get;<br /> +And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.<br /> +Yea, if thither indeed had come e’en one of the Deathless, e’en +he<br /> +Had wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there to see.<br /> +And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.<br /> +But when o’er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled amain,<br /> +Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead’s Grace,<br /> +Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face;<br /> +For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though they<br /> +Apart from one another may be dwelling far away.<br /> +But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there,<br /> +Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear<br /> +His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and he<br /> +As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o’er the untilled +sea.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This is close enough to the Greek, but</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>And flowing on in order four ways they thence +did get</i>”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>is not precisely musical. Why is Hermes “The Flitter”? +But I have often ventured to remonstrate against these archaistic peculiarities, +which to some extent mar our pleasure in Mr. Morris’s translations. +In his version of the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out +of place. The “Æneid” is rendered with a roughness +which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus the reader +of Mr. Morris’s poetical translations has in his hands versions +of almost literal closeness, and (what is extremely rare) versions of +poetry by a poet. But his acquaintance with Early English and +Icelandic has added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his +English in the “Odyssey,” still more in the “Æneid,” +is occasionally more <i>archaic</i> than the Greek of 900 B.C. +So at least it seems to a reader not unversed in attempts to fit the +classical poets with an English rendering. But the true test is +in the appreciation of the lovers of poetry in general.</p> +<p>To them, as to all who desire the restoration of beauty in modern +life, Mr. Morris has been a benefactor almost without example. +Indeed, were adequate knowledge mine, Mr. Morris’s poetry should +have been criticised as only a part of the vast industry of his life +in many crafts and many arts. His place in English life and literature +is unique as it is honourable. He did what he desired to do—he +made vast additions to simple and stainless pleasures.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER VI: MRS. RADCLIFFE’S NOVELS</h2> +<p>Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in +her windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, +and shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker +out, and leave me in darkness? People know the name of “The +Mysteries of Udolpho;” they know that boys would say to Thackeray, +at school, “Old fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition.” +But have they penetrated into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho? +Have they shuddered for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked +Inquisition? Certainly Mrs. Radcliffe, within the memory of man, +has been extremely popular. The thick double-columned volume in +which I peruse the works of the Enchantress belongs to a public library. +It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most +bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of the books have remained, +during the last hundred years, uncut, even to this day, and I have had +to apply the paper knife to many an author, from Alciphron (1790) to +Mr. Max Müller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill’s edition of Bozzy’s +“Life of Dr. Johnson.” But Mrs. Radcliffe has been +read diligently, and copiously annotated.</p> +<p>This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of +Evelina, he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole. Just +when King Romance seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that +Gothic tale, “The Castle of Otranto,” in 1764. In +that very year was born Anne Ward, who, in 1787, married William Radcliffe, +Esq., M.A., Oxon. In 1789 she published “The Castles of +Athlin and Dunbayne.” The scene, she tells us, is laid in +“the most romantic part of the Highlands, the north-east coast +of Scotland.” On castles, anywhere, she doted. Walpole, +not Smollett or Miss Burney, inspired her with a passion for these homes +of old romance. But the north-east coast of Scotland is hardly +part of the Highlands at all, and is far from being very romantic. +The period is “the dark ages” in general. Yet the +captive Earl, when “the sweet tranquillity of evening threw an +air of tender melancholy over his mind . . . composed the following +sonnet, which (having committed it to paper) he the next evening dropped +upon the terrace. He had the pleasure to observe that the paper +was taken up by the ladies, who immediately retired into the castle.” +These were not the manners of the local Mackays, of the Sinclairs, and +of “the small but fierce clan of Gunn,” in the dark ages.</p> +<p>But this was Mrs. Radcliffe’s way. She delighted in descriptions +of scenery, the more romantic the better, and usually drawn entirely +from her inner consciousness. Her heroines write sonnets (which +never but once <i>are</i> sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion. +With his usual generosity Scott praised her landscape and her lyrics, +but, indeed, they are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs. Hemans, “too +poetical,” and probably they were skipped, even by her contemporary +devotees. “The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne” frankly +do not permit themselves to be read, and it was not till 1790, with +“A Sicilian Romance,” that Mrs. Radcliffe “found herself,” +and her public. After reading, with breathless haste, through, +“A Sicilian Romance,” and “The Romance of the Forest,” +in a single day, it would ill become me to speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe. +Like Catherine Morland, I love this lady’s tender yet terrific +fancy.</p> +<p>Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we +must remember that her last romance, “The Italian,” is by +far her best. She had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, +and, when she had attained to it, she published no more. The reason +is uncertain. She became a Woman’s Rights woman, and wrote +“The Female Advocate,” not a novel! Scott thinks that +she may have been annoyed by her imitators, or by her critics, against +whom he defends her in an admirable passage, to be cited later. +Meanwhile let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward course.</p> +<p>The “Sicilian Romance” appeared in 1790, when the author’s +age was twenty-six. The book has a treble attraction, for it contains +the germ of “Northanger Abbey,” and the germ of “Jane +Eyre,” and—the germ of Byron! Like “Joseph Andrews,” +“Northanger Abbey” began as a parody (of Mrs. Radcliffe) +and developed into a real novel of character. So too Byron’s +gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere repetitions +in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni. This is so obvious +that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe’s Schedoni, Scott adds, in +a note, parallel passages from Byron’s “Giaour.” +Sir Walter did not mean to mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits. +“The noble poet” “kept on the business still,” +and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott, his descriptions +of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe.</p> +<p>“A Sicilian Romance” has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, +fifth Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily. The +time is about 1580, but there is nothing in the manners or costume to +indicate that, or any other period. Such “local colour” +was unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, as to Clara Reeve. In Horace Walpole, +however, a character goes so far in the mediæval way as to say +“by my halidome.”</p> +<p>The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters by his first amiable +consort, supposed to be long dead when the story opens. The son +is the original of Henry Tilney in “Northanger Abbey,” and +in General Tilney does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis +of Mazzini. But the Marquis’s wife, to be sure, is <i>not</i> +dead; like the first Mrs. Rochester she is concealed about the back +premises, and, as in “Jane Eyre,” it is her movements, and +those of her gaolers, that produce mystery, and make the reader suppose +that “the place is haunted.” It is, of course, only +the mystery and the “machinery” of Mrs. Radcliffe that Miss +Brontë adapted. These passages in “Jane Eyre” +have been censured, but it is not easy to see how the novel could do +without them. Mrs. Radcliffe’s tale entirely depends on +its machinery. Her wicked Marquis, having secretly immured Number +One, has now a new and beautiful Number Two, whose character does not +bear inspection. This domestic position, as Number Two, we know, +was declined by the austere virtue of Jane Eyre.</p> +<p>“Phenomena” begin in the first chapter of “A Sicilian +Romance,” mysterious lights wander about uninhabited parts of +the castle, and are vainly investigated by young Ferdinand, son of the +Marquis. This Hippolytus the Chaste, loved all in vain by the +reigning Marchioness, is adored by, and adores, her stepdaughter, Julia. +Jealousy and revenge are clearly indicated. But, in chasing mysterious +lights and figures through mouldering towers, Ferdinand gets into the +very undesirable position of David Balfour, when he climbs, in the dark, +the broken turret stair in his uncle’s house of Shaws (in “Kidnapped”). +Here is a <i>fourth</i> author indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe: her disciples +are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss Brontë, and Mr. Louis Stevenson! +Ferdinand “began the ascent. He had not proceeded very far, +when the stones of a step which his foot had just quitted gave way, +and, dragging with them those adjoining, formed a chasm in the staircase +that terrified even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on the suspended +half of the steps, in momentary expectation of falling to the bottom +with the stone on which he rested. In the terror which this occasioned, +he attempted to save himself by catching at a kind of beam which suspended +over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from his hand, and he was left +in total darkness.”</p> +<p>Can anything be more “amazing horrid,” above all as there +are mysterious figures in and about the tower? Mrs. Radcliffe’s +lamps always fall, or are blown out, in the nick of time, an expedient +already used by Clara Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost +story, “The Old English Baron” (1777). All authors +have such favourite devices, and I wonder how many fights Mr. Stanley +Weyman’s heroes have fought, from the cellar to their favourite +tilting ground, the roof of a strange house!</p> +<p>Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when the ladies came with +a light, and he scrambled back to solid earth. In his next nocturnal +research, “a sullen groan arose from beneath where he stood,” +and when he tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors +in Mrs. Radcliffe) “a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful +than the first. His courage forsook him”—and no wonder! +Of course he could not know that the author of the groans was, in fact, +his long-lost mother, immured by his father, the wicked Marquis. +We need not follow the narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling +galleries of this terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily. +Everybody is always “gazing in silent terror,” and all the +locks are rusty. “A savage and dexterous banditti” +play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand “did not hesitate +to believe that the moans he heard came from the restless spirit of +the murdered della Campo.” No working hypothesis could seem +more plausible, but it was erroneous. Mrs. Radcliffe does not +deal in a single avowed ghost. She finally explains away, by normal +causes, everything that she does not forget to explain. At the +most, she indulges herself in a premonitory dream. On this point +she is true to common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of +David Hume. “I do not say that spirits have appeared,” +she remarks, “but if several discreet unprejudiced persons were +to assure me that they had seen one—I should not be bold or proud +enough to reply, it is impossible!” But Hume <i>was</i> +bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.</p> +<p>Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe’s employment of explanations. +He is in favour of “boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery,” +or of leaving the matter in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith +of the dying Alice to Ravenswood. But, in Mrs. Radcliffe’s +day, common sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady’s romances +would have been excluded from families, if she had not provided normal +explanations of her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures. +The ghost-hunt in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, +“strengthened by desperation, she forced back.” There +was a middle-aged lady in the room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, +“suddenly exclaimed, ‘My daughter!’ and fainted away.” +Julia being about seventeen, and Madame Mazzini, her mamma, having been +immured for fifteen years, we observe, in this recognition, the force +of the maternal instinct.</p> +<p>The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, +who anon stabbed herself with a poniard. The virtuous Julia marries +the chaste Hippolytus, and, says the author, “in reviewing this +story, we perceive a singular and striking instance of moral retribution.”</p> +<p>We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled +to be defunct, in one’s own country house. Had Mr. Rochester, +in “Jane Eyre,” studied the “Sicilian Romance,” +he would have shunned an obsolete system, inconvenient at best, and +apt, in the long run, to be disastrous.</p> +<p>In the “Romance of the Forest” (1791), Mrs. Radcliffe +remained true to Mr. Stanley Weyman’s favourite period, the end +of the sixteenth century. But there are no historical characters +or costumes in the story, and all the persons, as far as language and +dress go, might have been alive in 1791.</p> +<p>The story runs thus: one de la Motte, who appears to have fallen +from dissipation to swindling, is, on the first page, discovered flying +from Paris and the law, with his wife, in a carriage. Lost in +the dark on a moor, he follows a light, and enters an old lonely house. +He is seized by ruffians, locked in, and expects to be murdered, which +he knows that he cannot stand, for he is timid by nature. In fact, +a ruffian puts a pistol to La Motte’s breast with one hand, while +with the other he drags along a beautiful girl of eighteen. “Swear +that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more,” +exclaims the bully, and La Motte, with the young lady, is taken back +to his carriage. “If you return within an hour you will +be welcomed with a brace of bullets,” is the ruffian’s parting +threat.</p> +<p>So La Motte, Madame La Motte, and the beautiful girl drive away, +La Motte’s one desire being to find a retreat safe from the police +of an offended justice.</p> +<p>Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting situation; provocative, +too, of the utmost curiosity? A fugitive from justice, in a strange, +small, dark, ancient house, is seized, threatened, and presented with +a young and lovely female stranger. In this opening we recognise +the hand of a master genius. There <i>must</i> be an explanation +of proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be? +The reader is <i>empoigné</i> in the first page, and eagerly +follows the flight of La Motte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, +comic, and familiar domestic. After a few days, the party observe, +in the recesses of a gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic abbey. +They enter; by the light of a flickering lamp they penetrate “horrible +recesses,” discover a room handsomely provided with a trapdoor, +and determine to reside in a dwelling so congenial, though, as La Motte +judiciously remarks, “not in all respects strictly Gothic.” +After a few days, La Motte finds that somebody is inquiring for him +in the nearest town. He seeks for a hiding-place, and explores +the chambers under the trapdoor. Here he finds, in a large chest—what +do you suppose he finds? It was a human skeleton! Yet in +this awful vicinity he and his wife, with Adeline (the fair stranger) +conceal themselves. The brave Adeline, when footsteps are heard, +and a figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger. +His keen eye presently detects the practicable trapdoor, he raises it, +and the cowering La Motte recognises in the dreaded visitor—his +own son, who had sought him out of filial affection.</p> +<p>Already Madame La Motte has become jealous of Adeline, especially +as her husband is oddly melancholy, and apt to withdraw into a glade, +where he mysteriously disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic +sepulchre. This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is proof of faithlessness +on the part of a husband. As the son, Louis, really falls in love +with Adeline, Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and Adeline +now composes quantities of poems to Night, to Sunset, to the Nocturnal +Gale, and so on.</p> +<p>In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive in a terrific +thunderstorm. One is young, the other is a Marquis. On seeing +this nobleman, “La Motte’s limbs trembled, and a ghastly +paleness overspread his countenance. The Marquis was little less +agitated,” and was, at first, decidedly hostile. La Motte +implored forgiveness—for what?—and the Marquis (who, in +fact, owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not far off) was mollified. +They all became rather friendly, and Adeline asked La Motte about the +stories of hauntings, and a murder said to have been, at some time, +committed in the Abbey. La Motte said that the Marquis could have +no connection with such fables; still, there <i>was</i> the skeleton.</p> +<p>Meanwhile, Adeline had conceived a flame for Theodore, the young +officer who accompanied his colonel, the Marquis, on their first visit +to the family. Theodore, who returned her passion, had vaguely +warned her of an impending danger, and then had failed to keep tryst +with her, one evening, and had mysteriously disappeared. Then +unhappy Adeline dreamed about a prisoner, a dying man, a coffin, a voice +from the coffin, and the appearance within it of the dying man, amidst +torrents of blood. The chamber in which she saw these visions +was most vividly represented. Next day the Marquis came to dinner, +and, <i>though reluctantly</i>, consented to pass the night: Adeline, +therefore, was put in a new bedroom. Disturbed by the wind shaking +the mouldering tapestry, she found a concealed door behind the arras +and a suite of rooms, <i>one of which was the chamber of her dream</i>! +On the floor lay a rusty dagger! The bedstead, being touched, +crumbled, and disclosed a small roll of manuscripts. They were +not washing bills, like those discovered by Catherine Morland in “Northanger +Abbey.” Returning to her own chamber, Adeline heard the +Marquis professing to La Motte a passion for herself. Conceive +her horror! Silence then reigned, till all was sudden noise and +confusion; the Marquis flying in terror from his room, and insisting +on instant departure. His emotion was powerfully displayed.</p> +<p>What had occurred? Mrs. Radcliffe does not say, but horror, +whether caused by a conscience ill at ease, or by events of a terrific +and supernatural kind, is plainly indicated. In daylight, the +Marquis audaciously pressed his unholy suit, and even offered marriage, +a hollow mockery, for he was well known to be already a married man. +The scenes of Adeline’s flight, capture, retention in an elegant +villa of the licentious noble, renewed flight, rescue by Theodore, with +Theodore’s arrest, and wounding of the tyrannical Marquis, are +all of breathless interest. Mrs. Radcliffe excels in narratives +of romantic escapes, a topic always thrilling when well handled. +Adeline herself is carried back to the Abbey, but La Motte, who had +rather not be a villain if he could avoid it, enables her again to secure +her freedom. He is clearly in the power of the Marquis, and his +life has been unscrupulous, but he retains traces of better things. +Adeline is now secretly conveyed to a peaceful valley in Savoy, the +home of the honest Peter (the coachman), who accompanies her. +Here she learns to know and value the family of La Luc, the kindred +of her Theodore (by a romantic coincidence), and, in the adorable scenery +of Savoy, she throws many a ballad to the Moon.</p> +<p>La Motte, on the discovery of Adeline’s flight, was cast into +prison by the revengeful Marquis, for, in fact, soon after settling +in the Abbey, it had occurred to La Motte to commence highwayman. +His very first victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious +retreats to a tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in short, been +contemplating his booty, jewels which he could not convert into ready +money. Consequently, when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, +La Motte had every reason for alarm, and only pacified the vindictive +aristocrat by yielding to his cruel schemes against the virtue of Adeline.</p> +<p>Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial, who cast a +lurid light on the character of the Marquis. That villain, to +be plain, had murdered his elder brother (the skeleton of the Abbey), +and had been anxious to murder, it was added, his own natural daughter—that +is, Adeline! His hired felons, however, placed her in a convent, +and, later (rather than kill her, on which the Marquis insisted), simply +thrust her into the hands of La Motte, who happened to pass by that +way, as we saw in the opening of this romance. Thus, in making +love to Adeline, his daughter, the Marquis was, unconsciously, in an +awkward position. On further examination of evidence, however, +things proved otherwise. Adeline was <i>not</i> the natural daughter +of the Marquis, but his niece, the legitimate daughter and heiress of +his brother (the skeleton of the Abbey). The MS. found by Adeline +in the room of the rusty dagger added documentary evidence, for it was +a narrative of the sufferings of her father (later the skeleton), written +by him in the Abbey where he was imprisoned and stabbed, and where his +bones were discovered by La Motte. The hasty nocturnal flight +of the Marquis from the Abbey is thus accounted for: he had probably +been the victim of a terrific hallucination representing his murdered +brother; whether it was veridical or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe +does not decide. Rather than face the outraged justice of his +country, the Marquis, after these revelations, took poison. La +Motte was banished; and Adeline, now mistress of the Abbey, removed +the paternal skeleton to “the vault of his ancestors.” +Theodore and Adeline were united, and virtuously resided in a villa +on the beautiful banks of the Lake of Geneva.</p> +<p>Such is the “Romance of the Forest,” a fiction in which +character is subordinate to plot and incident. There is an attempt +at character drawing in La Motte, and in his wife; the hero and heroine +are not distinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus. But Mrs. Radcliffe +does not aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for +withholding what it was no part of her purpose to give. “The +Romance of the Forest” was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling +of modern English works of fiction. “Every reader felt the +force,” says Scott, “from the sage in his study, to the +family group in middle life,” and nobody felt it more than Scott +himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked how his +time was employed, answered, “I read no Civil Law.” +He did read Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in “The Betrothed,” followed +her example in the story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces +the spectre attached to her ancient family.</p> +<p>“The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Mrs. Radcliffe’s next +and most celebrated work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at +least) her masterpiece. The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, +calls “the unprecedented sum of £500” for the romance, +and they must have made a profitable bargain. “The public,” +says Scott, “rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity, +and rose from it with unsated appetite.” I arise with a +thoroughly sated appetite from the “Mysteries of Udolpho.” +The book, as Sir Walter saw, is “The Romance of the Forest” +raised to a higher power. We have a similar and similarly situated +heroine, cruelly detached from her young man, and immured in a howling +wilderness of a brigand castle in the Apennines. In place of the +Marquis is a miscreant on a larger and more ferocious scale. The +usual mysteries of voices, lights, secret passages, and innumerable +doors are provided regardless of economy. The great question, +which I shall not answer, is, <i>what did the Black Veil conceal</i>? +<i>Not</i> “the bones of Laurentina,” as Catherine Morland +supposed.</p> +<p>Here is Emily’s adventure with the veil. “She paused +again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let +it fall—perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, +and before she could leave the chamber she dropped senseless on the +floor. When she recovered her recollection, . . . horror occupied +her mind.” Countless mysteries coagulate around this veil, +and the reader is apt to be disappointed when the awful curtain is withdrawn. +But he has enjoyed, for several hundred pages, the pleasures of anticipation. +A pedantic censor may remark that, while the date of the story is 1580, +all the virtuous people live in an idyllic fashion, like creatures of +Rousseau, existing solely for landscape and the affections, writing +poetry on Nature, animate and inanimate, including the common Bat, and +drawing in water colours. In those elegant avocations began, and +in these, after an interval of adventures “amazing horrid,” +concluded the career of Emily.</p> +<p>Mrs. Radcliffe keeps the many entangled threads of her complex web +well in hand, and incidents which puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally +into place before the end. The character of the heroine’s +silly, vain, unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed (that +Emily should mistake the corse of a moustached bandit for that of her +aunt is an incident hard to defend). Valancourt is not an ordinary +spotless hero, but sows his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest; +and Annette is a good sample of the usual <i>soubrette</i>. When +one has said that the landscapes and bandits of this romance are worthy +of Poussin and Salvator Rosa, from whom they were probably translated +into words, not much remains to be added. Sir Walter, after repeated +perusals, considered “Udolpho” “a step beyond Mrs. +Radcliffe’s former work, high as that had justly advanced her.” +But he admits that “persons of no mean judgment” preferred +“The Romance of the Forest.” With these amateurs I +would be ranked. The ingenuity and originality of the “Romance” +are greater: our friend the skeleton is better than that Thing which +was behind the Black Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling +than the escape of Emily, and the “Romance” is not nearly +so long, not nearly so prolix as “Udolpho.”</p> +<p>The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe’s work is “The Italian” +(1797), for which she received £800. <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a> +The scene is Naples, the date about 1764; the topic is the thwarted +loves of Vivaldi and Ellena; the villain is the admirable Schedoni, +the prototype of Byron’s lurid characters.</p> +<p>“The Italian” is an excellent novel. The Prelude, +“the dark and vaulted gateway,” is not unworthy of Hawthorne, +who, I suspect, had studied Mrs. Radcliffe. The theme is more +like a theme of this world than usual. The parents of a young +noble might well try to prevent him from marrying an unknown and penniless +girl. The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the ordinary paternal measures; +the Marchesa, and her confessor the dark-souled Schedoni, go farther—as +far as assassination. The casuistry by which Schedoni brings the +lady to this pass, while representing her as the originator of the scheme, +is really subtle, and the scenes between the pair show an extraordinary +advance on Mrs. Radcliffe’s earlier art. The mysterious +Monk who counteracts Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery to me, but +of that I do not complain. He is as good as the Dweller in the +Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun.” +The Inquisition, its cells, and its tribunals are coloured</p> +<blockquote><p> “As when some great painter dips<br /> +His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up in the dungeons +of the Inquisition merely because his master is there, reminds one of +Samuel Weller, he is a Neapolitan Samivel. The escapes are Mrs. +Radcliffe’s most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a +good deal. Poetry is not written, or not often, by the heroine. +The scene in which Schedoni has his dagger raised to murder Ellena, +when he discovers that she is his daughter, “is of a new, grand, +and powerful character” (Scott), while it is even more satisfactory +to learn later that Ellena was <i>not</i> Schedoni’s daughter +after all.</p> +<p>Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never +again published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries. +Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her “by showing +that she does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition +totally different from that which she has attempted.” This +is the usual way of reviewers. Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, +and Sheridan, “which possess charms for the learned and unlearned, +the grave and gay, the gentleman and clown,” do not deserve to +be dismissed with a sneer by people who have never read them. +Following Horace Walpole in some degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way +for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis, and Charlotte Brontë, just as +Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett and Miss Austen. Mrs. +Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance burning much more steadily +than the lamps which, in her novels, are always blown out, in the moment +of excited apprehension, by the night wind walking in the dank corridors +of haunted abbeys. But mark the cruelty of an intellectual parent! +Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe’s father in the spirit. +Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady Ossory: “I have read +some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your Ladyship says I +was the patriarch by several mothers” (Miss Reeve and Mrs. Radcliffe?). +“All I can say for myself is that I do not think my concubines +have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of anything marvellous.”</p> +<h2>CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830</h2> +<p>The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the +happier moments in life. Whatever we may think of life when we +contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has +sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really +want to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of +collecting. Perhaps nobody ever collected before</p> +<blockquote><p>THE<br /> +DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY<br /> +A NECROMAUNT</p> +<p>In Three Chimeras</p> +<p>BY THOMAS T. STODDART.</p> +<p>“Is’t like that lead contains her?—<br /> +It were too gross<br /> +To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave.”—<br /> +<i>Shakespeare</i>.</p> +<p>EDINBURGH:<br /> +Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,<br /> +And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.</p> +<p>MDCCCXXXI.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, +as will be shown. But first of the author. Mr. Thomas Tod +Stoddart was born in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all +his pilgrimage of three-score years and ten, his “rod and staff +did comfort him,” as the Scottish version of the Psalms has it; +nay, his staff was his rod. He “was an angler,” as +he remarked when a friend asked: “Well, Tom, what are you doing +now.” He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish +fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within +hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter, in +“Stoddart’s Angling Songs” (Blackwood), is an admirable +biography, <i>quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella +Vita senis</i>.