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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through the Magic Door, by Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Through the Magic Door
+
+Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2002 [eBook #5317]
+[Most recently updated: June 14, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Anders Thulin and Andrew Sly
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Through the Magic Door
+
+by Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+
+Contents
+
+ I.
+ II.
+ III.
+ IV.
+ V.
+ VI.
+ VII.
+ VIII.
+ IX.
+ X.
+ XI.
+ XII.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room
+which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with
+it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing
+company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal
+into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more.
+You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you.
+There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass
+your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to
+hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland.
+Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not
+that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul
+embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink. Each
+cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The
+personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as
+their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at
+your command.
+
+It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the
+miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were
+suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that he
+would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How
+eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him—the very best of
+him—at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves to
+put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man may be
+in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can summon the
+world’s greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be thoughtful,
+here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are the masters of
+fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one of
+the world’s great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds
+him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may
+come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing
+danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and
+our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand
+romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull,
+soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But
+best of all when the dead man’s wisdom and the dead man’s example give
+us guidance and strength and in the living of our own strenuous days.
+
+Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green settee,
+where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of volumes.
+Smoking is not forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of them? Well,
+I ask nothing better, for there is no volume there which is not a dear,
+personal friend, and what can a man talk of more pleasantly than that?
+The other books are over yonder, but these are my own favourites—the
+ones I care to re-read and to have near my elbow. There is not a
+tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.
+
+Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a possession
+dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the bottom? Every one
+of those represents a lunch. They were bought in my student days, when
+times were not too affluent. Threepence was my modest allowance for my
+midday sandwich and glass of beer; but, as luck would have it, my way
+to the classes led past the most fascinating bookshop in the world.
+Outside the door of it stood a large tub filled with an ever-changing
+litter of tattered books, with a card above which announced that any
+volume therein could be purchased for the identical sum which I carried
+in my pocket. As I approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger
+of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five
+times out of six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then
+there was an entrancing five minutes’ digging among out-of-date
+almanacs, volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until
+one found something which made it all worth while. If you will look
+over these titles, you will see that I did not do so very badly. Four
+volumes of Gordon’s “Tacitus” (life is too short to read originals, so
+long as there are good translations), Sir William Temple’s Essays,
+Addison’s works, Swift’s “Tale of a Tub,” Clarendon’s “History,” “Gil
+Blas,” Buckingham’s Poems, Churchill’s Poems, “Life of Bacon”—not so
+bad for the old threepenny tub.
+
+They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness of
+the rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering. Once they
+adorned the shelves of some noble library, and even among the odd
+almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces of their former
+greatness, like the faded silk dress of the reduced gentlewoman, a
+present pathos but a glory of the past.
+
+Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and free
+libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the thing that
+comes to him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill which Carlyle
+felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of Gibbon’s “History”
+under his arm, his mind just starving for want of food, to devour them
+at the rate of one a day? A book should be your very own before you can
+really get the taste of it, and unless you have worked for it, you will
+never have the true inward pride of possession.
+
+If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I have
+had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder stained
+copy of Macaulay’s “Essays.” It seems entwined into my whole life as I
+look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it has been with
+me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble kit
+when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch harpooners have
+addled their brains over it, and you may still see the grease stains
+where the second engineer grappled with Frederick the Great. Tattered
+and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound volume could ever take
+its place for me.
+
+What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach the
+study either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli, Hallam,
+Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive, Hastings,
+Chatham—what nuclei for thought! With a good grip of each how pleasant
+and easy to fill in all that lies between! The short, vivid sentences,
+the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they all throw a glamour
+round the subject and should make the least studious of readers desire
+to go further. If Macaulay’s hand cannot lead a man upon those pleasant
+paths, then, indeed, he may give up all hope of ever finding them.
+
+When I was a senior schoolboy this book—not this very volume, for it
+had an even more tattered predecessor—opened up a new world to me.
+History had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and the
+drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a land of colour
+and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path. In that great
+style of his I loved even the faults—indeed, now that I come to think
+of it, it was the faults which I loved best. No sentence could be too
+stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis too flowery. It pleased
+me to read that “a universal shout of laughter from the Tagus to the
+Vistula informed the Pope that the days of the crusades were past,” and
+I was delighted to learn that “Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which
+people placed foolish verses, and Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit
+to be placed in Lady Jerningham’s vase.” Those were the kind of
+sentences which used to fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure,
+like chords which linger in the musician’s ear. A man likes a plainer
+literary diet as he grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays
+I am filled with admiration and wonder at the alternate power of
+handling a great subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail—just
+a bold sweep of the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. As he
+leads you down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks
+which branch away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
+literary and historical education might be effected by working through
+every book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be curious,
+however, to know the exact age of the youth when he came to the end of
+his studies.
+
+I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that it
+would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power of
+drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift of
+reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look at the
+simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his atmosphere.
+Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter space—
+
+“As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which
+stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are
+assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds.
+There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton,
+the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon
+tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In
+the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the
+figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body,
+the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat,
+the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop,
+the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the
+eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form
+rolling; we hear it puffing, and then comes the ‘Why, sir!’ and the
+‘What then, sir?’ and the ‘No, sir!’ and the ‘You don’t see your way
+through the question, sir!’”
+
+It is etched into your memory for ever.
+
+I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
+first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage to
+Macaulay’s grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under the
+shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he had loved so
+well. It was the one great object of interest which London held for me.
+And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe him. It is not
+merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh interests, but it is
+the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal outlook, the general
+absence of bigotry and of prejudice. My judgment now confirms all that
+I felt for him then.
+
+My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the right
+of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that work—the one
+which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has
+always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay’s powers, with
+its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The
+population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of
+life are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the
+master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the
+multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single
+concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner in the
+country, or a countryman in London, felt equally out of place in those
+days of difficult travel, would seem to hardly require stating, and to
+afford no opportunity of leaving a strong impression upon the reader’s
+mind. See what Macaulay makes of it, though it is no more than a
+hundred other paragraphs which discuss a hundred various points—
+
+“A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he had
+intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord
+of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was
+as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a
+Lascar. His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed
+at the shops, stumbled into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood
+under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the
+operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the
+kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot, thieves
+explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman’s coat,
+while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor’s Show.
+Money-droppers, sore from the cart’s tail, introduced themselves to
+him, and appeared to him the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had
+ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone
+Park, passed themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If
+he asked his way to St. James’, his informants sent him to Mile End. If
+he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser
+of everything that nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroidery,
+copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any
+fashionable coffee-house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of
+fops, and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon
+returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and
+the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the
+vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once
+more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the
+assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the
+muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.”
+
+On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at the
+very head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another volume.
+The History as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach the same
+level as the shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it is a
+brilliant piece of special pleading from a fervid Whig, and that there
+must be more to be said for the other side than is there set forth.
+Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his own political and
+religious limitations. The best are those which get right away into the
+broad fields of literature and philosophy. Johnson, Walpole, Madame
+D’Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian ones, Clive and Warren
+Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick the Great, too, must surely
+stand in the first rank. Only one would I wish to eliminate. It is the
+diabolically clever criticism upon Montgomery. One would have wished to
+think that Macaulay’s heart was too kind, and his soul too gentle, to
+pen so bitter an attack. Bad work will sink of its own weight. It is
+not necessary to souse the author as well. One would think more highly
+of the man if he had not done that savage bit of work.
+
+I don’t know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott,
+whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of
+their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence, and
+woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity in the
+minds and characters of the two men. You don’t see it, you say? Well,
+just think of Scott’s “Border Ballads,” and then of Macaulay’s “Lays.”
+The machines must be alike, when the products are so similar. Each was
+the only man who could possibly have written the poems of the other.
+What swing and dash in both of them! What a love of all that is manly
+and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so strong. But there are
+minds on which strength and simplicity are thrown away. They think that
+unless a thing is obscure it must be superficial, whereas it is often
+the shallow stream which is turbid, and the deep which is clear. Do you
+remember the fatuous criticism of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious
+“Lays,” where he calls out “is this poetry?” after quoting—
+
+“And how can man die better
+    Than facing fearful odds
+For the ashes of his fathers
+    And the Temples of his Gods?”
+
+
+In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was really
+showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The baldness of the
+idea and of the language had evidently offended him. But this is
+exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving the rough, blunt
+words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals to two comrades to
+help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown sentiment would have been
+absolutely out of character. The lines are, I think, taken with their
+context, admirable ballad poetry, and have just the dramatic quality
+and sense which a ballad poet must have. That opinion of Arnold’s shook
+my faith in his judgment, and yet I would forgive a good deal to the
+man who wrote—
+
+“One more charge and then be dumb,
+    When the forts of Folly fall,
+May the victors when they come
+    Find my body near the wall.”
+
+
+Not a bad verse that for one’s life aspiration.
+
+This is one of the things which human society has not yet
+understood—the value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does we
+shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate places, and our
+progress through the streets will be brightened and ennobled by one
+continual series of beautiful mental impulses and images, reflected
+into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our eyes. To think
+that we should walk with empty, listless minds while all this splendid
+material is running to waste. I do not mean mere Scriptural texts, for
+they do not bear the same meaning to all, though what human creature
+can fail to be spurred onwards by “Work while it is day, for the night
+cometh when no man can work.” But I mean those beautiful thoughts—who
+can say that they are uninspired thoughts?—which may be gathered from a
+hundred authors to match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine
+language is a most precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be
+exposed for use and ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a
+horse-trough across the road from my house, a plain stone trough, and
+no man could pass it with any feelings save vague discontent at its
+ugliness. But suppose that on its front slab you print the verse of
+Coleridge—
+
+“He prayeth best who loveth best
+    All things, both great and small
+For the dear Lord who fashioned him
+    He knows and loveth all.”
+
+
+I fear I may misquote, for I have not “The Ancient Mariner” at my
+elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough? We
+all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There are few men
+who have not some chosen quotations printed on their study
+mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. Carlyle’s
+transcription of “Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all Eternity to rest
+in!” is a pretty good spur to a weary man. But what we need is a more
+general application of the same thing for public and not for private
+use, until people understand that a graven thought is as beautiful an
+ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye right deep down
+into the soul.
+
+However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay’s glorious lays, save
+that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you can
+pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to learn the
+Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it stamped itself
+on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off almost the whole of
+it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was like the man who had a
+thousand pounds in the bank, but could not compete with the man who had
+an actual sixpence in his pocket. So the ballad that you bear in your
+mind outweighs the whole bookshelf which waits for reference. But I
+want you now to move your eye a little farther down the shelf to the
+line of olive-green volumes. That is my edition of Scott. But surely I
+must give you a little breathing space before I venture upon them.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
+books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
+You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You
+may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days
+come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the
+chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently
+for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in
+your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how
+the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day
+onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with
+some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as
+you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to
+you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of
+your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the
+old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past. Yes,
+it was the olive-green line of Scott’s novels which started me on to
+rhapsody. They were the first books I ever owned—long, long before I
+could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a
+treasure they were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious
+candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a
+new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my “Ivanhoe” is
+of a different edition from the others. The first copy was left in the
+grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually
+picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I
+think I may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it.
+Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
+replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
+breaking fresh ground.
+
+I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
+literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
+thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
+found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when the
+unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the
+lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to
+mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a
+splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was allowed by the rules
+of his Order to take part in so secular and frivolous an affair as a
+tournament? It is the privilege of great masters to make things so, and
+it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who
+described the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room with a couple of
+facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them
+loose on any play of fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If
+Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an
+English prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack—well, it _was_ so, and that’s
+an end of it. “There is no second line of rails at that point,” said an
+editor to a minor author. “I make a second line,” said the author; and
+he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers’ conviction with
+him.
+
+But this is a digression from “Ivanhoe.” What a book it is! The second
+greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every successive
+reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott’s soldiers are always
+as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak; but here, while the
+soldiers are at their very best, the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems
+the female side of the story from the usual commonplace routine. Scott
+drew manly men because he was a manly man himself, and found the task a
+sympathetic one.
+
+He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he had
+never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for a dozen
+chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat—in the long stretch, for
+example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the end of the Friar
+Tuck incident—that we realize the height of continued romantic
+narrative to which he could attain. I don’t think in the whole range of
+our literature we have a finer sustained flight than that.
+
+There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
+Scott’s novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the
+shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
+admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
+relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
+introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
+matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order are
+traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on
+nothing a year as Thackeray did in “Vanity Fair,” or sandwiching in a
+ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well might a dramatic author
+rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play
+was suspending its action and his characters waiting wearily behind
+him. It is all wrong, though every great name can be quoted in support
+of it. Our sense of form is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned
+with the rest. But get past all that to a crisis in the real story, and
+who finds the terse phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do
+you remember when the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last
+before the grim Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: “A
+thousand marks or a bed of heather!” says he, as he draws. The Puritan
+draws also: “The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!” says he. No verbiage
+there! But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the
+few stern words, which haunt your mind. “Bows and Bills!” cry the Saxon
+Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just what
+they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the actual
+battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day when
+they fought under the “Red Dragon of Wessex” on the low ridge at
+Hastings. “Out! Out!” they roared, as the Norman chivalry broke upon
+them. Terse, strong, prosaic—the very genius of the race was in the
+cry.
+
+Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they are
+damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited? Something
+of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as a young
+signal midshipman, had taken Nelson’s famous message from the Signal
+Yeoman and communicated it to the ship’s company. The officers were
+impressed. The men were not. “Duty!” they muttered. “We’ve always done
+it. Why not?” Anything in the least highfalutin’ would depress, not
+exalt, a British company. It is the under statement which delights
+them. German troops can march to battle singing Luther’s hymns.
+Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy by a song of glory and of
+Fatherland. Our martial poets need not trouble to imitate—or at least
+need not imagine that if they do so they will ever supply a want to the
+British soldier. Our sailors working the heavy guns in South Africa
+sang: “Here’s another lump of sugar for the Bird.” I saw a regiment go
+into action to the refrain of “A little bit off the top.” The martial
+poet aforesaid, unless he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling,
+would have wasted a good deal of ink before he had got down to such
+chants as these. The Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I
+remember reading of some column ascending a breach and singing lustily
+from start to finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon
+the crest with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous
+chant it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he
+found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was
+“Ivan is in the garden picking cabbages.” The fact is, I suppose, that
+a mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
+warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.
+
+Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
+with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during the
+most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged—the only war
+in which it could have been said that they were stretched to their
+uttermost and showed their true form—“Tramp, tramp, tramp,” “John
+Brown’s Body,” “Marching through Georgia”—all had a playful humour
+running through them. Only one exception do I know, and that is the
+most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an outsider in time of
+peace can hardly read it without emotion. I mean, of course, Julia Ward
+Howe’s “War-Song of the Republic,” with the choral opening line: “Mine
+eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” If that were ever
+sung upon a battle-field the effect must have been terrific.
