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+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***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
+by Andrew Lang
+
+
+Contents:
+
+Preface
+Adventures Among Books
+Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson
+Rab's Friend
+Oliver Wendell Holmes
+Mr. Morris's Poems
+Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels
+A Scottish Romanticist of 1830
+The Confessions of Saint Augustine
+Smollett
+Nathaniel Hawthorne
+The Paradise of Poets
+Paris and Helen
+Enchanted Cigarettes
+Stories and Story-telling
+The Supernatural in Fiction
+An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher
+The Boy
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
+Friend," appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_; and "Recollections of Robert
+Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's memory) in _The North
+American Review_.  The Essay on "Smollett" was in the _Anglo-Saxon_,
+which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as "The
+Confessions of Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled _Wit and Wisdom_.
+For "The Poems of William Morris" the author has to thank the Editor of
+_Longman's Magazine_; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels," the
+Proprietors of _The Cornhill Magazine_; for "Enchanted Cigarettes," and
+possibly for "The Supernatural in Fiction," the Proprietors of _The
+Idler_.  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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
+
+
+I
+
+
+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 _Biographia Literaria_ 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.
+
+In beginning an _autobiographia literaria_, 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.  _On n'a que soi_, 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":--
+
+   "Look not thou on beauty's charming,
+   Sit thou still when kings are arming,
+   Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
+   Speak not when the people listens,
+   Stop thine ear against the singer,
+   From the red gold keep thy finger,
+   Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
+   Easy live and quiet die."
+
+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 _fallentis semita vitae_.
+This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.
+
+"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
+_Epigoniad_.
+
+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.
+
+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 _introuvable_.  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.
+
+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 _Ford_, 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: _Ferdinand_ and _Miranda_ at chess, _Cleopatra_ cuffing the
+messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the _Friar_ and the
+_Apothecary_, _Troilus_ on the Ilian walls, a vision of _Cassandra_ 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."
+
+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--
+
+   "The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
+      He spurred his courser on,
+   Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
+      That leads to Brotherstone."
+
+A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be
+neglected.  But they _were_ neglected till we had learned how--
+
+   "The sable score of fingers four
+      Remains on that board impressed,
+   And for evermore that lady wore
+      A covering on her wrist."
+
+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."
+
+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--
+
+   "The stag at eve had drunk his fill
+   Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
+   And deep his midnight lair had made
+   In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."
+
+Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase,
+till--
+
+   "Few were the stragglers, following far,
+   That reached the lake of Vennachar,
+   And when the Brig of Turk was won,
+   The foremost horseman rode alone."
+
+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.
+{1}  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"--
+
+   "Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
+   Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+_assommant_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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 Caesar, through the Latin and Greek
+grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
+play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae."  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.
+
+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:--
+
+   "Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
+      Too good for such a breed."
+
+Where--
+
+   "Valerius struck at Titus,
+      And lopped off half his crest;
+   But Titus stabbed Valerius
+      A span deep in the breast,"--
+
+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.
+
+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 _Adsum_, and the end of Socrates in
+the _Phaedo_ 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--
+
+   "_All was done that men may do_,
+   _And all was done in vain_,"--
+
+"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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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--
+
+   "So all day long the noise of battle rolled
+   Among the mountains by the winter sea;
+   Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
+   Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."
+
+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--
+
+      "Among a world of ghosts,
+   And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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!"
+
+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 _read all of them_.  There is no other course.  Let this be a
+reply.  No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+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.
+
+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
+_hospitium_ 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.
+
+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 _religio loci_
+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, _latro quidam_, 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.
+
+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--
+
+   "Once again the people
+   Called it but a weed."
+
+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.
+
+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, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
+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 _Oxford Spectator_ 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.
+
+      "None the less
+   I still came out no wiser than I went."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+"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."
+
+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 _Once a Week_.  "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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _The Oxford Spectator_, 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 _Echoes from the
+Oxford Magazine_, but the _Spectator_ was the flower of academic
+journals.  "When I look back to my own experience," says the _Spectator_,
+"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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _Pastourelles_?  Where is there _naivete_
+of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in _Aucassin et Nicolette_?  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 Moliere
+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 aesthetic, 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 aesthetics, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II: RECOLLECTIONS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+   TUSITALA
+
+   We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he
+      Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of the west
+   Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,
+      Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaea crest.
+
+   Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
+      Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,
+   Looks o'er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the sails
+      Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.
+
+   Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow,
+      Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,
+   Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,
+      Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.
+
+   Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea,
+      Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent tides
+   Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,
+      When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.
+
+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.
+
+"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.
+
+   "Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,"
+
+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
+_was_ 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!
+
+I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly favourable.
+"Here," I thought, "is one of your aesthetic 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, _nous autres_, 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: _his_ motto was never Lucy Ashton's--
+
+   "Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
+   Easy live and quiet die."
+
+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 _Portfolio_ and the _Cornhill_, 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!
+
+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, _not_ 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,
+_London_, was to start next week.  He had no writer of political leading
+articles.  Would I do a "leader"?  But I was _not_ 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.
+
+What a paper that was!  I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of gold,
+in handfuls of bank-notes.  Nobody ever read _London_, 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
+_London_ (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 _Virginibus Puerisque_ and "Studies
+of Men and Books," or "Treasure Island" and "Catriona."  With the decease
+of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, _London_ struggled
+and disappeared.