</p> +<p>But it is with the “young Tom Stoddart,” the poet of +twenty, not with the old angling sage, that we have to do. Miss +Stoddart has discreetly republished only the Angling Songs of her father, +the pick of them being classical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold +writes:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Two desires toss about<br /> + The poet’s feverish blood,<br /> +One drives him to the world without,<br /> + And one to solitude.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The young Stoddart’s two desires were poetry and fishing. +He began with poetry. “At the age of ten his whole desire +was to produce an immortal tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers +with which he worked, and with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic +form he despised.” It is curious to think of the schoolboy, +the born Romanticist, labouring at these things, while Gérard +de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, and Pétrus +Borel were boys also—boys of the same ambitions, and with much +the same romantic tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love +besides the Muse. “With the spring and the May fly, the +dagger dipped in gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge.” +Finally, the rod and midge prevailed.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,<br /> +Mouse body and laverock wing.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he +wrote and published the volume whose title-page we have printed, “The +Death Wake.” The lad who drove home from an angling expedition +in a hearse had an odd way of combining his amusements. He lived +among poets and critics who were anglers—Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd +(who cast but a heavy line, they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher +North, De Quincey—</p> +<blockquote><p>“No fisher<br /> +But a well-wisher<br /> +To the game,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>as Scott has it—these were his companions, older or younger. +None of these, certainly not Wilson, nor Hogg, nor Aytoun, were friends +of the Romantic school, as illustrated by Keats and Shelley. None +of them probably knew much of Gautier, De Nerval, Borel, le lycanthrope, +and the other boys in that boyish movement of 1830. It was only +Stoddart, unconsciously in sympathy with Paris, and censured by his +literary friends, who produced the one British Romantic work of 1830. +The title itself shows that he was partly laughing at his own performance; +he has the mockery of <i>Les Jeunes France</i> in him, as well as the +wormy and obituary joys of <i>La Comédie de la Mort</i>. +The little book came out, inspired by “all the poetasters.” +Christopher North wrote, four years later, in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i>, +a tardy review. He styled it “an ingeniously absurd poem, +with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a strange, namby-pamby +sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry +Cornwall.” The book “fell dead from the Press,” +far more dead than “Omar Khayyam.” Nay, misfortune +pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and it was doomed to the +flames. The “remainder,” the bulk of the edition, +was returned to the poet in sheets, and by him was deposited in a garret. +The family had a cook, one Betty, a descendant, perhaps, of “that +unhappy Betty or Elizabeth Barnes, cook of Mr. Warburton, Somerset Herald,” +who burned, among other quartos, Shakespeare’s “Henry I.,” +“Henry II.,” and “King Stephen.” True +to her inherited instincts, Mr. Stoddart’s Betty, slowly, relentlessly, +through forty years, used “The Death Wake” for the needs +and processes of her art. The whole of the edition, except probably +a few “presentation copies,” perished in the kitchen. +As for that fell cook, let us hope that</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Biblioclastic Dead<br /> + Have diverse pains to brook,<br /> +They break Affliction’s bread<br /> + With Betty Barnes, the Cook,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>as the author of “The Bird Bride” sings.</p> +<p>Miss Stoddart had just informed me of this disaster, which left one +almost hopeless of ever owning a copy of “The Death Wake,” +when I found a brown paper parcel among many that contained to-day’s +minor poetry “with the author’s compliments,” and +lo, in this unpromising parcel was the long-sought volume! Ever +since one was a small boy, reading Stoddart’s “Scottish +Angler,” and old <i>Blackwood’s</i>, one had pined for a +sight of “The Necromaunt,” and here, clean in its “pure +purple mantle” of smooth cloth, lay the desired one!</p> +<blockquote><p>“Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,<br /> +It gave itself, and was not bought,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and +studies the Lacustrine Muses.</p> +<p>The copy has a peculiar interest; it once belonged to Aytoun, the +writer of “The Scottish Cavaliers,” of “The Bon Gaultier +Ballads,” and of “Firmilian,” the scourge of the Spasmodic +School. Mr. Aytoun has adorned the margins with notes and with +caricatures of skulls and cross-bones, while the fly-leaves bear a sonnet +to the author, and a lyric in doggerel. Surely this is, indeed, +a literary curiosity. The sonnet runs thus:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest<br /> + Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,<br /> +Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest<br /> + And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?<br /> +Seek’st thou for maggots such as have affinity<br /> + With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think<br /> + That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?<br /> +Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?<br /> +Here is enough of genius to convert<br /> + Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,<br /> +Then why transform the diamond into dirt,<br /> + And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,<br /> +Into a medley of creations foul,<br /> +As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>No doubt Mr. Stoddart’s other passion for angling, in which +he used a Scottish latitude concerning bait, <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a> +impelled him to search for “worms and maggots”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Fire and faggots,<br /> +Worms and maggots,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of +“The Death Wake.”</p> +<p>Then, why, some one may ask, write about “The Death Wake” +at all? Why rouse again the nightmare of a boy of twenty? +Certainly I am not to say that “The Death Wake” is a pearl +of great price, but it does contain passages of poetry—of poetry +very curious because it is full of the new note, the new melody which +young Mr. Tennyson was beginning to waken. It anticipates Beddoes, +it coincides with Gautier and <i>Les Chimères</i> of Gérard, +it answers the accents, then unheard in England, of Poe. Some +American who read out of the way things, and was not too scrupulous, +recognised, and robbed, a brother in Tom Stoddart. Eleven years +after “The Death Wake” appeared in England, it was published +in <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>, as “Agatha, a Necromaunt in +Three Chimeras,” by Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro. Now Poe was +closely connected with <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>, and after “Arthur +Gordon Pym,” “Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro” does suggest +Edgar Allen Poe. But Poe was not Tasistro.</p> +<p>So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.</p> +<p>The poem begins—Chimera I. begins:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“An anthem of a sister choristry!<br /> +And, like a windward murmur of the sea,<br /> +O’er silver shells, so solemnly it falls!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;</p> +<blockquote><p> “Agathè<br /> +Was on the lid—a name. And who? No more!<br /> +’Twas only Agathè.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>A solitary monk is prowling around in the moonlit cathedral; he has +a brow of stony marble, he has raven hair, and he falters out the name +of Agathè. He has said adieu to that fair one, and to her +sister Peace, that lieth in her grave. He has loved, and loves, +the silent Agathè. He was the son of a Crusader,</p> +<blockquote><p> “And Julio +had fain<br /> +Have been a warrior, but his very brain<br /> +Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death,<br /> +And to be stricken with a want of breath.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>On the whole he did well not to enter the service. Mr. Aytoun +has here written—“A rum Cove for a hussar.”</p> +<blockquote><p> “And he would +say<br /> +A curse be on their laurels.<br /> + And anon<br /> +Was Julio forgotten and his line—<br /> +No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>How? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma yet been unriddled.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Oh! he was wearied of this passing scene!<br /> +But loved not Death; his purpose was between<br /> +Life and the grave; and it would vibrate there<br /> +Like a wild bird that floated far and fair<br /> +Betwixt the sun and sea!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So “he became monk,” and was sorry he had done so, especially +when he met a pretty maid,</p> +<blockquote><p>“And this was Agathè, young Agathè,<br /> +A motherless fair girl,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>whose father was a kind of Dombey, for</p> +<blockquote><p> “When she smiled<br /> +He bade no father’s welcome to the child,<br /> +But even told his wish, and will’d it done,<br /> +For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So she “took the dreary veil.”</p> +<p>They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:</p> +<blockquote><p>“They met many a time<br /> +In the lone chapels after vesper chime,<br /> +They met in love and fear.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Then, one day,</p> +<blockquote><p> “He heard it +said:<br /> +Poor Julio, thy Agathè is dead.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>She died</p> +<blockquote><p>“Like to a star within the twilight hours<br /> +Of morning, and she was not! Some have thought<br /> +The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes “Damn her!” (the +Lady Abbess, that is) and suggests that thought must be read “thaft.”</p> +<p>Through “the arras of the gloom” (arras is good), the +pale breezes are moaning, and Julio is wan as stars unseen for paleness. +However, he lifts the tombstone “as it were lightsome as a summer +gladness.” “A summer gladness,” remarks Mr. +Aytoun, “may possibly weigh about half-an-ounce.” +Julio came on a skull, a haggard one, in the grave, and Mr. Aytoun kindly +designs a skeleton, ringing a bell, and crying “Dust ho!”</p> +<p>Now go, and give your poems to your friends!</p> +<p>Finally Julio unburies Agathè:—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Thou must go,<br /> +My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,<br /> +Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,<br /> +But where is light, and life, and one to brood<br /> +Above thee, till thou wakest. Ha, I fear<br /> +Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,<br /> +Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.<br /> +And Convent fathers, and a choristry<br /> +Of sisters saying Hush! But I will sing<br /> +Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering<br /> +Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune<br /> +The instrument of the ethereal moon,<br /> +And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall<br /> +In harmony and beauty musical.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Is this not melodious madness, and is this picture of the distraught +priest, setting forth to sail the seas with his dead lady, not an invention +that Nanteuil might have illustrated, and the clan of Bousingots approved?</p> +<p>The Second Chimera opens nobly:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“A curse! a curse! <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a> +the beautiful pale wing<br /> +Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering,<br /> +And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,<br /> +It stood, the golden waters gazing o’er;<br /> +And they were nearing a brown amber flow<br /> +Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Julio appears with Agathè in his arms, and what ensues is +excellent of its kind:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,<br /> +Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste,<br /> +The silent ladye, and he mutter’d wild,<br /> +Strange words about a mother and no child.<br /> +“And I shall wed thee, Agathè! although<br /> +Ours be no God-blest bridal—even so!”<br /> +And from the sand he took a silver shell,<br /> +That had been wasted by the fall and swell<br /> +Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring—<br /> +A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,<br /> +Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died<br /> +In ages far away. ‘Thou art a bride,<br /> +Sweet Agathè! Wake up; we must not linger!’<br /> +He press’d the ring upon her chilly finger,<br /> +And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone<br /> +Shouted, ‘Pale priest that liest all alone<br /> +Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away<br /> +To our glad bridal!’ and its wings of gray<br /> +All lazily it spread, and hover’d by<br /> +With a wild shriek—a melancholy cry!<br /> +Then, swooping slowly o’er the heaving breast<br /> +Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid:—</p> +<blockquote><p>. . .</p> +<p>“A rosary of stars, love! a prayer as we glide,<br /> +And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide,<br /> +And we’ll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen,<br /> +With shells of silver sown in radiancy between.</p> +<p>“A rosary of stars, love! the purest they shall be,<br /> +Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea;<br /> +Now help thee, <a name="citation9"></a><a href="#footnote9">{9}</a> +Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go,<br /> +Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical sad song, if, +indeed, he ever saw the poem.</p> +<p>One may give too many extracts, and there is scant room for the extraordinary +witchery of the midnight sea and sky, where the dead and the distraught +drift wandering,</p> +<blockquote><p>“And the great ocean, like the holy hall,<br /> +Where slept a Seraph host maritimal,<br /> +Was gorgeous with wings of diamond”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>it was a sea</p> +<blockquote><p>“Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There follows another song—</p> +<blockquote><p>“’Tis light to love thee living, girl, when +hope is full and fair,<br /> +In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow there<br /> +No sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart,<br /> +When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art</p> +<p>. . .</p> +<p>“But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide<br /> +And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside,<br /> +It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,<br /> +When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>We ought to distrust our own admiration of what is rare, odd, novel +to us, found by us in a sense, and especially one must distrust one’s +liking for the verses of a Tweedside angler, of a poet whose forebears +lie in the green kirkyard of Yarrow. But, allowing for all this, +I cannot but think these very musical, accomplished, and, in their place, +appropriate verses, to have been written by a boy of twenty. Nor +is it a common imagination, though busy in this vulgar field of horrors, +that lifts the pallid bride to look upon the mirror of the sea—</p> +<blockquote><p>“And bids her gaze into the startled sea,<br /> +And says, ‘Thine image, from eternity,<br /> +Hath come to meet thee, ladye!’ and anon<br /> +He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one<br /> +That shook amid the waters.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The picture of the madness of thirst, allied to the disease of the +brain, is extremely powerful, the delirious monk tells the salt sea +waves</p> +<blockquote><p>“That ye have power, and passion, and a sound<br /> +As of the flying of an angel round<br /> +The mighty world; that ye are one with time!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Here, I can’t but think, is imagination.</p> +<p>Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages, nor that where, +in tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, +sees the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of +the wave. But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves +the passage where an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly +stranded on the shore of pure and silver shells. The horrors of +corruption, in the Third Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies—</p> +<blockquote><p>“The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, +the cheeses,<br /> +And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on +limpets, “by the mass, he feasteth well!”</p> +<p>There was a holy hermit on the isle,</p> +<blockquote><p>“I ween like other hermits, so was he.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>He is Agathè’s father, and he has retired to an eligible +island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio +tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which +follows is marked “Beautiful” by Aytoun, and is in the spirit +of Charles Lamb’s remark that madness has pleasures unknown to +the sane.</p> +<blockquote><p> “Thou art, +thou art alone,<br /> +A pure, pure being, but the God on high<br /> +Is with thee ever as thou goest by.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing</p> +<blockquote><p>“A murmur far and far, of those that stirred<br /> +Within the great encampment of the sea.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The tide sweeps the mad and the dead down the shores. “He +perished in a dream.” As for the Hermit, he buried them, +not knowing who they were, but on a later day found and recognised the +golden cross of Agathè,</p> +<blockquote><p>“For long ago he gave that blessed cross<br /> +To his fair girl, and knew the relic still.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, “and +I hope the reader is sorry.”</p> +<p>The “other poems” are vague memories of Shelley, or anticipations +of Poe. One of them is curiously styled “Her, a Statue,” +and contains a passage that reminds us of a rubaiyat of Omar’s,</p> +<blockquote><p> “She might +see<br /> +A love-wing’d Seraph glide in glory by,<br /> +Striking the tent of its mortality.</p> +<p>“But that is but a tent wherein may rest<br /> +A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;<br /> +The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrásh<br /> +Strikes, and prepares it for another guest.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Most akin to Poe is the “Hymn to Orion,”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail<br /> +Arcturus on his chariot pale,<br /> +Leading him with a fiery flight—<br /> +Over the hollow hill of night?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>This, then, is a hasty sketch, and incomplete, of a book which, perhaps, +is only a curiosity, but which, I venture to think, gave promise of +a poet. Where is the lad of twenty who has written as well to-day—nay, +where is the mature person of forty? There was a wind of poetry +abroad in 1830, blowing over the barricades of Paris, breathing by the +sedges of Cam, stirring the heather on the hills of Yarrow. Hugo, +Mr. Browning, Lord Tennyson, caught the breeze in their sails, and were +borne adown the Tigris of romance. But the breath that stirred +the loch where Tom Stoddart lay and mused in his boat, soon became to +him merely the curl on the waters of lone St. Mary’s or Loch Skene, +and he began casting over the great uneducated trout of a happier time, +forgetful of the Muse. He wrote another piece, with a sonorous +and delightful title, “Ajalon of the Winds.” Where +is “Ajalon of the Winds”? Miss Stoddart knows nothing +of it, but I fancy that the thrice-loathed Betty could have told a tale.</p> +<blockquote><p>MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>We need not, perhaps, regret that Mr. Stoddart withdrew from the +struggles and competitions of poetic literature. No very high +place, no very glorious crown, one fancies, would have been his. +His would have been anxiety, doubt of self, disappointment, or, if he +succeeded, the hatred, and envyings, and lies which even then dogged +the steps of the victor. It was better to be quiet and go a-fishing.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Sorrow, sorrow speed away<br /> + To our angler’s quiet mound,<br /> +With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,<br /> + Enter through the holy ground;<br /> +There he sleeps whose heart is twined<br /> + With wild stream and wandering burn,<br /> +Wooer of the western wind<br /> + Watcher of the April morn!”</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>CHAPTER VIII: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE</h2> +<p>My copy of the Confessions is a dark little book, “a size uncumbersome +to the nicest hand,” in the format of an Elzevir, bound in black +morocco, and adorned with “blind-tooled,” that is ungilt, +skulls and crossbones. It has lost the title-page with the date, +but retains the frontispiece, engraved by Huret. Saint Augustine, +in his mitre and other episcopal array, with a quill in his hand, sits +under a flood of inspiring sunshine. The dumpy book has been much +read, was at some time the property of Mr. John Philips, and bears one +touching manuscript note, of which more hereafter. It is, I presume, +a copy of the translation by Sir Toby Matthew. The author of the +Preface declares, with truth, that the translator “hath consulted +so closely and earnestly with the saint that he seemeth to have lighted +his torch att his fire, and to speak in the best and most significant +English, what and how he would have done had he understood our language.”</p> +<p>There can be no better English version of this famous book, in which +Saint Augustine tells the story of his eager and passionate youth—a +youth tossed about by the contending tides of Love, human and divine. +Reading it to-day, with a mundane curiosity, we may half regret the +space which he gives to theological metaphysics, and his brief tantalising +glimpses of what most interests us now—the common life of men +when the Church was becoming mistress of the world, when the old Religions +were dying of allegory and moral interpretations and occult dreams. +But, even so, Saint Augustine’s interest in himself, in the very +obscure origins of each human existence, in the psychology of infancy +and youth, in school disputes, and magical pretensions; his ardent affections, +his exultations, and his faults, make his memoirs immortal among the +unveilings of the spirit. He has studied babies, that he may know +his dark beginnings, and the seeds of grace and of evil. “Then, +by degrees, I began to find where I was; and I had certain desires to +declare my will to those by whom it might be executed. But I could +not do it, . . . therefore would I be tossing my arms, and sending out +certain cryes, . . . and when they obeyed me not . . . I would fall +into a rage, and that not against such as were my subjects or servants, +but against my Elders and my betters, and I would revenge myself upon +them by crying.” He has observed that infants “begin +to laugh, first sleeping, and then shortly waking;” a curious +note, but he does not ask wherefore the sense of humour, or the expression +of it, comes to children first in their slumber. Of what do babies +dream? And what do the nested swallows chirrup to each other in +their sleep?</p> +<p>“Such have I understood that such infants are as I could know, +and such have I been told that I was by them who brought me up, though +even they may rather be accounted not to know, than to know these things.” +One thing he knows, “that even infancy is subject to sin.” +From the womb we are touched with evil. “Myselfe have seene +and observed some little child, who could not speake; and yet he was +all in an envious kind of wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance +upon his foster-brother.” In an envious kind of wrath! +Is it not the motive of half our politics, and too much of our criticism? +Such is man’s inborn nature, not to be cured by laws or reforms, +not to be washed out of his veins, though “blood be shed like +rain, and tears like a mist.” For “an infant cannot +endure a companion to feed with him in a fountain of milk which is richly +abounding and overflowing, although that companion be wholly destitute, +and can take no other food but that.” This is the Original +Sin, inherited, innate, unacquired; for this are “babes span-long” +to suffer, as the famous or infamous preacher declared. “Where, +or at what time, was I ever innocent?” he cries, and hears no +answer from “the dark backward and abysm” of the pre-natal +life.</p> +<p>Then the Saint describes a child’s learning to speak; how he +amasses verbal tokens of things, “having tamed, and, as it were, +broken my mouth to the pronouncing of them.” “And +so I began to launch out more deeply into the tempestuous traffique +and society of mankind.” Tempestuous enough he found or +made it—this child of a Pagan father and a Christian saint, Monica, +the saint of Motherhood. The past generations had “chalked +out certain laborious ways of learning,” and, perhaps, Saint Augustine +never forgave the flogging pedagogue—the <i>plagosus Orbilius</i> +of his boyhood. Long before his day he had found out that the +sorrows of children, and their joys, are no less serious than the sorrows +of mature age. “Is there, Lord, any man of so great a mind +that he can think lightly of those racks, and hooks, and other torments, +for the avoiding whereof men pray unto Thee with great fear from one +end of the world to the other, as that he can make sport at such as +doe most sharply inflict these things upon them, as our parents laughed +at the torments which we children susteyned at our master’s hands?” +Can we suppose that Monica laughed, or was it only the heathen father +who approved of “roughing it?” “Being yet a +childe, I began to beg Thy ayde and succour; and I did loosen the knots +of my tongue in praying Thee; and I begged, being yet a little one, +with no little devotion, that I might not be beaten at the schoole.” +One is reminded of Tom Tulliver, who gave up even praying that he might +learn one part of his work: “Please make Mr. --- say that I am +not to do mathematics.”</p> +<p>The Saint admits that he lacked neither memory nor wit, “but +he took delight in playing.” “The plays and toys of +men are called business, yet, when children fall unto them, the same +men punish them.” Yet the schoolmaster was “more fed +upon by rage,” if beaten in any little question of learning, than +the boy; “if in any match at Ball I had been maistered by one +of my playfellows.” He “aspired proudly to be victorious +in the matches which he made,” and I seriously regret to say that +he would buy a match, and pay his opponent to lose when he could not +win fairly. He liked romances also, “to have myne eares +scratched with lying fables”—a “lazy, idle boy,” +like him who dallied with Rebecca and Rowena in the holidays of Charter +House.</p> +<p>Saint Augustine, like Sir Walter Scott at the University of Edinburgh, +was “The Greek Dunce.” Both of these great men, to +their sorrow and loss, absolutely and totally declined to learn Greek. +“But what the reason was why I hated the Greeke language, while +I was taught it, being a child, I do not yet understand.” +The Saint was far from being alone in that distaste, and he who writes +loathed Greek like poison—till he came to Homer. Latin the +Saint loved, except “when reading, writing, and casting of accounts +was taught in Latin, which I held not for lesse paynefull or penal than +the very Greeke. I wept for Dido’s death, who made herselfe +away with the sword,” he declares, “and even so, the saying +that two and two makes foure was an ungrateful song in mine ears; whereas +the wooden horse full of armed men, the burning of Troy, and the very +Ghost of Creusa, was a most delightful spectacle of vanity.”</p> +<p>In short, the Saint was a regular Boy—a high-spirited, clever, +sportive, and wilful creature. He was as fond as most boys of +the mythical tales, “and for that I was accounted to be a towardly +boy.” Meanwhile he does not record that Monica disliked +his learning the foolish dear old heathen fables—“that flood +of hell!”</p> +<p>Boyhood gave place to youth, and, allowing for the vanity of self-accusation, +there can be little doubt that the youth of Saint Augustine was <i>une +jeunesse orageuse</i>. “And what was that wherein I took +delight but to love and to be beloved.” There was ever much +sentiment and affection in his amours, but his soul “could not +distinguish the beauty of chast love from the muddy darkness of lust. +Streams of them did confusedly boyl in me”—in his African +veins. “With a restless kind of weariness” he pursued +that Other Self of the Platonic dream, neglecting the Love of God:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The course of his education—for the Bar, as we should say—carried +him from home to Carthage, where he rapidly forgot the pure counsels +of his mother “as old wife’s consailes.” “And +we delighted in doing ill, not only for the pleasure of the fact, but +even for the affection of prayse.” Even Monica, it seems, +justified the saying:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Every woman is at heart a Rake.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Marriage would have been his making, Saint Augustine says, “but +she desired not even that so very much, lest the cloggs of a wife might +have hindered her hopes of me . . . In the meantime the reins were loosed +to me beyond reason.” Yet the sin which he regrets most +bitterly was nothing more dreadful than the robbery of an orchard! +Pears he had in plenty, none the less he went, with a band of roisterers, +and pillaged another man’s pear tree. “I loved the +sin, not that which I obtained by the same, but I loved the sin itself.” +There lay the sting of it! They were not even unusually excellent +pears. “A Peare tree ther was, neere our vineyard, heavy +loaden with fruite, which tempted not greatly either the sight or tast. +To the shaking and robbing thereof, certaine most wicked youthes (whereof +I was one) went late at night. We carried away huge burthens of +fruit from thence, not for our owne eating, but to be cast before the +hoggs.”</p> +<p>Oh, moonlit night of Africa, and orchard by these wild seabanks where +once Dido stood; oh, laughter of boys among the shaken leaves, and sound +of falling fruit; how do you live alone out of so many nights that no +man remembers? For Carthage is destroyed, indeed, and forsaken +of the sea, yet that one hour of summer is to be unforgotten while man +has memory of the story of his past.</p> +<p>Nothing of this, to be sure, is in the mind of the Saint, but a long +remorse for this great sin, which he earnestly analyses. Nor is +he so penitent but that he is clear-sighted, and finds the spring of +his mis-doing in the Sense of Humour! “It was a delight +and laughter which tickled us, even at the very hart, to find that we +were upon the point of deceiving them who feared no such thing from +us, and who, if they had known it, would earnestly have procured the +contrary.”</p> +<p>Saint Augustine admits that he lived with a fast set, as people say +now—“the Depravers” or “Destroyers”; though +he loved them little, “whose actions I ever did abhor, that is, +their Destruction of others, amongst whom I yet lived with a kind of +shameless bashfulness.” In short, the “Hell-Fire Club” +of that day numbered a reluctant Saint among its members! It was +no Christian gospel, but the Hortensius of Cicero which won him from +this perilous society. “It altered my affection, and made +me address my prayers to Thee, O Lord, and gave me other desires and +purposes than I had before. All vain hopes did instantly grow +base in myne eyes, and I did, with an incredible heat of hart, aspire +towards the Immortality of Wisdom.” Thus it was really “Saint +Tully,” and not the mystic call of <i>Tolle</i>! <i>Lege</i>! +that “converted” Augustine, diverting the current of his +life into the channel of Righteousness. “How was I kindled +then, oh, my God, with a desire to fly from earthly things towards Thee.”