+
+A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts at
+the other side of the Magic Door. You can’t pull one out without a
+dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott’s soldiers that I was
+talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no
+posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero abominates),
+but just the short bluff word and the simple manly ways, with every
+expression and metaphor drawn from within his natural range of thought.
+What a pity it is that he, with his keen appreciation of the soldier,
+gave us so little of those soldiers who were his own contemporaries—the
+finest, perhaps, that the world has ever seen! It is true that he wrote
+a life of the great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one piece of
+hackwork of his career. How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training
+had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such
+a theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of
+all men could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not
+give for a portrait of one of Murat’s light-cavalrymen, or of a
+Grenadier of the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the
+Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers of the French King’s Guard in
+“Quentin Durward”?
+
+In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men who
+during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also the
+redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from the
+sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much romantic
+figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling cavaliers of
+his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular veteran, with his
+views upon the Duke, would be as striking as Dugald Dalgetty from the
+German wars. But then no man ever does realize the true interest of the
+age in which he happens to live. All sense of proportion is lost, and
+the little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a distance. It is
+easy in the dark to confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for
+example, the Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St.
+Sebastians, while Columbus was discovering America before their very
+faces.
+
+I have said that I think “Ivanhoe” the best of Scott’s novels. I
+suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the second
+best? It speaks well for their general average that there is hardly one
+among them which might not find some admirers who would vote it to a
+place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels which deal with
+Scottish life and character have a quality of raciness which gives them
+a place apart. There is a rich humour of the soil in such books as “Old
+Mortality,” “The Antiquary,” and “Rob Roy,” which puts them in a
+different class from the others. His old Scottish women are, next to
+his soldiers, the best series of types that he has drawn. At the same
+time it must be admitted that merit which is associated with dialect
+has such limitations that it can never take the same place as work
+which makes an equal appeal to all the world. On the whole, perhaps,
+“Quentin Durward,” on account of its wider interests, its strong
+character-drawing, and the European importance of the events and people
+described, would have my vote for the second place. It is the father of
+all those sword-and-cape novels which have formed so numerous an
+addition to the light literature of the last century. The pictures of
+Charles the Bold and of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily
+vivid. I can see those two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing
+the herald, and clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel
+mirth, more clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested
+upon.
+
+The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
+superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and is
+the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like rival. It
+is not often that historical characters work out in their actual
+physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the High
+Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles which
+might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin, ascetic,
+varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It is hard on
+us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas, when, for
+example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man with a noble,
+olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read beneath it that it is
+the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally, however, as at Innsbruck, we
+are absolutely satisfied. I have before me on the mantelpiece yonder a
+portrait of a painting which represents Queen Mary’s Bothwell. Take it
+down and look at it. Mark the big head, fit to conceive large schemes;
+the strong animal face, made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman;
+the brutally forceful features—the mouth with a suggestion of wild
+boars’ tusks behind it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the
+whole man and his life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder
+if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family
+seat?
+
+Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which the
+critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the last from
+his tired pen. I mean “Count Robert of Paris.” I am convinced that if
+it had been the first, instead of the last, of the series it would have
+attracted as much attention as “Waverley.” I can understand the state
+of mind of the expert, who cried out in mingled admiration and despair:
+“I have studied the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and
+here comes a Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear to me in a
+flash!” Many men could draw with more or less success Norman England,
+or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so
+plausible a way, with such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I
+should think, a most wonderful _tour de force_. His failing health
+showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the latter half
+equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena
+reading aloud her father’s exploits, or of such majesty as the account
+of the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
+the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
+front rank of the novels.
+
+I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse of
+the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was ever
+anything in the world’s history like it? It had what historical
+incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from the
+half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem. Those
+leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice. Godfrey the
+perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous and formidable,
+Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad hero!
+Here is material so rich that one feels one is not worthy to handle it.
+What richest imagination could ever evolve anything more marvellous and
+thrilling than the actual historical facts?
+
+But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
+romance of “The Talisman”; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life in
+“The Pirate”; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England in
+“Kenilworth”; the rich humour of the “Legend of Montrose”; above all,
+bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a coarse age,
+there is not one word to offend the most sensitive ear, and it is borne
+in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter Scott, and how high
+the service which he did for literature and for humanity.
+
+For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the same
+shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his
+admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly impartial
+man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to tell the
+absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a man as well
+as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world was ever quite
+so good as the subject of most of our biographies. Surely these worthy
+people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen eye for a pretty face,
+or opened the second bottle when they would have done better to stop at
+the first, or did something to make us feel that they were men and
+brothers. They need not go the length of the lady who began a biography
+of her deceased husband with the words—“D—— was a dirty man,” but the
+books certainly would be more readable, and the subjects more lovable
+too, if we had greater light and shade in the picture.
+
+But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would have
+admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country, and
+I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of toddy occasionally of
+an evening which would have laid his feeble successors under the table.
+His last years, at least, poor fellow, were abstemious enough, when he
+sipped his barley-water, while the others passed the decanter. But what
+a high-souled chivalrous gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of
+honour, translating itself not into empty phrases, but into years of
+labour and denial! You remember how he became sleeping partner in a
+printing house, and so involved himself in its failure. There was a
+legal, but very little moral, claim against him, and no one could have
+blamed him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have
+enabled him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took
+the whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
+spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort to
+save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly a hundred
+thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the creditors—a great
+record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his life thrown in.
+
+And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
+has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
+recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single year.
+I remember reading in some book of reminiscences—on second thoughts it
+was in Lockhart himself—how the writer had lodged in some rooms in
+Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen all evening the
+silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the opposite house. All
+evening the man wrote, and the observer could see the shadow hand
+conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to the pile at the side. He
+went to a party and returned, but still the hand was moving the sheets.
+Next morning he was told that the rooms opposite were occupied by
+Walter Scott.
+
+A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction is shown
+by the fact that he wrote two of his books—good ones, too—at a time
+when his health was such that he could not afterwards remember one word
+of them, and listened to them when they were read to him as if he were
+hearing the work of another man. Apparently the simplest processes of
+the brain, such as ordinary memory, were in complete abeyance, and yet
+the very highest and most complex faculty—imagination in its supreme
+form—was absolutely unimpaired. It is an extraordinary fact, and one to
+be pondered over. It gives some support to the feeling which every
+writer of imaginative work must have, that his supreme work comes to
+him in some strange way from without, and that he is only the medium
+for placing it upon the paper. The creative thought—the germ thought
+from which a larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a
+bullet. He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of
+having originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
+functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
+that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the
+unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the least
+sense of personal effort.
+
+And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical
+powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man’s materialism
+at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual
+uses? It is an old tag that
+
+“Great Genius is to madness close allied,
+And thin partitions do those rooms divide.”
+
+
+But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
+seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the body.
+
+Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns, Shelley,
+Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band, yet Burns
+was only thirty-eight when he passed away, “burned out,” as his brother
+terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died by accident, and
+Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid
+state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he
+was banker first and poet afterwards. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and
+Browning have all raised the average age of the poets, but for some
+reason the novelists, especially of late years, have a deplorable
+record. They will end by being scheduled with the white-lead workers
+and other dangerous trades. Look at the really shocking case of the
+young Americans, for example. What a band of promising young writers
+have in a few years been swept away! There was the author of that
+admirable book, “David Harum”; there was Frank Norris, a man who had in
+him, I think, the seeds of greatness more than almost any living
+writer. His “Pit” seemed to me one of the finest American novels. He
+also died a premature death. Then there was Stephen Crane—a man who had
+also done most brilliant work, and there was Harold Frederic, another
+master-craftsman. Is there any profession in the world which in
+proportion to its numbers could show such losses as that? In the
+meantime, out of our own men Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry
+Seton Merriman, and many another.
+
+Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had rounded
+off their career were really premature in their end. Thackeray, for
+example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52; Dickens attained the
+age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life,
+although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately
+for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.
+
+He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is as
+much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
+example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
+believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who were
+not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous disease;
+that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his signature.
+Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special scourge of the
+imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more, were its victims. As
+to the tradition, first mentioned long after his death, that he died of
+a fever contracted from a drinking bout, it is absurd on the face of
+it, since no such fever is known to science. But a very moderate
+drinking bout would be extremely likely to bring a chronic nervous
+complaint to a disastrous end.
+
+One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
+volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account of
+his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
+secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
+the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
+the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met him
+day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the whole of
+Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his pecuniary
+liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the
+first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might
+trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish
+Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret
+through the long chapters of so many of his novels.
+
+It’s a sad book, Lockhart’s “Life.” It leaves gloom in the mind. The
+sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
+overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
+intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
+literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is the
+memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but faced
+Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper. He sampled
+every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his success, great was
+his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the sons of men I don’t
+think there are many greater than he who lies under the great slab at
+Dryburgh.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and Lockhart’s
+“Life” which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the four big grey
+volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print edition of
+Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” I emphasize the large print, for that is
+the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English Classics which
+come now into the market. With subjects which are in the least archaic
+or abstruse you need good clear type to help you on your way. The other
+is good neither for your eyes nor for your temper. Better pay a little
+more and have a book that is made for use.
+
+That book interests me—fascinates me—and yet I wish I could join
+heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully has
+enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to “clear one’s
+mind of cant” upon the subject, for when you have been accustomed to
+look at him through the sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell,
+it is hard to take them off, to rub one’s eyes, and to have a good
+honest stare on one’s own account at the man’s actual words, deeds, and
+limitations. If you try it you are left with the oddest mixture of
+impressions. How could one express it save that this is John Bull taken
+to literature—the exaggerated John Bull of the caricaturists—with every
+quality, good or evil, at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a
+kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular
+narrowness, the want of sympathy and insight, the rudeness of
+perception, the positiveness, the overbearing bluster, the strong
+deep-seated religious principle, and every other characteristic of the
+cruder, rougher John Bull who was the great grandfather of the present
+good-natured Johnnie.
+
+If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
+huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
+the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
+should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
+delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a safe
+basis from which any third person could argue. When they met, Boswell
+was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year. The one
+was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and
+impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his
+fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to
+exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed
+criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary father
+and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken relation between them.
+
+It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but it
+is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the language.
+He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was a clear and
+vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his great model.
+Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once permitted a fault
+of taste in this whole enormous book where he must have had to pick his
+steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They say that he was a fool
+and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so with a pen in his hand.
+Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson, where he ventured some
+little squeak of remonstrance, before the roaring “No, sir!” came to
+silence him, there are few in which his views were not, as experience
+proved, the wiser. On the question of slavery he was in the wrong. But
+I could quote from memory at least a dozen cases, including such vital
+subjects as the American Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious
+Toleration, and so on, where Boswell’s views were those which survived.
+
+But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those little
+things that you want to know. How often you read the life of a man and
+are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It is not so
+here. The man lives again. There is a short description of Johnson’s
+person—it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the Hebrides, the very
+next book upon the shelf, which is typical of his vivid portraiture.
+May I take it down, and read you a paragraph of it?—
+
+“His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic,
+and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of
+the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of
+King’s evil. He was now in his sixty-fourth year and was become a
+little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so
+much does mind govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that
+his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
+sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of
+palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps or convulsive
+contractions of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’ dance.
+He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons
+of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black
+worsted stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
+wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets which
+might almost have held the two volumes of his folio dictionary, and he
+carried in his hand a large English oak stick.”
+
+You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
+that it is not Mr. Boswell’s fault—and it is but one of a dozen equally
+vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just these
+pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts and his
+groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and his tricks
+with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate the reader,
+and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than his writings
+could have done.
+
+For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
+to-day? Not “Rasselas,” surely—that stilted romance. “The Lives of the
+Poets” are but a succession of prefaces, and the “Ramblers” of
+ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a
+huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to
+genius. “London” has a few vigorous lines, and the “Journey to the
+Hebrides” some spirited pages. This, with a number of political and
+other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it must be
+admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant place in
+English literature, and that we must turn to his humble, much-ridiculed
+biographer for the real explanation.
+
+And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
+distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this is
+a sign of a narrow finality—impossible to the man of sympathy and of
+imagination, who sees the other side of every question and understands
+what a little island the greatest human knowledge must be in the ocean
+of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at the results. Did
+ever any single man, the very dullest of the race, stand convicted of
+so many incredible blunders? It recalls the remark of Bagehot, that if
+at any time the views of the most learned could be stamped upon the
+whole human race the result would be to propagate the most absurd
+errors. He was asked what became of swallows in the winter. Rolling and
+wheezing, the oracle answered: “Swallows,” said he, “certainly sleep
+all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together by flying round
+and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water and lie
+in the bed of a river.” Boswell gravely dockets the information.
+However, if I remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of
+Selborne had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are
+Johnson’s misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one
+would have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
+would seem monstrous to a modern taste. “Shakespeare,” he said, “never
+wrote six consecutive good lines.” He would only admit two good verses
+in Gray’s exquisite “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,” where it
+would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. “Tristram Shandy”
+would not live. “Hamlet” was gabble. Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” was
+poor stuff, and he never wrote anything good except “A Tale of a Tub.”
+Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume,
+Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be honest men.
+
+And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I suppose
+even in those days they were reactionary. “A poor man has no honour.”
+“Charles the Second was a good King.” “Governments should turn out of
+the Civil Service all who were on the other side.” “Judges in India
+should be encouraged to trade.” “No country is the richer on account of
+trade.” (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the company when this
+proposition was laid down!) “A landed proprietor should turn out those
+tenants who did not vote as he wished.” “It is not good for a labourer
+to have his wages raised.” “When the balance of trade is against a
+country, the margin _must_ be paid in current coin.” Those were a few
+of his convictions.
+
+And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion. In
+our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider those of
+Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so very much left.
+He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested Nonconformists (a
+young lady who joined them was “an odious wench”). He loathed
+Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire and fury at
+everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay’s posthumous
+admiration is all very well, but had they met in life Macaulay would
+have contrived to unite under one hat nearly everything that Johnson
+abominated.
+
+It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
+principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
+interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record. In
+his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by which
+the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the unfortunate
+definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable contingency,
+but when George III., either through policy or charity, offered him one
+a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting it. One would have
+liked to feel that the violent expression of his convictions
+represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts in this instance
+seem against it.