+
+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 _think_ it was he who called Julius
+Caesar "the howlingest cheese who ever lived."  One of the "crawlers" was
+"Thrawn Janet"; after "Wandering Willie's Tale" (but certainly _after_
+it), to my taste, it seems the most wonderful story of the "supernatural"
+in our language.
+
+Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey, Montepin, 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.
+
+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.
+
+It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque story
+together.  There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.
+
+"We'll extract information from him," I said.
+
+"How?"
+
+"With corkscrews."
+
+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 _did_ 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 _atelier_, 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 cafe, I remember that Mr. Stevenson heard a Frenchman say
+the English were cowards.  He got up and slapped the man's face.
+
+"_Monsieur, vous m'avez frappe_!" said the Gaul.
+
+"_A ce qu'il parait_," 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:
+
+"What a play! what a people!"
+
+"_Ah, Monsieur, vous etes bien jeune_!" said an old French gentleman.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _literati_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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?
+
+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."
+
+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 _cabotin_ 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.
+
+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 _noctes coenaeque deum_ 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.
+
+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
+_longueus_ and lazinesses of Scott, as a Scot should do.  He read French
+much; Greek only in translations.
+
+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."
+
+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 _sur le pont
+d'Avignon_: 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III: RAB'S FRIEND
+
+
+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 _epigoni_ 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.
+
+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--"_nous avons tous assez de
+force pour supporter les maux d'autrui_." {2}
+
+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.
+
+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."
+{3}  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:--
+
+   "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; _their world is
+   about three feet high_, 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."
+
+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--
+
+   "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." {4}
+
+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 _horae subsecivae_, as he said:
+_Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire non patior_, as Cicero writes,
+"shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost."
+
+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,
+_Remember upon Dethe_.  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.
+
+"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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 "_unquestionable_ 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.
+
+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 _not_ 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.
+
+   "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--_torvo vultu_--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 _gowl_.  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."
+
+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."
+
+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:"--
+
+      "And what saw ye there,
+      At the bush aboon Traquair;
+   Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
+      I heard the cushie croon
+      Thro' the gowden afternoon,
+   And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."
+
+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, _haud sine
+Dis animosus infans_, like Horace.
+
+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.
+
+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:--
+
+   "Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,
+      Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed
+      With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread,--
+   The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold,
+   None there might wear about his brows enrolled
+      A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,
+      Whose lovesome love of children and the dead
+   All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold
+      A dear dead hand that links us, and a light
+      The blithest and benignest of the night,--
+         The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be
+      A star to show your spirit in present sight
+         Some happier isle in the Elysian sea
+         Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 Moliere 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.
+
+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.
+
+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--
+
+      "Recapture
+   The first fine careless rapture."
+
+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 _known_ 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.
+
+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 _Spectator_ 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.
+
+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 _May
+Flower_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _Pater Noster_.  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 aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
+literary effects.
+
+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 _be_ himself, and for
+himself responsible.
+
+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 "Melusine," 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.
+
+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.
+
+"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.
+
+"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."
+
+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.
+
+"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
+_second time_ 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.
+
+"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.
+
+"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."
+
+Now for the anecdote--one of Mark Twain's.
+
+Some years ago, Mark Twain published in _Harper's Magazine_ 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.
+
+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, _a propos des bottes_, the story of the last challenge to judicial
+combat in England (1817).  He then opened a newspaper directed to him
+from England, the _Sporting Times_, 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.
+
+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 _Atlantic Monthly_, but they have had a
+vitality and a vogue far beyond those of the magazine _causerie_.  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.
+
+There are some very perishable puns.  The learning is not so _recherche_
+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 AElius, 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.
+
+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 _he_ 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.
+
+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 _old_ 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
+_shass caffy_ 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, _audax juventa_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V: MR. MORRIS'S POEMS
+
+
+"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, {5} 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
+
+      "Many a place
+      That's in sad case
+   Where joy was wont afore, oh!"
+
+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
+
+   "Beyond the sphere of time,
+      And sin, and grief's control,
+   Serene in changeless prime
+      Of body and of soul."
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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 _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, 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 mediaeval 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:--
+
+   "Listen: suppose your time were come to die,
+   And you were quite alone and very weak;
+   Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily
+
+   "The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
+   Of river through your broad lands running well:
+   Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:
+
+   "'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
+   Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
+   I will not tell you, you must somehow tell
+
+   "'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
+   Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
+   At foot of your familiar bed to see
+
+   "A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
+   Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
+   Held out two ways, light from the inner skies
+
+   "Showing him well, and making his commands
+   Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
+   Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;
+
+   "And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
+   Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
+   No man could tell the better of the two.
+
+   "After a shivering half-hour you said,
+   'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.'
+   Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,
+
+   "And cry to all good men that loved you well,
+   'Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.'"
+
+There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the
+_bizarrerie_ 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):--
+
+         "I saw
+   One sitting on the altar as a throne,
+      Whose face no man could say he did not know,
+   And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
+      With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow."
+
+Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.
+
+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:--
+
+   "ALICE
+
+         "Can you talk faster, sir?
+   Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes
+   On mine, I pray you, and whate'er you see
+   Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,
+   Or bid you stop.
+
+   "SQUIRE
+
+         "I pray your pardon then,
+   And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
+   I am unhappy that your knight is dead.
+   Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.