</p> +<p>There now remained only the choice of a Road. Saint Augustine +dates his own conversion from the day of his turning to the strait Christian +orthodoxy. Even the Platonic writings, had he known Greek, would +not have satisfied his desire. “For where was that Charity +that buildeth upon the foundation of Humility, which is Christ Jesus? +. . . These pages” (of the Platonists) “carried not in them +this countenance of piety—the tears of confession, and that sacrifice +of Thine which is an afflicted spirit, a contrite and humbled heart, +the salvation of Thy people, the Spouse, the City, the pledge of Thy +Holy Spirit, the Cup of our Redemption. No man doth there thus +express himself. Shall not my soul be subject to God, for of Him +is my salvation? For He is my God, and my salvation, my protectour; +I shall never be moved. No man doth there once call and say to +him: ‘Come unto me all you that labour.’”</p> +<p>The heathen doctors had not the grace which Saint Augustine instinctively +knew he lacked—the grace of Humility, nor the Comfort that is +not from within but from without. To these he aspired; let us +follow him on the path by which he came within their influence; but +let us not forget that the guide on the way to the City was kind, clever, +wordy, vain old Marcus Tullius Cicero. It is to the City that +all our faces should be set, if we knew what belongs to our peace; thither +we cast fond, hopeless, backward glances, even if we be of those whom +Tertullian calls “Saint Satan’s Penitents.” +Here, in Augustine, we meet a man who found the path—one of the +few who have found it, of the few who have won that Love which is our +only rest. It may be worth while to follow him to the journey’s +end.</p> +<p>The treatise of Cicero, then, inflamed Augustine “to the loving +and seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom +itself, wheresoever it was.” Yet, when he looked for wisdom +in the Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in +him, was repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going +further than Mr. Pater’s book, “Marius, the Epicurean,” +and his account of Apuleius, an English reader may learn what kind of +style a learned African of that date found not too simple. But +Cicero, rather than Apuleius, was Augustine’s ideal; that verbose +and sonorous eloquence captivated him, as it did the early scholars +when learning revived. Augustine had dallied a little with the +sect of the Manichees, which appears to have grieved his mother more +than his wild life.</p> +<p>But she was comforted by a vision, when she found herself in a wood, +and met “a glorious young man,” who informed her that “where +she was there should her son be also.” Curious it is to +think that this very semblance of a glorious young man haunts the magical +dreams of heathen Red Indians, advising them where they shall find game, +and was beheld in such ecstasies by John Tanner, a white man who lived +with the Indians, and adopted their religion. The Greeks would +have called this appearance Hermes, even in this guise Odysseus met +him in the oak wood of Circe’s Isle. But Augustine was not +yet in his mother’s faith; he still taught and studied rhetoric, +contending for its prizes, but declining to be aided by a certain wizard +of his acquaintance. He had entered as a competitor for a “Tragicall +poeme,” but was too sportsmanlike to seek victory by art necromantic. +Yet he followed after Astrologers, because they used no sacrifices, +and did not pretend to consult spirits. Even the derision of his +dear friend Nebridius could not then move him from those absurd speculations. +His friend died, and “his whole heart was darkened;” “mine +eyes would be looking for him in all places, but they found him not, +and I hated all things because they told me no news of him.” +He fell into an extreme weariness of life, and no less fear of death. +He lived but by halves; having lost <i>dimidium animae suae</i>, and +yet dreaded death, “Lest he might chance to have wholy dyed whome +I extremely loved.” So he returned to Carthage for change, +and sought pleasure in other friendships; but “Blessed is the +man that loves Thee and his friend in Thee and his enemy for Thee. +For he only never loseth a dear friend to whom all men are dear, for +His sake, who is never lost.”</p> +<p>Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these thoughts, so beautiful +if so helpless, like all words, to console, some reader long dead has +written:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Pray for your poor servant, J. M.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And again,</p> +<blockquote><p>“Pray for your poor friend.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved, is imploring the +prayers of a dear friend dead; and sure we need their petitions more +than they need ours, who have left this world of temptation, and are +at peace.</p> +<p>After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his ambition urging +him, perhaps, but more his disgust with the violent and riotous life +of students in Carthage. To leave his mother was difficult, but +“I lyed to my mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from +her.” And now he had a dangerous sickness, and afterwards +betook himself to converse with the orthodox, for example at Milan with +Saint Ambrose. In Milan his mother would willingly have continued +in the African ritual—a Pagan survival—carrying wine and +food to the graves of the dead; but this Saint Ambrose forbade, and +she obeyed him for him “she did extremely affect for the regard +of my spirituall good.”</p> +<p>From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there “was +damnably delighted” with the gladiatorial combats, being “made +drunk with a delight in blood.” Augustine followed him to +Rome, and there lost the girl of his heart, “so that my heart +was wounded, as that the very blood did follow.” The lady +had made a vow of eternal chastity, “having left me with a son +by her.” But he fell to a new love as the old one was departed, +and yet the ancient wound pained him still “after a more desperate +and dogged manner.”</p> +<p><i>Haeret letalis arundo</i>!</p> +<p>By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual +wills fighting against each other within him. “Give me chastity +and continency, O Lord,” he would pray, “but do not give +it yet,” and perhaps this is the frankest of the confessions of +Saint Augustine. In the midst of this war of the spirit and the +flesh, “Behold I heard a voyce, as if it had been of some boy +or girl from some house not farre off, uttering and often repeating +these words in a kind of singing voice,</p> +<blockquote><p>“<i>Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege</i>,<br /> +Take up and read, take up and read.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner +of his Virgilian lots, read:—</p> +<p>“Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness,” +with what follows. “Neither would I read any further, neither +was there any cause why I should.” Saint Augustine does +not, perhaps, mean us to understand (as his translator does), that he +was “miraculously called.” He knew what was right +perfectly well before; the text only clinched a resolve which he has +found it very hard to make. Perhaps there was a trifle of superstition +in the matter. We never know how superstitious we are. At +all events, henceforth “I neither desired a wife, nor had I any +ambitious care of any worldly thing.” He told his mother, +and Monica rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered.</p> +<p>Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine. It +was the maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred. Much stranger +stories are told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric; +another man was engaged “to sell words” to the students +of Milan. Being now converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, +except for his account of his mother’s death, and of that ecstatic +converse they held “she and I alone, leaning against a window, +which had a prospect upon the garden of our lodging at Ostia.” +They</p> +<blockquote><p>“Came on that which is, and heard<br /> +The vast pulsations of the world.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, +we grew able to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of +our hearts, and we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the +very top and flower of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the +noyse of language again, where words are begun and ended.”</p> +<p>Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to +lie beside her husband in Africa, she said: “Lay this Body where +you will. Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, +that you will remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you +be.” “But upon the ninth day of her sickness, in the +six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and the three-and-thirtieth of mine, +that religious and pious soul was discharged from the prison of her +body.”</p> +<p>The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been +at the death of his friend. But he could remember how “she +related with great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh +or unkind word to be darted out of my mouth against her.” +And to this consolation was added who knows what of confidence and tenderness +of certain hope, or a kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the +pain of a heart very often tried and inured to every pain. For +it is certain that “this green wound” was green and grievous +for a briefer time than the agony of his earlier sorrows. He himself, +so earnest in analysing his own emotions, is perplexed by the short +date of his tears, and his sharpest grief: “Let him read it who +will, and interpret it as it pleaseth him.”</p> +<p>So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint Augustine. +The most human of books, the “Confessions,” now strays into +theology. Of all books that which it most oddly resembles, to +my fancy at least, is the poems of Catullus. The passion and the +tender heart they have in common, and in common the war of flesh and +spirit; the shameful inappeasable love of Lesbia, or of the worldly +life; so delightful and dear to the poet and to the saint, so despised +in other moods conquered and victorious again, among the battles of +the war in our members. The very words in which the Veronese and +the Bishop of Hippo described the pleasure and gaiety of an early friendship +are almost the same, and we feel that, born four hundred years later, +the lover of Lesbia, the singer of Sirmio might actually have found +peace in religion, and exchanged the earthly for the heavenly love.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER IX: SMOLLETT</h2> +<p>The great English novelists of the eighteenth century turned the +course of English Literature out of its older channel. Her streams +had descended from the double peaks of Parnassus to irrigate the enamelled +fields and elegant parterres of poetry and the drama, as the critics +of the period might have said. But Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, +and Sterne, diverted the waters, from poetry and plays, into the region +of the novel, whither they have brought down a copious alluvial deposit. +Modern authors do little but till this fertile Delta: the drama is now +in the desert, poetry is a drug, and fiction is literature. Among +the writers who made this revolution, Smollett is, personally, the least +well known to the world, despite the great part which autobiography +and confessions play in his work. He is always talking about himself, +and introducing his own experiences. But there is little evidence +from without; his extant correspondence is scanty; he was not in Dr. +Johnson’s circle, much less was he in that of Horace Walpole. +He was not a popular man, and probably he has long ceased to be a popular +author. About 1780 the vendors of children’s books issued +abridgments of “Tom Jones” and “Pamela,” “Clarissa” +and “Joseph Andrews,” adapted to the needs of infant minds. +It was a curious enterprise, certainly, but the booksellers do not seem +to have produced “Every Boy’s Roderick Random,” or +“Peregrine Pickle for the Young.” Smollett, in short, +is less known than Fielding and Sterne, even Thackeray says but a word +about him, in the “English Humorists,” and he has no place +in the series of “English Men of Letters.”</p> +<p>What we know of Smollett reveals a thoroughly typical Scot of his +period; a Scot of the species absolutely opposed to Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, +and rather akin to the species of Robert Burns. “Rather +akin,” we may say, for Smollett, like Burns, was a humorist, and +in his humour far from dainty; he was a personal satirist, and a satirist +far from chivalrous. Like Burns, too, he was a poet of independence; +like Burns, and even more than Burns, in a time of patronage he was +recalcitrant against patrons. But, unlike Burns, he was <i>farouche</i> +to an extreme degree; and, unlike Burns, he carried very far his prejudices +about his “gentrice,” his gentle birth. Herein he +is at the opposite pole from the great peasant poet.</p> +<p>Two potent characteristics of his country were at war within him. +There was, first, the belief in “gentrice,” in a natural +difference of kind between men of coat armour and men without it. +Thus Roderick Random, the starving cadet of a line of small lairds, +accepts the almost incredible self-denial and devotion of Strap as merely +his due. Prince Charles could not have taken the devotion of Henry +Goring, or of Neil MacEachain, more entirely as a matter of course, +involving no consideration in return, than Roderick took the unparalleled +self-sacrifice of his barber friend and school-mate. Scott has +remarked on this contemptuous and ungrateful selfishness, and has contrasted +it with the relations of Tom Jones and Partridge. Of course, it +is not to be assumed that Smollett would have behaved like Roderick, +when, “finding the fire in my apartment almost extinguished, I +vented my fury upon poor Strap, whose ear I pinched with such violence +that he roared hideously with pain . . . ” To be sure Roderick +presently “felt unspeakable remorse . . . foamed at the mouth, +and kicked the chairs about the room.” Now Strap had rescued +Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hundreds of pounds, and +had carried his baggage, and dined on his leavings. But Strap +was not gently born! Smollett would not, probably, have acted +thus, but he did not consider such conduct a thing out of nature.</p> +<p>On the other side was Smollett’s Scottish spirit of independence. +As early as 1515, James Ingles, chaplain of Margaret Tudor, wrote to +Adam Williamson, “You know the use of this country. . . . The +man hath more words than the master, and will not be content except +he know the master’s counsel. There is no order among us.” +Strap had the instinct of feudal loyalty to a descendant of a laird. +But Smollett boasts that, being at the time about twenty, and having +burdened a nobleman with his impossible play, “The Regicide,” +“resolved to punish his barbarous indifference, and actually discarded +my Patron.” <i>He</i> was not given to “booing” +(in the sense of bowing), but had, of all known Scots, the most “canty +conceit o’ himsel’.” These qualities, with a +violence of temper which took the form of beating people when on his +travels, cannot have made Smollett a popular character. He knew +his faults, as he shows in the dedication of “Ferdinand, Count +Fathom,” to himself. “I have known you trifling, superficial, +and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and awkwardly reserved; rash +and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and lowly in your connections.”</p> +<p>He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not +been wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce +attacks made in hours when he was “meanly jealous.” +Yet, in early life at least, he regarded his own Roderick Random as +“modest and meritorious,” struggling nobly with the difficulties +which beset a “friendless orphan,” especially from the “selfishness, +envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.” Roderick +himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest selfishness. +In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme infamy which the +d’Artagnan of “The Three Musketeers” and of the “Memoirs” +committed, and for which the d’Artagnan of <i>Le Vicomte de Bragelonne</i> +took shame to himself. While engaged in a virtuous passion, Roderick +not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the meanest arts +of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for her money. +Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now carries its +“base indifference” so far, that Smollett’s biographer, +Mr. Hannay, says, “if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, +should have heard the tidings unmoved . . . Smollett obviously died +without realising how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait +of himself, came to being a ruffian.”</p> +<p>Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett “much +of a humorist, and not to be put out of his way.” A “humorist,” +here, means an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who +lived much in a society of literary dependants, was apt to become. +But Dr. Carlyle also found that, though Smollett “described so +well the characters of ruffians and profligates,” he did not resemble +them. Dr. Robertson, the historian, “expressed great surprise +at his polished and agreeable manners, and the great urbanity of his +conversation.” He was handsome in person, as his portrait +shows, but his “nervous system was exceedingly irritable and subject +to passion,” as he says in the Latin account of his health which, +in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montpellier. Though, +when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though he +undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not always +choose to behave well. Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems +to have had few real friends during most of his career.</p> +<p>As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond +measure rancorous and dangerous. From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton, +to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity. If he +did not mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, +his school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended—in +“Roderick Random,”—yet he left the originals who suggested +his characters in a very awkward situation. For assuredly he did +entertain a spite against his grandfather: and as many of the incidents +in “Roderick Random” were autobiographical, the public readily +inferred that others were founded on fact.</p> +<p>The outlines of Smollett’s career are familiar, though gaps +in our knowledge occur. Perhaps they may partly be filled up by +the aid of passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all +events, he describes conditions and situations through which he himself +may, or must, have passed.</p> +<p>Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of +Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between +Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde. Smollett’s father +made an imprudent marriage: the grandfather provided a small, but competent +provision for him and his family, during his own life. The father, +Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias +and her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the +heirs. Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick +Random: but, later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.</p> +<p>In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire. About 1710 +that gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life. Hence we learn +that <i>he</i>, in childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as +“a clog and burden,” and was neglected by his father, ill-used +by his step-mother. Thus Tobias had not only his own early poverty +to resent, but had a hereditary grudge against fortune, and “the +base indifference of mankind.” The old gentleman was lodged +“with very hard and penurious people,” at Glasgow University. +He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but “had +no liberty” to help to forfeit James II. “The puir +child, his son” (James III. and VIII.), “if he was really +such, was innocent, and it were hard to do anything that would touch +the son for the father’s fault.” The old gentleman, +therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending the first +Parliament after the Union: “I had no freedom to do it, because +I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make +laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, +being always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who +had not freedom to take them.”</p> +<p>This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, +though no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite +Scotland. Indeed, he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own +Lismahago. These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish +patriotism was more than a mere historical sentiment. Scotland +was inconceivably poor, and Scots, in England, were therefore ridiculous. +The country had, so far, gained very little by the Union, and the Union +was detested even by Scottish Whig Earls. It is recorded by Moore +that, while at the Dumbarton Grammar School, Smollett wrote “verses +to the memory of Wallace, of whom he became an early admirer,” +having read “Blind Harry’s translation of the Latin poems +of John Blair,” chaplain to that hero. There probably never +were any such Latin poems, but Smollett began with the same hero-worship +as Burns. He had the attachment of a Scot to his native stream, +the Leven, which later he was to celebrate. Now if Smollett had +credited Roderick Random with these rural, poetical, and patriotic tastes, +his hero would have been much more human and amiable. There was +much good in Smollett which is absent in Random. But for some +reason, probably because Scotland was unpopular after the Forty-Five, +Smollett merely describes the woes, ill usage, and retaliations of Roderick. +That he suffered as Random did is to the last degree improbable. +He had a fair knowledge of Latin, and was not destitute of Greek, while +his master, a Mr. Love, bore a good character both for humanity and +scholarship. He must have studied the classics at Glasgow University, +where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon, again, +was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after days, +and the odious Potion of “Roderick Random” must, like his +rival, Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, +and profligacy. Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of +that “one continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms,” such +as Mr. Colquhoun told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off +on his companions, “for which no talents could compensate.” +Judging by Dr. Carlyle’s Memoirs this intolerable kind of display +was not unusual in Caledonian conversation: but it was not likely to +make Tobias popular in England.</p> +<p>Thither he went in 1739, with very little money, “and a very +large assortment of letters of recommendation: whether his relatives +intended to compensate for the scantiness of the one by their profusion +in the other is uncertain; but he has often been heard to declare that +their liberality in the last article was prodigious.” The +Smolletts were not “kinless loons”; they had connections: +but who, in Scotland, had money? Tobias had passed his medical +examinations, but he rather trusted in his MS. tragedy, “The Regicide.” +Tragical were its results for the author. Inspired by George Buchanan’s +Latin history of Scotland, Smollett had produced a play, in blank verse, +on the murder of James I. That a boy, even a Scottish boy, should +have an overweening passion for this unlucky piece, that he should expect +by such a work to climb a step on fortune’s ladder, is nowadays +amazing. For ten years he clung to it, modified it, polished, +improved it, and then published it in 1749, after the success of “Roderick +Random.” Twice he told the story of his theatrical mishaps +and disappointments, which were such as occur to every writer for the +stage. He wailed over them in “Roderick Random,” in +the story of Mr. Melopoyn; he prolonged his cry, in the preface to “The +Regicide,” and probably the noble whom he “lashed” +(very indecently) in his two satires (“Advice,” 1746, “Reproof,” +1747, and in “Roderick Random”) was the patron who could +not get the tragedy acted. First, in 1739, he had a patron whom +he “discarded.” Then he went to the West Indies, and, +returning in 1744, he lugged out his tragedy again, and fell foul again +of patrons, actors, and managers. What befell him was the common +fate. People did not, probably, hasten to read his play: managers +and “supercilious peers” postponed that entertainment, or, +at least, the noblemen could not make the managers accept it if they +did not want it. Our taste differs so much from that of the time +which admired Home’s “Douglas,” and “The Regicide” +was so often altered to meet objections, that we can scarcely criticise +it. Of course it is absolutely unhistorical; of course it is empty +of character, and replete with fustian, and ineffably tedious; but perhaps +it is not much worse than other luckier tragedies of the age. +Naturally a lover calls his wounded lady “the bleeding fair.” +Naturally she exclaims—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Celestial +powers<br /> +Protect my father, shower upon his—oh!” (Dies).</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Naturally her adorer answers with—</p> +<blockquote><p> “So may our +mingling souls<br /> +To bliss supernal wing our happy—oh!” (Dies).</p> +</blockquote> +<p>We are reminded of—</p> +<blockquote><p> “Alas, my Bom!” +(Dies).<br /> +“‘Bastes’ he would have said!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The piece, if presented, must have been damned. But Smollett +was so angry with one patron, Lord Lyttelton, that he burlesqued the +poor man’s dirge on the death of his wife. He was so angry +with Garrick that he dragged him into “Roderick Random” +as Marmozet. Later, obliged by Garrick, and forgiving Lyttelton, +he wrote respectfully about both. But, in 1746 (in “Advice”), +he had assailed the “proud lord, who smiles a gracious lie,” +and “the varnished ruffians of the State.” Because +Tobias’s play was unacted, people who tried to aid him were liars +and ruffians, and a great deal worse, for in his satire, as in his first +novel, Smollett charges men of high rank with the worst of unnamable +crimes. Pollio and Lord Strutwell, whoever they may have been, +were probably recognisable then, and were undeniably libelled, though +they did not appeal to a jury. It is improbable that Sir John +Cope had ever tried to oblige Smollett. His ignoble attack on +Cope, after that unfortunate General had been fairly and honourably +acquitted of incompetence and cowardice, was, then, wholly disinterested. +Cope is “a courtier Ape, appointed General.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,<br /> +Nor deign’d, in three-score miles, to look behind;<br /> +While every band for orders bleat in vain,<br /> +And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain,”—</p> +</blockquote> +<p>of Preston Pans.</p> +<p>Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or more unjustly cruel. +Smollett had not here even the excuse of patriotism. Sir John +Cope was no Butcher Cumberland. In fact the poet’s friend +is not wrong, when, in “Reproof,” he calls Smollett “a +flagrant misanthrope.” The world was out of joint for the +cadet of Bonhill: both before and after his very trying experiences +as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept “The Regicide.” +This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little money +and notoriety by penning satires. They are fierce, foul-mouthed, +and pointless. But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had +the examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence +went, he could imitate. Above all, it was then the fixed belief +of men of letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; +and, as no peer did support Smollett, obviously they were “varnished +ruffians.” He erred as he would not err now, for times, +and ways of going wrong, are changed. But, at best, how different +are his angry couplets from the lofty melancholy of Johnson’s +satires!</p> +<p>Smollett’s “small sum of money” did not permit +him long to push the fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and as for his +“very large assortment of letters of recommendation,” they +only procured for him the post of surgeon’s mate in the <i>Cumberland</i> +of the line. Here he saw enough of the horrors of naval life, +enough of misery, brutality, and mismanagement, at Carthagena (1741), +to supply materials for the salutary and sickening pages on that theme +in “Roderick Random.” He also saw and appreciated +the sterling qualities of courage, simplicity, and generosity, which +he has made immortal in his Bowlings and Trunnions.</p> +<p>It is part of a novelist’s business to make one half of the +world know how the other half lives; and in this province Smollett anticipated +Dickens. He left the service as soon as he could, when the beaten +fleet was refitting at Jamaica. In that isle he seems to have +practised as a doctor; and he married, or was betrothed to, a Miss Lascelles, +who had a small and far from valuable property. The real date +of his marriage is obscure: more obscure are Smollett’s resources +on his return to London, in 1744. Houses in Downing Street can +never have been cheap, but we find “Mr. Smollett, surgeon in Downing +Street, Westminster,” and, in 1746, he was living in May Fair, +not a region for slender purses. His tragedy was now bringing +in nothing but trouble, to himself and others. His satires cannot +have been lucrative. As a dweller in May Fair he could not support +himself, like his Mr. Melopoyn, by writing ballads for street singers. +Probably he practised in his profession. In “Count Fathom” +he makes his adventurer “purchase an old chariot, which was new +painted for the occasion, and likewise hire a footman . . . This equipage, +though much more expensive than his finances could bear, he found absolutely +necessary to give him a chance of employment . . . A walking physician +was considered as an obscure pedlar.” A chariot, Smollett +insists, was necessary to “every raw surgeon”; while Bob +Sawyer’s expedient of “being called from church” was +already <i>vieux jeu</i>, in the way of advertisement. Such things +had been “injudiciously hackneyed.” In this passage +of Fathom’s adventures, Smollett proclaims his insight into methods +of getting practice. A physician must ingratiate himself with +apothecaries and ladies’ maids, or “acquire interest enough” +to have an infirmary erected “by the voluntary subscriptions of +his friends.” Here Smollett denounces hospitals, which “encourage +the vulgar to be idle and dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and +their families, from the diseases of poverty and intemperance.” +This is odd morality for one who suffered from “the base indifference +of mankind.” He ought to have known that poverty is not +a vice for which the poor are to be blamed; and that intemperance is +not the only other cause of their diseases. Perhaps the unfeeling +passage is a mere paradox in the style of his own Lismahago.</p> +<p>With or without a chariot, it is probable that Tobias had not an +insinuating style, or “a good bedside manner”; friends to +support a hospital for his renown he had none; but, somehow, he could +live in May Fair, and, in 1746, could meet Dr. Carlyle and Stewart, +son of the Provost of Edinburgh, and other Scots, at the Golden Ball +in Cockspur Street. There they were enjoying “a frugal supper +and a little punch,” when the news of Culloden arrived. +Carlyle had been a Whig volunteer: he, probably, was happy enough; but +Stewart, whose father was in prison, grew pale, and left the room. +Smollett and Carlyle then walked home through secluded streets, and +were silent, lest their speech should bewray them for Scots. “John +Bull,” quoth Smollett, “is as haughty and valiant to-day, +as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when the Highlanders +were at Derby.”</p> +<p>“Weep, Caledonia, weep!” he had written in his tragedy. +Now he wrote “Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn.” Scott +has quoted, from Graham of Gartmore, the story of Smollett’s writing +verses, while Gartmore and others were playing cards. He read +them what he had written, “The Tears of Scotland,” and added +the last verse on the spot, when warned that his opinions might give +offence.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,<br /> +My sympathising verse shall flow.