+
+He was a great talker—but his talk was more properly a monologue. It
+was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from his
+subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man who
+could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most vital
+questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke
+his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common ground of
+philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he could not argue
+he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: “If his pistol missed fire,
+he would knock you down with the butt end.” In the face of that
+“rhinoceros laugh” there was an end of gentle argument. Napoleon said
+that all the other kings would say “Ouf!” when they heard he was dead,
+and so I cannot help thinking that the older men of Johnson’s circle
+must have given a sigh of relief when at last they could speak freely
+on that which was near their hearts, without the danger of a scene
+where “Why, no, sir!” was very likely to ripen into “Let us have no
+more on’t!” Certainly one would like to get behind Boswell’s account,
+and to hear a chat between such men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the
+difference in the freedom and atmosphere of the Club on an evening when
+the formidable Doctor was not there, as compared to one when he was.
+
+No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not make due
+allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and early middle
+age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was fifty-three when the
+pension was given him, and up to then his existence had been spent in
+one constant struggle for the first necessities of life, for the daily
+meal and the nightly bed. He had seen his comrades of letters die of
+actual privation. From childhood he had known no happiness. The half
+blind gawky youth, with dirty linen and twitching limbs, had always,
+whether in the streets of Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the
+coffee-houses of London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement.
+With a proud and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have
+brought some bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a
+man’s spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
+roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
+caused Boswell’s father to christen him “Ursa Major.” If his nature was
+in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had gone to
+the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result of a
+dreadful experience.
+
+And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He had
+read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not merely
+in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read, but with
+every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he could quote
+it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its enormous
+advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect. With the
+mind so crammed with other people’s goods, how can you have room for
+any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I think, often
+fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other exceptions. The
+slate must be clear before you put your own writing upon it. When did
+Johnson ever discover an original thought, when did he ever reach
+forward into the future, or throw any fresh light upon those enigmas
+with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the past, he had space for
+nothing else. Modern developments of every sort cast no first herald
+rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France a few years before the
+greatest cataclysm that the world has ever known, and his mind,
+arrested by much that was trivial, never once responded to the
+storm-signals which must surely have been visible around him. We read
+that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery and
+supplied him with statistics as to his output of beer. It was the same
+foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the drums to drown Louis’ voice at
+the scaffold. The association shows how near the unconscious sage was
+to the edge of that precipice and how little his learning availed him
+in discerning it.
+
+He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would think,
+could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In either
+case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent sense of
+piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top. His brain,
+working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There is no more
+wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of Scotch law,
+as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the Scotch judges.
+That an outsider with no special training should at short notice write
+such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and reason, is, I think,
+as remarkable a _tour de force_ as literature can show.
+
+Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must count
+for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small purse. The
+rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge in which several
+strange battered hulks found their last moorings. There were the blind
+Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams, and the colourless Mrs. De
+Moulins, all old and ailing—a trying group amid which to spend one’s
+days. His guinea was always ready for the poor acquaintance, and no
+poet was so humble that he might not preface his book with a dedication
+whose ponderous and sonorous sentences bore the hall-mark of their
+maker. It is the rough, kindly man, the man who bore the poor
+street-walker home upon his shoulders, who makes one forget, or at
+least forgive, the dogmatic pedantic Doctor of the Club.
+
+There is always to me something of interest in the view which a great
+man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of how far the
+philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw death afar, and
+met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson’s mind flinched from that
+dread opponent. His letters and his talk during his latter years are
+one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for physically he was one
+of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived. There were no limits to
+his courage. It was spiritual diffidence, coupled with an actual belief
+in the possibilities of the other world, which a more humane and
+liberal theology has done something to soften. How strange to see him
+cling so desperately to that crazy body, with its gout, its asthma, its
+St. Vitus’ dance, and its six gallons of dropsy! What could be the
+attraction of an existence where eight hours of every day were spent
+groaning in a chair, and sixteen wheezing in a bed? “I would give one
+of these legs,” said he, “for another year of life.” None the less,
+when the hour did at last strike, no man could have borne himself with
+more simple dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent
+him how you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without
+getting some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some
+insight into human learning or character, which should leave you a
+better and a wiser man.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for
+my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not
+resist getting a set of Bury’s new six-volume presentment of the
+History. In reading that book you don’t want to be handicapped in any
+way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not
+to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and keenness
+for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a note-book
+hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now and then to keep
+your grip of the past and to link it up with what follows. There are no
+thrills in it. You won’t be kept out of your bed at night, nor will you
+forget your appointments during the day, but you will feel a certain
+sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and when it is done you will have
+gained something which you can never lose—something solid, something
+definite, something that will make you broader and deeper than before.
+
+Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed only
+one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should choose.
+For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for thought is
+contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand years of the
+world’s history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is
+broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods
+we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when
+Johnson’s turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part
+I do not dislike Gibbon’s pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and
+sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or
+the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with this lucid
+and just spirit by your side upholding and instructing you. Beneath you
+are warring nations, the clash of races, the rise and fall of
+dynasties, the conflict of creeds. Serene you float above them all, and
+ever as the panorama flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice
+whispers the true meaning of the scene into your ear.
+
+It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description of
+the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
+throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass down
+the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of greatness
+and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal lunacy. When the
+Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries to
+corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a religion of peace
+affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of Christianity, Roman
+history was still written in blood. The new creed had only added a
+fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the many which already existed,
+and the wars of angry nations were mild compared to those of excited
+sectaries.
+
+Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the waste
+places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly through
+the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally cleansing
+and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A storm-centre
+somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it may very well do
+again. The human volcano blew its top off, and Europe was covered by
+the destructive debris. The absurd point is that it was not the
+conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it was the terrified
+fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle, blundered over
+everything which barred their way. It was a wild, dramatic time—the
+time of the formation of the modern races of Europe. The nations came
+whirling in out of the north and east like dust-storms, and amid the
+seeming chaos each was blended with its neighbour so as to toughen the
+fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul got his steadying from the Franks,
+the steady Saxon got his touch of refinement from the Norman, the
+Italian got a fresh lease of life from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth,
+the corrupt Greek made way for the manly and earnest Mahommedan.
+Everywhere one seems to see a great hand blending the seeds. And so one
+can now, save only that emigration has taken the place of war. It does
+not, for example, take much prophetic power to say that something very
+great is being built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an
+Anglo-Celtic basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian
+being added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
+thereby evolved.
+
+But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
+Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its centre
+some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is the whole
+strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the south,
+submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to India on the
+one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing right over the
+walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of Christianity, became what
+it is now, the advanced European fortress of the Moslem. Such is the
+tremendous narrative covering half the world’s known history, which can
+all be acquired and made part of yourself by the aid of that humble
+atlas, pencil, and note-book already recommended.
+
+When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me there
+has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in the first
+entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has something of
+the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a great man. You
+remember how the Russians made their debut—came down the great rivers
+and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred canoes, from which they
+endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys. Singular that a thousand
+years have passed and that the ambition of the Russians is still to
+carry out the task at which their skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the
+Turks again; you may recall the characteristic ferocity with which they
+opened their career. A handful of them were on some mission to the
+Emperor. The town was besieged from the landward side by the
+barbarians, and the Asiatics obtained leave to take part in a skirmish.
+The first Turk galloped out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then,
+lying down beside him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified
+the man’s comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
+adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived at
+the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the ambition of
+the other for so many centuries.
+
+And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are those
+that disappear. There is something there which appeals most powerfully
+to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those Vandals who
+conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe, blue-eyed and
+flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country. Suddenly they, too,
+were seized with the strange wandering madness which was epidemic at
+the time. Away they went on the line of least resistance, which is
+always from north to south and from east to west. South-west was the
+course of the Vandals—a course which must have been continued through
+pure love of adventure, since in the thousands of miles which they
+traversed there were many fair resting-places, if that were only their
+quest.
+
+They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
+more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the old
+Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much as the
+English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some hundreds
+of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those flickers
+which showed that there was still some fire among the ashes. Belisarius
+landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The Vandals were cut off
+from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they carry those blue eyes
+and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated by the negroes, or did
+they amalgamate with them? Travellers have brought back stories from
+the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid race with light eyes and hair.
+Is it possible that here we have some trace of the vanished Germans?
+
+It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland. That
+also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic questions
+in history—the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my eyes to see
+across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point (or near it)
+where the old “Eyrbyggia” must have stood. That was the Scandinavian
+city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to be a
+considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a bishop.
+That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming out to his
+see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a climatic
+change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait between
+Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been able to
+say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were at the time,
+be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced race in Europe. They
+may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux, the despised Skroeling—or
+they may have amalgamated with them—or conceivably they might have held
+their own. Very little is known yet of that portion of the coast. It
+would be strange if some Nansen or Peary were to stumble upon the
+remains of the old colony, and find possibly in that antiseptic
+atmosphere a complete mummy of some bygone civilization.
+
+But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been which
+first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty years,
+carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author so little
+known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish chronicle so
+crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into their
+appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application, great
+perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all this, but the
+coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in the heart of his
+own creation the individuality of the man himself becomes as
+insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the little creature
+that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon’s work for one who cares
+anything for Gibbon.
+
+And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are greater
+than their work. Their work only represents one facet of their
+character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable, and uniting
+to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so with Gibbon. He
+was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to have grown at the
+expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life one generous impulse,
+one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics. His excellent judgment
+was never clouded by the haze of human emotion—or, at least, it was
+such an emotion as was well under the control of his will. Could
+anything be more laudable—or less lovable? He abandons his girl at the
+order of his father, and sums it up that he “sighs as a lover but obeys
+as a son.” The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark
+that “the tears of a son are seldom lasting.” The terrible spectacle of
+the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity
+because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees,
+just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
+was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the
+allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon—often without even mentioning
+his name—and one cannot read the great historian’s life without
+understanding why.
+
+I should think that few men have been born with the material for
+self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward
+Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an
+insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry, a
+retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
+enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
+critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked upon
+as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but his
+views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
+susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days. Turn
+him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is upon his
+contentions. “Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters it is
+not necessary to dwell,” says the biographer, “because at this time of
+day no Christian apologist dreams of denying the substantial truth of
+any of the more important allegations of Gibbon. Christians may
+complain of the suppression of some circumstances which might influence
+the general result, and they must remonstrate against the unfair
+construction of their case. But they no longer refuse to hear any
+reasonable evidence tending to show that persecution was less severe
+than had been once believed, and they have slowly learned that they can
+afford to concede the validity of all the secondary causes assigned by
+Gibbon and even of others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the
+historian has again and again admitted, that his account of the
+secondary causes which contributed to the progress and establishment of
+Christianity leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural
+origin of Christianity practically untouched.” This is all very well,
+but in that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
+upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
+for.
+
+Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was a
+curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth, was
+ulcerated and tortured by the king’s evil, in spite of the Royal touch.
+Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own boyhood.
+
+“I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by opposite
+tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit, by a contraction of my
+nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the bite of a dog, most vehemently
+suspected of madness. Every practitioner was called to my aid, the fees
+of the doctors were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and
+surgeons. There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
+my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets, issues, and
+caustics.”
+
+Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that day
+seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
+ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far the
+hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had anything
+to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection between struma
+and learning; but one has only to compare this account of Gibbon with
+Johnson’s nervous twitches, his scarred face and his St. Vitus’ dance,
+to realize that these, the two most solid English writers of their
+generation, were each heir to the same gruesome inheritance.
+
+I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character of
+subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame, his
+huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform, he must
+have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so round a peg
+in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different type, held a
+commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a soldier in spite of
+himself. War had broken out, the regiment was mustered, and the
+unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was kept under arms until
+the conclusion of hostilities. For three years he was divorced from his
+books, and loudly and bitterly did he resent it. The South Hampshire
+Militia never saw the enemy, which is perhaps as well for them. Even
+Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but after three years under canvas it
+is probable that his men had more cause to smile at their book-worm
+captain than he at his men. His hand closed much more readily on a
+pen-handle than on a sword-hilt. In his lament, one of the items is
+that his colonel’s example encouraged the daily practice of hard and
+even excessive drinking, which gave him the gout. “The loss of so many
+busy and idle hours were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure,”
+says he; “and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic
+officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the
+manners of gentlemen.” The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
+mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must certainly
+have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he found consolations
+as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering. It made him an
+Englishman once more, it improved his health, it changed the current of
+his thoughts. It was even useful to him as an historian. In a
+celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says, “The discipline and
+evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the
+Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers
+has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.”
+
+If we don’t know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no
+fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the
+other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than
+Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most difficult of all
+human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and
+frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of
+his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with
+the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No
+British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British
+autobiography has ever been good. Trollope’s, perhaps, is as good as
+any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least
+adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British
+Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to
+the credit of the race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as
+our neighbours we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to
+suppress its publication.
+
+There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke’s) of
+Pepys’ Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in our
+language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When Mr.
+Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought which
+came into his head he would have been very much surprised had any one
+told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our literature. Yet
+his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some obscure reason or for
+private reference, but certainly never meant for publication, is as
+much the first in that line of literature as Boswell’s book among
+biographies or Gibbon’s among histories.
+
+As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce a
+good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy, and yet
+of all nations we are the least frank as to our own emotions—especially
+on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the heart, for example,
+which are such an index to a man’s character, and so profoundly modify
+his life—what space do they fill in any man’s autobiography? Perhaps in
+Gibbon’s case the omission matters little, for, save in the instance of
+his well-controlled passion for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was
+never an organ which gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the
+British author tells his own story he tries to make himself
+respectable, and the more respectable a man is the less interesting
+does he become. Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate.
+Cellini may stand self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not
+respectable they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.
+
+The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
+making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been a
+man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who
+read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for
+dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for
+their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque
+character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women,
+timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in
+religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet,
+though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very
+different person, a devoted civil servant, an eloquent orator, an
+excellent writer, a capable musician, and a ripe scholar who
+accumulated 3000 volumes—a large private library in those days—and had
+the public spirit to leave them all to his University. You can forgive
+old Pepys a good deal of his philandering when you remember that he was
+the only official of the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the
+worst days of the Plague. He may have been—indeed, he assuredly was—a
+coward, but the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his
+cowardice is the most truly brave of mankind.
+
+But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys is
+what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of writing
+down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of his life, but
+even his own very gross delinquencies which any other man would have
+been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for about ten years,
+and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes of the crabbed
+shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose that he became so
+familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as easily as he did
+ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour to compile these
+books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to leave some memorial of
+his own existence to single him out from all the countless sons of men?