+   We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
+   And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
+   His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
+   And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
+   Yet for three days about the barriers there
+   The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
+   And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;
+   But still amid the crash of falling walls,
+   And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
+   The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
+   St. George's banner, and the seven swords,
+   And still they cried, 'St. George Guienne,' until
+   Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
+   And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."
+
+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 Theophile Gautier's _Chateau de Souvenir_.
+
+   "The apples now grow green and sour
+      Upon the mouldering castle wall,
+      Before they ripen there they fall:
+   There are no banners on the tower,
+
+   The draggled swans most eagerly eat
+      The green weeds trailing in the moat;
+      Inside the rotting leaky boat
+   You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."
+
+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.
+
+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 mediaeval point of view; at all
+events, not from an historical and archaeological 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).
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _vanitas vanitatum_: 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.
+
+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:--
+
+      "I know a little garden-close
+   Set thick with lily and with rose,
+   Where I would wander if I might
+   From dewy dawn to dewy night,
+   And have one with me wandering.
+      And though within it no birds sing,
+   And though no pillared house is there,
+   And though the apple boughs are bare
+   Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
+   Her feet upon the green grass trod,
+   And I beheld them as before.
+      There comes a murmur from the shore,
+   And in the place two fair streams are,
+   Drawn from the purple hills afar,
+   Drawn down unto the restless sea;
+   The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
+   The shore no ship has ever seen,
+   Still beaten by the billows green,
+   Whose murmur comes unceasingly
+   Unto the place for which I cry.
+      For which I cry both day and night,
+   For which I let slip all delight,
+   That maketh me both deaf and blind,
+   Careless to win, unskilled to find,
+   And quick to lose what all men seek.
+      Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
+   Still have I left a little breath
+   To seek within the jaws of death
+   An entrance to that happy place,
+   To seek the unforgotten face
+   Once seen, once kissed, once rest from me
+   Anigh the murmuring of the sea."
+
+"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 mediaeval London abominably dirty!  A Celt himself,
+no doubt, with the Celt's proverbial way of being _impossibilium
+cupitor_, 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:--
+
+      "His words nigh made me weep, but while he spoke
+   I noted how a mocking smile just broke
+   The thin line of the Prince's lips, and he
+   Who carried the afore-named armoury
+   Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low:
+   But the King smiled, and said, 'Can it be so?
+   I know not, and ye twain are such as find
+   The things whereto old kings must needs be blind.
+   For you the world is wide--but not for me,
+   Who once had dreams of one great victory
+   Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,
+   And now, the victor in so many an one,
+   Find that in Asia Alexander died
+   And will not live again; the world is wide
+   For you I say,--for me a narrow space
+   Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.
+      Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fill
+   Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill
+   But fear of that fair rest I hope to win
+   One day, when I have purged me of my sin.
+      Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king
+   Shall be remembered but by this one thing,
+   That on the morn before ye crossed the sea
+   Ye gave and took in common talk with me;
+   But with this ring keep memory with the morn,
+   O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
+   Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.'"
+
+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:--
+
+      "Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
+   Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
+   Though still the less we knew of its intent;
+   The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
+   Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
+   Hung round about a little room, where play
+   Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."
+
+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.
+
+   "It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old,
+   And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,
+   And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,
+   And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be
+   wrought.
+   Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,
+   And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail,
+   And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.
+
+   "But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net,
+   And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways
+   wet;
+   And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left alive
+   That hath cunning to match man's cunning or might with his might to
+   strive.
+
+   "And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of
+   ease?
+   Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future
+   sees;
+   And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;
+   And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's
+   desire;
+   And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never
+   done;
+   And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is
+   won.
+
+   "Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;
+   Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.
+   But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:
+   We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our will
+   Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;
+   For belike no fixed semblance we had in the days of old,
+   Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must take
+   That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make."
+
+But when we turn to the passage of the _eclaircissement_ between Sigurd
+and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most _modern_ 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":--
+
+   "So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on
+   high,
+   But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry
+   From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel
+   Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel
+   Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,
+   While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne
+   When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,
+   And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack?
+   So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East
+   As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast,
+   There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his
+   edges stopped;
+   He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he
+   lopped;
+   There met him Atli's marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred;
+   Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the
+   dead;
+   And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a
+   throat he thrust,
+   But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the
+   ruddy dust,
+   And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:
+   Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set;
+   Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell;
+   Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,
+   And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew,
+   And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through;
+   And man 'gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,
+   And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,
+   And there ran a river of death 'twixt the Niblung and his foes,
+   And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose."
+
+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":--
+
+   "And e'en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword out
+   Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout
+   Rushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let fly
+   And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,
+   And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell
+   the sword
+   From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,
+   And staggered; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered
+   around,
+   And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the ground;
+   And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet spurning he
+   smote
+   The high-seat; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.
+
+   "And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword
+   And fell on, making his onrush 'gainst Odysseus the glorious lord,
+   If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent,
+   And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sent
+   Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,
+   And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead
+   smote."
+
+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.:--
+
+   "But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming wood,
+   Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good;
+   And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,
+   For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the sea,
+   And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a care
+   But round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fair
+   A vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad;
+   And four wells of the white water their heads together had,
+   And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get;
+   And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.
+   Yea, if thither indeed had come e'en one of the Deathless, e'en he
+   Had wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there to see.
+   And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.