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The “Tears” are better than the “Ode to Blue-Eyed +Ann,” probably Mrs. Smollett. But the courageous author +of “The Tears of Scotland,” had manifestly broken with patrons. +He also broke with Rich, the manager at Covent Garden, for whom he had +written an opera libretto. He had failed as doctor, and as dramatist; +nor, as satirist, had he succeeded. Yet he managed to wear wig +and sword, and to be seen in good men’s company. Perhaps +his wife’s little fortune supported him, till, in 1748, he produced +“Roderick Random.” It is certain that we never find +Smollett in the deep distresses of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith. +Novels were now in vogue; “Pamela” was recent, “Joseph +Andrews” was yet more recent, “Clarissa Harlowe” had +just appeared, and Fielding was publishing “Tom Jones.” +Smollett, too, tried his hand, and, at last, he succeeded.</p> +<p>His ideas of the novel are offered in his preface. The Novel, +for him, is a department of Satire; “the most entertaining and +universally improving.” To Smollett, “Roderick Random” +seemed an “improving” work! <i>Où le didacticisme +va t’il se nicher</i>? Romance, he declares, “arose +in ignorance, vanity, and superstition,” and declined into “the +ludicrous and unnatural.” Then Cervantes “converted +romance to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by making it assume +the sock, and point out the follies of ordinary life.” Romance +was to revive again some twenty years after its funeral oration was +thus delivered. As for Smollett himself, he professedly “follows +the plan” of Le Sage, in “Gil Blas” (a plan as old +as Petronius Arbiter, and the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius); +but he gives more place to “compassion,” so as not to interfere +with “generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader +against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.” +As a contrast to sordid vice, we are to admire “modest merit” +in that exemplary orphan, Mr. Random. This gentleman is a North +Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor orphan get such an +education as Roderick’s “birth and character require,” +and for other reasons. Now, as for Roderick, the schoolmaster +“gave himself no concern about the progress I made,” but, +“should endeavour, with God’s help, to prevent my future +improvement.” It must have been at Glasgow University, then, +that Roderick learned “Greek very well, and was pretty far advanced +in the mathematics,” and here he must have used his genius for +the <i>belles lettres</i>, in the interest of his “amorous complexion,” +by “lampooning the rivals” of the young ladies who admired +him.</p> +<p>Such are the happy beginnings, accompanied by practical jokes, of +this interesting model. Smollett’s heroes, one conceives, +were intended to be fine, though not faultless young fellows; men, not +plaster images; brave, generous, free-living, but, as Roderick finds +once, when examining his conscience, pure from serious stains on that +important faculty. To us these heroes often appear no better than +ruffians; Peregrine Pickle, for example, rather excels the infamy of +Ferdinand, Count Fathom, in certain respects; though Ferdinand is professedly +“often the object of our detestation and abhorrence,” and +is left in a very bad, but, as “Humphrey Clinker” shows, +in by no means a hopeless way. Yet, throughout, Smollett regarded +himself as a moralist, a writer of improving tendencies; one who “lashed +the vices of the age.” He was by no means wholly mistaken, +but we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we accepted all +Smollett’s censures as entirely deserved. The vices which +he lashed are those which he detected, or fancied that he detected, +in people who regarded a modest and meritorious Scottish orphan with +base indifference. Unluckily the greater part of mankind was guilty +of this crime, and consequently was capable of everything.</p> +<p>Enough has probably been said about the utterly distasteful figure +of Smollett’s hero. In Chapter LX. we find him living on +the resources of Strap, then losing all Strap’s money at play, +and then “I bilk my taylor.” That is, Roderick orders +several suits of new clothes, and sells them for what they will fetch. +Meanwhile Strap can live honestly anywhere, while he has his ten fingers. +Roderick rescues himself from poverty by engaging, with his uncle, in +the slave trade. We are apt to consider this commerce infamous. +But, in 1763, the Evangelical director who helped to make Cowper “a +castaway,” wrote, as to the slaver’s profession: “It +is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment, and is usually very profitable, +though to me it did not prove so, the Lord seeing that a large increase +of wealth could not be good for me.” The reverend gentleman +had, doubtless, often sung—</p> +<blockquote><p> “<i>Time for us to go</i>,<br /> + <i>Time for us to go</i>,<br /> +<i>And when we’d got the hatches down</i>,<br /> + ’<i>Twas time for us to go</i>!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Roderick, apart from “black ivory,” is aided by his uncle +and his long lost father. The base world, in the persons of Strap, +Thompson, the uncle, Mr. Sagely, and other people, treats him infinitely +better than he deserves. His very love (as always in Smollett) +is only an animal appetite, vigorously insisted upon by the author. +By a natural reaction, Scott, much as he admired Smollett, introduced +his own blameless heroes, and even Thackeray could only hint at the +defects of youth, in “Esmond.” Thackeray is accused +of making his good people stupid, or too simple, or eccentric, and otherwise +contemptible. Smollett went further: Strap, a model of benevolence, +is ludicrous and a coward; even Bowling has the stage eccentricities +of the sailor. Mankind was certain, in the long run, to demand +heroes more amiable and worthy of respect. Our inclinations, as +Scott says, are with “the open-hearted, good-humoured, and noble-minded +Tom Jones, whose libertinism (one particular omitted) is perhaps rendered +but too amiable by his good qualities.” To be sure Roderick +does befriend “a reclaimed street-walker” in her worst need, +but why make her the <i>confidante</i> of the virginal Narcissa? +Why reward Strap with her hand? Fielding decidedly, as Scott insists, +“places before us heroes, and especially heroines, of a much higher +as well as more pleasing character, than Smollett was able to present.”</p> +<p>“But the deep and fertile genius of Smollett afforded resources +sufficient to make up for these deficiencies . . . If Fielding had superior +taste, the palm of more brilliancy of genius, more inexhaustible richness +of invention, must in justice be awarded to Smollett. In comparison +with his sphere, that in which Fielding walked was limited . . . ” +The second part of Scott’s parallel between the men whom he considered +the greatest of our novelists, qualifies the first. Smollett’s +invention was not richer than Fielding’s, but the sphere in which +he walked, the circle of his experience, was much wider. One division +of life they knew about equally well, the category of rakes, adventurers, +card-sharpers, unhappy authors, people of the stage, and ladies without +reputations, in every degree. There were conditions of higher +society, of English rural society, and of clerical society, which Fielding, +by birth and education, knew much better than Smollett. But Smollett +had the advantage of his early years in Scotland, then as little known +as Japan; with the “nautical multitude,” from captain to +loblolly boy, he was intimately familiar; with the West Indies he was +acquainted; and he later resided in Paris, and travelled in Flanders, +so that he had more experience, certainly, if not more invention, than +Fielding.</p> +<p>In “Roderick Random” he used Scottish “local colour” +very little, but his life had furnished him with a surprising wealth +of “strange experiences.” Inns were, we must believe, +the favourite home of adventures, and Smollett could ring endless changes +on mistakes about bedrooms. None of them is so innocently diverting +as the affair of Mr. Pickwick and the lady in yellow curl-papers; but +the absence of that innocence which heightens Mr. Pickwick’s distresses +was welcome to admirers of what Lady Mary Wortley Montagu calls “gay +reading.”</p> +<p>She wrote from abroad, in 1752, “There is something humorous +in R. Random, that makes me believe that the author is H. Fielding”—her +kinsman. Her ladyship did her cousin little justice. She +did not complain of the morals of “R. Random,” but thought +“Pamela” and “Clarissa” “likely to do +more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester.” +Probably “R. Random” did little harm. His career is +too obviously ideal. Too many ups and downs occur to him, and +few orphans of merit could set before themselves the ideal of bilking +their tailors, gambling by way of a profession, dealing in the slave +trade, and wheedling heiresses.</p> +<p>The variety of character in the book is vast; in Morgan we have an +excellent, fiery, Welshman, of the stage type; the different minor miscreants +are all vividly designed; the eccentric lady author may have had a real +original; Miss Snapper has much vivacity as a wit; the French adventures +in the army are, in their rude barbaric way, a forecast of Barry Lyndon’s; +and, generally, both Scott and Thackeray owe a good deal to Smollett +in the way of suggestions. Smollett’s extraordinary love +of dilating on noisome smells and noisome sights, that intense affection +for the physically nauseous, which he shared with Swift, is rather less +marked in “Roderick” than in “Humphrey Clinker,” +and “The Adventures of an Atom.” The scenes in the +Marshalsea must have been familiar to Dickens. The terrible history +of Miss Williams is Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress done into +unsparing prose. Smollett guides us at a brisk pace through the +shady and brutal side of the eighteenth century; his vivacity is as +unflagging as that of his disagreeable rattle of a hero. The passion +usually understood as love is, to be sure, one of which he seems to +have no conception; he regards a woman much as a greedy person might +regard a sirloin of beef, or, at least, a plate of ortolans. At +her marriage a bride is “dished up;” that is all.</p> +<p>Thus this “gay writing” no longer makes us gay. +In reading “Peregrine Pickle” and “Humphrey Clinker,” +a man may find himself laughing aloud, but hardly in reading “Roderick +Random.” The fun is of the cruel primitive sort, arising +merely from the contemplation of somebody’s painful discomfiture. +Bowling and Rattlin may be regarded with affectionate respect; but Roderick +has only physical courage and vivacity to recommend him. Whether +Smollett, in Flaubert’s deliberate way, purposely abstained from +moralising on the many scenes of physical distress which he painted; +or whether he merely regarded them without emotion, has been debated. +It seems more probable that he thought they carried their own moral. +It is the most sympathetic touch in Roderick’s character, that +he writes thus of his miserable crew of slaves: “Our ship being +freed from the disagreeable lading of negroes, <i>to whom indeed I had +been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea</i>, I +began to enjoy myself.” Smollett was a physician, and had +the pitifulness of his profession; though we see how casually he makes +Random touch on his own unwonted benevolence.</p> +<p>People had not begun to know the extent of their own brutality in +the slave trade, but Smollett probably did know it. If a curious +prophetic letter attributed to him, and published more than twenty years +after his death, be genuine; he had the strongest opinions about this +form of commercial enterprise. But he did not wear his heart on +his sleeve, where he wore his irritable nervous system. It is +probable enough that he felt for the victims of poverty, neglect, and +oppression (despite his remarks on hospitals) as keenly as Dickens. +We might regard his offensively ungrateful Roderick as a purely dramatic +exhibition of a young man, if his other heroes were not as bad, or worse; +if their few redeeming qualities were not stuck on in patches; and if +he had omitted his remark about Roderick’s “modest merit.” +On the other hand, the good side of Matthew Bramble seems to be drawn +from Smollett’s own character, and, if that be the case, he can +have had little sympathy with his own humorous Barry Lyndons. +Scott and Thackeray leaned to the favourable view: Smollett, his nervous +system apart, was manly and kindly.</p> +<p>As regards plot, “Roderick Random” is a mere string of +picturesque adventures. It is at the opposite pole from “Tom +Jones” in the matter of construction. There is no reason +why it should ever stop except the convenience of printers and binders. +Perhaps we lay too much stress on the somewhat mechanical art of plot-building. +Fielding was then setting the first and best English example of a craft +in which the very greatest authors have been weak, or of which they +were careless. Smollett was always rather more incapable, or rather +more indifferent, in plot-weaving, than greater men.</p> +<p>In our day of royalties, and gossip about the gains of authors, it +would be interesting to know what manner and size of a cheque Smollett +received from his publisher, the celebrated Mr. Osborne. We do +not know, but Smollett published his next novel “on commission,” +“printed for the Author”; so probably he was not well satisfied +with the pecuniary result of “Roderick Random.” Thereby, +says Dr. Moore, he “acquired much more reputation than money.” +So he now published “The Regicide” “by subscription, +that method of publication being then more reputable than it has been +thought since” (1797). Of “The Regicide,” and +its unlucky preface, enough, or more, has been said. The public +sided with the managers, not with the meritorious orphan.</p> +<p>For the sake of pleasure, or of new experiences, or of economy, Smollett +went to Paris in 1750, where he met Dr. Moore, later his biographer, +the poetical Dr. Akenside, and an affected painter. He introduced +the poet and painter into “Peregrine Pickle”; and makes +slight use of a group of exiled Jacobites, including Mr. Hunter of Burnside. +In 1750, there were Jacobites enough in the French capital, all wondering +very much where Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious that +he was their neighbour in a convent in the Rue St. Dominique. +Though Moore does not say so (he is provokingly economical of detail), +we may presume that Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine +Pickle. It is curious that he should introduce a Capucin, a Jew, +and a black-eyed damsel, all in the Ghent diligence, when we know that +Prince Charles did live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walkenshaw, +did go about disguised as a Capucin, and was tracked by a Jewish spy, +while the other spy, Young Glengarry, styled himself “Pickle.” +But all those events occurred about a year after the novel was published +in 1751.</p> +<p>Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree from Aberdeen University, +and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or two at +Bath. But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable +invalids, and, in “Humphrey Clinker,” he make Matthew Bramble +give such an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. +He was still trying to gain ground in his profession, when, in March +1751, Mr. D. Wilson published the first edition of “Peregrine +Pickle” “for the Author,” unnamed. I have never +seen this first edition, which was “very curious and disgusting.” +Smollett, in his preface to the second edition, talks of “the +art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth, by certain +booksellers and others.” He now “reformed the manners, +and corrected the expressions,” removed or modified some passages +of personal satire, and held himself exempt from “the numerous +shafts of envy, rancour, and revenge, that have lately, both in private +and public, been levelled at his reputation.” Who were these +base and pitiless dastards? Probably every one who did not write +favourably about the book. Perhaps Smollett suspected Fielding, +whom he attacks in several parts of his works, treating him as a kind +of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker, and an associate with thieves. +Why Smollett thus misconducted himself is a problem, unless he was either +“meanly jealous,” or had taken offence at some remarks in +Fielding’s newspaper. Smollett certainly began the war, +in the first edition of “Peregrine Pickle.” He made +a kind of palinode to the “trading justice” later, as other +people of his kind have done.</p> +<p>A point in “Peregrine Pickle” easily assailed was the +long episode about a Lady of Quality: the beautiful Lady Vane, whose +memoirs Smollett introduced into his tale. Horace Walpole found +that she had omitted the only feature in her career of which she had +just reason to be proud: the number of her lovers. Nobody doubted +that Smollett was paid for casting his mantle over Lady Vane: moreover, +he might expect a success of scandal. The <i>roman à clef</i> +is always popular with scandal-mongers, but its authors can hardly hope +to escape rebuke.</p> +<p>It was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Italy, received +“Peregrine,” with other fashionable romances—“Pompey +the Little,” “The Parish Girl,” “Eleanora’s +Adventures,” “The Life of Mrs. Theresa Constantia Phipps,” +“The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil,” and so on. Most of +them contained portraits of real people, and, no doubt, most of them +were therefore successful. But where are they now? Lady +Mary thought Lady Vane’s part of “Peregrine” “more +instructive to young women than any sermon that I know.” +She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only “original” +of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is “the +most contemptible way of getting bread.” She did not, at +this time, even know Smollett’s name, but she admired him, and, +later, calls him “my dear Smollett.” This lady thought +that Fielding did not know what sorry fellows his Tom Jones and Captain +Booth were. Not near so sorry as Peregine Pickle were they, for +this gentleman is a far more atrocious ruffian than Roderick Random.</p> +<p>None the less “Peregrine” is Smollett’s greatest +work. Nothing is so rich in variety of character, scene, and adventure. +We are carried along by the swift and copious volume of the current, +carried into very queer places, and into the oddest miscellaneous company, +but we cannot escape from Smollett’s vigorous grasp. Sir +Walter thought that “Roderick” excelled its successor in +“ease and simplicity,” and that Smollett’s sailors, +in “Pickle,” “border on caricature.” No +doubt they do: the eccentricities of Hawser Trunnion, Esq., are exaggerated, +and Pipes is less subdued than Rattlin, though always delightful. +But Trunnion absolutely makes one laugh out aloud: whether he is criticising +the sister of Mr. Gamaliel Pickle in that gentleman’s presence, +at a pot-house; or riding to the altar with his squadron of sailors, +tacking in an unfavourable gale; or being run away into a pack of hounds, +and clearing a hollow road over a waggoner, who views him with “unspeakable +terror and amazement.” Mr. Winkle as an equestrian is not +more entirely acceptable to the mind than Trunnion. We may speak +of “caricature,” but if an author can make us sob with laughter, +to criticise him solemnly is ungrateful.</p> +<p>Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift, and Sheridan, +and the authors of “The Rovers,” one does not remember any +writers of the eighteenth century who quite upset the gravity of the +reader. The scene of the pedant’s dinner after the manner +of the ancients, does not seem to myself so comic as the adventures +of Trunnion, while the bride is at the altar, and the bridegroom is +tacking and veering with his convoy about the fields. One sees +how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of Athenæus, Juvenal, +Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written this set piece. +But Trunnion is quite inimitable: he is a child of humour and of the +highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder. Till Scott created +Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had ever produced anything except “Tam +o’ Shanter,” that could be a pendant to Trunnion. +His pathos is possibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my +own opinion. Dear Trunnion! he makes me overlook the gambols of +his detestable <i>protégé</i>, the hero.</p> +<p>That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain, +cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love +with Emilia <i>pour le bon motif</i>, and then attempt to ruin her, +though she was the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace +at his last and lowest stage. Peregrine’s overwhelming vanity, +swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this +abyss. The intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical +jokes of his, in which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. +Peregrine, in fact, is a hero of <i>naturalisme</i>, except that his +fits of generosity are mere patches daubed on, and that his reformation +is a farce, in which a modern <i>naturaliste</i> would have disdained +to indulge. Emilia, in her scene with Peregrine in the <i>bouge</i> +to which he has carried her, rises much above Smollett’s heroines, +and we could like her, if she had never forgiven behaviour which was +beneath pardon.</p> +<p>Peregrine’s education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho’s +description of that academy in his lately published Memoirs. It +was apt to develop Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished +Smollett with suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that +Cadwallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and +that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their abode with Peregrine in the +Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the +same abode. That “Peregrine” “does far excel +‘Joseph Andrews’ and ‘Amelia’,” as Scott +declares, few modern readers will admit. The world could do much +better without “Peregrine” than without “Joseph”; +while Amelia herself alone is a study greatly preferable to the whole +works of Smollett: such, at least, is the opinion of a declared worshipper +of that peerless lady. Yet “Peregrine” is a kind of +Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and of adventure.</p> +<p>In February 1753, Smollett “obliged the town” with his +“Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” a cosmopolitan +swindler and adventurer. The book is Smollett’s “Barry +Lyndon,” yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually +held up as a “dreadful example,” there is none of Thackeray’s +irony, none of his subtlety. “Here is a really bad man, +a foreigner too,” Smollett seems to say, “do not be misled, +oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play +not with him at billiards, basset, or gleek. Fathers, on such +a rogue shut your doors: collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques. +Let all avoid the path and shun the example of Ferdinand, Count Fathom!”</p> +<p>Such is Smollett’s sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is hardly +worse than Roderick or Peregrine. The son of a terrible old sutler +and camp-follower, a robber and slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had +to live by his wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than +Peregrine and Roderick. The daubs of casual generosity were not +laid on, and that is all the difference. As Sophia Western was +mistaken for Miss Jenny Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince +Charles, who, in fact, caused much inconvenience to harmless travellers. +People were often arrested as “The Pretender’s son” +abroad as well as in England.</p> +<p>The life and death of Ferdinand’s mother, shot by a wounded +hussar in her moment of victory, make perhaps the most original and +interesting part of this hero’s adventures. The rest is +much akin to his earlier novels, but the history of Rinaldo and Monimia +has a passage not quite alien to the vein of Mrs. Radcliffe. Some +remarks in the first chapter show that Smollett felt the censures on +his brutality and “lowness,” and he promises to seek “that +goal of perfection where nature is castigated almost even to still life +. . . where decency, divested of all substance, hovers about like a +fantastic shadow.”</p> +<p>Smollett never reached that goal, and even the shadow of decency +never haunted him so as to make him afraid with any amazement. +Smollett avers that he “has had the courage to call in question +the talents of a pseudo-patron,” and so is charged with “insolence, +rancour, and scurrility.” Of all these things, and of worse, +he had been guilty; his offence had never been limited to “calling +in question the talents” of persons who had been unsuccessful +in getting his play represented. Remonstrance merely irritated +Tobias. His new novel was but a fainter echo of his old novels, +a panorama of scoundrelism, with the melodramatic fortunes of the virtuous +Monimia for a foil. If read to-day, it is read as a sketch of +manners, or want of manners. The scene in which the bumpkin squire +rooks the accomplished Fathom at hazard, in Paris, is prettily conceived, +and Smollett’s indignation at the British system of pews in church +is edifying. But when Monimia appears to her lover as he weeps +at her tomb, and proves to be no phantom, but a “warm and substantial” +Monimia, capable of being “dished up,” like any other Smollettian +heroine, the reader is sensibly annoyed. Tobias as <i>un romantique</i> +is absolutely too absurd; “not here, oh Tobias, are haunts meet +for thee.”</p> +<p>Smollett’s next novel, “Sir Launcelot Greaves,” +was not published till 1761, after it had appeared in numbers, in <i>The +British Magazine</i>. This was a sixpenny serial, published by +Newbery. The years between 1753 and 1760 had been occupied by +Smollett in quarrelling, getting imprisoned for libel, editing the <i>Critical +Review</i>, writing his “History of England,” translating +(or adapting old translations of) “Don Quixote,” and driving +a team of literary hacks, whose labours he superintended, and to whom +he gave a weekly dinner. These exploits are described by Dr. Carlyle, +and by Smollett himself, in “Humphrey Clinker.” He +did not treat his vassals with much courtesy or consideration; but then +they expected no such treatment. We have no right to talk of his +doings as “a blood-sucking method, literary sweating,” like +a recent biographer of Smollett. Not to speak of the oddly mixed +metaphor, we do not know what Smollett’s relations to his retainers +really were. As an editor he had to see his contributors. +The work of others he may have recommended, as “reader” +to publishers. Others may have made transcripts for him, or translations. +That Smollett “sweated” men, or sucked their blood, or both, +seems a crude way of saying that he found them employment. Nobody +says that Johnson “sweated” the persons who helped him in +compiling his Dictionary; or that Mr. Jowett “sweated” the +friends and pupils who aided him in his translation of Plato. +Authors have a perfect right to procure literary assistance, especially +in learned books, if they pay for it, and acknowledge their debt to +their allies. On the second point, Smollett was probably not in +advance of his age.</p> +<p>“Sir Launcelot Greaves” is, according to Chambers, “a +sorry specimen of the genius of the author,” and Mr. Oliphant +Smeaton calls it “decidedly the least popular” of his novels, +while Scott astonishes us by preferring it to “Jonathan Wild.” +Certainly it is inferior to “Roderick Random” and to “Peregrine +Pickle,” but it cannot be so utterly unreal as “The Adventures +of an Atom.” I, for one, venture to prefer “Sir Launcelot” +to “Ferdinand, Count Fathom.” Smollett was really +trying an experiment in the fantastic. Just as Mr. Anstey Guthrie +transfers the mediæval myth of Venus and the Ring, or the Arabian +tale of the bottled-up geni (or djinn) into modern life, so Smollett +transferred Don Quixote. His hero, a young baronet of wealth, +and of a benevolent and generous temper, is crossed in love. Though +not mad, he is eccentric, and commences knight-errant. Scott, +and others, object to his armour, and say that, in his ordinary clothes, +and with his well-filled purse, he would have been more successful in +righting wrongs. Certainly, but then the comic fantasy of the +armed knight arriving at the ale-house, and jangling about the rose-hung +lanes among the astonished folk of town and country, would have been +lost. Smollett is certainly less unsuccessful in wild fantasy, +than in the ridiculous romantic scenes where the substantial phantom +of Monimia disports itself. The imitation of the knight by the +nautical Captain Crowe (an excellent Smollettian mariner) is entertaining, +and Sir Launcelot’s crusty Sancho is a pleasant variety in squires. +The various forms of oppression which the knight resists are of historical +interest, as also is the contested election between a rustic Tory and +a smooth Ministerialist: “sincerely attached to the Protestant +succession, in detestation of a popish, an abjured, and an outlawed +Pretender.” The heroine, Aurelia Darrel, is more of a lady, +and less of a luxury, than perhaps any other of Smollett’s women. +But how Smollett makes love! “Tea was called. The +lovers were seated; he looked and languished; she flushed and faltered; +all was doubt and delirium, fondness and flutter.”</p> +<p>“All was gas and gaiters,” said the insane lover of Mrs. +Nickleby, with equal delicacy and point.</p> +<p>Scott says that Smollett, when on a visit to Scotland, used to write +his chapter of “copy” in the half-hour before the post went +out. Scott was very capable of having the same thing happen to +himself. “Sir Launcelot” is hurriedly, but vigorously +written: the fantasy was not understood as Smollett intended it to be, +and the book is blotted, as usual, with loathsome medical details. +But people in Madame du Deffand’s circle used openly to discuss +the same topics, to the confusion of Horace Walpole. As the hero +of this book is a generous gentleman, as the most of it is kind and +manly, and the humour provocative of an honest laugh, it is by no means +to be despised, while the manners, if caricatured, are based on fact.</p> +<p>It is curious to note that in “Sir Launcelot Greaves,” +we find a character, Ferret, who frankly poses as a <i>strugforlifeur</i>. +M. Daudet’s <i>strugforlifeur</i> had heard of Darwin. Mr. +Ferret had read Hobbes, learned that man was in a state of nature, and +inferred that we ought to prey upon each other, as a pike eats trout. +Miss Burney, too, at Bath, about 1780, met a perfectly emancipated young +“New Woman.” She had read Bolingbroke and Hume, believed +in nothing, and was ready to be a “Woman who Did.” +Our ancestors could be just as advanced as we are.</p> +<p>Smollett went on compiling, and supporting himself by his compilations, +and those of his vassals. In 1762 he unluckily edited a paper +called <i>The Briton</i> in the interests of Lord Bute. <i>The +Briton</i> was silenced by Wilkes’s <i>North Briton</i>. +Smollett lost his last patron; he fell ill; his daughter died; he travelled +angrily in France and Italy. His “Travels” show the +choleric nature of the man, and he was especially blamed for not admiring +the Venus de Medici. Modern taste, enlightened by the works of +a better period of Greek art, has come round to Smollett’s opinions. +But, in his own day, he was regarded as a Vandal and a heretic.</p> +<p>In 1764, he visited Scotland, and was warmly welcomed by his kinsman, +the laird of Bonhill. In 1769, he published “The Adventures +of an Atom,” a stupid, foul, and scurrilous political satire, +in which Lord Bute, having been his patron, was “lashed” +in Smollett’s usual style. In 1768, Smollett left England +for ever. He desired a consulship, but no consulship was found +for him, which is not surprising. He died at Monte Nova, near +Leghorn, in September (others say October) 1771. He had finished +“Humphrey Clinker,” which appeared a day or two before his +death.</p> +<p>Thackeray thought “Humphrey Clinker” the most laughable +book that ever was written. Certainly nobody is to be envied who +does not laugh over the epistles of Winifred Jenkins. The book +is too well known for analysis. The family of Matthew Bramble, +Esq., are on their travels, with his nephew and niece, young Melford +and Lydia Melford, with Miss Jenkins, and the squire’s tart, greedy, +and amorous old maid of a sister, Tabitha Bramble. This lady’s +persistent amours and mean avarice scarcely strike modern readers as +amusing. Smollett gave aspects of his own character in the choleric, +kind, benevolent Matthew Bramble, and in the patriotic and paradoxical +Lieutenant Lismahago. Bramble, a gouty invalid, is as full of +medical abominations as Smollett himself, as ready to fight, and as +generous and open-handed. Probably the author shared Lismahago’s +contempt of trade, his dislike of the Union (1707), his fiery independence +(yet he <i>does</i> marry Tabitha!), and those opinions in which Lismahago +heralds some of the social notions of Mr. Ruskin.