+In such a case he would assuredly have left directions in somebody’s
+care with a reference to it in the deed by which he bequeathed his
+library to Cambridge. In that way he could have ensured having his
+Diary read at any date he chose to name after his death. But no
+allusion to it was left, and if it had not been for the ingenuity and
+perseverance of a single scholar the dusty volumes would still lie
+unread in some top shelf of the Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was
+not his object. What could it have been? The only alternative is
+reference and self-information. You will observe in his character a
+curious vein of method and order, by which he loved, to be for ever
+estimating his exact wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his
+possessions. It is conceivable that this systematic recording of his
+deeds—even of his misdeeds—was in some sort analogous, sprung from a
+morbid tidiness of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is
+difficult to advance another one.
+
+One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical a
+nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one seems to
+have had command of some instrument, many of several. Part-singing was
+common. There is not much of Charles the Second’s days which we need
+envy, but there, at least, they seem to have had the advantage of us.
+It was real music, too—music of dignity and tenderness—with words which
+were worthy of such treatment. This cult may have been the last remains
+of those mediaeval pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs
+were, as I have read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange
+thing this for a land which in the whole of last century has produced
+no single master of the first rank!
+
+What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
+life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
+climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
+England, alas, the sound of a poor man’s voice raised in song means
+only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know that
+the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout forth if
+they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs were the best
+in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I believe, that our
+orchestral associations are now the best in Europe. So, at least, the
+German papers said on the occasion of the recent visit of a north of
+England choir. But one cannot read Pepys without knowing that the
+general musical habit is much less cultivated now than of old.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow—from one pole of
+the human character to the other—and yet they are in contact on the
+shelf of my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I think,
+about the land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out into the
+ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things, and has held
+them there in isolation until they have woven themselves into the
+texture of the Cornish race. What is this strange strain which lurks
+down yonder and every now and then throws up a great man with singular
+un-English ways and features for all the world to marvel at? It is not
+Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further and deeper lie the
+springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving men of Tyre, with
+noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations, who have in far-off
+days forgotten their blue Mediterranean and settled on the granite
+shores of the Northern Sea?
+
+Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry Irving?
+How strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know that his
+mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination
+of the Brontes—so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their
+predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman.
+Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle
+head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a
+king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange
+mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once more, his
+father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is something strange, and weird,
+and great, lurking down yonder in the great peninsula which juts into
+the western sea. Borrow may, if he so pleases, call himself an East
+Anglian—“an English Englishman,” as he loved to term it—but is it a
+coincidence that the one East Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one
+who showed these strange qualities? The birth was accidental. The
+qualities throw back to the twilight of the world.
+
+There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so
+voluminous that I feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be well
+read in their works. Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them
+altogether. There is Balzac, for example, with his hundred odd volumes.
+I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest pot-boilers,
+but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an author makes an undue
+claim upon the little span of mortal years. Because he asks too much
+one is inclined to give him nothing at all. Dumas, too! I stand on the
+edge of him, and look at that huge crop, and content myself with a
+sample here and there. But no one could raise this objection to Borrow.
+A month’s reading—even for a leisurely reader—will master all that he
+has written. There are “Lavengro,” “The Bible in Spain,” “Romany Rye,”
+and, finally, if you wish to go further, “Wild Wales.” Only four
+books—not much to found a great reputation upon—but, then, there are no
+other four books quite like them in the language.
+
+He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined to
+be sulky, as wayward as a man could be. So far his catalogue of
+qualities does not seem to pick him as a winner. But he had one great
+and rare gift. He preserved through all his days a sense of the great
+wonder and mystery of life—the child sense which is so quickly dulled.
+Not only did he retain it himself, but he was word-master enough to
+make other people hark back to it also. As he writes you cannot help
+seeing through his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw or his ear
+heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was all strange, mystic, with
+some deeper meaning struggling always to the light. If he chronicled
+his conversation with a washer-woman there was something arresting in
+the words he said, something singular in her reply. If he met a man in
+a public-house one felt, after reading his account, that one would wish
+to know more of that man. If he approached a town he saw and made you
+see—not a collection of commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but
+something very strange and wonderful, the winding river, the noble
+bridge, the old castle, the shadows of the dead. Every human being,
+every object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol and
+reminder of the past. He looked through a man at that which the man
+represented. Was his name Welsh? Then in an instant the individual is
+forgotten and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient Britons,
+intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower, mountain raiders
+and a thousand fascinating things. Or is it a Danish name? He leaves
+the individual in all his modern commonplace while he flies off to huge
+skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may remark that I have examined the
+said skulls with some care, and they seemed to me to be rather below
+the human average), to Vikings, Berserkers, Varangians, Harald
+Haardraada, and the innate wickedness of the Pope. To Borrow all roads
+lead to Rome.
+
+But, my word, what English the fellow could write! What an organ-roll
+he could get into his sentences! How nervous and vital and vivid it all
+is!
+
+There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an ear
+for the music of prose. Take the chapter in “Lavengro” of how the
+screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped in the
+Dingle. The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle of Bunyan and
+Defoe. And, observe the art of it, under all the simplicity—notice, for
+example, the curious weird effect produced by the studied repetition of
+the word “dingle” coming ever round and round like the master-note in a
+chime. Or take the passage about Britain towards the end of “The Bible
+in Spain.” I hate quoting from these masterpieces, if only for the very
+selfish reason that my poor setting cannot afford to show up
+brilliants. None the less, cost what it may, let me transcribe that one
+noble piece of impassioned prose—
+
+“O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath
+the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now
+gathering rapidly around thee, still, still may it please the Almighty
+to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and
+still brighter in renown than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may
+that doom be a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled the Old
+Queen of the waters! May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst blood and
+flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one nation to participate
+in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it please the Lord to preserve thee
+from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and
+a mockery for those self-same foes who now, though they envy and abhor
+thee, still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and respect
+thee…. Remove from thee the false prophets, who have seen vanity and
+divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it
+may fall; who see visions of peace where there is no peace; who have
+strengthened the hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the
+righteous sad. Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall
+thy end be a majestic and an enviable one; or God shall perpetuate thy
+reign upon the waters, thou Old Queen!”
+
+Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. It’s too long for
+quotation—but read it, read every word of it. Where in the language can
+you find a stronger, more condensed and more restrained narrative? I
+have seen with my own eyes many a noble fight, more than one
+international battle, where the best of two great countries have been
+pitted against each other—yet the second-hand impression of Borrow’s
+description leaves a more vivid remembrance upon my mind than any of
+them. This is the real witchcraft of letters.
+
+He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in
+other than literary circles—circles which would have been amazed to
+learn that he was a writer of books. With his natural advantages, his
+six foot three of height and his staglike agility, he could hardly fail
+to be formidable. But he was a scientific sparrer as well, though he
+had, I have been told, a curious sprawling fashion of his own. And how
+his heart was in it—how he loved the fighting men! You remember his
+thumb-nail sketches of his heroes. If you don’t I must quote one, and
+if you do you will be glad to read it again—
+
+“There’s Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best man in
+England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure, and face
+wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher, the younger, not the
+mighty one, who is gone to his place, but the Teucer Belcher, the most
+scientific pugilist that ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to
+be I won’t say what. He appears to walk before me now, as he did that
+evening, with his white hat, white great coat, thin genteel figure,
+springy step, and keen determined eye. Crosses him, what a contrast!
+Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word for nobody, and a hard blow
+for anybody. Hard! One blow given with the proper play of his athletic
+arm will unsense a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his
+hands behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized, and
+who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the light-weights,
+so-called—Randall! The terrible Randall, who has Irish blood in his
+veins; not the better for that, nor the worse; and not far from him is
+his last antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still
+thinks himself as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it
+was a near thing. But how shall I name them all? They were there by
+dozens, and all tremendous in their way. There was Bulldog Hudson, and
+fearless Scroggins, who beat the conqueror of Sam the Jew. There was
+Black Richmond—no, he was not there, but I knew him well; he was the
+most dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was Purcell,
+who could never conquer until all seemed over with him. There was—what!
+shall I name thee last? Ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last
+of all that strong family still above the sod, where mayst thou long
+continue—true piece of English stuff—Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee, Tom
+of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be called, Spring
+or Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown eye, worthy
+to have carried a six-foot bow at Flodden, where England’s yeomen
+triumphed over Scotland’s King, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee,
+last of English bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast
+achieved—true English victories, unbought by yellow gold.”
+
+Those are words from the heart. Long may it be before we lose the
+fighting blood which has come to us from of old! In a world of peace we
+shall at last be able to root it from our natures. In a world which is
+armed to the teeth it is the last and only guarantee of our future.
+Neither our numbers, nor our wealth, nor the waters which guard us can
+hold us safe if once the old iron passes from our spirit. Barbarous,
+perhaps—but there are possibilities for barbarism, and none in this
+wide world for effeminacy.
+
+Borrow’s views of literature and of literary men were curious.
+Publisher and brother author, he hated them with a fine comprehensive
+hatred. In all his books I cannot recall a word of commendation to any
+living writer, nor has he posthumous praise for those of the generation
+immediately preceding. Southey, indeed, he commends with what most
+would regard as exaggerated warmth, but for the rest he who lived when
+Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all in their glorious prime,
+looks fixedly past them at some obscure Dane or forgotten Welshman. The
+reason was, I expect, that his proud soul was bitterly wounded by his
+own early failures and slow recognition. He knew himself to be a chief
+in the clan, and when the clan heeded him not he withdrew in haughty
+disdain. Look at his proud, sensitive face and you hold the key to his
+life.
+
+Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which gave
+me pleasure. A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called “Rodney
+Stone” to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon a bed of
+mortal sickness. The dying gladiator listened with intent interest but
+keen, professional criticism to the combats of the novel. The reader
+had got to the point where the young amateur fights the brutal Berks.
+Berks is winded, but holds his adversary off with a stiff left arm. The
+amateur’s second in the story, an old prize-fighter, shouts some advice
+to him as to how to deal with the situation. “That’s right. By —— he’s
+got him!” yelled the stricken man in the bed. Who cares for critics
+after that?
+
+You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown volumes
+which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow. They are
+the three volumes of “Pugilistica,” given me years ago by my old
+friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for half an
+hour without striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang of those
+days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and its fogles,
+its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing a word or two
+in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate encounters, fit
+sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become dull and vulgar, in
+that dreadful jargon. You have to turn to Hazlitt’s account of the
+encounter between the Gasman and the Bristol Bull, to feel the savage
+strength of it all. It is a hardened reader who does not wince even in
+print before that frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and
+left him in “red ruin” from eyebrow to jaw. But even if there be no
+Hazlitt present to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination
+which is not fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so
+vividly upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these
+little-read pages. They were picturesque creatures, men of great force
+of character and will, who reached the limits of human bravery and
+endurance. There is Jackson on the cover, gold upon brown, “gentleman
+Jackson,” Jackson of the balustrade calf and the noble head, who wrote
+his name with an 88-pound weight dangling from his little finger.
+
+Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well—
+
+“I can see him now as I saw him in ’84 walking down Holborn Hill,
+towards Smithfield. He had on a scarlet coat worked in gold at the
+buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace, a small white stock, no
+collar (they were not then invented), a looped hat with a broad black
+band, buff knee-breeches and long silk strings, striped white silk
+stockings, pumps and paste buckles; his waistcoat was pale blue satin,
+sprigged with white. It was impossible to look on his fine ample chest,
+his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything too small), his large but
+not too large hips, his balustrade calf and beautifully turned but not
+over delicate ankle, his firm foot and peculiarly small hand, without
+thinking that nature had sent him on earth as a model. On he went at a
+good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all men and the
+admiration of all women.”
+
+Now, that is a discriminating portrait—a portrait which really helps
+you to see that which the writer sets out to describe. After reading it
+one can understand why even in reminiscent sporting descriptions of
+those old days, amid all the Tonis and Bills and Jacks, it is always
+Mr. John Jackson. He was the friend and instructor of Byron and of half
+the bloods in town. Jackson it was who, in the heat of combat, seized
+the Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so ensured that the pugs for ever
+afterwards should be a close-cropped race. Inside you see the square
+face of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth
+century, the man whose humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot
+man of the Prussian Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He
+had a chronicler, the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some
+English which would take some beating. How about this passage?—
+
+“He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows truly in
+the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself, to stop a blow, and
+puddle in the return, with an arm unaided by his body, producing but
+fly-flap blows. No! Broughton steps boldly and firmly in, bids a
+welcome to the coming blow; receives it with his guardian arm; then,
+with a general summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body
+seconding his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the
+pile-driving force upon his man.”
+
+One would like a little more from the gallant Captain. Poor Broughton!
+He fought once too often. “Why, damn you, you’re beat!” cried the Royal
+Duke. “Not beat, your highness, but I can’t see my man!” cried the
+blinded old hero. Alas, there is the tragedy of the ring as it is of
+life! The wave of youth surges ever upwards, and the wave that went
+before is swept sobbing on to the shingle. “Youth will be served,” said
+the terse old pugs. But what so sad as the downfall of the old
+champion! Wise Tom Spring—Tom of Bedford, as Borrow calls him—had the
+wit to leave the ring unconquered in the prime of his fame. Cribb also
+stood out as a champion. But Broughton, Slack, Belcher, and the
+rest—their end was one common tragedy.
+
+The latter days of the fighting men were often curious and unexpected,
+though as a rule they were short-lived, for the alternation of the
+excess of their normal existence and the asceticism of their training
+undermined their constitution. Their popularity among both men and
+women was their undoing, and the king of the ring went down at last
+before that deadliest of light-weights, the microbe of tubercle, or
+some equally fatal and perhaps less reputable bacillus. The crockiest
+of spectators had a better chance of life than the magnificent young
+athlete whom he had come to admire. Jem Belcher died at 30, Hooper at
+31, Pearce, the Game Chicken, at 32, Turner at 35, Hudson at 38,
+Randall, the Nonpareil, at 34. Occasionally, when they did reach mature
+age, their lives took the strangest turns. Gully, as is well known,
+became a wealthy man, and Member for Pontefract in the Reform
+Parliament. Humphries developed into a successful coal merchant. Jack
+Martin became a convinced teetotaller and vegetarian. Jem Ward, the
+Black Diamond, developed considerable powers as an artist. Cribb,
+Spring, Langan, and many others, were successful publicans. Strangest
+of all, perhaps, was Broughton, who spent his old age haunting every
+sale of old pictures and bric-a-brac. One who saw him has recorded his
+impression of the silent old gentleman, clad in old-fashioned garb,
+with his catalogue in his hand—Broughton, once the terror of England,
+and now the harmless and gentle collector.