+   But when o'er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled amain,
+   Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead's Grace,
+   Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face;
+   For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though they
+   Apart from one another may be dwelling far away.
+   But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there,
+   Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear
+   His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and he
+   As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o'er the untilled sea."
+
+This is close enough to the Greek, but
+
+   "_And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get_"
+
+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 "AEneid" 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 "AEneid," is occasionally more _archaic_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI: MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS
+
+
+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 Muller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
+edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson."  But Mrs. Radcliffe has been
+read diligently, and copiously annotated.
+
+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.
+
+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 _are_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+"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 mediaeval way as to say "by my halidome."
+
+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 _not_ 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 Bronte
+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.
+
+"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 _fourth_ author
+indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe: her disciples are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss
+Bronte, 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."
+
+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!
+
+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
+_was_ bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _must_ be an explanation of
+proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be?  The
+reader is _empoigne_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _was_ the
+skeleton.
+
+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, _though reluctantly_, 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, _one of which was the chamber of
+her dream_!  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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _not_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+"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 pounds" 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, _what did the
+Black Veil conceal_?  _Not_ "the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine
+Morland supposed.
+
+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.
+
+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 _soubrette_.  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."
+
+The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe's work is "The Italian" (1797), for
+which she received 800 pounds. {6}  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.
+
+"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
+
+      "As when some great painter dips
+   His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."
+
+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 _not_ Schedoni's
+daughter after all.
+
+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 Bronte, 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830
+
+
+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
+
+   THE
+   DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
+   A NECROMAUNT
+
+   In Three Chimeras
+
+   BY THOMAS T. STODDART.
+
+   "Is't like that lead contains her?--
+   It were too gross
+   To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."--
+   _Shakespeare_.
+
+   EDINBURGH:
+   Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
+   And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.
+
+   MDCCCXXXI.
+
+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, _quo
+fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.
+
+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:--
+
+   "Two desires toss about
+      The poet's feverish blood,
+   One drives him to the world without,
+      And one to solitude."
+
+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 Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile
+Gautier, and Petrus 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.
+
+   "Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
+   Mouse body and laverock wing."
+
+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--
+
+   "No fisher
+   But a well-wisher
+   To the game,"
+
+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 _Les Jeunes France_ in him, as well as the wormy and
+obituary joys of _La Comedie de la Mort_.  The little book came out,
+inspired by "all the poetasters."  Christopher North wrote, four years
+later, in _Blackwood's Magazine_, 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
+
+   "The Biblioclastic Dead
+      Have diverse pains to brook,
+   They break Affliction's bread
+      With Betty Barnes, the Cook,"
+
+as the author of "The Bird Bride" sings.
+
+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 _Blackwood's_, one had pined for a sight of
+"The Necromaunt," and here, clean in its "pure purple mantle" of smooth
+cloth, lay the desired one!
+
+   "Like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought,
+   It gave itself, and was not bought,"
+
+being, indeed, the discovery and gift of a friend who fishes and studies
+the Lacustrine Muses.
+
+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:--
+
+   "O wormy Thomas Stoddart, who inheritest
+      Rich thoughts and loathsome, nauseous words and rare,
+   Tell me, my friend, why is it that thou ferretest
+      And gropest in each death-corrupted lair?
+   Seek'st thou for maggots such as have affinity
+      With those in thine own brain, or dost thou think
+      That all is sweet which hath a horrid stink?
+   Why dost thou make Haut-gout thy sole divinity?
+   Here is enough of genius to convert
+      Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare,
+   Then why transform the diamond into dirt,
+      And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair,
+   Into a medley of creations foul,
+   As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?"
+
+No doubt Mr. Stoddart's other passion for angling, in which he used a
+Scottish latitude concerning bait, {7} impelled him to search for "worms
+and maggots":--
+
+   "Fire and faggots,
+   Worms and maggots,"
+
+as Aytoun writes on the other fly-leaf, are indeed the matter of "The
+Death Wake."
+
+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 _Les Chimeres_ of
+Gerard, 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 _Graham's
+Magazine_, as "Agatha, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras," by Louis
+Fitzgerald Tasistro.  Now Poe was closely connected with _Graham's
+Magazine_, and after "Arthur Gordon Pym," "Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro"
+does suggest Edgar Allen Poe.  But Poe was not Tasistro.
+
+So much for the literary history of the Lunacy.
+
+The poem begins--Chimera I. begins:--
+
+   "An anthem of a sister choristry!
+   And, like a windward murmur of the sea,
+   O'er silver shells, so solemnly it falls!"
+
+The anthem accompanies a procession of holy fathers towards a bier;
+
+         "Agathe
+   Was on the lid--a name.  And who?  No more!
+   'Twas only Agathe."
+
+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
+Agathe.  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 Agathe.  He
+was the son of a Crusader,
+
+         "And Julio had fain
+   Have been a warrior, but his very brain
+   Grew fevered at the sickly thought of death,
+   And to be stricken with a want of breath."
+
+On the whole he did well not to enter the service.  Mr. Aytoun has here
+written--"A rum Cove for a hussar."
+
+         "And he would say
+   A curse be on their laurels.
+         And anon
+   Was Julio forgotten and his line--
+   No wonder for this frenzied tale of mine."
+
+How? asks Aytoun, nor has the grammatical enigma yet been unriddled.
+
+   "Oh! he was wearied of this passing scene!