</p> +<p>Melford is an honourable kind of “walking gentleman”; +Lydia, though enamoured, is modest and dignified; Clinker is a worthy +son of Bramble, with abundant good humour, and a pleasing vein of Wesleyan +Methodism. But the grotesque spelling, rural vanity, and <i>naïveté</i> +of Winifred Jenkins, with her affection for her kitten, make her the +most delightful of this wandering company. After beholding the +humours and partaking of the waters of Bath, they follow Smollett’s +own Scottish tour, and each character gives his picture of the country +which Smollett had left at its lowest ebb of industry and comfort, and +found so much more prosperous. The book is a mine for the historian +of manners and customs: the novel-reader finds Count Fathom metamorphosed +into Mr. Grieve, an exemplary apothecary, “a sincere convert to +virtue,” and “unaffectedly pious.”</p> +<p>Apparently a wave of good-nature came over Smollett: he forgave everybody, +his own relations even, and he reclaimed his villain. A patron +might have played with him. He mellowed in Scotland: Matthew there +became less tart, and more tolerant; an actual English Matthew would +have behaved quite otherwise. “Humphrey Clinker” is an astonishing +book, as the work of an exiled, poor, and dying man. None of his +works leaves so admirable an impression of Smollett’s virtues: +none has so few of his less amiable qualities.</p> +<p>With the cadet of Bonhill, outworn with living, and with labour, +died the burly, brawling, picturesque old English novel of humour and +of the road. We have nothing notable in this manner, before the +arrival of Mr. Pickwick. An exception will scarcely be made in +the interest of Richard Cumberland, who, as Scott says, “has occasionally +. . . become disgusting, when he meant to be humorous.” +Already Walpole had begun the new “Gothic romance,” and +the “Castle of Otranto,” with Miss Burney’s novels, +was to lead up to Mrs. Radcliffe and Scott, to Miss Edgeworth and Miss +Austen.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER X: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE</h2> +<p>Sainte-Beuve says somewhere that it is impossible to speak of “The +German Classics.” Perhaps he would not have allowed us to +talk of the American classics. American literature is too nearly +contemporary. Time has not tried it. But, if America possesses +a classic author (and I am not denying that she may have several), that +author is decidedly Hawthorne. His renown is unimpeached: his +greatness is probably permanent, because he is at once such an original +and personal genius, and such a judicious and determined artist.</p> +<p>Hawthorne did not set himself to “compete with life.” +He did not make the effort—the proverbially tedious effort—to +say everything. To his mind, fiction was not a mirror of commonplace +persons, and he was not the analyst of the minutest among their ordinary +emotions. Nor did he make a moral, or social, or political purpose +the end and aim of his art. Moral as many of his pieces naturally +are, we cannot call them didactic. He did not expect, nor intend, +to better people by them. He drew the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale without +hoping that his Awful Example would persuade readers to “make +a clean breast” of their iniquities and their secrets. It +was the moral situation that interested him, not the edifying effect +of his picture of that situation upon the minds of novel-readers.</p> +<p>He set himself to write Romance, with a definite idea of what Romance-writing +should be; “to dream strange things, and make them look like truth.” +Nothing can be more remote from the modern system of reporting commonplace +things, in the hope that they will read like truth. As all painters +must do, according to good traditions, he selected a subject, and then +placed it in a deliberately arranged light—not in the full glare +of the noonday sun, and in the disturbances of wind, and weather, and +cloud. Moonshine filling a familiar chamber, and making it unfamiliar, +moonshine mixed with the “faint ruddiness on walls and ceiling” +of fire, was the light, or a clear brown twilight was the light by which +he chose to work. So he tells us in the preface to “The +Scarlet Letter.” The room could be filled with the ghosts +of old dwellers in it; faint, yet distinct, all the life that had passed +through it came back, and spoke with him, and inspired him. He +kept his eyes on these figures, tangled in some rare knot of Fate, and +of Desire: these he painted, not attending much to the bustle of existence +that surrounded them, not permitting superfluous elements to mingle +with them, and to distract him.</p> +<p>The method of Hawthorne can be more easily traced than that of most +artists as great as himself. Pope’s brilliant passages and +disconnected trains of thought are explained when we remember that “paper-sparing,” +as he says, he wrote two, or four, or six couplets on odd, stray bits +of casual writing material. These he had to join together, somehow, +and between his “Orient Pearls at Random Strung” there is +occasionally “too much string,” as Dickens once said on +another opportunity. Hawthorne’s method is revealed in his +published note-books. In these he jotted the germ of an idea, +the first notion of a singular, perhaps supernatural moral situation. +Many of these he never used at all, on others he would dream, and dream, +till the persons in the situations became characters, and the thing +was evolved into a story. Thus he may have invented such a problem +as this: “The effect of a great, sudden sin on a simple and joyous +nature,” and thence came all the substance of “The Marble +Faun” (“Transformation”). The original and germinal +idea would naturally divide itself into another, as the protozoa reproduce +themselves. Another idea was the effect of nearness to the great +crime on a pure and spotless nature: hence the character of Hilda. +In the preface to “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne shows +us how he tried, by reflection and dream, to warm the vague persons +of the first mere notion or hint into such life as characters in romance +inherit. While he was in the Civil Service of his country, in +the Custom House at Salem, he could not do this; he needed freedom. +He was dismissed by political opponents from office, and instantly he +was himself again, and wrote his most popular and, perhaps, his best +book. The evolution of his work was from the prime notion (which +he confessed that he loved best when “strange”) to the short +story, and thence to the full and rounded novel. All his work +was leisurely. All his language was picked, though not with affectation. +He did not strive to make a style out of the use of odd words, or of +familiar words in odd places. Almost always he looked for “a +kind of spiritual medium, seen through which” his romances, like +the Old Manse in which he dwelt, “had not quite the aspect of +belonging to the material world.”</p> +<p>The spiritual medium which he liked, he was partly born into, and +partly he created it. The child of a race which came from England, +robust and Puritanic, he had in his veins the blood of judges—of +those judges who burned witches and persecuted Quakers. His fancy +is as much influenced by the old fanciful traditions of Providence, +of Witchcraft, of haunting Indian magic, as Scott’s is influenced +by legends of foray and feud, by ballad, and song, and old wives’ +tales, and records of conspiracies, fire-raisings, tragic love-adventures, +and border wars. Like Scott, Hawthorne lived in phantasy—in +phantasy which returned to the romantic past, wherein his ancestors +had been notable men. It is a commonplace, but an inevitable commonplace, +to add that he was filled with the idea of Heredity, with the belief +that we are all only new combinations of our fathers that were before +us. This has been made into a kind of pseudo-scientific doctrine +by M. Zola, in the long series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. +Hawthorne treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in “The +House of the Seven Gables.”</p> +<p>It is curious to mark Hawthorne’s attempts to break away from +himself—from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the +divine gift of genius had made him. He naturally “haunts +the mouldering lodges of the past”; but when he came to England +(where such lodges are abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-grained. +He knew that a long past, with mysteries, dark places, malisons, curses, +historic wrongs, was the proper atmosphere of his art. But a kind +of conscientious desire to be something other than himself—something +more ordinary and popular—make him thank Heaven that his chosen +atmosphere was rare in his native land. He grumbled at it, when +he was in the midst of it; he grumbled in England; and how he grumbled +in Rome! He permitted the American Eagle to make her nest in his +bosom, “with the customary infirmity of temper that characterises +this unhappy fowl,” as he says in his essay “The Custom +House.” “The general truculency of her attitude” +seems to “threaten mischief to the inoffensive community” +of Europe, and especially of England and Italy.</p> +<p>Perhaps Hawthorne travelled too late, when his habits were too much +fixed. It does not become Englishmen to be angry because a voyager +is annoyed at not finding everything familiar and customary in lands +which he only visits because they are strange. This is an inconsistency +to which English travellers are particularly prone. But it is, +in Hawthorne’s case, perhaps, another instance of his conscientious +attempts to be, what he was not, very much like other people. +His unexpected explosions of Puritanism, perhaps, are caused by the +sense of being too much himself. He speaks of “the Squeamish +love of the Beautiful” as if the love of the Beautiful were something +unworthy of an able-bodied citizen. In some arts, as in painting +and sculpture, his taste was very far from being at home, as his Italian +journals especially prove. In short, he was an artist in a community +for long most inartistic. He could not do what many of us find +very difficult—he could not take Beauty with gladness as it comes, +neither shrinking from it as immoral, nor getting girlishly drunk upon +it, in the æsthetic fashion, and screaming over it in an intoxication +of surprise. His tendency was to be rather shy and afraid of Beauty, +as a pleasant but not immaculately respectable acquaintance. Or, +perhaps, he was merely deferring to Anglo-Saxon public opinion.</p> +<p>Possibly he was trying to wean himself from himself, and from his +own genius, when he consorted with odd amateur socialists in farm-work, +and when he mixed, at Concord, with the “queer, strangely-dressed, +oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important +agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simple bores of a very +intense water.” They haunted Mr. Emerson as they haunted +Shelley, and Hawthorne had to see much of them. But they neither +made a convert of him, nor irritated him into resentment. His +long-enduring kindness to the unfortunate Miss Delia Bacon, an early +believer in the nonsense about Bacon and Shakespeare, was a model of +manly and generous conduct. He was, indeed, an admirable character, +and his goodness had the bloom on it of a courteous and kindly nature +that loved the Muses. But, as one has ventured to hint, the development +of his genius and taste was hampered now and then, apparently, by a +desire to put himself on the level of the general public, and of their +ideas. This, at least, is how one explains to oneself various +remarks in his prefaces, journals, and note-books. This may account +for the moral allegories which too weirdly haunt some of his short, +early pieces. Edgar Poe, in a passage full of very honest and +well-chosen praise, found fault with the allegorical business.</p> +<p>Mr. Hutton, from whose “Literary Essays” I borrow Poe’s +opinion, says: “Poe boldly asserted that the conspicuously ideal +scaffoldings of Hawthorne’s stories were but the monstrous fruits +of the bad transcendental atmosphere which he breathed so long.” +But I hope this way of putting it is not Poe’s. “Ideal +scaffoldings,” are odd enough, but when scaffoldings turn out +to be “fruits” of an “atmosphere,” and monstrous +fruits of a “bad transcendental atmosphere,” the brain reels +in the fumes of mixed metaphors. “Let him mend his pen,” +cried Poe, “get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old +Manse, cut Mr. Alcott,” and, in fact, write about things less +impalpable, as Mr. Mallock’s heroine preferred to be loved, “in +a more human sort of way.”</p> +<p>Hawthorne’s way was never too ruddily and robustly human. +Perhaps, even in “The Scarlet Letter,” we feel too distinctly +that certain characters are moral conceptions, not warmed and wakened +out of the allegorical into the real. The persons in an allegory +may be real enough, as Bunyan has proved by examples. But that +culpable clergyman, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale, with his large, white brow, +his melancholy eyes, his hand on his heart, and his general resemblance +to the High Church Curate in Thackeray’s “Our Street,” +is he real? To me he seems very unworthy to be Hester’s +lover, for she is a beautiful woman of flesh and blood. Mr. Dimmesdale +was not only immoral; he was unsportsmanlike. He had no more pluck +than a church-mouse. His miserable passion was degraded by its +brevity; how could he see this woman’s disgrace for seven long +years, and never pluck up heart either to share her shame or <i>peccare +forliter</i>? He is a lay figure, very cleverly, but somewhat +conventionally made and painted. The vengeful husband of Hester, +Roger Chillingworth, is a Mr. Casaubon stung into jealous anger. +But his attitude, watching ever by Dimmesdale, tormenting him, and yet +in his confidence, and ever unsuspected, reminds one of a conception +dear to Dickens. He uses it in “David Copperfield,” +where Mr. Micawber (of all people!) plays this trick on Uriah Heep; +he uses it in “Hunted Down”; he was about using it in “Edwin +Drood”; he used it (old Martin and Pecksniff) in “Martin +Chuzzlewit.” The person of Roger Chillingworth and his conduct +are a little too melodramatic for Hawthorne’s genius.</p> +<p>In Dickens’s manner, too, is Hawthorne’s long sarcastic +address to Judge Pyncheon (in “The House of the Seven Gables”), +as the judge sits dead in his chair, with his watch ticking in his hand. +Occasionally a chance remark reminds one of Dickens; this for example: +He is talking of large, black old books of divinity, and of their successors, +tiny books, Elzevirs perhaps. “These little old volumes +impressed me as if they had been intended for very large ones, but had +been unfortunately blighted at an early stage of their growth.” +This might almost deceive the elect as a piece of the true Boz. +Their widely different talents did really intersect each other where +the perverse, the grotesque, and the terrible dwell.</p> +<p>To myself “The House of the Seven Gables” has always +appeared the most beautiful and attractive of Hawthorne’s novels. +He actually gives us a love story, and condescends to a pretty heroine. +The curse of “Maule’s Blood” is a good old romantic +idea, terribly handled. There is more of lightness, and of a cobwebby +dusty humour in Hepzibah Pyncheon, the decayed lady shopkeeper, than +Hawthorne commonly cares to display. Do you care for the “first +lover,” the Photographer’s Young Man? It may be conventional +prejudice, but I seem to see him going about on a tricycle, and I don’t +think him the right person for Phoebe. Perhaps it is really the +beautiful, gentle, oppressed Clifford who haunts one’s memory +most, a kind of tragic and thwarted Harold Skimpole. “How pleasant, +how delightful,” he murmured, but not as if addressing any one. +“Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open +window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine. +Those flowers, how very fragrant! That young girl’s face, +how cheerful, how blooming. A flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams +in the dewdrops . . . ” This comparison with Skimpole may +sound like an unkind criticism of Clifford’s character and place +in the story—it is only a chance note of a chance resemblance.</p> +<p>Indeed, it may be that Hawthorne himself was aware of the resemblance. +“An individual of Clifford’s character,” he remarks, +“can always be pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful +and harmonious than through his heart.” And he suggests +that, if Clifford had not been so long in prison, his æsthetic +zeal “might have eaten out or filed away his affections.” +This was what befell Harold Skimpole—himself “in prisons +often”—at Coavinses! The Judge Pyncheon of the tale +is also a masterly study of swaggering black-hearted respectability, +and then, in addition to all the poetry of his style, and the charm +of his haunted air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave conclusion of +the good sort, the old sort. They come into money, they marry, +they are happy ever after. This is doing things handsomely, though +some of our modern novelists think it coarse and degrading. Hawthorne +did not think so, and they are not exactly better artists than Hawthorne.</p> +<p>Yet he, too, had his economies, which we resent. I do not mean +his not telling us what it was that Roger Chillingworth saw on Arthur +Dimmesdale’s bare breast. To leave that vague is quite legitimate. +But what had Miriam and the spectre of the Catacombs done? Who +was the spectre? What did he want? To have told all this +would have been better than to fill the novel with padding about Rome, +sculpture, and the Ethics of Art. As the silly saying runs: “the +people has a right to know” about Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance. +<a name="citation10"></a><a href="#footnote10">{10}</a> But the +“Marble Faun” is not of Hawthorne’s best period, beautiful +as are a hundred passages in the tale.</p> +<p>Beautiful passages are as common in his prose as gold in the richest +quartz. How excellent are his words on the first faint but certain +breath of Autumn in the air, felt, perhaps, early in July. “And +then came Autumn, with his immense burthen of apples, dropping them +continually from his overladen shoulders as he trudged along.” +Keats might have written so of Autumn in the orchards—if Keats +had been writing prose.</p> +<p>There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than Hawthorne’s, +none more original, more surefooted, in his own realm of moonlight and +twilight.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XI: THE PARADISE OF POETS</h2> +<p>We were talking of Love, Constancy, the Ideal. “Who ever +loved like the poets?” cried Lady Violet Lebas, her pure, pale +cheek flushing. “Ah, if ever I am to love, he shall be a +singer!”</p> +<p>“Tenors are popular, very,” said Lord Walter.</p> +<p>“I mean a poet,” she answered witheringly.</p> +<p>Near them stood Mr. Witham, the author of “Heart’s Chords +Tangled.”</p> +<p>“Ah,” said he, “that reminds me. I have been +trying to catch it all the morning. That reminds me of my dream.”</p> +<p>“Tell us your dream,” murmured Lady Violet Lebas, and +he told it.</p> +<p>“It was through an unfortunate but pardonable blunder,” +said Mr. Witham, “that I died, and reached the Paradise of Poets. +I had, indeed, published volumes of verse, but with the most blameless +motives. Other poets were continually sending me theirs, and, +as I could not admire them, and did not like to reply by critical remarks, +I simply printed some rhymes for the purpose of sending them to the +gentlemen who favoured me with theirs. I always wrote on the fly-leaf +a quotation from the ‘Iliad,’ about giving copper in exchange +for gold; and the few poets who could read Greek were gratified, while +the others, probably, thought a compliment was intended. Nothing +could be less culpable or pretentious, but, through some mistake on +the part of Charon, I was drafted off to the Paradise of Poets.</p> +<p>“Outside the Golden Gate a number of Shadows were waiting, +in different attitudes of depression and languor. Bavius and Maevius +were there, still complaining of ‘cliques,’ railing at Horace +for a mere rhymer of society, and at Virgil as a plagiarist, ‘Take +away his cribs from Homer and Apollonius Rhodius,’ quoth honest +Maevius, ‘and what is there left of him?’ I also met +a society of gentlemen, in Greek costume, of various ages, from a half-naked +minstrel with a tortoiseshell lyre in his hand to an elegant of the +age of Pericles. They all consorted together, talking various +dialects of Aeolic, Ionian, Attic Greek, and so forth, which were plainly +not intelligible to each other. I ventured to ask one of the company +who he was, but he, with a sweep of his hand, said, ‘We are Homer!’ +When I expressed my regret and surprise that the Golden Gate had not +yet opened for so distinguished, though collective, an artist, my friend +answered that, according to Fick, Peppmüller, and many other learned +men, they were Homer. ‘But an impostor from Chios has got +in somehow,’ he said; ‘they don’t pay the least attention +to the Germans in the Paradise of Poets.’</p> +<p>“At this moment the Golden Gates were thrown apart, and a fair +lady, in an early Italian costume, carrying a laurel in her hand, appeared +at the entrance. All the Shadows looked up with an air of weary +expectation, like people waiting for their turn in a doctor’s +consulting-room. She beckoned to me, however, and I made haste +to follow her. The words ‘Charlatan!’ ‘You +a poet!’ in a variety of languages, greeted me by way of farewell +from the Shadows.</p> +<p>“‘The renowned Laura, if I am not mistaken,’ I +ventured to remark, recognising her, indeed, from the miniature in the +Laurentian library at Florence.</p> +<p>“She bowed, and I began to ask for her adorer, Petrarch.</p> +<p>“‘Excuse me,’ said Laura, as we glided down a mossy +path, under the shade of trees particularly dear to poets, ‘excuse +me, but the sonneteer of whom you speak is one whose name I cannot bear +to mention. His conduct with Burns’s Clarinda, his heartless +infatuation for Stella—’</p> +<p>“‘You astonish me,’ I said. ‘In the +Paradise of Poets—’</p> +<p>“‘They are poets still—incorrigible!’ answered +the lady; then slightly raising her voice of silver, as a beautiful +appearance in a toga drew near, she cried ‘<i>Catullo mio</i>!’</p> +<p>“The greeting between these accomplished ghosts was too kindly +to leave room for doubt as to the ardour of their affections.</p> +<p>“‘Will you, my Catullus,’ murmured Laura, ‘explain +to this poet from the land of fogs, any matters which, to him, may seem +puzzling and unfamiliar in our Paradise?’</p> +<p>“The Veronese, with a charming smile, took my hand, and led +me to a shadowy arbour, whence we enjoyed a prospect of many rivers +and mountains in the poets’ heaven. Among these I recognised +the triple crest of the Eildons, Grongar Hill, Cithaeron and Etna; while +the reed-fringed waters of the Mincius flowed musically between the +banks and braes o’ bonny Doon to join the Tweed. Blithe +ghosts were wandering by, in all varieties of apparel, and I distinctly +observed Dante’s Beatrice, leaning loving on the arm of Sir Philip +Sidney, while Dante was closely engaged in conversation with the lost +Lenore, celebrated by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.</p> +<p>“‘In what can my knowledge of the Paradise of Poets be +serviceable to you, sir?’ said Catullus, as he flung himself at +the feet of Laura, on the velvet grass.</p> +<p>“‘I am disinclined to seem impertinently curious,’ +I answered, ‘but the ladies in this fair, smiling country—have +the gods made them poetical?’</p> +<p>“‘Not generally,’ replied Catullus. ‘Indeed, +if you would be well with them, I may warn you never to mention poetry +in their hearing. They never cared for it while on earth, and +in this place it is a topic which the prudent carefully avoid among +ladies. To tell the truth, they have had to listen to far too +much poetry, and too many discussions on the caesura. There are, +indeed, a few lady poets—very few. Sappho, for example; +indeed I cannot recall any other at this moment. The result is +that Phaon, of all the shadows here, is the most distinguished by the +fair. He was not a poet, you know; he got in on account of Sappho, +who adored him. They are estranged now, of course.’</p> +<p>“‘You interest me deeply,’ I answered. ‘And +now, will you kindly tell me why these ladies are here, if they were +not poets?’</p> +<p>“‘The women that were our ideals while we dwelt on earth, +the women we loved but never won, or, at all events, never wedded, they +for whom we sighed while in the arms of a recognised and legitimate +affection, have been chosen by the Olympians to keep us company in Paradise!’</p> +<p>“‘Then wherefore,’ I interrupted, ‘do I see +Robert Burns loitering with that lady in a ruff,—Cassandra, I +make no doubt—Ronsard’s Cassandra? And why is the +incomparable Clarinda inseparable from Petrarch; and Miss Patty Blount, +Pope’s flame, from the Syrian Meleager, while <i>his</i> Heliodore +is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am delighted, +if rather surprised, to see here?’</p> +<p>“‘Ah,’ said Catullus, ‘you are a new-comer +among us. Poets will be poets, and no sooner have they attained +their desire, and dwelt in the company of their earthly Ideals, than +they feel strangely, yet irresistibly drawn to Another. So it +was in life, so it will ever be. No Ideal can survive a daily +companionship, and fortunate is the poet who did not marry his first +love!’</p> +<p>“‘As far as that goes,’ I answered, ‘most +of you were highly favoured; indeed, I do not remember any poet whose +Ideal was his wife, or whose first love led him to the altar.’</p> +<p>“‘I was not a marrying man myself,’ answered the +Veronese; ‘few of us were. Myself, Horace, Virgil—we +were all bachelors.’</p> +<p>“‘And Lesbia!’</p> +<p>“I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into +a chaplet, and inattentive to our conversation.</p> +<p>“‘Poor Lesbia!’ said Catullus, with a suppressed +sigh. ‘How I misjudged that girl! How cruel, how causeless +were my reproaches,’ and wildly rending his curled locks and laurel +crown, he fled into a thicket, whence there soon arose the melancholy +notes of the Ausonian lyre.’</p> +<p>“‘He is incorrigible,’ said Laura, very coldly; +and she deliberately began to tear and toss away the fragments of the +chaplet she had been weaving. ‘I shall never break him of +that habit of versifying. But they are all alike.’</p> +<p>“‘Is there nobody here,’ said I, ‘who is +happy with his Ideal—nobody but has exchanged Ideals with some +other poet?’</p> +<p>“‘There is one,’ she said. ‘He comes +of a northern tribe; and in his life-time he never rhymed upon his unattainable +lady, or if rhyme he did, the accents never carried her name to the +ears of the vulgar. Look there.’</p> +<p>“She pointed to the river at our feet, and I knew the mounted +figure that was riding the ford, with a green-mantled lady beside him +like the Fairy Queen.</p> +<p>“Surely I had read of her, and knew her—</p> +<blockquote><p>“‘She whose blue eyes their secret told,<br /> +Though shaded by her locks of gold.’</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“‘They are different; I know not why. They are +constant,’ said Laura, and rising with an air of chagrin, she +disappeared among the boughs of the trees that bear her name.</p> +<p>“‘Unhappy hearts of poets,’ I mused. ‘Light +things and sacred they are, but even in their Paradise, and among their +chosen, with every wish fulfilled, and united to their beloved, they +cannot be at rest!’</p> +<p>“Thus moralising, I wended my way to a crag, whence there was +a wide prospect. Certain poets were standing there, looking down +into an abyss, and to them I joined myself.</p> +<p>“‘Ah, I cannot bear it!’ said a voice, and, as +he turned away, his brow already clearing, his pain already forgotten, +I beheld the august form of Shakespeare.</p> +<p>“Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he answered +the unuttered question.</p> +<p>“‘That is a sight for Pagans,’ he said, ‘and +may give them pleasure. But my Paradise were embittered if I had +to watch the sorrows of others, and their torments, however well deserved. +The others are gazing on the purgatory of critics and commentators.’</p> +<p>“He passed from me, and I joined the ‘Ionian father of +the rest’—Homer, who, with a countenance of unspeakable +majesty, was seated on a throne of rock, between the Mantuan Virgil +of the laurel crown, Hugo, Sophocles, Milton, Lovelace, Tennyson, and +Shelley.</p> +<p>“At their feet I beheld, in a vast and gloomy hall, many an +honest critic, many an erudite commentator, an army of reviewers. +Some were condemned to roll logs up insuperable heights, whence they +descended thundering to the plain. Others were set to impositions, +and I particularly observed that the Homeric commentators were obliged +to write out the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ in their +complete shape, and were always driven by fiends to the task when they +prayed for the bare charity of being permitted to leave out the ‘interpolations.’ +Others, fearful to narrate, were torn into as many fragments as they +had made of these immortal epics. Others, such as Aristarchus, +were spitted on their own critical signs of disapproval. Many +reviewers were compelled to read the books which they had criticised +without perusal, and it was terrible to watch the agonies of the worthy +pressmen who were set to this unwonted task. ‘May we not +be let off with the preface?’ they cried in piteous accents. +‘May we not glance at the table of contents and be done with it?’ +But the presiding demons (who had been Examiners in the bodily life) +drove them remorseless to their toils.</p> +<p>“Among the condemned I could not but witness, with sympathy, +the punishment reserved for translators. The translators of Virgil, +in particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable +men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, +in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in +all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre +of the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’ the heroic couplet and +similar devices can inflict. For all these men had loved Virgil, +though not wisely: and now their penance was to hear each other read +their own translations.”</p> +<p>“That must have been more than they could bear,” said +Lady Violet</p> +<p>“Yes,” said Mr. Witham; “I should know, for down +I fell into Tartarus with a crash, and writhed among the Translators.”</p> +<p>“Why?” asked Lady Violet.</p> +<p>“Because I have translated Theocritus!”</p> +<p>“Mr. Witham,” said Lady Violet, “did you meet your +ideal woman when you were in the Paradise of Poets?”</p> +<p>“She yet walks this earth,” said the bard, with a too +significant bow.</p> +<p>Lady Violet turned coldly away.</p> +<p>* * *</p> +<p>Mr. Witham was never invited to the Blues again—the name of +Lord Azure’s place in Kent.</p> +<p>The Poet is shut out of Paradise.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XII: PARIS AND HELEN</h2> +<p>The first name in romance, the most ancient and the most enduring, +is that of Argive Helen. During three thousand years fair women +have been born, have lived, and been loved, “that there might +be a song in the ears of men of later time,” but, compared to +the renown of Helen, their glory is dim. Cleopatra, who held the +world’s fate in her hands, and lay in the arms of Cæsar; +Mary Stuart (<i>Maria Verticordia</i>), for whose sake, as a northern +novelist tells, peasants have lain awake, sorrowing that she is dead; +Agnes Sorel, Fair Rosamond, la belle Stuart, “the Pompadour and +the Parabère,” can still enchant us from the page of history +and chronicle. “Zeus gave them beauty, which naturally rules +even strength itself,” to quote the Greek orator on the mistress +of them all, on her who, having never lived, can never die, the Daughter +of the Swan.</p> +<p>While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal of beauty upon +earth, it is curious to reflect on the <i>modernité</i> of her +story, the oldest of the love stories of the world. In Homer we +first meet her, the fairest of women in the song of the greatest of +poets. It might almost seem as if Homer meant to justify, by his +dealing with Helen, some of the most recent theories of literary art. +In the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” the tale of Helen +is without a beginning and without an end, like a frieze on a Greek +temple. She crosses the stage as a figure familiar to all, the +poet’s audience clearly did not need to be told who Helen was, +nor anything about her youth.