+
+Many of them, as was but natural, died violent deaths, some by accident
+and a few by their own hands. No man of the first class ever died in
+the ring. The nearest approach to it was the singular and mournful fate
+which befell Simon Byrne, the brave Irishman, who had the misfortune to
+cause the death of his antagonist, Angus Mackay, and afterwards met his
+own end at the hands of Deaf Burke. Neither Byrne nor Mackay could,
+however, be said to be boxers of the very first rank. It certainly
+would appear, if we may argue from the prize-ring, that the human
+machine becomes more delicate and is more sensitive to jar or shock. In
+the early days a fatal end to a fight was exceedingly rare. Gradually
+such tragedies became rather more common, until now even with the
+gloves they have shocked us by their frequency, and we feel that the
+rude play of our forefathers is indeed too rough for a more highly
+organized generation. Still, it may help us to clear our minds of cant
+if we remember that within two or three years the hunting-field and the
+steeple-chase claim more victims than the prize-ring has done in two
+centuries.
+
+Many of these men had served their country well with that strength and
+courage which brought them fame. Cribb was, if I mistake not, in the
+Royal Navy. So was the terrible dwarf Scroggins, all chest and
+shoulders, whose springing hits for many a year carried all before them
+until the canny Welshman, Ned Turner, stopped his career, only to be
+stopped in turn by the brilliant Irishman, Jack Randall. Shaw, who
+stood high among the heavy-weights, was cut to pieces by the French
+Cuirassiers in the first charge at Waterloo. The brutal Berks died
+greatly in the breach of Badajos. The lives of these men stood for
+something, and that was just the one supreme thing which the times
+called for—an unflinching endurance which could bear up against a world
+in arms. Look at Jem Belcher—beautiful, heroic Jem, a manlier Byron—but
+there, this is not an essay on the old prize-ring, and one man’s lore
+is another man’s bore. Let us pass those three low-down, unjustifiable,
+fascinating volumes, and on to nobler topics beyond!
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+Which are the great short stories of the English language? Not a bad
+basis for a debate! This I am sure of: that there are far fewer
+supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long books.
+It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the statue. But
+the strangest thing is that the two excellences seem to be separate and
+even antagonistic. Skill in the one by no means ensures skill in the
+other. The great masters of our literature, Fielding, Scott, Dickens,
+Thackeray, Reade, have left no single short story of outstanding merit
+behind them, with the possible exception of Wandering Willie’s Tale in
+“Red Gauntlet.” On the other hand, men who have been very great in the
+short story, Stevenson, Poe, and Bret Harte, have written no great
+book. The champion sprinter is seldom a five-miler as well.
+
+Well, now, if you had to choose your team whom would you put in? You
+have not really a large choice. What are the points by which you judge
+them? You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a
+single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the master of all. I
+may remark by the way that it is the sight of his green cover, the next
+in order upon my favourite shelf, which has started this train of
+thought. Poe is, to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of
+all time. His brain was like a seed-pod full of seeds which flew
+carelessly around, and from which have sprung nearly all our modern
+types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal
+fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some
+new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of
+writers on the detection of crime—“_quorum pars parva fui!_” Each may
+find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace
+back to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in
+their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point.
+After all, mental acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed to
+the ideal detective, and when that has once been admirably done,
+succeeding writers must necessarily be content for all time to follow
+in the same main track. But not only is Poe the originator of the
+detective story; all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving yarns trace
+back to his “Gold Bug,” just as all pseudo-scientific Verne-and-Wells
+stories have their prototypes in the “Voyage to the Moon,” and the
+“Case of Monsieur Valdemar.” If every man who receives a cheque for a
+story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe to a monument for
+the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.
+
+And yet I could only give him two places in my team. One would be for
+the “Gold Bug,” the other for the “Murder in the Rue Morgue.” I do not
+see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not admit
+_perfect_ excellence to any other of his stories. These two have a
+proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the
+horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the
+narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand
+in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those
+great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of a longer
+flight. He was always like one of his own gold-miners who struck a rich
+pocket, but found no continuous reef. The pocket was, alas, a very
+limited one, but the gold was of the best. “The Luck of Roaring Camp”
+and “Tennessee’s Partner” are both, I think, worthy of a place among my
+immortals. They are, it is true, so tinged with Dickens as to be almost
+parodies of the master, but they have a symmetry and satisfying
+completeness as short stories to which Dickens himself never attained.
+The man who can read those two stories without a gulp in the throat is
+not a man I envy.
+
+And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two places also, for where is a
+finer sense of what the short story can do? He wrote, in my judgment,
+two masterpieces in his life, and each of them is essentially a short
+story, though the one happened to be published as a volume. The one is
+“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which, whether you take it as a vivid
+narrative or as a wonderfully deep and true allegory, is a supremely
+fine bit of work. The other story of my choice would be “The Pavilion
+on the Links”—the very model of dramatic narrative. That story stamped
+itself so clearly on my brain when I read it in _Cornhill_ that when I
+came across it again many years afterwards in volume form, I was able
+instantly to recognize two small modifications of the text—each very
+much for the worse—from the original form. They were small things, but
+they seemed somehow like a chip on a perfect statue. Surely it is only
+a very fine work, of art which could leave so definite an impression as
+that. Of course, there are a dozen other of his stories which would put
+the average writer’s best work to shame, all with the strange Stevenson
+glamour upon them, of which I may discourse later, but only to those
+two would I be disposed to admit that complete excellence which would
+pass them into such a team as this.
+
+And who else? If it be not an impertinence to mention a contemporary, I
+should certainly have a brace from Rudyard Kipling. His power, his
+compression, his dramatic sense, his way of glowing suddenly into a
+vivid flame, all mark him as a great master. But which are we to choose
+from that long and varied collection, many of which have claims to the
+highest? Speaking from memory, I should say that the stories of his
+which have impressed me most are “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” “The
+Man who Would be King,” “The Man who Was,” and “The Brushwood Boy.”
+Perhaps, on the whole, it is the first two which I should choose to add
+to my list of masterpieces.
+
+They are stories which invite criticism and yet defy it. The great
+batsman at cricket is the man who can play an unorthodox game, take
+every liberty which is denied to inferior players, and yet succeed
+brilliantly in the face of his disregard of law. So it is here. I
+should think the model of these stories is the most dangerous that any
+young writer could follow. There is digression, that most deadly fault
+in the short narrative; there is incoherence, there is want of
+proportion which makes the story stand still for pages and bound
+forward in a few sentences. But genius overrides all that, just as the
+great cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the straight one to leg.
+There is a dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded, confident mastery which
+carries everything before it. Yes, no team of immortals would be
+complete which did not contain at least two representatives of Kipling.
+
+And now whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree
+to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave
+stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for
+effect. Indeed, I have been more affected by some of the short work of
+his son Julian, though I can quite understand the high artistic claims
+which the senior writer has, and the delicate charm of his style. There
+is Bulwer Lytton as a claimant. His “Haunted and the Haunters” is the
+very best ghost story that I know. As such I should include it in my
+list. There was a story, too, in one of the old
+Blackwoods—“Metempsychosis” it was called, which left so deep an
+impression upon my mind that I should be inclined, though it is many
+years since I read it, to number it with the best. Another story which
+has the characteristics of great work is Grant Allen’s “John Creedy.”
+So good a story upon so philosophic a basis deserves a place among the
+best. There is some first-class work to be picked also from the
+contemporary work of Wells and of Quiller-Couch which reaches a high
+standard. One little sketch—“Old Œson” in “Noughts and Crosses”—is, in
+my opinion, as good as anything of the kind which I have ever read.
+
+And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover
+of Poe. I am sure that if I had to name the few books which have really
+influenced my own life I should have to put this one second only to
+Macaulay’s Essays. I read it young when my mind was plastic. It
+stimulated my imagination and set before me a supreme example of
+dignity and force in the methods of telling a story. It is not
+altogether a healthy influence, perhaps. It turns the thoughts too
+forcibly to the morbid and the strange.
+
+He was a saturnine creature, devoid of humour and geniality, with a
+love for the grotesque and the terrible. The reader must himself
+furnish the counteracting qualities or Poe may become a dangerous
+comrade. We know along what perilous tracks and into what deadly
+quagmires his strange mind led him, down to that grey October Sunday
+morning when he was picked up, a dying man, on the side-walk at
+Baltimore, at an age which should have seen him at the very prime of
+his strength and his manhood.
+
+I have said that I look upon Poe as the world’s supreme short story
+writer. His nearest rival, I should say, was Maupassant. The great
+Norman never rose to the extreme force and originality of the American,
+but he had a natural inherited power, an inborn instinct towards the
+right way of making his effects, which mark him as a great master. He
+produced stories because it was in him to do so, as naturally and as
+perfectly as an apple tree produces apples. What a fine, sensitive,
+artistic touch it is! How easily and delicately the points are made!
+How clear and nervous is his style, and how free from that redundancy
+which disfigures so much of our English work! He pares it down to the
+quick all the time.
+
+I cannot write the name of Maupassant without recalling what was either
+a spiritual interposition or an extraordinary coincidence in my own
+life. I had been travelling in Switzerland and had visited, among other
+places, that Gemmi Pass, where a huge cliff separates a French from a
+German canton. On the summit of this cliff was a small inn, where we
+broke our journey. It was explained to us that, although the inn was
+inhabited all the year round, still for about three months in winter it
+was utterly isolated, because it could at any time only be approached
+by winding paths on the mountain side, and when these became
+obliterated by snow it was impossible either to come up or to descend.
+They could see the lights in the valley beneath them, but were as
+lonely as if they lived in the moon. So curious a situation naturally
+appealed to one’s imagination, and I speedily began to build up a short
+story in my own mind, depending upon a group of strong antagonistic
+characters being penned up in this inn, loathing each other and yet
+utterly unable to get away from each other’s society, every day
+bringing them nearer to tragedy. For a week or so, as I travelled, I
+was turning over the idea.
+
+At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to
+read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant’s Tales which I had never
+seen before. The first story was called “L’Auberge” (The Inn)—and as I
+ran my eye down the printed page I was amazed to see the two words,
+“Kandersteg” and “Gemmi Pass.” I settled down and read it with
+ever-growing amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I had visited.
+The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people through the
+snowfall. Everything that I imagined was there, save that Maupassant
+had brought in a savage hound.
+
+Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced to
+visit the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same train
+of thought. All that is quite intelligible. But what is perfectly
+marvellous is that in that short journey I should have chanced to buy
+the one book in all the world which would prevent me from making a
+public fool of myself, for who would ever have believed that my work
+was not an imitation? I do not think that the hypothesis of coincidence
+can cover the facts. It is one of several incidents in my life which
+have convinced me of spiritual interposition—of the promptings of some
+beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it
+can. The old Catholic doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a
+beautiful one, but has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.
+
+Or is it that our subliminal ego, to use the jargon of the new
+psychology, or our astral, in the terms of the new theology, can learn
+and convey to the mind that which our own known senses are unable to
+apprehend? But that is too long a side track for us to turn down it.
+
+When Maupassant chose he could run Poe close in that domain of the
+strange and weird which the American had made so entirely his own. Have
+you read Maupassant’s story called “Le Horla”? That is as good a bit of
+_diablerie_ as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has, of course,
+far the broader range. He has a keen sense of humour, breaking out
+beyond all decorum in some of his stories, but giving a pleasant
+sub-flavour to all of them. And yet, when all is said, who can doubt
+that the austere and dreadful American is far the greater and more
+original mind of the two?
+
+Talking of weird American stories, have you ever read any of the works
+of Ambrose Bierce? I have one of his works there, “In the Midst of
+Life.” This man had a flavour quite his own, and was a great artist in
+his way. It is not cheering reading, but it leaves its mark upon you,
+and that is the proof of good work.
+
+I have often wondered where Poe got his style. There is a sombre
+majesty about his best work, as if it were carved from polished jet,
+which is peculiarly his own. I dare say if I took down that volume I
+could light anywhere upon a paragraph which would show you what I mean.
+This is the kind of thing—
+
+“Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi—in the iron-bound
+melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories
+of the heaven and of the earth, and of the mighty sea—and of the genius
+that overruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There were
+much lore, too, in the sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy,
+holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled round
+Dodona, but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he
+sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most
+wonderful of all.” Or this sentence: “And then did we, the seven, start
+from our seats in horror, and stand trembling and aghast, for the tones
+in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of
+a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to
+syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the well-remembered and
+familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.”
+
+Is there not a sense of austere dignity? No man invents a style. It
+always derives back from some influence, or, as is more usual, it is a
+compromise between several influences. I cannot trace Poe’s. And yet if
+Hazlitt and De Quincey had set forth to tell weird stories they might
+have developed something of the kind.
+
+Now, by your leave, we will pass on to my noble edition of “The
+Cloister and the Hearth,” the next volume on the left.
+
+I notice, in glancing over my rambling remarks, that I classed
+“Ivanhoe” as the second historical novel of the century. I dare say
+there are many who would give “Esmond” the first place, and I can quite
+understand their position, although it is not my own. I recognize the
+beauty of the style, the consistency of the character-drawing, the
+absolutely perfect Queen Anne atmosphere. There was never an historical
+novel written by a man who knew his period so thoroughly. But, great as
+these virtues are, they are not the essential in a novel. The essential
+in a novel is interest, though Addison unkindly remarked that the real
+essential was that the pastrycooks should never run short of paper. Now
+“Esmond” is, in my opinion, exceedingly interesting during the
+campaigns in the Lowlands, and when our Machiavelian hero, the Duke,
+comes in, and also whenever Lord Mohun shows his ill-omened face; but
+there are long stretches of the story which are heavy reading. A
+pre-eminently good novel must always advance and never mark time.
+“Ivanhoe” never halts for an instant, and that just makes its
+superiority as a novel over “Esmond,” though as a piece of literature I
+think the latter is the more perfect.
+
+No, if I had three votes, I should plump them all for “The Cloister and
+the Hearth,” as being our greatest historical novel, and, indeed, as
+being our greatest novel of any sort. I think I may claim to have read
+most of the more famous foreign novels of last century, and (speaking
+only for myself and within the limits of my reading) I have been more
+impressed by that book of Reade’s and by Tolstoi’s “Peace and War” than
+by any others. They seem to me to stand at the very top of the
+century’s fiction. There is a certain resemblance in the two—the sense
+of space, the number of figures, the way in which characters drop in
+and drop out. The Englishman is the more romantic. The Russian is the
+more real and earnest. But they are both great.
+
+Think of what Reade does in that one book. He takes the reader by the
+hand, and he leads him away into the Middle Ages, and not a
+conventional study-built Middle Age, but a period quivering with life,
+full of folk who are as human and real as a ’bus-load in Oxford Street.