+   But loved not Death; his purpose was between
+   Life and the grave; and it would vibrate there
+   Like a wild bird that floated far and fair
+   Betwixt the sun and sea!"
+
+So "he became monk," and was sorry he had done so, especially when he met
+a pretty maid,
+
+   "And this was Agathe, young Agathe,
+   A motherless fair girl,"
+
+whose father was a kind of Dombey, for
+
+      "When she smiled
+   He bade no father's welcome to the child,
+   But even told his wish, and will'd it done,
+   For her to be sad-hearted, and a nun!"
+
+So she "took the dreary veil."
+
+They met like a blighted Isabella and Lorenzo:
+
+   "They met many a time
+   In the lone chapels after vesper chime,
+   They met in love and fear."
+
+Then, one day,
+
+         "He heard it said:
+   Poor Julio, thy Agathe is dead."
+
+She died
+
+   "Like to a star within the twilight hours
+   Of morning, and she was not!  Some have thought
+   The Lady Abbess gave her a mad draught."
+
+Here Mr. Aytoun, with sympathy, writes "Damn her!" (the Lady Abbess, that
+is) and suggests that thought must be read "thaft."
+
+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!"
+
+Now go, and give your poems to your friends!
+
+Finally Julio unburies Agathe:--
+
+      "Thou must go,
+   My sweet betrothed, with me, but not below,
+   Where there is darkness, dream, and solitude,
+   But where is light, and life, and one to brood
+   Above thee, till thou wakest.  Ha, I fear
+   Thou wilt not wake for ever, sleeping here,
+   Where there are none but the winds to visit thee.
+   And Convent fathers, and a choristry
+   Of sisters saying Hush!  But I will sing
+   Rare songs to thy pure spirit, wandering
+   Down on the dews to hear me; I will tune
+   The instrument of the ethereal moon,
+   And all the choir of stars, to rise and fall
+   In harmony and beauty musical."
+
+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?
+
+The Second Chimera opens nobly:--
+
+   "A curse! a curse! {8} the beautiful pale wing
+   Of a sea-bird was worn with wandering,
+   And, on a sunny rock beside the shore,
+   It stood, the golden waters gazing o'er;
+   And they were nearing a brown amber flow
+   Of weeds, that glittered gloriously below!"
+
+Julio appears with Agathe in his arms, and what ensues is excellent of
+its kind:--
+
+   "He dropt upon a rock, and by him placed,
+   Over a bed of sea-pinks growing waste,
+   The silent ladye, and he mutter'd wild,
+   Strange words about a mother and no child.
+   "And I shall wed thee, Agathe! although
+   Ours be no God-blest bridal--even so!"
+   And from the sand he took a silver shell,
+   That had been wasted by the fall and swell
+   Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring--
+   A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,
+   Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died
+   In ages far away.  'Thou art a bride,
+   Sweet Agathe!  Wake up; we must not linger!'
+   He press'd the ring upon her chilly finger,
+   And to the sea-bird on its sunny stone
+   Shouted, 'Pale priest that liest all alone
+   Upon thy ocean altar, rise, away
+   To our glad bridal!' and its wings of gray
+   All lazily it spread, and hover'd by
+   With a wild shriek--a melancholy cry!
+   Then, swooping slowly o'er the heaving breast
+   Of the blue ocean, vanished in the west."
+
+Julio sang a mad song of a mad priest to a dead maid:--
+
+   . . .
+
+   "A rosary of stars, love! a prayer as we glide,
+   And a whisper on the wind, and a murmur on the tide,
+   And we'll say a fair adieu to the flowers that are seen,
+   With shells of silver sown in radiancy between.
+
+   "A rosary of stars, love! the purest they shall be,
+   Like spirits of pale pearls in the bosom of the sea;
+   Now help thee, {9} Virgin Mother, with a blessing as we go,
+   Upon the laughing waters that are wandering below."
+
+One can readily believe that Poe admired this musical sad song, if,
+indeed, he ever saw the poem.
+
+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,
+
+   "And the great ocean, like the holy hall,
+   Where slept a Seraph host maritimal,
+   Was gorgeous with wings of diamond"--
+
+it was a sea
+
+   "Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald."
+
+There follows another song--
+
+   "'Tis light to love thee living, girl, when hope is full and fair,
+   In the springtide of thy beauty, when there is no sorrow there
+   No sorrow on thy brow, and no shadow on thy heart,
+   When, like a floating sea-bird, bright and beautiful thou art
+
+   . . .
+
+   "But when the brow is blighted, like a star at morning tide
+   And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside,
+   It is to love as seldom love the brightest and the best,
+   When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest."
+
+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--
+
+   "And bids her gaze into the startled sea,
+   And says, 'Thine image, from eternity,
+   Hath come to meet thee, ladye!' and anon
+   He bade the cold corse kiss the shadowy one
+   That shook amid the waters."
+
+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
+
+   "That ye have power, and passion, and a sound
+   As of the flying of an angel round
+   The mighty world; that ye are one with time!"
+
+Here, I can't but think, is imagination.
+
+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--
+
+   "The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,
+   And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses."
+
+Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on
+limpets, "by the mass, he feasteth well!"
+
+There was a holy hermit on the isle,
+
+   "I ween like other hermits, so was he."
+
+He is Agathe'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.