</p> +<p>The famous judgment of Paris, the beginning of evil to Achaeans and +Ilian men, is only mentioned once by Homer, late, and in a passage of +doubtful authenticity. Of her reconciliation to her wedded lord, +Menelaus, not a word is said; of her end we are told no more than that +for her and him a mansion in Elysium is prepared—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>We leave her happy in Argos, a smile on her lips, a gift in her hands, +as we met her in Troy, beautiful, adored despite her guilt, as sweet +in her repentance as in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom +mention her, in the epic, but with horror and anger; men never address +her but in gentle courtesy. What is her secret? How did +she leave her home with Paris—beguiled by love, by magic, or driven +by the implacable Aphrodite? Homer is silent on all of these things; +these things, doubtless, were known by his audience. In his poem +Helen moves as a thing of simple grace, courtesy, and kindness, save +when she rebels against her doom, after seeing her lover fly from her +husband’s spear. Had we only Homer, by far our earliest +literary source, we should know little of the romance of Helen; should +only know that a lawless love brought ruin on Troy and sorrow on the +Achaeans; and this is thrown out, with no moral comment, without praise +or blame. The end, we learn, was peace, and beauty was reconciled +to life. There is no explanation, no <i>dénouement</i>; +and we know how much <i>dénouement</i> and explanations hampered +Scott and Shakespeare. From these trammels Homer is free, as a +god is free from mortal limitations.</p> +<p>All this manner of telling a tale—a manner so ancient, so original—is +akin, in practice, to recent theories of what art should be, and what +art seldom is, perhaps never is, in modern hands.</p> +<p>Modern enough, again, is the choice of a married woman for the heroine +of the earliest love tale. Apollonius Rhodius sings (and no man +has ever sung so well) of a maiden’s love; Virgil, of a widow’s; +Homer, of love that has defied law, blindly obedient to destiny, which +dominates even Zeus. Once again, Helen is not a very young girl; +ungallant chronologists have attributed to her I know not what age. +We think of her as about the age of the Venus of Milo; in truth, she +was “ageless and immortal.” Homer never describes +her beauty; we only see it reflected in the eyes of the old men, white +and weak, thin-voiced as cicalas: but hers is a loveliness “to +turn an old man young.” “It is no marvel,” they +say, “that for her sake Trojans and Achaeans slay each other.”</p> +<p>She was embroidering at a vast web, working in gold and scarlet the +sorrows that for her sake befell mankind, when they called her to the +walls to see Paris fight Menelaus, in the last year of the war. +There she stands, in raiment of silvery white, her heart yearning for +her old love and her own city. Already her thought is far from +Paris. Was her heart ever with Paris? That is her secret. +A very old legend, mentioned by the Bishop of Thessalonica, Eustathius, +tells us that Paris magically beguiled her, disguised in the form of +Menelaus, her lord, as Uther beguiled Ygerne. She sees the son +of Priam play the dastard in the fight; she turns in wrath on Aphrodite, +who would lure her back to his arms; but to his arms she must go, “for +the daughter of Zeus was afraid.” Violence is put upon beauty; +it is soiled, or seems soiled, in its way through the world. Helen +urges Paris again into the war. He has a heart invincibly light +and gay; shame does not weigh on him. “Not every man is +valiant every day,” he says; yet once engaged in battle, he bears +him bravely, and his arrows rain death among the mail-clad Achaeans.</p> +<p>What Homer thinks of Paris we can only guess. His beauty is +the bane of Ilios; but Homer forgives so much to beauty. In the +end of the “Iliad,” Helen sings the immortal dirge over +Hector, the stainless knight, “with thy loving kindness and thy +gentle speech.”</p> +<p>In the “Odyssey,” she is at home again, playing the gracious +part of hostess to Odysseus’s wandering son, pouring into the +bowl the magic herb of Egypt, “which brings forgetfulness of sorrow.” +The wandering son of Odysseus departs with a gift for his bride, “to +wear upon the day of her desire, a memorial of the hands of Helen,” +the beautiful hands, that in Troy or Argos were never idle.</p> +<p>Of Helen, from Homer, we know no more. Grace, penitence in +exile, peace at home, these are the portion of her who set East and +West at war and ruined the city of Priam of the ashen spear. As +in the strange legend preserved by Servius, the commentator on Virgil, +who tells us that Helen wore a red “star-stone,” whence +fell gouts of blood that vanished ere they touched her swan’s +neck; so all the blood shed for her sake leaves Helen stainless. +Of Homer’s Helen we know no more.</p> +<p>The later Greek fancy, playing about this form of beauty, wove a +myriad of new fancies, or disinterred from legend old beliefs untouched +by Homer. Helen was the daughter of the Swan—that is, as +was later explained, of Zeus in the shape of a swan. Her loveliness, +even in childhood, plunged her in many adventures. Theseus carried +her off; her brothers rescued her. All the princes of Achaea competed +for her hand, having first taken an oath to avenge whomsoever she might +choose for her husband. The choice fell on the correct and honourable, +but rather inconspicuous, Menelaus, and they dwelt in Sparta, beside +the Eurotas, “in a hollow of the rifted hills.” Then, +from across the sea, came the beautiful and fatal Paris, son of Priam, +King of Troy. As a child, Paris had been exposed on the mountains, +because his mother dreamed that she brought forth a firebrand. +He was rescued and fostered by a shepherd; he tended the flocks; he +loved the daughter of a river god, Œnone. Then came the +naked Goddesses, to seek at the hand of the most beautiful of mortals +the prize of beauty. Aphrodite won the golden apple from the queen +of heaven, Hera, and from the Goddess of war and wisdom, Athena, bribing +the judge by the promise of the fairest wife in the world. No +incident is more frequently celebrated in poetry and art, to which it +lends such gracious opportunities. Paris was later recognised +as of the royal blood of Troy. He came to Lacedaemon on an embassy, +he saw Helen, and destiny had its way.</p> +<p>Concerning the details in this most ancient love-story, we learn +nothing from Homer, who merely makes Paris remind Helen of their bridal +night in the isle of Cranaë. But from Homer we learn that +Paris carried off not only the wife of Menelaus, but many of his treasures. +To the poet of the “Iliad,” the psychology of the wooing +would have seemed a simple matter. Like the later vase-painters, +he would have shown us Paris beside Helen, Aphrodite standing near, +accompanied by the figure of Peitho—Persuasion.</p> +<p>Homer always escapes our psychological problems by throwing the weight +of our deeds and misdeeds on a God or a Goddess, or on destiny. +To have fled from her lord and her one child, Hermione, was not in keeping +with the character of Helen as Homer draws it. Her repentance +is almost Christian in its expression, and repentance indicates a consciousness +of sin and of shame, which Helen frequently professes. Thus she, +at least, does not, like Homer, in his chivalrous way, throw all the +blame on the Immortals and on destiny. The cheerful acquiescence +of Helen in destiny makes part of the comic element in <i>La Belle Hélène</i>, +but the mirth only arises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas +and those of ancient Greece.</p> +<p>Helen is freely and bitterly blamed in the “Odyssey” +by Penelope, chiefly because of the ruinous consequences which followed +her flight. Still, there is one passage, when Penelope prudently +hesitates about recognising her returned lord, which makes it just possible +that a legend chronicled by Eustathius was known to Homer,—namely, +the tale already mentioned, that Paris beguiled her in the shape of +Menelaus. The incident is very old, as in the story of Zeus and +Amphitryon, and might be used whenever a lady’s character needed +to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, is inconsistent +with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer’s manner.</p> +<p>The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshly +against Helen. She punished him by blindness, and he indited a +palinode, explaining that it was not she who went to Troy, but a woman +fashioned in her likeness, by Zeus, out of mist and light. The +real Helen remained safely and with honour in Egypt. Euripides +has made this idea, which was calculated to please him, the groundwork +of his “Helena,” but it never had a strong hold on the Greek +imagination. Modern fancy is pleased by the picture of the cloud-bride +in Troy, Greeks and Trojans dying for a phantasm. “Shadows +we are, and shadows we pursue.”</p> +<p>Concerning the later feats, and the death of Paris, Homer says very +little. He slew Achilles by an arrow-shot in the Scaean gate, +and prophecy was fulfilled. He himself fell by another shaft, +perhaps the poisoned shaft of Philoctetes. In the fourth or fifth +century of our era a late poet, Quintus Smyrnaeus, described Paris’s +journey, in quest of a healing spell, to the forsaken Œnone, and +her refusal to aid him; her death on his funeral pyre. Quintus +is a poet of extraordinary merit for his age, and scarcely deserves +the reproach of laziness affixed on him by Lord Tennyson.</p> +<p>On the whole, Homer seems to have a kind of half-contemptuous liking +for the beautiful Paris. Later art represents him as a bowman +of girlish charms, wearing a Phrygian cap. There is a late legend +that he had a son, Corythus, by Œnone, and that he killed the +lad in a moment of jealousy, finding him with Helen and failing to recognise +him. On the death of Paris, perhaps by virtue of the custom of +the Levirate, Helen became the wife of his brother, Deïphobus.</p> +<p>How her reconciliation with Menelaus was brought about we do not +learn from Homer, who, in the “Odyssey,” accepts it as a +fact. The earliest traditional hint on the subject is given by +the famous “Coffer of Cypselus,” a work of the seventh century, +B.C., which Pausanias saw at Olympia, in A.D. 174. Here, on a +band of ivory, was represented, among other scenes from the tale of +Troy, Menelaus rushing, sword in hand, to slay Helen. According +to Stesichorus, the army was about to stone her after the fall of Ilios, +but relented, amazed by her beauty.</p> +<p>Of her later life in Lacedaemon, nothing is known on really ancient +authority, and later traditions vary. The Spartans showed her +sepulchre and her shrine at Therapnae, where she was worshipped. +Herodotus tells us how Helen, as a Goddess, appeared in her temple and +healed a deformed child, making her the fairest woman in Sparta, in +the reign of Ariston. It may, perhaps, be conjectured that in +Sparta, Helen occupied the place of a local Aphrodite. In another +late story she dwells in the isle of Leuke, a shadowy bride of the shadowy +Achilles. The mocking Lucian, in his <i>Vera Historia</i>, meets +Helen in the Fortunate Islands, whence she elopes with one of his companions. +Again, the sons of Menelaus, by a concubine, were said to have driven +Helen from Sparta on the death of her lord, and she was murdered in +Rhodes, by the vengeance of Polyxo, whose husband fell at Troy. +But, among all these inventions, that of Homer stands out pre-eminent. +Helen and Menelaus do not die, they are too near akin to Zeus; they +dwell immortal, not among the shadows of heroes and of famous ladies +dead and gone, but in Elysium, the paradise at the world’s end, +unvisited by storms.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Beyond these voices there is peace.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>It is plain that, as a love-story, the tale of Paris and Helen must +to modern readers seem meagre. To Greece, in every age, the main +interest lay not in the passion of the beautiful pair, but in its world-wide +consequences: the clash of Europe and Asia, the deaths of kings, the +ruin wrought in their homes, the consequent fall of the great and ancient +Achaean civilisation. To the Greeks, the Trojan war was what the +Crusades are in later history. As in the Crusades, the West assailed +the East for an ideal, not to recover the Holy Sepulchre of our religion, +but to win back the living type of beauty and of charm. Perhaps, +ere the sun grows cold, men will no more believe in the Crusades, as +an historical fact, than we do in the siege of Troy. In a sense, +a very obvious sense, the myth of Helen is a parable of Hellenic history. +They sought beauty, and they found it; they bore it home, and, with +beauty, their bane. Wherever Helen went “she brought calamity,” +in this a type of all the famous and peerless ladies of old days, of +Cleopatra and of Mary Stuart. Romance and poetry have nothing +less plausible than the part which Cleopatra actually played in the +history of the world, a world well lost by Mark Antony for her sake. +The flight from Actium might seem as much a mere poet’s dream +as the gathering of the Achaeans at Aulis, if we were not certain that +it is truly chronicled.</p> +<p>From the earliest times, even from times before Homer (whose audience +is supposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and +later, the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, +devising about her all that possibly could be devised. She was +the daughter of Zeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the +swan, or a child of the changeful moon, brooding on “the formless +and multi-form waters.” She could speak in the voices of +all women, hence she was named “Echo,” and we might fancy +that, like the witch of the Brocken, she could appear to every man in +the likeness of his own first love. The ancient Egyptians either +knew her, or invented legends of her to amuse the inquiring Greeks. +She had touched at Sidon, and perhaps Astaroth is only her Sidonian +name. Whatever could be told of beauty, in its charm, its perils, +the dangers with which it surrounds its lovers, the purity which it +retains, unsmirched by all the sins that are done for beauty’s +sake, could be told of Helen.</p> +<p>Like a golden cup, as M. Paul de St. Victor says, she was carried +from lips to lips of heroes, but the gold remains unsullied and unalloyed. +To heaven she returns again, to heaven which is her own, and looks down +serenely on men slain, and women widowed, and sinking ships, and burning +towns. Yet with death she gives immortality by her kiss, and Paris +and Menelaus live, because they have touched the lips of Helen. +Through the grace of Helen, for whom he fell, Sarpedon’s memory +endures, and Achilles and Memnon, the son of the Morning, and Troy is +more imperishable than Carthage, or Rome, or Corinth, though Helen</p> +<blockquote><p>“Burnt the topless towers of Ilium.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>In one brief passage, Marlowe did more than all poets since Stesichorus, +or, at least since the epithalamium of Theocritus, for the glory of +Helen. Roman poets knew her best as an enemy of their fabulous +ancestors, and in the “Æneid,” Virgil’s hero +draws his sword to slay her. Through the Middle Ages, in the romances +of Troy, she wanders as a shining shadow of the ideally fair, like Guinevere, +who so often recalls her in the Arthurian romances. The chivalrous +mediæval poets and the Celts could understand better than the +Romans the philosophy of “the world well lost” for love. +Modern poetry, even in Goethe’s “Second part of Faust,” +has not been very fortunately inspired by Helen, except in the few lines +which she speaks in “The Dream of Fair Women.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“I had great beauty; ask thou not my name.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. William Morris’s Helen, in the “Earthly Paradise,” +charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves little abiding memory. +The Helen of “Troilus and Cressida” is not one of Shakespeare’s +immortal women, and Mr. Rossetti’s ballad is fantastic and somewhat +false in tone—a romantic <i>pastiche</i>. Where Euripides +twice failed, in the “Troades” and the “Helena,” +it can be given to few to succeed. Helen is best left to her earliest +known minstrel, for who can recapture the grace, the tenderness, the +melancholy, and the charm of the daughter of Zeus in the “Odyssey” +and “Iliad”? The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, +and Helen was best understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning simplicity.</p> +<p>As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands paltered with her +legend, Helen is Homer’s alone, there remains no great or typical +work of Greek art which represents her beauty, and the breasts from +which were modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. +We have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which, though graceful, +is conventional and might represent any other heroine, Polyxena, or +Eriphyle. No Helen from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived +to our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae over the shattered +remains of her only statue.</p> +<p>As Stesichorus fabled that only an <i>eidolon</i> of Helen went to +Troy, so, except in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” +we meet but shadows of her loveliness, phantasms woven out of clouds, +and the light of setting suns.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XIII: ENCHANTED CIGARETTES</h2> +<p>To dream over literary projects, Balzac says, is like “smoking +enchanted cigarettes,” but when we try to tackle our projects, +to make them real, the enchantment disappears. We have to till +the soil, to sow the seed, to gather the leaves, and then the cigarettes +must be manufactured, while there may be no market for them after all. +Probably most people have enjoyed the fragrance of these enchanted cigarettes, +and have brooded over much which they will never put on paper. +Here are some of “the ashes of the weeds of my delight”—memories +of romances whereof no single line is written, or is likely to be written.</p> +<p>Of my earliest novel I remember but little. I know there had +been a wreck, and that the villain, who was believed to be drowned, +came home and made himself disagreeable. I know that the heroine’s +mouth was <i>not</i> “too large for regular beauty.” +In that respect she was original. All heroines are “muckle-mou’d,” +I know not why. It is expected of them. I know she was melancholy +and merry; it would not surprise me to learn that she drowned herself +from a canoe. But the villain never descended to crime, the first +lover would not fall in love, the heroine’s own affections were +provokingly disengaged, and the whole affair came to a dead stop for +want of a plot. Perhaps, considering modern canons of fiction, +this might have been a very successful novel. It was entirely +devoid of incident or interest, and, consequently, was a good deal like +real life, as real life appears to many cultivated authors. On +the other hand, all the characters were flippant. This would never +have done, and I do not regret novel No. I., which had not even a name.</p> +<p>The second story had a plot, quantities of plot, nothing but plot. +It was to have been written in collaboration with a very great novelist, +who, as far as we went, confined himself to making objections. +This novel was stopped (not that my friend would ever have gone on) +by “Called Back,” which anticipated part of the idea. +The story was entitled “Where is Rose?” and the motto was—</p> +<blockquote><p> “<i>Rosa quo locorum</i><br /> +<i>Sera moratur</i>.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The characters were—(1) Rose, a young lady of quality. +(2) The Russian Princess, her friend (need I add that, to meet a public +demand, <i>her</i> name was Vera?). (3) Young man engaged to Rose. +(4) Charles, his friend. (5) An enterprising person named “The +Whiteley of Crime,” the universal Provider of Iniquity. +In fact, he anticipated Sir Arthur Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. +The rest were detectives, old ladies, mob, and a wealthy young Colonial +larrikin. Neither my friend nor I was fond of describing love +scenes, so we made the heroine disappear in the second chapter, and +she never turned up again till chapter the last. After playing +in a comedy at the house of an earl, Rosa and Vera entered her brougham. +Soon afterwards the brougham drew up, <i>empty</i>, at Rose’s +own door. Where <i>was</i> Rose? Traces of her were found, +of all places, in the Haunted House in Berkeley Square, which is not +haunted any longer. After that Rose was long sought in vain.</p> +<p>This, briefly, is what had occurred. A Russian detective “wanted” +Vera, who, to be sure, was a Nihilist. To catch Vera he made an +alliance with “The Whiteley of Crime.” He was a man +who would destroy a parish register, or forge a will, or crack a crib, +or break up a Pro-Boer meeting, or burn a house, or kidnap a rightful +heir, or manage a personation, or issue amateur bank-notes, or what +you please. Thinking to kill two birds with one stone, he carried +off Rose for her diamonds and Vera for his friend, the Muscovite police +official, lodging them both in the Haunted House. But there he +and the Russian came to blows, and, in the confusion, Vera made her +escape, while Rose was conveyed, <i>as Vera</i>, to Siberia. Not +knowing how to dispose of her, the Russian police consigned her to a +nunnery at the mouth of the Obi. Her lover, in a yacht, found +her hiding-place, and got a friendly nun to give her some narcotic known +to the Samoyeds. It was the old <i>truc</i> of the Friar in “Romeo +and Juliet.” At the mouth of the Obi they do not bury the +dead, but lay them down on platforms in the open air. Rose was +picked up there by her lover (accompanied by a chaperon, of course), +was got on board the steam yacht, and all went well. I forget +what happened to “The Whiteley of Crime.” After him +I still rather hanker—he was a humorous ruffian. Something +could be made of “The Whiteley of Crime.” Something +<i>has</i> been made, by the author of “Sherlock Holmes.”</p> +<p>In yet another romance, a gentleman takes his friend, in a country +place, to see his betrothed. The friend, who had only come into +the neighbourhood that day, is found dead, next morning, hanging to +a tree. Gipsies and others are suspected. But the lover +was the murderer. He had been a priest, in South America, and +the lady was a Catholic (who knew not of his Orders). Now the +friend fell in love with the lady at first sight, on being introduced +to her by the lover. As the two men walked home, the friend threatened +to reveal the lover’s secret—his tonsure—which would +be fatal to his hopes. They quarrelled, parted, and the ex-priest +lassoed his friend. The motive, I think, is an original one, and +not likely to occur to the first comer. The inventor is open to +offers.</p> +<p>The next novel, based on a dream, was called “In Search of +Qrart.”</p> +<p>What is <i>Qrart</i>? I decline to divulge this secret beyond +saying that <i>Qrart</i> was a product of the civilisation which now +sleeps under the snows of the pole. It was an article of the utmost +value to humanity. Farther I do not intend to commit myself. +The Bride of a God was one of the characters.</p> +<p>The next novel is, at present, my favourite cigarette. The +scene is partly in Greece, partly at the Parthian Court, about 80-60 +B.C. Crassus is the villain. The heroine was an actress +in one of the wandering Greek companies, splendid strollers, who played +at the Indian and Asiatic Courts. The story ends with the representation +of the “Bacchae,” in Parthia. The head of Pentheus +is carried by one of the Bacchae in that drama. Behold, it is +not a mask, but <i>the head of Crassus</i>, and thus conveys the first +news of the Roman defeat. Obviously, this is a novel that needs +a great deal of preliminary study, as much, indeed, as “Salammbo.”</p> +<p>Another story will deal with the Icelandic discoverers of America. +Mr. Kipling, however, has taken the wind out of its sails with his sketch, +“The Finest Story in the World.” There are all the +marvels and portents of the <i>Eyrbyggja Saga</i> to draw upon, there +are Skraelings to fight, and why should not Karlsefni’s son kill +the last mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of +the Aztecs? After that a romance on the intrigues to make Charles +Edward King of Poland sounds commonplace. But much might be made +of that, too, if the right man took it in hand. Believe me, there +are plenty of stories left, waiting for the man who can tell them. +I have said it before, but I say it again, if I were king I would keep +court officials, Mr. Stanley Weyman, Mr. Mason, Mr. Kipling, and others, +to tell me my own stories. I know the kind of thing which I like, +from the discovery of <i>Qrart</i> to that of the French gold in the +burn at Loch Arkaig, or in “the wood by the lochside” that +Murray of Broughton mentions.</p> +<p>Another cigarette I have, the adventures of a Poet, a Poet born in +a Puritan village of Massachusetts about 1670. Hawthorne could +have told me my story, and how my friend was driven into the wilderness +and lived among the Red Men. I think he was killed in an attempt +to warn his countrymen of an Indian raid; I think his MS. poems have +a bullet-hole through them, and blood on the leaves. They were +in Carew’s best manner, these poems.</p> +<p>Another tale Hawthorne might have told me, the tale of an excellent +man, whose very virtues, by some baneful moral chemistry, corrupt and +ruin the people with whom he comes in contact. I do not mean by +goading them into the opposite extremes, but rather something like a +moral <i>jettatura</i>. This needs a great deal of subtlety, and +what is to become of the hero? Is he to plunge into vice till +everybody is virtuous again? It wants working out. I have +omitted, after all, a schoolboy historical romance, explaining <i>why +Queen Elizabeth was never married</i>. A Scottish paper offered +a prize for a story of Queen Mary Stuart’s reign. I did +not get the prize—perhaps did not deserve it, but my story ran +thus: You must know that Queen Elizabeth was singularly like Darnley +in personal appearance. What so natural as that, disguised as +a page, her Majesty should come spying about the Court of Holyrood? +Darnley sees her walking out of Queen Mary’s room, he thinks her +an hallucination, discovers that she is real, challenges her, and they +fight at Faldonside, by the Tweed, Shakespeare holding Elizabeth’s +horse. Elizabeth is wounded, and is carried to the Kirk of Field, +and laid in Darnley’s chamber, while Darnley goes out and makes +love to my rural heroine, the lady of Fernilee, a Kerr. That night +Bothwell blows up the Kirk of Field, Elizabeth and all. Darnley +has only one resource. Borrowing the riding habit of the rural +heroine, the lady of Fernilee, he flees across the Border, and, for +the rest of his life, personates Queen Elizabeth. That is why +Elizabeth, who was Darnley, hated Mary so bitterly (on account of the +Kirk of Field affair), and <i>that is why Queen Elizabeth was never +married</i>. Side-lights on Shakespeare’s Sonnets were obviously +cast. The young man whom Shakespeare admired so, and urged to +marry, was—Darnley. This romance did not get the prize (the +anachronism about Shakespeare is worthy of Scott), but I am conceited +enough to think it deserved an honourable mention.</p> +<p>Enough of my own cigarettes. But there are others of a more +fragrant weed. Who will end for me the novel of which Byron only +wrote a chapter; who, as Bulwer Lytton is dead? A finer opening, +one more mysteriously stirring, you can nowhere read. And the +novel in letters, which Scott began in 1819, who shall finish it, or +tell us what he did with his fair Venetian courtezan, a character so +much out of Sir Walter’s way? He tossed it aside—it +was but an enchanted cigarette—and gave us “The Fortunes +of Nigel” in its place. I want both. We cannot call +up those who “left half told” these stories. In a +happier world we shall listen to their endings, and all our dreams shall +be coherent and concluded. Meanwhile, without trouble, and expense, +and disappointment, and reviews, we can all smoke our cigarettes of +fairyland. Would that many people were content to smoke them peacefully, +and did not rush on pen, paper, and ink!</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XIV: STORIES AND STORY-TELLING<br /> +(From STRATH NAVER)</h2> +<p>We have had a drought for three weeks. During a whole week +this northern strath has been as sunny as the Riviera is expected to +be. The streams can be crossed dry-shod, kelts are plunging in +the pools, but even kelts will not look at a fly. Now, by way +of a pleasant change, an icy north wind is blowing, with gusts of snow, +not snow enough to swell the loch that feeds the river, but just enough +snow (as the tourist said of the water in the River Styx) “to +swear by,” or at! <i>The Field</i> announces that a duke, +who rents three rods on a neighbouring river, has not yet caught one +salmon. The acrimoniously democratic mind may take comfort in +that intelligence, but, if the weather will not improve for a duke, +it is not likely to change for a mere person of letters. Thus +the devotee of the Muses is driven back, by stress of climate, upon +literature, and as there is nothing in the lodge to read he is compelled +to write.</p> +<p>Now certainly one would not lack material, if only one were capable +of the art of fiction. The genesis of novels and stories is a +topic little studied, but I am inclined to believe that, like the pearls +in the mussels of the river, fiction is a beautiful disease of the brain. +Something, an incident or an experience, or a reflection, gets imbedded, +incrusted, in the properly constituted mind, and becomes the nucleus +of a pearl of romance. Mr. Marion Crawford, in a recent work, +describes his hero, who is a novelist, at work. This young gentleman, +by a series of faults or misfortunes, has himself become a centre of +harrowing emotion. Two young ladies, to each of whom he has been +betrothed, are weeping out their eyes for him, or are kneeling to heaven +with despairing cries, or are hardening their hearts to marry men for +whom they “do not care a bawbee.” The hero’s +aunt has committed a crime; everybody, in fact, is in despair, when +an idea occurs to the hero. Indifferent to the sorrows of his +nearest and dearest, he sits down with his notion and writes a novel—writes +like a person possessed.</p> +<p>He has the proper kind of brain, the nucleus has been dropped into +it, the pearl begins to grow, and to assume prismatic hues. So +he is happy, and even the frozen-out angler might be happy if he could +write a novel in the absence of salmon. Unluckily, my brain is +not capable of this æsthetic malady, and to save my life, or to +“milk a fine warm cow rain,” as the Zulus say, I could not +write a novel, or even a short story. About The Short Story, as +they call it, with capital letters, our critical American cousins have +much to say. Its germ, one fancies, is usually an incident, or +a mere anecdote, according to the nature of the author’s brain; +this germ becomes either the pearl of a brief <i>conte</i>, or the seed +of a stately tree, in three volumes. An author of experience soon +finds out how he should treat his material. One writer informs +me that, given the idea, the germinal idea, it is as easy for him to +make a novel out of it as a tale—as easy, and much more satisfactory +and remunerative. Others, like M. Guy de Maupassant, for example, +seem to find their strength in brevity, in cutting down, not in amplifying; +in selecting and reducing, not in allowing other ideas to group themselves +round the first, other characters to assemble about those who are essential. +That seems to be really the whole philosophy of this matter, concerning +which so many words are expended. The growth of the germinal idea +depends on the nature of an author’s talent—he may excel +in expansion, or in reduction; he may be economical, and out of an anecdote +may spin the whole cocoon of a romance; or he may be extravagant, and +give a capable idea away in the briefest form possible.</p> +<p>These ideas may come to a man in many ways, as we said, from a dream, +from a fragmentary experience (as most experiences in life are fragmentary), +from a hint in a newspaper, from a tale told in conversation. +Not long ago, for example, I heard an anecdote out of which M. Guy de +Maupassant could have made the most ghastly, the most squalid, and the +most supernaturally moving of all his <i>contes</i>. Indeed, that +is not saying much, as he did not excel in the supernatural. Were +it written in French, it might lie in my lady’s chamber, and, +as times go, nobody would be shocked. But, by our curious British +conventions, this tale cannot be told in an English book or magazine. +It was not, in its tendency, immoral; those terrible tales never are. +The events were rather calculated to frighten the hearer into the paths +of virtue. When Mr. Richard Cameron, the founder of the Cameronians, +and the godfather of the Cameronian Regiment, was sent to his parish, +he was bidden by Mr. Peden to “put hell-fire to the tails” +of his congregation. This vigorous expression was well fitted +to describe the <i>conte</i> which I have in my mind (I rather wish +I had it not), and which is not to be narrated here, nor in English.