+He takes him through Holland, he shows him the painters, the dykes, the
+life. He leads him down the long line of the Rhine, the spinal marrow
+of Mediaeval Europe. He shows him the dawn of printing, the beginnings
+of freedom, the life of the great mercantile cities of South Germany,
+the state of Italy, the artist-life of Rome, the monastic institutions
+on the eve of the Reformation. And all this between the covers of one
+book, so naturally introduced, too, and told with such vividness and
+spirit. Apart from the huge scope of it, the mere study of Gerard’s own
+nature, his rise, his fall, his regeneration, the whole pitiable
+tragedy at the end, make the book a great one. It contains, I think, a
+blending of knowledge with imagination, which makes it stand alone in
+our literature. Let any one read the “Autobiography of Benvenuto
+Cellini,” and then Charles Reade’s picture of Mediaeval Roman life, if
+he wishes to appreciate the way in which Reade has collected his rough
+ore and has then smelted it all down in his fiery imagination. It is a
+good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a greater and a
+rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them when you have got
+them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without being dull,
+that should be the ideal of the writer of historical romance.
+
+Reade is one of the most perplexing figures in our literature. Never
+was there a man so hard to place. At his best he is the best we have.
+At his worst he is below the level of Surreyside melodrama. But his
+best have weak pieces, and his worst have good. There is always silk
+among his cotton, and cotton among his silk. But, for all his flaws,
+the man who, in addition to the great book, of which I have already
+spoken, wrote “It is Never Too Late to Mend,” “Hard Cash,” “Foul Play,”
+and “Griffith Gaunt,” must always stand in the very first rank of our
+novelists.
+
+There is a quality of heart about his work which I recognize nowhere
+else. He so absolutely loves his own heroes and heroines, while he so
+cordially detests his own villains, that he sweeps your emotions along
+with his own. No one has ever spoken warmly enough of the humanity and
+the lovability of his women. It is a rare gift—very rare for a man—this
+power of drawing a human and delightful girl. If there is a better one
+in nineteenth-century fiction than Julia Dodd I have never had the
+pleasure of meeting her. A man who could draw a character so delicate
+and so delightful, and yet could write such an episode as that of the
+Robber Inn in “The Cloister and the Hearth,” adventurous romance in its
+highest form, has such a range of power as is granted to few men. My
+hat is always ready to come off to Charles Reade.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other side of
+that door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears, headaches
+and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments; but within, as you lie
+back on the green settee, and face the long lines of your silent
+soothing comrades, there is only peace of spirit and rest of mind in
+the company of the great dead. Learn to love, learn to admire them;
+learn to know what their comradeship means; for until you have done so
+the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to man have not yet shed
+their blessing upon you. Here behind this magic door is the rest house,
+where you may forget the past, enjoy the present, and prepare for the
+future.
+
+You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with
+the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the
+drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the
+goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes
+that one’s dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why
+should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would have thought that
+noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed the huge vagrant,
+and yet there is no word too bitter for the younger man to use towards
+the elder. The fact is that Borrow had one dangerous virus in him—a
+poison which distorts the whole vision—for he was a bigoted sectarian
+in religion, seeing no virtue outside his own interpretation of the
+great riddle. Downright heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the
+chaunting Druid, appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the
+man of his own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of
+ritual, or in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil
+to the bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott
+therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once
+hateful in his eyes. In any case he was a disappointed man, the big
+Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was
+good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the
+Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it
+has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing
+the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must not be
+unkind behind the magic door—and yet to be charitable to the
+uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
+
+So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped for
+six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as you see
+there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to my heart,
+and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and to my memory.
+Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old friends, and tell
+you why I love them, and all that they have meant to me in the past. If
+you picked any book from that line you would be picking a little fibre
+also from my mind, very small, no doubt, and yet an intimate and
+essential part of what is now myself. Hereditary impulses, personal
+experiences, books—those are the three forces which go to the making of
+man. These are the books.
+
+This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the eighteenth
+century, or those of them whom I regard as essential. After all,
+putting aside single books, such as Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,”
+Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” and Miss Burney’s “Evelina,” there
+are only three authors who count, and they in turn wrote only three
+books each, of first-rate importance, so that by the mastery of nine
+books one might claim to have a fairly broad view of this most
+important and distinctive branch of English literature. The three men
+are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. The books are:
+Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison”;
+Fielding’s “Tom Jones”, “Joseph Andrews,” and “Amelia”; Smollett’s
+“Peregrine Pickle,” “Humphrey Clinker,” and “Roderick Random.” There we
+have the real work of the three great contemporaries who illuminated
+the middle of the eighteenth century—only nine volumes in all. Let us
+walk round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
+discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a hundred
+and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far they have
+justified them by the permanent value of their work. A fat little
+bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and a rugged
+Scotch surgeon from the navy—those are the three strange immortals who
+now challenge a comparison—the three men who dominate the fiction of
+their century, and to whom we owe it that the life and the types of
+that century are familiar to us, their fifth generation.
+
+It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that these
+three writers would appeal quite differently to every temperament, and
+that whichever one might desire to champion one could find arguments to
+sustain one’s choice. Yet I cannot think that any large section of the
+critical public could maintain that Smollett was on the same level as
+the other two. Ethically he is gross, though his grossness is
+accompanied by a full-blooded humour which is more mirth-compelling
+than the more polished wit of his rivals. I can remember in callow
+boyhood—_puris omnia pura_—reading “Peregrine Pickle,” and laughing
+until I cried over the Banquet in the Fashion of the Ancients. I read
+it again in my manhood with the same effect, though with a greater
+appreciation of its inherent bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive
+merit, he has in a high degree, but in no other respect can he
+challenge comparison with either Fielding or Richardson. His view of
+life is far more limited, his characters less varied, his incidents
+less distinctive, and his thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one,
+should award him the third place in the trio.
+
+But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition of
+giants. Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare them
+with each other.
+
+There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which each
+of them had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most delightful
+women—the most perfect women, I think, in the whole range of our
+literature. If the eighteenth-century women were like that, then the
+eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than they ever deserved.
+They had such a charming little dignity of their own, such good sense,
+and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so human and so charming, that
+even now they become our ideals. One cannot come to know them without a
+double emotion, one of respectful devotion towards themselves, and the
+other of abhorrence for the herd of swine who surrounded them. Pamela,
+Harriet Byron, Clarissa, Amelia, and Sophia Western were all equally
+delightful, and it was not the negative charm of the innocent and
+colourless woman, the amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it
+was a beauty of nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong
+principles, true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this
+respect our rival authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a
+preference to one set of these perfect creatures over another. The
+plump little printer and the worn-out man-about-town had each a supreme
+woman in his mind.
+
+But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all
+capable of doing what Tom Jones did—as I have seen stated—is the worst
+form of inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than we are.
+It is a libel on mankind to say that a man who truly loves a woman is
+usually false to her, and, above all, a libel that he should be false
+in the vile fashion which aroused good Tom Newcome’s indignation. Tom
+Jones was no more fit to touch the hem of Sophia’s dress than Captain
+Booth was to be the mate of Amelia. Never once has Fielding drawn a
+gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A lusty, brawling,
+good-hearted, material creature was the best that he could fashion.
+Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of distinction, of
+spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the plebeian printer has
+done very much better than the aristocrat. Sir Charles Grandison is a
+very noble type—spoiled a little by over-coddling on the part of his
+creator, perhaps, but a very high-souled and exquisite gentleman all
+the same. Had _he_ married Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden
+the banns. Even the persevering Mr. B—— and the too amorous Lovelace
+were, in spite of their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had
+possibilities of greatness and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot
+doubt that Richardson drew the higher type of man—and that in Grandison
+he has done what has seldom or never been bettered.
+
+Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He
+concerns himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a
+very searching analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily,
+and in such simple English, that the depth and truth of it only come
+upon reflection. He condescends to none of those scuffles and
+buffetings and pantomime rallies which enliven, but cheapen, many of
+Fielding’s pages. The latter has, it may be granted, a broader view of
+life. He had personal acquaintance of circles far above, and also far
+below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival, had ever been
+able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London life, the prison
+scenes in “Amelia,” the thieves’ kitchens in “Jonathan Wild,” the
+sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid and as complete as those of
+his friend Hogarth—the most British of artists, even as Fielding was
+the most British of writers. But the greatest and most permanent facts
+of life are to be found in the smallest circles. Two men and a woman
+may furnish either the tragedian or the comedian with the most
+satisfying theme. And so, although his range was limited, Richardson
+knew very clearly and very thoroughly just that knowledge which was
+essential for his purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life,
+Clarissa, the perfect lady, Grandison the ideal gentleman—these were
+the three figures on which he lavished his most loving art. And now,
+after one hundred and fifty years, I do not know where we may find more
+satisfying types.
+
+He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him cut?
+He loved to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of letters
+for his narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First _he_ writes
+and he tells all that passed. You have his letter. _She_ at the same
+time writes to her friend, and also states her views. This also you
+see. The friends in each case reply, and you have the advantage of
+their comments and advice. You really do know all about it before you
+finish. It may be a little wearisome at first, if you have been
+accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in every chapter.
+But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you live, and you come
+to know these people, with their characters and their troubles, as you
+know no others of the dream-folk of fiction. Three times as long as an
+ordinary book, no doubt, but why grudge the time? What is the hurry?
+Surely it is better to read one masterpiece than three books which will
+leave no permanent impression on the mind.
+
+It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet
+centuries. In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer
+papers, do you suppose that the readers ever complained of the length
+of a book, or could have too much of the happy Pamela or of the unhappy
+Clarissa? It is only under extraordinary circumstances that one can now
+get into that receptive frame of mind which was normal then. Such an
+occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells how in some Indian hill
+station, where books were rare, he let loose a copy of “Clarissa.” The
+effect was what might have been expected. Richardson in a suitable
+environment went through the community like a mild fever. They lived
+him, and dreamed him, until the whole episode passed into literary
+history, never to be forgotten by those who experienced it. It is
+tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style is so correct and yet so
+simple that there is no page which a scholar may not applaud nor a
+servant-maid understand.
+
+Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told in
+letters. Scott reverted to it in “Guy Mannering,” and there are other
+conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the expense of
+a strain upon the reader’s good-nature and credulity. One feels that
+these constant details, these long conversations, could not possibly
+have been recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and dishevelled
+heroine could not sit down and record her escape with such cool
+minuteness of description. Richardson does it as well as it could be
+done, but it remains intrinsically faulty. Fielding, using the third
+person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival, and gave a freedom
+and personal authority to the novel which it had never before enjoyed.
+There at least he is the master.
+
+And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson, though I
+dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of all, beyond
+anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having
+been the first. Surely the originator should have a higher place than
+the imitator, even if in imitating he should also improve and amplify.
+It is Richardson and not Fielding who is the father of the English
+novel, the man who first saw that without romantic gallantry, and
+without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be made from
+everyday life, told in everyday language. This was his great new
+departure. So entirely was Fielding his imitator, or rather perhaps his
+parodist, that with supreme audacity (some would say brazen impudence)
+he used poor Richardson’s own characters, taken from “Pamela,” in his
+own first novel, “Joseph Andrews,” and used them too for the unkind
+purpose of ridiculing them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if
+Thackeray wrote a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to
+show what faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the
+gentle little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a
+somewhat unscrupulous man.
+
+And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking of
+this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain class
+of critics. The inference appears to be that there is some subtle
+connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of the lewd,
+or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of the true
+artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict. On the contrary, it is
+so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its forms, that the
+temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the easiest and cheapest
+of all methods of creating a spurious effect. The difficulty does not
+lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in avoiding it. But one tries to
+avoid it because on the face of it there is no reason why a writer
+should cease to be a gentleman, or that he should write for a woman’s
+eyes that which he would be justly knocked down for having said in a
+woman’s ears. But “you must draw the world as it is.” Why must you?
+Surely it is just in selection and restraint that the artist is shown.
+It is true that in a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions,
+but life itself had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and
+must live up to it.
+
+But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means. Our
+decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit in
+which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various spirits
+could preach on a better text than these three great rivals,
+Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with
+some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a
+moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it is
+possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but
+simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and such
+was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to
+extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such
+was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to show
+sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked man, and there were many among
+the writers of the Restoration. But of all reasons that exist for
+treating this side of life, Richardson’s were the best, and nowhere do
+we find it more deftly done.
+
+Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble
+about Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew.
+Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the most
+dangerous and lawless of European capitals. Hogarth’s pictures give
+some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs, the
+high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves’
+kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is thrust.
+This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and poor Hercules
+was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a sick-room than for
+such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at 47, worn out with his
+own exertions. It might well have cost him his life in more dramatic
+fashion, for he had become a marked man to the criminal classes, and he
+headed his own search-parties when, on the information of some bribed
+rascal, a new den of villainy was exposed. But he carried his point. In
+little more than a year the thing was done, and London turned from the
+most rowdy to what it has ever since remained, the most law-abiding of
+European capitals. Has any man ever left a finer monument behind him?
+
+If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the
+novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock
+cynicism, but in his “Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon.” He knew that his
+health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were numbered. Those
+are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he has no longer a
+motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate presence of the
+most tremendous of all realities. Yet, sitting in the shadow of death,
+Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and constancy of mind, which
+show how splendid a nature had been shrouded by his earlier frailties.
+
+Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish
+this somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed so
+much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage it. I
+skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky methods. And
+I skip Miss Burney’s novels, as being feminine reflections of the great
+masters who had just preceded her. But Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield”
+surely deserves one paragraph to itself. There is a book which is
+tinged throughout, as was all Goldsmith’s work, with a beautiful
+nature. No one who had not a fine heart could have written it, just as
+no one without a fine heart could have written “The Deserted Village.”
+How strange it is to think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the
+shrinking Irishman, when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama
+the latter has proved himself far the greater man. But here is an
+object-lesson of how the facts of life may be treated without offence.
+Nothing is shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded. Yet if I wished
+to set before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would
+prepare her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
+feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as “The
+Vicar of Wakefield.”
+
+So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of
+their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For years
+you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word or train
+of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them and love them,
+and rejoice that you know them. But let us pass to something which may
+interest you more.
+
+If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the
+kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists with
+the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George Meredith
+would come out very low indeed. If, on the other hand, a number of
+authors were convened to determine which of their fellow-craftsmen they
+considered the greatest and the most stimulating to their own minds, I
+am equally confident that Mr. Meredith would have a vast preponderance
+of votes. Indeed, his only conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy. It
+becomes an interesting study, therefore, why there should be such a
+divergence of opinion as to his merits, and what the qualities are
+which have repelled so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose
+opinion must be allowed to have a special weight.
+
+The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The public
+read to be amused. The novelist reads to have new light thrown upon his
+art. To read Meredith is _not_ a mere amusement; it is an intellectual
+exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you develop your
+thinking powers. Your mind is in a state of tension the whole time that
+you are reading him.
+
+If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his
+pointer, you will observe that these remarks are excited by the
+presence of my beloved “Richard Feverel,” which lurks in yonder corner.