+
+         "Thou art, thou art alone,
+   A pure, pure being, but the God on high
+   Is with thee ever as thou goest by."
+
+Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing
+
+   "A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
+   Within the great encampment of the sea."
+
+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 Agathe,
+
+   "For long ago he gave that blessed cross
+   To his fair girl, and knew the relic still."
+
+So the Hermit died of remorse, and one cannot say, with Walton, "and I
+hope the reader is sorry."
+
+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,
+
+         "She might see
+   A love-wing'd Seraph glide in glory by,
+   Striking the tent of its mortality.
+
+   "But that is but a tent wherein may rest
+   A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
+   The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
+   Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."
+
+Most akin to Poe is the "Hymn to Orion,"
+
+   "Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail
+   Arcturus on his chariot pale,
+   Leading him with a fiery flight--
+   Over the hollow hill of night?"
+
+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.
+
+   MALIM CONVIVIS QVAM PLACVISSE COQVIS.
+
+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.
+
+   "Sorrow, sorrow speed away
+      To our angler's quiet mound,
+   With the old pilgrim, twilight gray,
+      Enter through the holy ground;
+   There he sleeps whose heart is twined
+      With wild stream and wandering burn,
+   Wooer of the western wind
+      Watcher of the April morn!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII: THE CONFESSIONS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE
+
+
+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."
+
+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?
+
+"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.
+
+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 _plagosus Orbilius_
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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!"
+
+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 _une jeunesse orageuse_.  "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:
+
+   "Oh, how late art thou come, O my Joy!"
+
+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:
+
+   "Every woman is at heart a Rake."
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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 _Tolle_! _Lege_! 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."
+
+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.'"
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _dimidium animae suae_, 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."
+
+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:--
+
+   "Pray for your poor servant, J. M."
+
+And again,
+
+   "Pray for your poor friend."
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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."
+
+_Haeret letalis arundo_!
+
+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,
+
+   "_Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege_,
+   Take up and read, take up and read."
+
+So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of
+his Virgilian lots, read:--
+
+"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.
+
+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
+
+   "Came on that which is, and heard
+   The vast pulsations of the world."
+
+"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."
+
+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."
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX: SMOLLETT
+
+
+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."
+
+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 _farouche_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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."  _He_ 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."
+
+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 _Le Vicomte de
+Bragelonne_ 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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire.  About 1710 that
+gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life.  Hence we learn that _he_, 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."
+
+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.
+
+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--
+
+         "Celestial powers
+   Protect my father, shower upon his--oh!"  (Dies).
+
+Naturally her adorer answers with--
+
+         "So may our mingling souls
+   To bliss supernal wing our happy--oh!"  (Dies).
+
+We are reminded of--
+
+         "Alas, my Bom!"  (Dies).
+   "'Bastes' he would have said!"
+
+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."
+
+   "Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,
+   Nor deign'd, in three-score miles, to look behind;
+   While every band for orders bleat in vain,
+   And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain,"--
+
+of Preston Pans.
+
+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!
+
+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 _Cumberland_ 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.
+
+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 _vieux jeu_, 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.
+
+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."
+
+"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.
+
+   "Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
+   My sympathising verse shall flow."
+
+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.
+
+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!
+_Ou le didacticisme va t'il se nicher_?  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 _belles lettres_, in the interest of his "amorous
+complexion," by "lampooning the rivals" of the young ladies who admired
+him.
+
+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.
+
+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--
+
+      "_Time for us to go_,
+      _Time for us to go_,
+   _And when we'd got the hatches down_,
+      '_Twas time for us to go_!"
+
+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 _confidante_ 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."
+
+"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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, _to whom indeed I
+had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _roman a clef_ is always popular with scandal-mongers, but
+its authors can hardly hope to escape rebuke.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+Athenaeus, 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 _protege_,
+the hero.
+
+That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain,
+cruel libertine.  Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with
+Emilia _pour le bon motif_, 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 _naturalisme_, except that his fits of generosity are mere
+patches daubed on, and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern
+_naturaliste_ would have disdained to indulge.  Emilia, in her scene with
+Peregrine in the _bouge_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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!"
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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 _un romantique_ is absolutely too
+absurd; "not here, oh Tobias, are haunts meet for thee."
+
+Smollett's next novel, "Sir Launcelot Greaves," was not published till
+1761, after it had appeared in numbers, in _The British Magazine_.  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 _Critical Review_, 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.
+
+"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 mediaeval 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."
+
+"All was gas and gaiters," said the insane lover of Mrs. Nickleby, with
+equal delicacy and point.
+
+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.
+
+It is curious to note that in "Sir Launcelot Greaves," we find a
+character, Ferret, who frankly poses as a _strugforlifeur_.  M. Daudet's
+_strugforlifeur_ 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.
+
+Smollett went on compiling, and supporting himself by his compilations,
+and those of his vassals.  In 1762 he unluckily edited a paper called
+_The Briton_ in the interests of Lord Bute.  _The Briton_ was silenced by
+Wilkes's _North Briton_.  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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _does_ marry Tabitha!), and those opinions in which
+Lismahago heralds some of the social notions of Mr. Ruskin.
+
+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 _naivete_ 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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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 aesthetic 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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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 _peccare forliter_?  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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 aesthetic 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.
+
+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. {10}  But the "Marble Faun" is not
+of Hawthorne's best period, beautiful as are a hundred passages in the
+tale.