</p> +<p>For a combination of pity and terror, it seemed to me unmatched in +the works of the modern fancy, or in the horrors of modern experience; +whether in experience or in imagination it had its original source. +But even the English authors, who plume themselves on their audacity, +or their realism, or their contempt for “the young person,” +would not venture this little romance, much less, then, is a timidly +uncorrect pen-man likely to tempt Mr. Mudie with the <i>conte</i>. +It is one of two tales, both told as true, which one would like to be +able to narrate in the language of Molière. The other is +also very good, and has a wonderful scene with a corpse and a <i>chapelle +ardente</i>, and a young lady; it is historical, and of the last generation +but one.</p> +<p>Even our frozen strath here has its modern legend, which may be told +in English, and out of which, I am sure, a novelist could make a good +short story, or a pleasant opening chapter of a romance. What +is the mysterious art by which these things are done? What makes +the well-told story seem real, rich with life, actual, engrossing? +It is the secret of genius, of the novelist’s art, and the writer +who cannot practise the art might as well try to discover the Philosopher’s +Stone, or to “harp fish out of the water.” However, +let me tell the legend as simply as may be, and as it was told to me.</p> +<p>The strath runs due north, the river flowing from a great loch to +the Northern sea. All around are low, undulating hills, brown +with heather, and as lonely almost as the Sahara. On the horizon +to the south rise the mountains, Ben this and Ben that, real mountains +of beautiful outline, though no higher than some three thousand feet. +Before the country was divided into moors and forests, tenanted by makers +of patent corkscrews, and boilers of patent soap, before the rivers +were distributed into beats, marked off by white and red posts, there +lived over to the south, under the mountains, a sportsman of athletic +frame and adventurous disposition. His name I have forgotten, +but we may call him Dick Lindsay. It is told of him that he once +found a poacher in the forest, and, being unable to catch the intruder, +fired his rifle, not at him, but in his neighbourhood, whereon the poacher, +deliberately kneeling down, took a long shot at Dick. How the +duel ended, and whether either party flew a flag of truce, history does +not record.</p> +<p>At all events, one stormy day in late September, Dick had stalked +and wounded a stag on the hills to the south-east of the strath. +Here, if only one were a novelist, one could weave several pages of +valuable copy out of the stalk. The stag made for the strath here, +and Dick, who had no gillie, but was an independent sportsman of the +old school, pursued on foot. Plunging down the low, birch-clad +hills, the stag found the flooded river before him, black and swollen +with rain. He took the water, crossing by the big pool, which +looked almost like a little loch, tempestuous under a north wind blowing +up stream, and covered with small white, vicious crests. The stag +crossed and staggered up the bank, where he stood panting. It +is not a humane thing to leave a deer to die slowly of a rifle bullet, +and Dick, reaching the pool, hesitated not, but threw off his clothes, +took his skene between his teeth, plunged in, and swam the river.</p> +<p>All naked as he was he cut the stag’s throat in the usual manner, +and gralloched him with all the skill of Bucklaw. This was very +well, and very well it would be to add a description of the stag at +bay; but as I never happened to see a stag at bay, I omit all that. +Dick had achieved success, but his clothes were on one side of a roaring +river in spate, and he and the dead stag were on the other. There +was no chance of fording the stream, and there was then no bridge. +He did not care to swim back, for the excitement was out of him. +He was trembling with cold, and afraid of cramp. “A mother-naked +man,” in a wilderness, with a flood between him and his raiment, +was in a pitiable position. It did not occur to him to flay the +stag, and dress in the hide, and, indeed, he would have been frozen +before he could have accomplished that task. So he reconnoitred.</p> +<p>There was nobody within sight but one girl, who was herding cows. +Now for a naked man, with a knife, and bedabbled with blood, to address +a young woman on a lonely moor is a delicate business. The chances +were that the girl would flee like a startled fawn, and leave Dick to +walk, just as he was, to the nearest farmhouse, about a mile away. +However, Dick had to risk it; he lay down so that only his face appeared +above the bank, and he shouted to the maiden. When he had caught +her attention he briefly explained the unusual situation. Then +the young woman behaved like a trump, or like a Highland Nausicaa, for +students of the “Odyssey” will remember how Odysseus, simply +clad in a leafy bough of a tree, made supplication to the sea-king’s +daughter, and how she befriended him. Even if Dick had been a +reader of Homer, which is not probable, there were no trees within convenient +reach, and he could not adopt the leafy covering of Odysseus.</p> +<p>“You sit still; if you move an inch before I give you the word, +I’ll leave you where you are!” said Miss Mary. She +then cast her plaid over her face, marched up to the bank where Dick +was crouching and shivering, dropped her ample plaid over him, and sped +away towards the farmhouse. When she had reached its shelter, +and was giving an account of the adventure, Dick set forth, like a primeval +Highlander, the covering doing duty both for plaid and kilt. Clothes +of some kind were provided for him at the cottage, a rickety old boat +was fetched, and he and his stag were rowed across the river to the +place where his clothes lay.</p> +<p>That is all, but if one were a dealer in romance, much play might +be made with the future fortunes of the sportsman and the maiden, happy +fortunes or unhappy. In real life, the lassie “drew up with” +a shepherd lad, as Miss Jenny Denison has it, married him, and helped +to populate the strath. As for Dick, history tells no more of +his adventures, nor is it alleged that he ever again visited the distant +valley, or beheld the face of his Highland Nausicaa.</p> +<p>Now, if one were a romancer, this mere anecdote probably would “rest, +lovely pearl, in the brain, and slowly mature in the oyster,” +till it became a novel. Properly handled, the incident would make +a very agreeable first chapter, with the aid of scenery, botany, climate, +and remarks on the manners and customs of the red deer stolen from St. +John, or the Stuarts d’Albanie. Then, probably, one would +reflect on the characters of Mary and of Richard; Mary must have parents, +of course, and one would make them talk in Scottish. Probably +she already had a lover; how should she behave to that lover? +There is plenty of room for speculation in that problem. As to +Dick, is he to be a Lothario, or a lover <i>pour le bon motif</i>? +What are his distinguished family to think of the love affair, which +would certainly ensue in fiction, though in real life nobody thought +of it at all? Are we to end happily, with a marriage or marriages, +or are we to wind all up in the pleasant, pessimistic, realistic, fashionable +modern way? Is Mary to drown the baby in the Muckle Pool? +Is she to suffer the penalty of her crime at Inverness? Or, happy +thought, shall we not make her discarded rival lover meet Dick in the +hills on a sunny day and then—are they not (taking a hint from +facts) to fight a duel with rifles? I see Dick lying, with a bullet +in his brow, on the side of a corrie; his blood crimsons the snow, an +eagle stoops from the sky. That makes a pretty picturesque conclusion +to the unwritten romance of the strath.</p> +<p>Another anecdote occurs to me; good, I think, for a short story, +but capable, also, of being dumped down in the middle of a long novel. +It was in the old coaching days. A Border squire was going north, +in the coach, alone. At a village he was joined by a man and a +young lady: their purpose was manifest, they were a runaway couple, +bound for Gretna Green. They had not travelled long together before +the young lady, turning to the squire, said, “<i>Vous parlez français, +Monsieur</i>?” He did speak French—it was plain that +the bridegroom did not—and, to the end of the journey, that remarkable +lady conducted a lively and affectionate conversation with the squire +in French! Manifestly, he had only to ask and receive, but, alas! +he was an unadventurous, plain gentleman; he alighted at his own village; +he drove home in his own dogcart; the fugitive pair went forward, and +the Gretna blacksmith united them in holy matrimony. The rest +is silence.</p> +<p>I would give much to know what that young person’s previous +history and adventures had been, to learn what befell her after her +wedding, to understand, in brief, her conduct and her motives. +Were I a novelist, a Maupassant, or a Meredith, the Muse, “from +whatsoever quarter she chose,” would enlighten me about all, and +I would enlighten you. But I can only marvel, only throw out the +hint, only deposit the grain of sand, the nucleus of romance, in some +more fertile brain. Indeed the topic is much more puzzling than +the right conclusion for my Highland romance. In that case fancy +could find certain obvious channels, into one or other of which it must +flow. But I see no channels for the lives of these three queerly +met people in the coach.</p> +<p>As a rule, fancies are capable of being arranged in but a few familiar +patterns, so that it seems hardly worth while to make the arrangement. +But he who looks at things thus will never be a writer of stories. +Nay, even of the slowly unfolding tale of his own existence he may weary, +for the combinations therein have all occurred before; it is in a hackneyed +old story that he is living, and you, and I. Yet to act on this +knowledge is to make a bad affair of our little life: we must try our +best to take it seriously. And so of story-writing. As Mr. +Stevenson says, a man must view “his very trifling enterprise +with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and think the smallest +improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. +The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning +good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play.”</p> +<p>That is true, that is the worst of it. The man, the writer, +over whom the irresistible desire to mock at himself, his work, his +puppets and their fortunes has power, will never be a novelist. +The novelist must “make believe very much”; he must be in +earnest with his characters. But how to be in earnest, how to +keep the note of disbelief and derision “out of the memorial”? +Ah, there is the difficulty, but it is a difficulty of which many authors +appear to be insensible. Perhaps they suffer from no such temptations.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XV: THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION</h2> +<p>It is a truism that the supernatural in fiction should, as a general +rule, be left in the vague. In the creepiest tale I ever read, +the horror lay in this—<i>there was no ghost</i>! You may +describe a ghost with all the most hideous features that fancy can suggest—saucer +eyes, red staring hair, a forked tail, and what you please—but +the reader only laughs. It is wiser to make as if you were going +to describe the spectre, and then break off, exclaiming, “But +no! No pen can describe, no memory, thank Heaven, can recall, +the horror of that hour!” So writers, as a rule, prefer +to leave their terror (usually styled “The Thing”) entirely +in the dark, and to the frightened fancy of the student. Thus, +on the whole, the treatment of the supernaturally terrible in fiction +is achieved in two ways, either by actual description, or by adroit +suggestion, the author saying, like cabmen, “I leave it to yourself, +sir.” There are dangers in both methods; the description, +if attempted, is usually overdone and incredible: the suggestion is +apt to prepare us too anxiously for something that never becomes real, +and to leave us disappointed.</p> +<p>Examples of both methods may be selected from poetry and prose. +The examples in verse are rare enough; the first and best that occurs +in the way of suggestion is, of course, the mysterious lady in “Christabel.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“She was most beautiful to see,<br /> +Like a lady of a far countrée.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Who was she? What did she want? Whence did she come? +What was the horror she revealed to the night in the bower of Christabel?</p> +<blockquote><p>“Then drawing in her breath aloud<br /> +Like one that shuddered, she unbound<br /> +The cincture from beneath her breast.<br /> +Her silken robe and inner vest<br /> +Dropt to her feet, and full in view<br /> +Behold her bosom and half her side—<br /> +A sight to dream of, not to tell!<br /> +O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>And then what do her words mean?</p> +<blockquote><p>“Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,<br /> +This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>What was it—the “sight to dream of, not to tell?”</p> +<p>Coleridge never did tell, and, though he and Mr. Gilman said he knew, +Wordsworth thought he did not know. He raised a spirit that he +had not the spell to lay. In the Paradise of Poets has he discovered +the secret? We only know that the mischief, whatever it may have +been, was wrought.</p> +<blockquote><p>“O sorrow and shame! Can this be she—<br /> +The lady who knelt at the old oak tree?”<br /> +. . .<br /> +“A star hath set, a star hath risen,<br /> + O Geraldine, since arms of thine<br /> +Have been the lovely lady’s prison.<br /> + O Geraldine, one hour was thine.” <a name="citation11"></a><a href="#footnote11">{11}</a></p> +</blockquote> +<p>If Coleridge knew, why did he never tell? And yet he maintains +that “in the very first conception of the tale, I had the whole +present to my mind, with the wholeness no less than with the liveliness +of a vision,” and he expected to finish the three remaining parts +within the year. The year was 1816, the poem was begun in 1797, +and finished, as far as it goes, in 1800. If Coleridge ever knew +what he meant, he had time to forget. The chances are that his +indolence, or his forgetfulness, was the making of “Christabel,” +which remains a masterpiece of supernatural suggestion.</p> +<p>For description it suffices to read the “Ancient Mariner.” +These marvels, truly, are <i>speciosa miracula</i>, and, unlike Southey, +we believe as we read. “You have selected a passage fertile +in unmeaning miracles,” Lamb wrote to Southey (1798), “but +have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate.” +Lamb appears to have been almost alone in appreciating this masterpiece +of supernatural description. Coleridge himself shrank from his +own wonders, and wanted to call the piece “A Poet’s Reverie.” +“It is as bad as Bottom the weaver’s declaration that he +is not a lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion. +What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of all credit—which +the tale should force upon us—of its truth?” Lamb +himself was forced, by the temper of the time, to declare that he “disliked +all the miraculous part of it,” as if it were not <i>all</i> miraculous! +Wordsworth wanted the Mariner “to have a character and a profession,” +perhaps would have liked him to be a gardener, or a butler, with “an +excellent character!” In fact, the love of the supernatural +was then at so low an ebb that a certain Mr. Marshall “went to +sleep while the ‘Ancient Mariner’ was reading,” and +the book was mainly bought by seafaring men, deceived by the title, +and supposing that the “Ancient Mariner” was a nautical +treatise.</p> +<p>In verse, then, Coleridge succeeds with the supernatural, both by +way of description in detail, and of suggestion. If you wish to +see a failure, try the ghost, the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth’s +“Laodamia.” It is blasphemy to ask the question, but +is the ghost in “Hamlet” quite a success? Do we not +see and hear a little too much of him? Macbeth’s airy and +viewless dagger is really much more successful by way of suggestion. +The stage makes a ghost visible and familiar, and this is one great +danger of the supernatural in art. It is apt to insist on being +too conspicuous. Did the ghost of Darius, in “Æschylus,” +frighten the Athenians? Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre. +There is more discretion in Cæsar’s ghost—</p> +<blockquote><p>“I think it is the weakness of mine eyes<br /> +That shapes this monstrous apparition,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>says Brutus, and he lays no very great stress on the brief visit +of the appearance. For want of this discretion, Alexandre Dumas’s +ghosts, as in “The Corsican Brothers,” are failures. +They make themselves too common and too cheap, like the spectre in Mrs. +Oliphant’s novel, “The Wizard’s Son.” +This, indeed, is the crux of the whole adventure. If you paint +your ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not fear. +If you touch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied curiosity, not fear. +It may be easy to shudder, but it is difficult to teach shuddering.</p> +<p>In prose, a good example of the over vague is Miriam’s mysterious +visitor—the shadow of the catacombs—in “Transformation; +or, The Marble Faun.” Hawthorne should have told us more +or less; to be sure his contemporaries knew what he meant, knew who +Miriam and the Spectre were. The dweller in the catacombs now +powerfully excites curiosity, and when that curiosity is unsatisfied, +we feel aggrieved, vexed, and suspect that Hawthorne himself was puzzled, +and knew no more than his readers. He has not—as in other +tales he has—managed to throw the right atmosphere about this +being. He is vague in the wrong way, whereas George Sand, in <i>Les +Dames Vertes</i>, is vague in the right way. We are left in <i>Les +Dames Vertes</i> with that kind of curiosity which persons really engaged +in the adventure might have felt, not with the irritation of having +a secret kept from us, as in “Transformation.”</p> +<p>In “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (in “Redgauntlet”), +the right atmosphere is found, the right note is struck. All is +vividly real, and yet, if you close the book, all melts into a dream +again. Scott was almost equally successful with a described horror +in “The Tapestried Chamber.” The idea is the commonplace +of haunted houses, the apparition is described as minutely as a burglar +might have been; and yet we do not mock, but shudder as we read. +Then, on the other side—the side of anticipation—take the +scene outside the closed door of the vanished Dr. Jekyll, in Mr. Stevenson’s +well-known apologue:</p> +<p>They are waiting on the threshold of the chamber whence the doctor +has disappeared—the chamber tenanted by what? A voice comes +from the room. “Sir,” said Poole, looking Mr. Utterson +in the eyes, “was that my master’s voice?”</p> +<p>A friend, a man of affairs, and a person never accused of being fanciful, +told me that he read through the book to that point in a lonely Highland +chateau, at night, and that he did not think it well to finish the story +till next morning, but rushed to bed. So the passage seems “well-found” +and successful by dint of suggestion. On the other side, perhaps, +only Scotsmen brought up in country places, familiar from childhood +with the terrors of Cameronian myth, and from childhood apt to haunt +the lonely churchyards, never stirred since the year of the great Plague +choked the soil with the dead, perhaps <i>they</i> only know how much +shudder may be found in Mr. Stevenson’s “Thrawn Janet.” +The black smouldering heat in the hills and glens that are commonly +so fresh, the aspect of the Man, the Tempter of the Brethren, we know +them, and we have enough of the old blood in us to be thrilled by that +masterpiece of the described supernatural. It may be only a local +success, it may not much affect the English reader, but it is of sure +appeal to the lowland Scot. The ancestral Covenanter within us +awakens, and is terrified by his ancient fears.</p> +<p>Perhaps it may die out in a positive age—this power of learning +to shudder. To us it descends from very long ago, from the far-off +forefathers who dreaded the dark, and who, half starved and all untaught, +saw spirits everywhere, and scarce discerned waking experience from +dreams. When we are all perfect positivist philosophers, when +a thousand generations of nurses that never heard of ghosts have educated +the thousand and first generation of children, then the supernatural +may fade out of fiction. But has it not grown and increased since +Wordsworth wanted the “Ancient Mariner” to have “a +profession and a character,” since Southey called that poem a +Dutch piece of work, since Lamb had to pretend to dislike its “miracles”? +Why, as science becomes more cock-sure, have men and women become more +and more fond of old follies, and more pleased with the stirring of +ancient dread within their veins?</p> +<p>As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem +to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far +from us, or, at least, we care more and more to follow fancy into these +airy regions, <i>et inania regna</i>. The supernatural has not +ceased to tempt romancers, like Alexandre Dumas, usually to their destruction; +more rarely, as in Mrs. Oliphant’s “Beleaguered City,” +to such success as they do not find in the world of daily occupation. +The ordinary shilling tales of “hypnotism” and mesmerism +are vulgar trash enough, and yet I can believe that an impossible romance, +if the right man wrote it in the right mood, might still win us from +the newspapers, and the stories of shabby love, and cheap remorses, +and commonplace failures.</p> +<blockquote><p>“But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill.”</p> +</blockquote> +<h2>CHAPTER XVI: AN OLD SCOTTISH PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER</h2> +<blockquote><p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> +<p>“If any Gentlemen, and others, will be pleased to send me any +relations about Spirits, Witches, and Apparitions, In any part of the +Kingdom; or any Information about the Second Sight, Charms, Spells, +Magic, and the like, They shall oblige the Author, and have them publisht +to their satisfaction.</p> +<p>“Direct your Relations to Alexander Ogstouns, Shop Stationer, +at the foot of the Plain-stones, at Edinburgh, on the North-side of +the Street.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Is this not a pleasing opportunity for Gentlemen, and Others, whose +Aunts have beheld wraiths, doubles, and fetches? It answers very +closely to the requests of the Society for Psychical Research, who publish, +as some one disparagingly says, “the dreams of the middle classes.” +Thanks to Freedom, Progress, and the decline of Superstition, it is +now quite safe to see apparitions, and even to publish the narrative +of their appearance.</p> +<p>But when Mr. George Sinclair, sometime Professor of Philosophy in +Glasgow, issued the invitation which I have copied, at the end of his +“Satan’s Invisible World Discovered,” <a name="citation12"></a><a href="#footnote12">{12}</a> +the vocation of a seer was not so secure from harm. He, or she, +might just as probably be burned as not, on the charge of sorcery, in +the year of grace, 1685. However, Professor Sinclair managed to +rake together an odd enough set of legends, “proving clearly that +there are Devils,” a desirable matter to have certainty about. +“Satan’s Invisible World Discovered” is a very rare +little book; I think Scott says in a MS. note that he had great difficulty +in procuring it, when he was at work on his “infernal demonology.” +As a copy fell in my way, or rather as I fell in its way, a helpless +victim to its charms and its blue morocco binding, I take this chance +of telling again the old tales of 1685.</p> +<p>Mr. Sinclair began with a long dedicatory Epistle about nothing at +all, to the Lord Winton of the period. The Earl dug coal-mines, +and constructed “a moliminous rampier for a harbour.” +A “moliminous rampier” is a choice phrase, and may be envied +by novelists who aim at distinction of style. “Your defending +the salt pans against the imperious waves of the raging sea from the +NE. is singular,” adds the Professor, addressing “the greatest +coal and salt-master in Scotland, who is a nobleman, and the greatest +nobleman who is a Coal and Salt Merchant.” Perhaps it is +already plain to the modern mind that Mr. George Sinclair, though a +Professor of Philosophy, was not a very sagacious character.</p> +<p>Mr. Sinclair professes that his proofs of the existence of Devils +“are no old wife’s trattles about the fire, but such as +may bide the test.” He lived, one should remember, in an +age when faith was really seeking aid from ghost stories. Glanvil’s +books—and, in America, those of Cotton Mather—show the hospitality +to anecdotes of an edifying sort, which we admire in Mr. Sinclair. +Indeed, Sinclair borrows from Glanvil and Henry More, authors who, like +himself, wished to establish the existence of the supernatural on the +strange incidents which still perplex us, but which are scarcely regarded +as safe matter to argue upon. The testimony for a Ghost would +seldom go to a jury in our days, though amply sufficient in the time +of Mr. Sinclair. About “The Devil of Glenluce” he +took particular care to be well informed, and first gave it to the world +in a volume on—you will never guess what subject—Hydrostatics! +In the present work he offers us</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Devil of Glenluce Enlarged<br /> +With several Remarkable Additions<br /> +from an Eye and Ear Witness,<br /> +A Person of undoubted<br /> +Honesty.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Mr. Sinclair recommends its “usefulness for refuting Atheism.” +Probably Mr. Sinclair got the story, or had it put off on him rather, +through one Campbell, a student of philosophy in Glasgow, the son of +Gilbert Campbell, a weaver of Glenluce, in Galloway; the scene in our +own time, of a mysterious murder. Campbell had refused alms to +Alexander Agnew, a bold and sturdy beggar, who, when asked by the Judge +whether he believed in a God, answered: “He knew no God but Salt, +Meal, and Water.” In consequence of the refusal of alms, +“The Stirs first began.” The “Stirs” are +ghostly disturbances. They commenced with whistling in the house +and out of it, “such as children use to make with their small, +slender glass whistles.” “About the Middle of November,” +says Mr. Sinclair, “the Foul Fiend came on with his extraordinary +assaults.” Observe that he takes the Foul Fiend entirely +for granted, and that he never tells us the date of the original quarrel, +and the early agitation. Stones were thrown down the chimney and +in at the windows, but nobody was hurt.</p> +<p>Naturally Gilbert Campbell carried his tale of sorrow to the parish +Minister. This did not avail him. His warp and threads were +cut on his loom, and even the clothes of his family were cut while they +were wearing them. At night something tugged the blankets off +their beds, a favourite old spiritual trick, which was played, if I +remember well, on a Roman Emperor, according to Suetonius. Poor +Campbell had to remove his stock-in-trade, and send his children to +board out, “to try whom the trouble did most follow.” +After this, all was quiet (as perhaps might be expected), and quiet +all remained, till a son named Thomas was brought home again. +Then the house was twice set on fire, and it might have been enough +to give Thomas a beating. On the other hand, Campbell sent Thomas +to stay with the Minister. But the troubles continued in the old +way. At last the family became so accustomed to the Devil, “that +they were no more afraid to keep up the Clash” (chatter) “with +the Foul Fiend than to speak to each other.” They were like +the Wesleys, who were so familiar with the fiend Jeffrey, that haunted +their home.</p> +<p>The Minister, with a few of the gentry, heard of their unholy friendship, +and paid Campbell a visit. “At their first coming in the +Devil says: ‘<i>Quum Literarum</i> is good Latin.’” +These are the first words of the Latin rudiments which scholars are +taught when they go to the Grammar School. Then they all prayed, +and a Voice came from under the bed: “Would you know the Witches +of Glenluce?” The Voice named a few, including one long +dead. But the Minister, with rare good sense, remarked that what +Satan said was not evidence.</p> +<p>Let it be remarked that “the lad Tom” had that very day +“come back with the Minister.” The Fiend then offered +terms. “Give me a spade and shovel, and depart from the +house for seven days, and I will make a grave, and lie down in it, and +trouble you no more.” Hereon Campbell, with Scottish caution, +declined to give the Devil the value of a straw. The visitors +then hunted after the voice, observing that some of the children were +in bed. They found nothing, and then, as the novelists say, “a +strange thing happened.”</p> +<p>There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the elbow down, beating +upon the floor till the house did shake again. “The Fiend +next exclaimed that if the candle were put out he would appear in the +shape of Fireballs.”</p> +<p>Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we learn that all +the scene occurred in candle-light. The appearance of floating +balls of fire is frequent (if we may believe the current reports) at +spiritualistic séances. But what a strange, ill-digested +tale is Mr. Sinclair’s! He lets slip an expression which +shows that the investigators were in one room, the But, while the Fiend +was diverting himself in the other room, the Ben! The Fiend (nobody +going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman who wore a fashionable broad-brimmed +hat, “whereupon he presently imagined that he felt a pair of shears +going about his hat,” but there was no such matter. The +voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others were eating, and +said the maid gave him a crust in the morning. This she denied, +but admitted that something had “clicked” a piece of bread +out of her hand.</p> +<p>The séance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion of the +children’s bodies, with a sound resembling applause. After +many months of this really annoying conduct, poor Campbell laid his +case before the Presbyters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of +publication. So a “solemn humiliation” was actually +held all through the bounds of the synod. But to little purpose +did Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes. The good wife’s +plate was snatched away before her very eyes, and then thrown back at +her. In similar “stirs,” described by a Catholic missionary +in Peru soon after Pizarro’s conquest, the cup of an Indian chief +was lifted up by an invisible hand, and set down empty. In that +case, too, stones were thrown, as by the Devil of Glenluce.</p> +<p>And what was the end of it all? Mr. Sinclair has not even taken +the trouble to inquire. It seems by some conjuration or other, +the Devil suffered himself to be put away, and gave the weaver a habitation. +The weaver “has been a very Odd man that endured so long these +marvellous disturbances.”</p> +<p>This is the tale which Mr. Sinclair offers, without mentioning his +authority. He complains that Dr. Henry More had plagiarised it, +from his book of Hydrostatics. Two points may be remarked. +First: modern Psychical Inquirers are more particular about evidence +than Mr. Sinclair. Not for nothing do we live in an age of science. +Next: the stories of these “stirs” are always much the same +everywhere, in Glenluce, at Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru, +in Wesley’s house, in heroic Iceland, when Glam, the vampire, +“rode the roofs.” It is curious to speculate on how +the tradition of making themselves little nuisances in this particular +manner has been handed down among children, if we are to suppose that +children do the trick. Last autumn a farmer’s house in Scotland +was annoyed exactly as the weaver’s home was, and that within +a quarter of a mile of a well-known man of science. The mattress +of the father was tenanted by something that wriggled like a snake. +The mattress was opened, nothing was found, and the disturbance began +again as soon as the bed was restored to its place. This occurred +when the farmer’s children had been sent to a distance.</p> +<p>One cannot but be perplexed by the problem which these tales suggest. +Almost bare of evidence as they are, their great number, their wide +diffusion, in many countries and in times ancient and modern, may establish +some substratum of truth. Scott mentions a case in which the imposture +was detected by a sheriff’s officer. But a recent anecdote +makes me almost distrust the detection.