+What a great book it is, how wise and how witty! Others of the master’s
+novels may be more characteristic or more profound, but for my own part
+it is the one which I would always present to the new-comer who had not
+yet come under the influence. I think that I should put it third after
+“Vanity Fair” and “The Cloister and the Hearth” if I had to name the
+three novels which I admire most in the Victorian era. The book was
+published, I believe, in 1859, and it is almost incredible, and says
+little for the discrimination of critics or public, that it was nearly
+twenty years before a second edition was needed.
+
+But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate the
+cause may be. What was it that stood in the way of the book’s success?
+Undoubtedly it was the style. And yet it is subdued and tempered here
+with little of the luxuriance and exuberance which it attained in the
+later works. But it was an innovation, and it stalled off both the
+public and the critics. They regarded it, no doubt, as an affectation,
+as Carlyle’s had been considered twenty years before, forgetting that
+in the case of an original genius style is an organic thing, part of
+the man as much as the colour of his eyes. It is not, to quote Carlyle,
+a shirt to be taken on and off at pleasure, but a skin, eternally
+fixed. And this strange, powerful style, how is it to be described?
+Best, perhaps, in his own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with
+perhaps the _arrière pensée_ that the words would apply as strongly to
+himself.
+
+“His favourite author,” says he, “was one writing on heroes in a style
+resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose
+and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled down here
+and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster, sentences without
+commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a
+sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and
+accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds;
+all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of
+electrical agitation in the mind and joints.”
+
+What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid is the
+impression left by such expressions as “all the pages in a breeze.” As
+a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the passage is
+equally perfect.
+
+Well, “Richard Feverel” has come into its own at last. I confess to
+having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I do
+not think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water, finds
+its true level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at last. I am
+sure that if the critics were to unite to praise a bad book or to damn
+a good one they could (and continually do) have a five-year influence,
+but it would in no wise affect the final result. Sheridan said that if
+all the fleas in his bed had been unanimous, they could have pushed him
+out of it. I do not think that any unanimity of critics has ever pushed
+a good book out of literature.
+
+Among the minor excellences of “Richard Feverel”—excuse the prolixity
+of an enthusiast—are the scattered aphorisms which are worthy of a
+place among our British proverbs. What could be more exquisite than
+this, “Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered”; or
+this, “Expediency is man’s wisdom. Doing right is God’s”; or, “All
+great thoughts come from the heart”? Good are the words “The coward
+amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of humanity,” and a healthy
+optimism rings in the phrase “There is for the mind but one grasp of
+happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom whence we see that
+this world is well designed.” In more playful mood is “Woman is the
+last thing which will be civilized by man.” Let us hurry away abruptly,
+for he who starts quotation from “Richard Feverel” is lost.
+
+He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There are
+the Italian ones, “Sandra Belloni,” and “Vittoria”; there is “Rhoda
+Fleming,” which carried Stevenson off his critical feet; “Beauchamp’s
+Career,” too, dealing with obsolete politics. No great writer should
+spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the beauty who is
+painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends to become obsolete
+along with her frame. Here also is the dainty “Diana,” the egoist with
+immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type of masculine selfishness, and
+“Harry Richmond,” the first chapters of which are, in my opinion, among
+the finest pieces of narrative prose in the language. That great mind
+would have worked in any form which his age had favoured. He is a
+novelist by accident. As an Elizabethan he would have been a great
+dramatist; under Queen Anne a great essayist. But whatever medium he
+worked in, he must equally have thrown the image of a great brain and a
+great soul.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+We have left our eighteenth-century novelists—Fielding, Richardson, and
+Smollett—safely behind us, with all their solidity and their audacity,
+their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre. They have brought us,
+as you perceive, to the end of the shelf. What, not wearied? Ready for
+yet another? Let us run down this next row, then, and I will tell you a
+few things which may be of interest, though they will be dull enough if
+you have not been born with that love of books in your heart which is
+among the choicest gifts of the gods. If that is wanting, then one
+might as well play music to the deaf, or walk round the Academy with
+the colour-blind, as appeal to the book-sense of an unfortunate who has
+it not.
+
+There is this old brown volume in the corner. How it got there I cannot
+imagine, for it is one of those which I bought for threepence out of
+the remnant box in Edinburgh, and its weather-beaten comrades are up
+yonder in the back gallery, while this one has elbowed its way among
+the quality in the stalls. But it is worth a word or two. Take it out
+and handle it! See how swarthy it is, how squat, with how bullet-proof
+a cover of scaling leather. Now open the fly-leaf “_Ex libris_
+Guilielmi Whyte. 1672” in faded yellow ink. I wonder who William Whyte
+may have been, and what he did upon earth in the reign of the merry
+monarch. A pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I should judge, by
+that hard, angular writing. The date of issue is 1642, so it was
+printed just about the time when the Pilgrim Fathers were settling down
+into their new American home, and the first Charles’s head was still
+firm upon his shoulders, though a little puzzled, no doubt, at what was
+going on around it. The book is in Latin—though Cicero might not have
+admitted it—and it treats of the laws of warfare.
+
+I picture some pedantic Dugald Dalgetty bearing it about under his buff
+coat, or down in his holster, and turning up the reference for every
+fresh emergency which occurred. “Hullo! here’s a well!” says he. “I
+wonder if I may poison it?” Out comes the book, and he runs a dirty
+forefinger down the index. “_Ob fas est aquam hostis venere_,” etc.
+“Tut, tut, it’s not allowed. But here are some of the enemy in a barn?
+What about that?” “_Ob fas est hostem incendio_,” etc. “Yes; he says we
+may. Quick, Ambrose, up with the straw and the tinder box.” Warfare was
+no child’s play about the time when Tilly sacked Magdeburg, and
+Cromwell turned his hand from the mash tub to the sword. It might not
+be much better now in a long campaign, when men were hardened and
+embittered. Many of these laws are unrepealed, and it is less than a
+century since highly disciplined British troops claimed their dreadful
+rights at Badajos and Rodrigo. Recent European wars have been so short
+that discipline and humanity have not had time to go to pieces, but a
+long war would show that man is ever the same, and that civilization is
+the thinnest of veneers.
+
+Now you see that whole row of books which takes you at one sweep nearly
+across the shelf? I am rather proud of those, for they are my
+collection of Napoleonic military memoirs. There is a story told of an
+illiterate millionaire who gave a wholesale dealer an order for a copy
+of all books in any language treating of any aspect of Napoleon’s
+career. He thought it would fill a case in his library. He was somewhat
+taken aback, however, when in a few weeks he received a message from
+the dealer that he had got 40,000 volumes, and awaited instructions as
+to whether he should send them on as an instalment, or wait for a
+complete set. The figures may not be exact, but at least they bring
+home the impossibility of exhausting the subject, and the danger of
+losing one’s self for years in a huge labyrinth of reading, which may
+end by leaving no very definite impression upon your mind. But one
+might, perhaps, take a corner of it, as I have done here in the
+military memoirs, and there one might hope to get some finality.
+
+Here is Marbot at this end—the first of all soldier books in the world.
+This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red and gold
+cover, smart and _débonnaire_ like its author. Here he is in one
+frontispiece with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a Captain of his
+beloved Chasseurs. And here in the other is the grizzled old bull-dog
+as a full general, looking as full of fight as ever. It was a real blow
+to me when some one began to throw doubts upon the authenticity of
+Marbot’s memoirs. Homer may be dissolved into a crowd of skin-clad
+bards. Even Shakespeare may be jostled in his throne of honour by
+plausible Baconians; but the human, the gallant, the inimitable Marbot!
+His book is that which gives us the best picture by far of the
+Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are even more interesting than
+their great leader, though his must ever be the most singular figure in
+history. But those soldiers, with their huge shakoes, their hairy
+knapsacks, and their hearts of steel—what men they were! And what a
+latent power there must be in this French nation which could go on
+pouring out the blood of its sons for twenty-three years with hardly a
+pause!
+
+It took all that time to work off the hot ferment which the Revolution
+had left in men’s veins. And they were not exhausted, for the very last
+fight which the French fought was the finest of all. Proud as we are of
+our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the French cavalry that
+the greenest laurels of that great epic rested. They got the better of
+our own cavalry, they took our guns again and again, they swept a large
+portion of our allies from the field, and finally they rode off
+unbroken, and as full of fight as ever. Read Gronow’s “Memoirs,” that
+chatty little yellow volume yonder which brings all that age back to us
+more vividly than any more pretentious work, and you will find the
+chivalrous admiration which our officers expressed at the fine
+performance of the French horsemen.
+
+It must be admitted that, looking back upon history, we have not always
+been good allies, nor yet generous co-partners in the battlefield. The
+first is the fault of our politics, where one party rejoices to break
+what the other has bound. The makers of the Treaty are staunch enough,
+as the Tories were under Pitt and Castlereagh, or the Whigs at the time
+of Queen Anne, but sooner or later the others must come in. At the end
+of the Marlborough wars we suddenly vamped up a peace and, left our
+allies in the lurch, on account of a change in domestic politics. We
+did the same with Frederick the Great, and would have done it in the
+Napoleonic days if Fox could have controlled the country. And as to our
+partners of the battlefield, how little we have ever said that is
+hearty as to the splendid staunchness of the Prussians at Waterloo. You
+have to read the Frenchman, Houssaye, to get a central view and to
+understand the part they played. Think of old Blucher, seventy years
+old, and ridden over by a regiment of charging cavalry the day before,
+yet swearing that he would come to Wellington if he had to be strapped
+to his horse. He nobly redeemed his promise.
+
+The loss of the Prussians at Waterloo was not far short of our own. You
+would not know it, to read our historians. And then the abuse of our
+Belgian allies has been overdone. Some of them fought splendidly, and
+one brigade of infantry had a share in the critical instant when the
+battle was turned. This also you would not learn from British sources.
+Look at our Portuguese allies also! They trained into magnificent
+troops, and one of Wellington’s earnest desires was to have ten
+thousand of them for his Waterloo campaign. It was a Portuguese who
+first topped the rampart of Badajos. They have never had their due
+credit, nor have the Spaniards either, for, though often defeated, it
+was their unconquerable pertinacity which played a great part in the
+struggle. No; I do not think that we are very amiable partners, but I
+suppose that all national history may be open to a similar charge.
+
+It must be confessed that Marbot’s details are occasionally a little
+hard to believe. Never in the pages of Lever has there been such a
+series of hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits. Surely he
+stretched it a little sometimes. You may remember his adventure at
+Eylau—I think it was Eylau—how a cannon-ball, striking the top of his
+helmet, paralyzed him by the concussion of his spine; and how, on a
+Russian officer running forward to cut him down, his horse bit the
+man’s face nearly off. This was the famous charger which savaged
+everything until Marbot, having bought it for next to nothing, cured it
+by thrusting a boiling leg of mutton into its mouth when it tried to
+bite him. It certainly does need a robust faith to get over these
+incidents. And yet, when one reflects upon the hundreds of battles and
+skirmishes which a Napoleonic officer must have endured—how they must
+have been the uninterrupted routine of his life from the first dark
+hair upon his lip to the first grey one upon his head, it is
+presumptuous to say what may or may not have been possible in such
+unparalleled careers. At any rate, be it fact or fiction—fact it is, in
+my opinion, with some artistic touching up of the high lights—there are
+few books which I could not spare from my shelves better than the
+memoirs of the gallant Marbot.
+
+I dwell upon this particular book because it is the best; but take the
+whole line, and there is not one which is not full of interest. Marbot
+gives you the point of view of the officer. So does De Segur and De
+Fezensac and Colonel Gonville, each in some different branch of the
+service. But some are from the pens of the men in the ranks, and they
+are even more graphic than the others. Here, for example, are the
+papers of good old Cogniet, who was a grenadier of the Guard, and could
+neither read nor write until after the great wars were over. A tougher
+soldier never went into battle. Here is Sergeant Bourgogne, also with
+his dreadful account of that nightmare campaign in Russia, and the
+gallant Chevillet, trumpeter of Chasseurs, with his matter-of-fact
+account of all that he saw, where the daily “combat” is sandwiched in
+betwixt the real business of the day, which was foraging for his frugal
+breakfast and supper. There is no better writing, and no easier
+reading, than the records of these men of action.
+
+A Briton cannot help asking himself, as he realizes what men these
+were, what would have happened if 150,000 Cogniets and Bourgognes, with
+Marbots to lead them, and the great captain of all time in the prime of
+his vigour at their head, had made their landing in Kent? For months it
+was touch-and-go. A single naval slip which left the Channel clear
+would have been followed by an embarkation from Boulogne, which had
+been brought by constant practice to so incredibly fine a point that
+the last horse was aboard within two hours of the start. Any evening
+might have seen the whole host upon the Pevensey Flats. What then? We
+know what Humbert did with a handful of men in Ireland, and the story
+is not reassuring. Conquest, of course, is unthinkable. The world in
+arms could not do that. But Napoleon never thought of the conquest of
+Britain. He has expressly disclaimed it. What he did contemplate was a
+gigantic raid in which he would do so much damage that for years to
+come England would be occupied at home in picking up the pieces,
+instead of having energy to spend abroad in thwarting his Continental
+plans.
+
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Sheerness in flames, with London either
+levelled to the ground or ransomed at his own figure—that was a more
+feasible programme. Then, with the united fleets of conquered Europe at
+his back, enormous armies and an inexhaustible treasury, swollen with
+the ransom of Britain, he could turn to that conquest of America which
+would win back the old colonies of France and leave him master of the
+world. If the worst happened and he had met his Waterloo upon the South
+Downs, he would have done again what he did in Egypt and once more in
+Russia: hurried back to France in a swift vessel, and still had force
+enough to hold his own upon the Continent. It would, no doubt, have
+been a big stake to lay upon the table—150,000 of his best—but he could
+play again if he lost; while, if he won, he cleared the board. A fine
+game—if little Nelson had not stopped it, and with one blow fixed the
+edge of salt water as the limit of Napoleon’s power.
+
+There’s the cast of a medal on the top of that cabinet which will bring
+it all close home to you. It is taken from the die of the medal which
+Napoleon had arranged to issue on the day that he reached London. It
+serves, at any rate, to show that his great muster was not a bluff, but
+that he really did mean serious business. On one side is his head. On
+the other France is engaged in strangling and throwing to earth a
+curious fish-tailed creature, which stands for perfidious Albion.
+“Frappe a Londres” is printed on one part of it, and “La Descente dans
+Angleterre” upon another. Struck to commemorate a conquest, it remains
+now as a souvenir of a fiasco. But it was a close call.
+
+By the way, talking of Napoleon’s flight from Egypt, did you ever see a
+curious little book called, if I remember right, “Intercepted Letters”?