+
+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.
+
+There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than Hawthorne's, none
+more original, more surefooted, in his own realm of moonlight and
+twilight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI: THE PARADISE OF POETS
+
+
+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!"
+
+"Tenors are popular, very," said Lord Walter.
+
+"I mean a poet," she answered witheringly.
+
+Near them stood Mr. Witham, the author of "Heart's Chords Tangled."
+
+"Ah," said he, "that reminds me.  I have been trying to catch it all the
+morning.  That reminds me of my dream."
+
+"Tell us your dream," murmured Lady Violet Lebas, and he told it.
+
+"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.
+
+"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, Peppmuller, 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.'
+
+"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.
+
+"'The renowned Laura, if I am not mistaken,' I ventured to remark,
+recognising her, indeed, from the miniature in the Laurentian library at
+Florence.
+
+"She bowed, and I began to ask for her adorer, Petrarch.
+
+"'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--'
+
+"'You astonish me,' I said.  'In the Paradise of Poets--'
+
+"'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 '_Catullo mio_!'
+
+"The greeting between these accomplished ghosts was too kindly to leave
+room for doubt as to the ardour of their affections.
+
+"'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?'
+
+"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.
+
+"'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.
+
+"'I am disinclined to seem impertinently curious,' I answered, 'but the
+ladies in this fair, smiling country--have the gods made them poetical?'
+
+"'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.'
+
+"'You interest me deeply,' I answered.  'And now, will you kindly tell me
+why these ladies are here, if they were not poets?'
+
+"'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!'
+
+"'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 _his_
+Heliodore is manifestly devoted to Mr. Emerson, whom, by the way, I am
+delighted, if rather surprised, to see here?'
+
+"'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!'
+
+"'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.'
+
+"'I was not a marrying man myself,' answered the Veronese; 'few of us
+were.  Myself, Horace, Virgil--we were all bachelors.'
+
+"'And Lesbia!'
+
+"I said this in a low voice, for Laura was weaving bay into a chaplet,
+and inattentive to our conversation.
+
+"'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.'
+
+"'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.'
+
+"'Is there nobody here,' said I, 'who is happy with his Ideal--nobody but
+has exchanged Ideals with some other poet?'
+
+"'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.'
+
+"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.
+
+"Surely I had read of her, and knew her--
+
+   "'She whose blue eyes their secret told,
+   Though shaded by her locks of gold.'
+
+"'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.
+
+"'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!'
+
+"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.
+
+"'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.
+
+"Marking my curiosity before it was expressed, he answered the unuttered
+question.
+
+"'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.'
+
+"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.
+
+"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.
+
+"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."
+
+"That must have been more than they could bear," said Lady Violet
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Witham; "I should know, for down I fell into Tartarus
+with a crash, and writhed among the Translators."
+
+"Why?" asked Lady Violet.
+
+"Because I have translated Theocritus!"
+
+"Mr. Witham," said Lady Violet, "did you meet your ideal woman when you
+were in the Paradise of Poets?"
+
+"She yet walks this earth," said the bard, with a too significant bow.
+
+Lady Violet turned coldly away.
+
+* * *
+
+Mr. Witham was never invited to the Blues again--the name of Lord Azure's
+place in Kent.
+
+The Poet is shut out of Paradise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII: PARIS AND HELEN
+
+
+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 Caesar; Mary Stuart (_Maria Verticordia_), 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 Parabere," 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.
+
+While Helen enjoys this immortality, and is the ideal of beauty upon
+earth, it is curious to reflect on the _modernite_ 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.
+
+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--
+
+   "Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow."
+
+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 _denouement_; and we
+know how much _denouement_ and explanations hampered Scott and
+Shakespeare.  From these trammels Homer is free, as a god is free from
+mortal limitations.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, OEnone.  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.
+
+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 Cranae.  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.
+
+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 _La Belle Helene_, but the mirth only
+arises out of the incongruity between Parisian ideas and those of ancient
+Greece.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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 OEnone, 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.
+
+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 OEnone, 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, Deiphobus.
+
+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.
+
+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 _Vera Historia_, 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.
+
+   "Beyond these voices there is peace."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+
+   "Burnt the topless towers of Ilium."
+
+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 "AEneid," 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 mediaeval 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."
+
+   "I had great beauty; ask thou not my name."
+
+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
+_pastiche_.  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.
+
+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.
+
+As Stesichorus fabled that only an _eidolon_ 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII: ENCHANTED CIGARETTES
+
+
+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.
+
+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 _not_
+"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.
+
+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--
+
+      "_Rosa quo locorum_
+   _Sera moratur_."
+
+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, _her_
+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, _empty_, at Rose's own
+door.  Where _was_ 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.
+
+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, _as
+Vera_, 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 _truc_ 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 _has_ been
+made, by the author of "Sherlock Holmes."
+
+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.
+
+The next novel, based on a dream, was called "In Search of Qrart."
+
+What is _Qrart_?  I decline to divulge this secret beyond saying that
+_Qrart_ 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.
+
+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 _the head of Crassus_, 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."
+
+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 _Eyrbyggja Saga_ 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 _Qrart_ to that of the French
+gold in the burn at Loch Arkaig, or in "the wood by the lochside" that
+Murray of Broughton mentions.
+
+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.
+
+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 _jettatura_.