</p> +<p>Some English people, having taken a country house in Ireland, were +vexed by the usual rappings, stone-throwings, and all the rest of the +business. They sent to Dublin for two detectives, who arrived. +On their first night, the lady of the house went into a room, where +she found one of the policemen asleep in his chair. Being a lively +person, she rapped twice or thrice on the table. He awakened, +and said: “Ah, so I suspected. It was hardly worth while, +madam, to bring us so far for this.” And next day the worthy +men withdrew in dudgeon, but quite convinced that they had discovered +the agent in the hauntings.</p> +<p>But they had not!</p> +<p>On the other hand, Scott (who had seen one ghost, if not two, and +had heard a “warning”) states that Miss Anne Robinson managed +the Stockwell disturbances by tying horsehairs to plates and light articles, +which then demeaned themselves as if possessed.</p> +<p>Here we have <i>vera causa</i>, a demonstrable cause of “stirs,” +and it may be inferred that all the other historical occurrences had +a similar origin. We have, then, only to be interested in the +persistent tradition, in accordance with which mischievous persons always +do exactly the same sort of thing. But this is a mere example +of the identity of human nature.</p> +<p>It is curious to see how Mr. Sinclair plumes himself on this Devil +of Glenluce as a “moliminous rampier” against irreligion. +“This one Relation is worth all the price that can be given for +the Book.” The price I have given for the volume is Ten +Golden Guineas, and perhaps the Foul Thief of Glenluce is hardly worth +the money.</p> +<p>“I believe if the Obdurest Atheist among men would seriously +and in good earnest consider that relation, and ponder all the circumstances +thereof, he would presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing +a story less considerable, ‘I believe I have been in the wrong +all the time—if this be true.’”</p> +<p>Mr. Sinclair is also a believer in the Woodstock devils, on which +Scott founded his novel. He does not give the explanation that +Giles Sharp, alias Joseph Collins of Oxford, alias Funny Joe, was all +the Devil in that affair. Scott had read the story of Funny Joe, +but could never remember “whether it exists in a separate collection, +or where it is to be looked for.”</p> +<p>Indifferent to evidence, Mr. Sinclair confutes the Obdurest Atheists +with the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with the young lady from Howells’ +“Letters,” whose house, like Rahab’s, was “on +the city wall,” and with the ghost of the Major who appeared to +the Captain (as he had promised), and scolded him for not keeping his +sword clean. He also gives us Major Weir, at full length, convincing +us that, as William Erskine said, “The Major was a disgusting +fellow, a most ungentlemanlike character.” Scott, on the +other hand, remarked, long before “Waverley,” “if +I ever were to become a writer of prose romances, I think I would choose +Major Weir, if not for my hero, at least for an agent and a leading +one, in my production.” He admitted that the street where +the Major lived was haunted by a woman “twice the common length,” +“but why should we set him down for an ungentlemanly fellow?” +Readers of Mr. Sinclair will understand the reason very well, and it +is not necessary, nor here even possible, to justify Erskine’s +opinion by quotations. Suffice it that, by virtue of his enchanted +staff, which was burned with him, the Major was enabled “to commit +evil not to be named, yea, even to reconcile man and wife when at variance.” +His sister, who was hanged, had Redgauntlet’s horse-shoe mark +on her brow, and one may marvel that Scott does not seem to have remembered +this coincidence. “There was seen an exact Horse-shoe, shaped +for nails, in her wrinkles. Terrible enough, I assure you, to +the stoutest beholder!”</p> +<p>Most modern readers will believe that both the luckless Major and +his sister were religious maniacs. Poverty, solitude, and the +superstition of their time were the true demon of Major Weir, burned +at the stake in April 1670. Perhaps the most singular impression +made by “Satan’s Invisible World Discovered” is that +in Sinclair’s day, people who did not believe in bogies believed +in nothing, while people who shared the common creed of Christendom +were capable of believing in everything.</p> +<p>Atheists are as common as ghosts in his marvellous relations, and +the very wizards themselves were often Atheists.</p> +<p>NOTE.—I have said that Scott himself had seen one ghost, if +not two, and heard a “warning.” The ghost was seen +near Ashestiel, on an open spot of hillside, “please to observe +it was before dinner.” The anecdote is in Gillis’s, +“Recollections of Sir Walter Scott,” p. 170. The vision +of Lord Byron standing in the great hall of Abbotsford is described +in the “Demonology and Witchcraft .” Scott alleges +that it resolved itself into “great coats, shawls, and plaids”—a +hallucination. But Lockhart remarks (“Life,” ix. p. +141) that he did not care to have the circumstance discussed in general. +The “stirs” in Abbotsford during the night when his architect, +Bullock, died in London, are in Lockhart, v. pp. 309-315. “The +noise resembled half-a-dozen men hard at work putting up boards and +furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody +on the premises at the time.” The noise, unluckily, occurred +twice, April 28 and 29, 1818, and Lockhart does not tell us on which +of these two nights Mr. Bullock died. Such is the casualness of +ghost story-tellers. Lockhart adds that the coincidence made a +strong impression on Sir Walter’s mind. He did not care +to ascertain the point in his own mental constitution “where incredulity +began to waver,” according to his friend, Mr. J. L. Adolphus.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER XVII: THE BOY</h2> +<p>As a humble student of savage life, I have found it necessary to +make researches into the manners and customs of boys. Boys are +not what a vain people supposes. If you meet them in the holidays, +you find them affable and full of kindness and good qualities. +They will condescend to your weakness at lawn-tennis, they will aid +you in your selection of fly-hooks, and, to be brief, will behave with +much more than the civility of tame Zulus or Red Men on a missionary +settlement. But boys at school and among themselves, left to the +wild justice and traditional laws which many generations of boys have +evolved, are entirely different beings. They resemble that Polynesian +prince who had rejected the errors of polytheism for those of an extreme +sect of Primitive Seceders. For weeks at a time this prince was +known to be “steady,” but every month or so he disappeared, +and his subjects said he was “lying off.” To adopt +an American idiom, he “felt like brandy and water”; he also +“felt like” wearing no clothes, and generally rejecting +his new conceptions of duty and decency. In fact, he had a good +bout of savagery, and then he returned to his tall hat, his varnished +boots, his hymn-book, and his edifying principles. The life of +small boys at school (before they get into long-tailed coats and the +upper-fifth) is often a mere course of “lying-off”—of +relapse into native savagery with its laws and customs.</p> +<p>If any one has so far forgotten his own boyhood as to think this +description exaggerated, let him just fancy what our comfortable civilised +life would be, if we could become boys in character and custom. +Let us suppose that you are elected to a new club, of which most of +the members are strangers to you. You enter the doors for the +first time, when two older members, who have been gossiping in the hall, +pounce upon you with the exclamation, “Hullo, here’s a new +fellow! You fellow, what’s your name?” You reply, +let us say, “Johnson.” “I don’t believe +it, it’s such a rum name. What’s your father?” +Perhaps you are constrained to answer “a Duke” or (more +probably) “a solicitor.” In the former case your friends +bound up into the smoking-room, howling, “Here’s a new fellow +says his father is a Duke. Let’s take the cheek out of him.” +And they “take it out” with umbrellas, slippers, and other +surgical instruments. Or, in the latter case (your parent being +a solicitor) they reply, “Then your father must be a beastly cad. +All solicitors are sharks. <i>My</i> father says so, and he knows. +How many sisters have you?” The new member answers, “Four.” +“Any of them married?” “No.” “How +awfully awkward for you.”</p> +<p>By this time, perhaps, luncheon is ready, or the evening papers come +in, and you are released for a moment. You sneak up into the library, +where you naturally expect to be entirely alone, and you settle on a +sofa with a novel. But an old member bursts into the room, spies +a new fellow, and puts him through the usual catechism. He ends +with, “How much tin have you got?” You answer “twenty +pounds,” or whatever the sum may be, for perhaps you had contemplated +playing whist. “Very well, fork it out; you must give a +dinner, all new fellows must, and <i>you</i> are not going to begin +by being a stingy beast?” Thus addressed, as your friend +is a big bald man, who looks mischievous, you do “fork out” +all your ready money, and your new friend goes off to consult the cook. +Meanwhile you “shed a blooming tear,” as Homer says, and +go home heart-broken. Now, does any grown-up man call this state +of society civilisation? Would life be worth living (whatever +one’s religious consolations) on these terms? Of course +not, and yet this picture is a not overdrawn sketch of the career of +some new boy, at some schools new or old. The existence of a small +schoolboy is, in other respects, not unlike that of an outsider in a +lawless “Brotherhood,” as the Irish playfully call their +murder clubs.</p> +<p>The small boy is <i>in</i> the society, but not <i>of</i> it, as +far as any benefits go. He has to field out (and I admit that +the discipline is salutary) while other boys bat. Other boys commit +the faults, and compel him to copy out the impositions—say five +hundred lines of Virgil—with which their sins are visited. +Other boys enjoy the pleasures of football, while the small boy has +to run vaguely about, never within five yards of the ball. Big +boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small boy gets lost in the +bitter weather, on the open moors, or perhaps (as in one historical +case) is frozen to death within a measurable distance of the school +playground. And the worst of it is that, as a member of the great +school secret society, the small boy can never complain of his wrongs, +or divulge the name of his tormentors. It is in this respect that +he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged into the coils of an Anarchist +“Inner Brotherhood.” He is exposed to all sorts of +wrongs from his neighbours, and he can only escape by turning “informer,” +by breaking the most sacred law of his society, losing all social status, +and, probably, obliging his parents to remove him from school. +Life at school, as among the Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that +law and authority are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.</p> +<p>The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which a man enters with +reluctance. Boys are, on the whole, such good fellows, and so +full of fine unsophisticated qualities, that the mature mind would gladly +turn away its eyes from beholding their iniquities. Even a cruel +bully does not inevitably and invariably develop into a bad man. +He is, let us hope, only passing through the savage stage, in which +the torture of prisoners is a recognised institution. He has, +perhaps, too little imagination to understand the pain he causes. +Very often bullying is not physically cruel, but only a perverted sort +of humour, such as Kingsley, in “Hypatia,” recognised among +his favourite Goths. I remember a feeble foolish boy at school +(feeble he certainly was, and was thought foolish) who became the subject +of much humorous bullying. His companions used to tie a thin thread +round his ear, and attach this to a bar at such a height that he could +only avoid breaking it by standing on tiptoe. But he was told +that he must not break the thread. To avoid infringing this commandment, +he put himself to considerable inconvenience and afforded much enjoyment +to the spectators.</p> +<p>Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remember the two following +species of bullying to which they were subjected, and which, perhaps, +are obsolescent. Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and the +victim was seated on the top, near the roof of the room. The other +savages brought him down from this bad eminence by hurling other stools +at those which supported him. Or the victim was made to place +his hands against the door, with the fingers outstretched, while the +young tormentors played at the Chinese knife-trick. They threw +knives, that is to say, at the door between the apertures of the fingers, +and, as a rule, they hit the fingers and not the door. These diversions +I know to be correctly reported, but the following pretty story is, +perhaps, a myth. At one of the most famous public schools, a praepostor, +or monitor, or sixth-form boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot +in the room above his own. He went up and found a big boy and +a little boy. They denied having any pistol. The monitor +returned to his studies, again was sure he heard a shot, went up, and +found the little boy dead. The big boy had been playing the William +Tell trick with him, and had hit his head instead of the apple. +That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all boys will +agree that the little victim could not have escaped by complaining to +the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side +not so seamy of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power +of honour among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society +might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour +is even more strong than fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable +circumstances in which it was developed.</p> +<p>People say bullying is not what it used to be. The much abused +monitorial system has this in it of good, that it enables a clever and +kindly boy who is high up in the school to stop the cruelties (if he +hears of them) of a much bigger boy who is low in the school. +But he seldom hears of them. Habitual bullies are very cunning, +and I am acquainted with instances in which they carry their victims +off to lonely torture cells (so to speak) and deserted places fit for +the sport. Some years ago a small boy, after a long course of +rope’s-ending in out-of-the-way dens, revealed the abominations +of some naval cadets. There was not much sympathy with him in +the public mind, and perhaps his case was not well managed. But +it was made clear that whereas among men an unpopular person is only +spoken evil of behind his back, an unpopular small boy among boys is +made to suffer in a more direct and very unpleasant way.</p> +<p>Most of us leave school with the impression that there was a good +deal of bullying when we were little, but that the institution has died +out. The truth is that we have grown too big to be bullied, and +too good-natured to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought +bullying was an extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was +rediscovered by Sir William Richmond). But a distinguished writer, +who was a small boy when I was a big one, has since revealed to me the +most abominable cruelties which were being practised at the very moment +when I supposed bullying to have had its day and ceased to be. +Now, the small boy need only have mentioned the circumstances to any +one of a score of big boys, and the tormentor would have been first +thrashed, and then, probably, expelled.</p> +<p>A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild and hilly region +on the other side of the world, let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. +In a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the society of the cook, +a very useless young man, who astonished him by references to one of +our universities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning. +This youth (who was made cook, and a very bad cook too, because he could +do nothing else) had been expelled from a large English school. +And he was expelled because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, +and had expressed his readiness to do it again. Now, there was +no doubt that this cook in the mountain inn was a very unserviceable +young fellow. But I wish more boys who have suffered things literally +unspeakable from bullies would try whether force (in the form of a paving +stone) is really no remedy.</p> +<p>The Catholic author of a recent book (“Schools,” by Lieut.-Col. +Raleigh Chichester), is very hard on “Protestant Schools,” +and thinks that the Catholic system of constant watching is a remedy +for bullying and other evils. “Swing-doors with their upper +half glazed, might have their uses,” he says, and he does not +see why a boy should not be permitted to complain, if he is roasted, +like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The boys at one Catholic +school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, “are never without +surveillance of some sort.” This is true of most French +schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there) +may read the published confessions of a <i>pion</i>—an usher, +or “spy.” A more degraded and degrading life than +that of the wretched <i>pion</i>, it is impossible to imagine. +In an English private school, the system of <i>espionnage</i> and tale +bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr. Anstey describes +in <i>Vice Versâ</i>. But in the Catholic schools spoken +of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he says, +“that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than +a check.” The religious question as between Catholics and +Protestants has no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant +school might, and Grimstone’s did, have tale-bearers; possibly +a Catholic school might exist without parental surveillance. That +system is called by its foes a “police,” by its friends +a “paternal” system. But fathers don’t exercise +the “paternal” system themselves in this country, and we +may take it for granted that, while English society and religion are +as they are, surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. +If any one regrets this, let him read the descriptions of French schools +and schooldays, in Balzac’s <i>Louis Lambert</i>, in the “Memoirs” +of M. Maxime du Camp, in any book where a Frenchman speaks his mind +about his youth. He will find spying (of course) among the ushers, +contempt and hatred on the side of the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, +a total lack of healthy exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent +in premature excursions into forbidden and shady quarters of the town.</p> +<p>No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation. +There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne’s experience +in “Vanity Fair”) be much bullying in an open cricket-field. +Big boys, too, with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when +they come across it, but make it their business to find out where it +exists. Exist it will, more or less, despite all precautions, +while boys are boys—that is, are passing through a modified form +of the savage state.</p> +<p>There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first +sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is +the true method. Before they go out into school life, many little +fellows of nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost +poetical. They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you +can win their confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts +and fancies which lie about them in their infancy. I have known +a little boy who liked to lie on the grass and to people the alleys +and glades of that miniature forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he +seemed actually to see in a kind of vision. But he went to school, +he instantly won the hundred yards race for boys under twelve, and he +came back a young barbarian, interested in “the theory of touch” +(at football), curious in the art of bowling, and no more capable than +you or I of seeing fairies in a green meadow. He was caught up +into the air of the boy’s world, and his imagination was in abeyance +for a season.</p> +<p>This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle +to behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss +of a good deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, +and come back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other +hand, if they had been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are +that they would have blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. +The awful infancy of Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. +Mr. Mill would probably have been a much happier and wiser man if he +had not been a precocious linguist, economist, and philosopher, but +had passed through a healthy stage of indifference to learning and speculation +at a public school. Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. +His <i>Primitiae</i> were published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), +when young Connop was but eleven years of age. His indiscreet +father “launched this slender bark,” as he says, and it +sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809. Young Thirlwall +was taught Latin at three years of age, “and at four read Greek +with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him.” +At seven he composed an essay, “On the Uncertainty of Human Life,” +but “his taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period.” +His sermons, some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these +<i>Primitiae</i> were collected.</p> +<p>He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecration. “I +confess,” observes this sage of ten, “when I look upon the +present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our +present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and +virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, +for the result of the change.” “The late Revolution +in France,” he adds, “has afforded us a remarkable lesson +how necessary religion is to a State, and that from a deficiency on +that head arise the chief evils which can befall society.” +He then bids us “remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may destroy +our Israel is near at hand,” though it might be difficult to show +how Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Israel.</p> +<p>As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that “Edward VI. +died in his minority, and disappointed his subjects, to whom he had +promised a happy reign.” Of this infant’s thirty-nine +sermons (just as many as the Articles), it may be said that they are +in no way inferior to other examples of this class of literature. +But sermons are among the least “scarce” and “rare” +of human essays, and many parents would rather see their boy patiently +acquiring the art of wicket-keeping at school than moralising on the +uncertainty of life at home. Some one “having presented +to the young author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar subject +of the Ploughboy,” he replied with an ode on “The Potboy.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Bliss is not always join’d to wealth,<br /> + Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof<br /> +For poverty is bliss with health,<br /> + Of that my potboy stands a proof.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The volume ends with this determination,</p> +<blockquote><p>“Still shall I seek Apollo’s shelt’ring +ray,<br /> +To cheer my spirits and inspire my lay.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>If any parent or guardian desires any further information about <i>Les +Enfans devenus célèbres par leurs écrits</i>, he +will find it in a work of that name, published in Paris in 1688. +The learned Scioppius published works at sixteen, “which deserved” +(and perhaps obtained) “the admiration of dotards.” +M. Du Maurier asserts that, at the age of fifteen, Grotius pleaded causes +at the Bar. At eleven Meursius made orations and harangues which +were much admired. At fifteen, Alexandre le Jeune wrote anacreontic +verses, and (less excusably) a commentary on the Institutions of Gaius. +Grevin published a tragedy and two comedies at the age of thirteen, +and at fifteen Louis Stella was a professor of Greek. But no one +reads Grevin now, nor Stella, nor Alexandre le Jeune, and perhaps their +time might have been better occupied in being “soaring human boys” +than in composing tragedies and commentaries. Monsieur le Duc +de Maine published, in 1678, his <i>Œuvres d’un Auteur de +Sept Ans</i>, a royal example to be avoided by all boys. These +and several score of other examples may perhaps reconcile us to the +spectacle of puerile genius fading away in the existence of the common +British schoolboy, who is nothing of a poet, and still less of a jurisconsult.</p> +<p>The British authors who understand boys best are not those who have +written books exclusively about boys. There is Canon Farrar, for +example, whose romances of boyish life appear to be very popular, but +whose boys, somehow, are not real boys. They are too good when +they are good, and when they are bad, they are not perhaps too bad (that +is impossible), but they are bad in the wrong way. They are bad +with a mannish and conscious vice, whereas even bad boys seem to sin +less consciously and after a ferocious fashion of their own. Of +the boys in “Tom Brown” it is difficult to speak, because +the Rugby boy under Arnold seems to have been of a peculiar species. +A contemporary pupil was asked, when an undergraduate, what he conceived +to be the peculiar characteristic of Rugby boys. He said, after +mature reflection, that “the <i>differentia</i> of the Rugby boy +was his moral thoughtfulness.” Now the characteristic of +the ordinary boy is his want of what is called moral thoughtfulness.</p> +<p>He lives in simple obedience to school traditions. These may +compel him, at one school, to speak in a peculiar language, and to persecute +and beat all boys who are slow at learning this language. At another +school he may regard dislike of the manly game of football as the sin +with which “heaven heads the count of crimes.” On +the whole this notion seems a useful protest against the prematurely +artistic beings who fill their studies with photographs of Greek fragments, +vases, etchings by the newest etcher, bits of China, Oriental rugs, +and very curious old brass candlesticks. The “challenge +cup” soon passes away from the keeping of any house in a public +school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated character. But +when we reach æsthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into +hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools are often terribly +“advanced,” and when they are not at work or play, they +are vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, +and all that kind of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives +fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing +a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking +and sacrifice on the altar of the Beautiful.</p> +<p>A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing <i>virelais</i> in +playtime is doing himself no good, and is worse than useless to the +society of which he is a member. The small boys, who are the most +ardent of hero-worshippers, either despise him or they allow him to +address them in <i>chansons royaux</i>, and respond with trebles in +<i>triolets</i>. At present a great many boys leave school, pass +three years or four at the universities, and go back as masters to the +place where some of their old schoolfellows are still pupils. +It is through these very young masters, perhaps, that “advanced” +speculations and tastes get into schools, where, however excellent in +themselves, they are rather out of place. Indeed, the very young +master, though usually earnest in his work, must be a sage indeed if +he can avoid talking to the elder boys about the problems that interest +him, and so forcing their minds into precocious attitudes. The +advantage of Eton boys used to be, perhaps is still, that they came +up to college absolutely destitute of “ideas,” and guiltless +of reading anything more modern than Virgil. Thus their intellects +were quite fallow, and they made astonishing progress when they bent +their fresh and unwearied minds to study. But too many boys now +leave school with settled opinions derived from the very latest thing +out, from the newest German pessimist or American socialist. It +may, however, be argued that ideas of these sorts are like measles, +and that it is better to take them early and be done with them for ever.</p> +<p>While schools are reformed and Latin grammars of the utmost ingenuity +and difficulty are published, boys on the whole change very little. +They remain the beings whom Thackeray understood better than any other +writer: Thackeray, who liked boys so much and was so little blind to +their defects. I think he exaggerates their habit of lying to +masters, or, if they lied in his day, their character has altered in +that respect, and they are more truthful than many men find it expedient +to be. And they have given up fighting; the old battles between +Berry and Biggs, or Dobbin and Cuff (major) are things of the glorious +past. Big boys don’t fight, and there is a whisper that +little boys kick each other’s shins when in wrath. That +practice can hardly be called an improvement, even if we do not care +for fisticuffs. Perhaps the gloves are the best peacemakers at +school. When all the boys, by practice in boxing, know pretty +well whom they can in a friendly way lick, they are less tempted to +more crucial experiments “without the gloves.”</p> +<p>But even the ascertainment of one’s relative merits with the +gloves hurts a good deal, and one may thank heaven that the fountain +of youth (as described by Pontus de Tyarde) is not a common beverage. +By drinking this liquid, says the old Frenchman, one is insensibly brought +back from old to middle age, and to youth and boyhood. But one +would prefer to stop drinking of the fountain before actually being +reduced to boy’s estate, and passing once more through the tumultuous +experiences of that period. And of these, <i>not having enough +to eat</i> is by no means the least common. The evidence as to +execrable dinners is rather dispiriting, and one may end by saying that +if there is a worse fellow than a bully, it is a master who does not +see that his boys are supplied with plenty of wholesome food. +He, at least, could not venture, like a distinguished headmaster, to +preach and publish sermons on “Boys’ Life: its Fulness.” +A schoolmaster who has boarders is a hotel-keeper, and thereby makes +his income, but he need not keep a hotel which would be dispraised in +guide books. Dinners are a branch of school economy which should +not be left to the wives of schoolmasters. <i>They</i> have never +been boys.</p> +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> +<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> “Mauth” +is Manx for dog, I am told.</p> +<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a> It is +easy to bear the misfortunes of others.</p> +<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a> In the +third volume of his essays.</p> +<p><a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a> “I +remember I went into the room where my father’s body lay, and +my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, +and fell a-beating the coffin and calling ‘Papa,’ for I +know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there.”—STEELE, +<i>The Tatler</i>, June 6, 1710.</p> +<p><a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a> Longmans.</p> +<p><a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a> I like +to know what the author got.</p> +<p><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a> Salmon +roe, I am sorry to say.</p> +<p><a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a> “Why +and Wherefore,” Aytoun.</p> +<p><a name="footnote9"></a><a href="#citation9">{9}</a> <i>Fersitan +legendum</i>, “Help Thou.”</p> +<p><a name="footnote10"></a><a href="#citation10">{10}</a> I know, +now, who Miriam was and who was the haunter of the Catacombs. +But perhaps the people is as well without the knowledge of an old and +“ower true tale” that shook a throne.</p> +<p><a name="footnote11"></a><a href="#citation11">{11}</a> Cannot +the reader guess? I am afraid that I can!</p> +<p><a name="footnote12"></a><a href="#citation12">{12}</a> Edinburgh, +1685.</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 1994-h.htm or 1994-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/9/9/1994 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. 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