+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 _why Queen Elizabeth was never married_.  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 _that is why Queen Elizabeth was never
+married_.  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.
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV: STORIES AND STORY-TELLING
+(From STRATH NAVER)
+
+
+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!  _The Field_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+aesthetic 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 _conte_, 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.
+
+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 _contes_.  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 _conte_ which I have in my
+mind (I rather wish I had it not), and which is not to be narrated here,
+nor in English.
+
+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 _conte_.  It is one of two tales,
+both told as true, which one would like to be able to narrate in the
+language of Moliere.  The other is also very good, and has a wonderful
+scene with a corpse and a _chapelle ardente_, and a young lady; it is
+historical, and of the last generation but one.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+"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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _pour le bon motif_?  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.
+
+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, "_Vous parlez francais, Monsieur_?"  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.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV: THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION
+
+
+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--_there was no ghost_!  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.
+
+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."
+
+   "She was most beautiful to see,
+   Like a lady of a far countree."
+
+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?
+
+   "Then drawing in her breath aloud
+   Like one that shuddered, she unbound
+   The cincture from beneath her breast.
+   Her silken robe and inner vest
+   Dropt to her feet, and full in view
+   Behold her bosom and half her side--
+   A sight to dream of, not to tell!
+   O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!"
+
+And then what do her words mean?
+
+   "Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
+   This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow."
+
+What was it--the "sight to dream of, not to tell?"
+
+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.
+
+   "O sorrow and shame!  Can this be she--
+   The lady who knelt at the old oak tree?"
+   . . .
+   "A star hath set, a star hath risen,
+      O Geraldine, since arms of thine
+   Have been the lovely lady's prison.
+      O Geraldine, one hour was thine." {11}
+
+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.
+
+For description it suffices to read the "Ancient Mariner."  These
+marvels, truly, are _speciosa miracula_, 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 _all_
+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.
+
+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 "AEschylus,"
+frighten the Athenians?  Probably they smiled at the imperial spectre.
+There is more discretion in Caesar's ghost--
+
+   "I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
+   That shapes this monstrous apparition,"
+
+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.
+
+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
+_Les Dames Vertes_, is vague in the right way.  We are left in _Les Dames
+Vertes_ 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."
+
+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:
+
+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?"
+
+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 _they_ 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.
+
+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?
+
+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, _et inania regna_.  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.
+
+   "But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI: AN OLD SCOTTISH PSYCHICAL RESEARCHER
+
+
+   ADVERTISEMENT
+
+   "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.
+
+   "Direct your Relations to Alexander Ogstouns, Shop Stationer, at the
+   foot of the Plain-stones, at Edinburgh, on the North-side of the
+   Street."
+
+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.
+
+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," {12} 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.
+
+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.
+
+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
+
+   "The Devil of Glenluce Enlarged
+   With several Remarkable Additions
+   from an Eye and Ear Witness,
+   A Person of undoubted
+   Honesty."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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:
+'_Quum Literarum_ 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.
+
+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."
+
+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."
+
+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
+seances.  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.
+
+The seance 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.
+
+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."
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But they had not!
+
+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.
+
+Here we have _vera causa_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+"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.'"
+
+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."
+
+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!"
+
+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.
+
+Atheists are as common as ghosts in his marvellous relations, and the
+very wizards themselves were often Atheists.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII: THE BOY
+
+
+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.
+
+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.  _My_ 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."
+
+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 _you_ 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.
+
+The small boy is _in_ the society, but not _of_ 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _pion_--an usher, or "spy."  A
+more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched _pion_, it is
+impossible to imagine.  In an English private school, the system of
+_espionnage_ and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike
+what Mr. Anstey describes in _Vice Versa_.  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 _Louis Lambert_, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 _Primitiae_ 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 _Primitiae_
+were collected.
+
+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.
+
+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."
+
+   "Bliss is not always join'd to wealth,
+      Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof
+   For poverty is bliss with health,
+      Of that my potboy stands a proof."
+
+The volume ends with this determination,
+
+   "Still shall I seek Apollo's shelt'ring ray,
+   To cheer my spirits and inspire my lay."
+
+If any parent or guardian desires any further information about _Les
+Enfans devenus celebres par leurs ecrits_, 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 _OEuvres d'un Auteur de Sept Ans_, 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.
+
+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 _differentia_ of the Rugby boy was his moral thoughtfulness."  Now
+the characteristic of the ordinary boy is his want of what is called
+moral thoughtfulness.
+
+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 aesthetic 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.
+
+A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing _virelais_ 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
+_chansons royaux_, and respond with trebles in _triolets_.  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.
+
+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."
+
+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, _not having enough to eat_ 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.  _They_ have never been
+boys.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  "Mauth" is Manx for dog, I am told.
+
+{2}  It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others.
+
+{3}  In the third volume of his essays.
+
+{4}  "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, _The Tatler_, June 6,
+1710.
+
+{5}  Longmans.
+
+{6}  I like to know what the author got.
+
+{7}  Salmon roe, I am sorry to say.
+
+{8}  "Why and Wherefore," Aytoun.
+
+{9}  _Fersitan legendum_, "Help Thou."
+
+{10}  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.
+
+{11}  Cannot the reader guess?  I am afraid that I can!
+
+{12}  Edinburgh, 1685.
+
+
+
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