+No; I have no copy upon this shelf, but a friend is more fortunate. It
+shows the almost incredible hatred which existed at the end of the
+eighteenth century between the two nations, descending even to the most
+petty personal annoyance. On this occasion the British Government
+intercepted a mail-bag of letters coming from French officers in Egypt
+to their friends at home, and they either published them, or at least
+allowed them to be published, in the hope, no doubt, of causing
+domestic complications. Was ever a more despicable action? But who
+knows what other injuries had been inflicted to draw forth such a
+retaliation? I have myself seen a burned and mutilated British mail
+lying where De Wet had left it; but suppose the refinement of his
+vengeance had gone so far as to publish it, what a thunder-bolt it
+might have been!
+
+As to the French officers, I have read their letters, though even after
+a century one had a feeling of guilt when one did so. But, on the
+whole, they are a credit to the writers, and give the impression of a
+noble and chivalrous set of men. Whether they were all addressed to the
+right people is another matter, and therein lay the poisoned sting of
+this most un-British affair. As to the monstrous things which were done
+upon the other side, remember the arrest of all the poor British
+tourists and commercials who chanced to be in France when the war was
+renewed in 1803. They had run over in all trust and confidence for a
+little outing and change of air. They certainly got it, for Napoleon’s
+steel grip fell upon them, and they rejoined their families in 1814. He
+must have had a heart of adamant and a will of iron. Look at his
+conduct over the naval prisoners. The natural proceeding would have
+been to exchange them. For some reason he did not think it good policy
+to do so. All representations from the British Government were set
+aside, save in the case of the higher officers. Hence the miseries of
+the hulks and the dreadful prison barracks in England. Hence also the
+unhappy idlers of Verdun. What splendid loyalty there must have been in
+those humble Frenchmen which never allowed them for one instant to turn
+bitterly upon the author of all their great misfortunes. It is all
+brought vividly home by the description of their prisons given by
+Borrow in “Lavengro.” This is the passage—
+
+“What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with their blank,
+blind walls, without windows or grating, and their slanting roofs, out
+of which, through orifices where the tiles had been removed, would be
+protruded dozens of grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the
+wide expanse of country unfolded from their airy height. Ah! there was
+much misery in those casernes; and from those roofs, doubtless, many a
+wistful look was turned in the direction of lovely France. Much had the
+poor inmates to endure, and much to complain of, to the disgrace of
+England be it said—of England, in general so kind and bountiful.
+Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I have seen the very
+hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy entertainment even for the
+most ruffian enemy, when helpless and captive; and such, alas! was the
+fare in those casernes. And then, those visits, or rather ruthless
+inroads, called in the slang of the place ‘straw-plait hunts,’ when in
+pursuit of a contraband article, which the prisoners, in order to
+procure themselves a few of the necessaries and comforts of existence,
+were in the habit of making, red-coated battalions were marched into
+the prisons, who, with the bayonet’s point, carried havoc and ruin into
+every poor convenience which ingenious wretchedness had been
+endeavouring to raise around it; and then the triumphant exit with the
+miserable booty, and worst of all, the accursed bonfire, on the barrack
+parade of the plait contraband, beneath the view of glaring eyeballs
+from those lofty roofs, amid the hurrahs of the troops frequently
+drowned in the curses poured down from above like a tempest-shower, or
+in the terrific war-whoop of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’”
+
+There is a little vignette of Napoleon’s men in captivity. Here is
+another which is worth preserving of the bearing of his veterans when
+wounded on the field of battle. It is from Mercer’s recollections of
+the Battle of Waterloo. Mercer had spent the day firing case into the
+French cavalry at ranges from fifty to two hundred yards, losing
+two-thirds of his own battery in the process. In the evening he had a
+look at some of his own grim handiwork.
+
+“I had satisfied my curiosity at Hougoumont, and was retracing my steps
+up the hill when my attention was called to a group of wounded
+Frenchmen by the calm, dignified, and soldier-like oration addressed by
+one of them to the rest. I cannot, like Livy, compose a fine harangue
+for my hero, and, of course, I could not retain the precise words, but
+the import of them was to exhort them to bear their sufferings with
+fortitude; not to repine, like women or children, at what every soldier
+should have made up his mind to suffer as the fortune of war, but above
+all, to remember that they were surrounded by Englishmen, before whom
+they ought to be doubly careful not to disgrace themselves by
+displaying such an unsoldier-like want of fortitude.
+
+“The speaker was sitting on the ground with his lance stuck upright
+beside him—an old veteran with thick bushy, grizzly beard, countenance
+like a lion—a lancer of the old guard, and no doubt had fought in many
+a field. One hand was flourished in the air as he spoke, the other,
+severed at the wrist, lay on the earth beside him; one ball (case-shot,
+probably) had entered his body, another had broken his leg. His
+suffering, after a night of exposure so mangled, must have been great;
+yet he betrayed it not. His bearing was that of a Roman, or perhaps an
+Indian warrior, and I could fancy him concluding appropriately his
+speech in the words of the Mexican king, ‘And I too; am I on a bed of
+roses?’”
+
+What a load of moral responsibility upon one man! But his mind was
+insensible to moral responsibility. Surely if it had not been it must
+have been crushed beneath it. Now, if you want to understand the
+character of Napoleon—but surely I must take a fresh start before I
+launch on so portentous a subject as that.
+
+But before I leave the military men let me, for the credit of my own
+country, after that infamous incident of the letters, indicate these
+six well-thumbed volumes of “Napier’s History.” This is the story of
+the great Peninsular War, by one who fought through it himself, and in
+no history has a more chivalrous and manly account been given of one’s
+enemy. Indeed, Napier seems to me to push it too far, for his
+admiration appears to extend not only to the gallant soldiers who
+opposed him, but to the character and to the ultimate aims of their
+leader. He was, in fact, a political follower of Charles James Fox, and
+his heart seems to have been with the enemy even at the moment when he
+led his men most desperately against them. In the verdict of history
+the action of those men who, in their honest zeal for freedom, inflamed
+somewhat by political strife, turned against their own country, when it
+was in truth the Champion of Freedom, and approved of a military despot
+of the most uncompromising kind, seems wildly foolish.
+
+But if Napier’s politics may seem strange, his soldiering was splendid,
+and his prose among the very best that I know. There are passages in
+that work—the one which describes the breach of Badajos, that of the
+charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera, and that of the French advance at
+Fuentes d’Onoro—which once read haunt the mind for ever. The book is a
+worthy monument of a great national epic. Alas! for the pregnant
+sentence with which it closes, “So ended the great war, and with it all
+memory of the services of the veterans.” Was there ever a British war
+of which the same might not have been written?
+
+The quotation which I have given from Mercer’s book turns my thoughts
+in the direction of the British military reminiscences of that period,
+less numerous, less varied, and less central than the French, but full
+of character and interest all the same. I have found that if I am
+turned loose in a large library, after hesitating over covers for half
+an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier memoirs which I take
+down. Man is never so interesting as when he is thoroughly in earnest,
+and no one is so earnest as he whose life is at stake upon the event.
+But of all types of soldier the best is the man who is keen upon his
+work, and yet has general culture which enables him to see that work in
+its due perspective, and to sympathize with the gentler aspirations of
+mankind. Such a man is Mercer, an ice-cool fighter, with a sense of
+discipline and decorum which prevented him from moving when a bombshell
+was fizzing between his feet, and yet a man of thoughtful and
+philosophic temperament, with a weakness for solitary musings, for
+children, and for flowers. He has written for all time the classic
+account of a great battle, seen from the point of view of a battery
+commander. Many others of Wellington’s soldiers wrote their personal
+reminiscences. You can get them, as I have them there, in the pleasant
+abridgement of “Wellington’s Men” (admirably edited by Dr.
+Fitchett)—Anton the Highlander, Harris the rifleman, and Kincaid of the
+same corps. It is a most singular fate which has made an Australian
+nonconformist clergyman the most sympathetic and eloquent reconstructor
+of those old heroes, but it is a noble example of that unity of the
+British race, which in fifty scattered lands still mourns or rejoices
+over the same historic record.
+
+And just one word, before I close down this over-long and too
+discursive chatter, on the subject of yonder twin red volumes which
+flank the shelf. They are Maxwell’s “History of Wellington,” and I do
+not think you will find a better or more readable one. The reader must
+ever feel towards the great soldier what his own immediate followers
+felt, respect rather than affection. One’s failure to attain a more
+affectionate emotion is alleviated by the knowledge that it was the
+last thing which he invited or desired. “Don’t be a damned fool, sir!”
+was his exhortation to the good citizen who had paid him a compliment.
+It was a curious, callous nature, brusque and limited. The hardest
+huntsman learns to love his hounds, but he showed no affection and a
+good deal of contempt for the men who had been his instruments. “They
+are the scum of the earth,” said he. “All English soldiers are fellows
+who have enlisted for drink. That is the plain fact—they have all
+enlisted for drink.” His general orders were full of undeserved
+reproaches at a time when the most lavish praise could hardly have met
+the real deserts of his army. When the wars were done he saw little,
+save in his official capacity, of his old comrades-in-arms. And yet,
+from major-general to drummer-boy, he was the man whom they would all
+have elected to serve under, had the work to be done once more. As one
+of them said, “The sight of his long nose was worth ten thousand men on
+a field of battle.” They were themselves a leathery breed, and cared
+little for the gentler amenities so long as the French were well
+drubbed.
+
+His mind, which was comprehensive and alert in warfare, was singularly
+limited in civil affairs. As a statesman he was so constant an example
+of devotion to duty, self-sacrifice, and high disinterested character,
+that the country was the better for his presence. But he fiercely
+opposed Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, and everything upon
+which our modern life is founded. He could never be brought to see that
+a pyramid should stand on its base and not on its apex, and that the
+larger the pyramid, the broader should be the base. Even in military
+affairs he was averse from every change, and I know of no improvements
+which came from his initiative during all those years when his
+authority was supreme. The floggings which broke a man’s spirit and
+self-respect, the leathern stock which hampered his movements, all the
+old traditional regime found a champion in him. On the other hand, he
+strongly opposed the introduction of the percussion cap as opposed to
+the flint and steel in the musket. Neither in war nor in politics did
+he rightly judge the future.
+
+And yet in reading his letters and dispatches, one is surprised
+sometimes at the incisive thought and its vigorous expression. There is
+a passage in which he describes the way in which his soldiers would
+occasionally desert into some town which he was besieging. “They knew,”
+he writes, “that they must be taken, for when we lay our bloody hands
+upon a place we are sure to take it, sooner or later; but they liked
+being dry and under cover, and then that extraordinary caprice which
+always pervades the English character! Our deserters are very badly
+treated by the enemy; those who deserted in France were treated as the
+lowest of mortals, slaves and scavengers. Nothing but English caprice
+can account for it; just what makes our noblemen associate with
+stage-coach drivers, and become stage-coach drivers themselves.” After
+reading that passage, how often does the phrase “the extraordinary
+caprice which always pervades the English character” come back as one
+observes some fresh manifestation of it!
+
+But let not my last note upon the great duke be a carping one. Rather
+let my final sentence be one which will remind you of his frugal and
+abstemious life, his carpetless floor and little camp bed, his precise
+courtesy which left no humblest letter unanswered, his courage which
+never flinched, his tenacity which never faltered, his sense of duty
+which made his life one long unselfish effort on behalf of what seemed
+to him to be the highest interest of the State. Go down and stand by
+the huge granite sarcophagus in the dim light of the crypt of St.
+Paul’s, and in the hush of that austere spot, cast back your mind to
+the days when little England alone stood firm against the greatest
+soldier and the greatest army that the world has ever known. Then you
+feel what this dead man stood for, and you pray that we may still find
+such another amongst us when the clouds gather once again.
+
+You see that the literature of Waterloo is well represented in my small
+military library. Of all books dealing with the personal view of the
+matter, I think that “Siborne’s Letters,” which is a collection of the
+narratives of surviving officers made by Siborne in the year 1827, is
+the most interesting. Gronow’s account is also very vivid and
+interesting. Of the strategical narratives, Houssaye’s book is my
+favourite. Taken from the French point of view, it gets the actions of
+the allies in truer perspective than any English or German account can
+do; but there is a fascination about that great combat which makes
+every narrative that bears upon it of enthralling interest.
+
+Wellington used to say that too much was made of it, and that one would
+imagine that the British Army had never fought a battle before. It was
+a characteristic speech, but it must be admitted that the British Army
+never had, as a matter of fact, for many centuries fought a battle
+which was finally decisive of a great European war. There lies the
+perennial interest of the incident, that it was the last act of that
+long-drawn drama, and that to the very fall of the curtain no man could
+tell how the play would end—“the nearest run thing that ever you
+saw”—that was the victor’s description. It is a singular thing that
+during those twenty-five years of incessant fighting the material and
+methods of warfare made so little progress. So far as I know, there was
+no great change in either between 1789 and 1805. The breech-loader,
+heavy artillery, the ironclad, all great advances in the art of war,
+have been invented in time of peace. There are some improvements so
+obvious, and at the same time so valuable, that it is extraordinary
+that they were not adopted. Signalling, for example, whether by
+heliograph or by flag-waving, would have made an immense difference in
+the Napoleonic campaigns. The principle of the semaphore was well
+known, and Belgium, with its numerous windmills, would seem to be
+furnished with natural semaphores. Yet in the four days during which
+the campaign of Waterloo was fought, the whole scheme of military
+operations on both sides was again and again imperilled, and finally in
+the case of the French brought to utter ruin by lack of that
+intelligence which could so easily have been conveyed. June 18th was at
+intervals a sunshiny day—a four-inch glass mirror would have put
+Napoleon in communication with Gruchy, and the whole history of Europe
+might have been altered. Wellington himself suffered dreadfully from
+defective information which might have been easily supplied. The
+unexpected presence of the French army was first discovered at four in
+the morning of June 15. It was of enormous importance to get the news
+rapidly to Wellington at Brussels that he might instantly concentrate
+his scattered forces on the best line of resistance—yet, through the
+folly of sending only a single messenger, this vital information did
+not reach him until three in the afternoon, the distance being thirty
+miles. Again, when Blucher was defeated at Ligny on the 16th, it was of
+enormous importance that Wellington should know at once the line of his
+retreat so as to prevent the French from driving a wedge between them.
+The single Prussian officer who was despatched with this information
+was wounded, and never reached his destination, and it was only next
+day that Wellington learned the Prussian plans. On what tiny things
+does History depend!
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+The contemplation of my fine little regiment of French military memoirs
+had brought me to the question of Napoleon himself, and you see that I
+have a very fair line dealing with him also. There is Scott’s life,
+which is not entirely a success. His ink was too precious to be shed in
+such a venture. But here are the three volumes of the physician
+Bourrienne—that Bourrienne who knew him so well. Does any one ever know
+a man so well as his doctor? They are quite excellent and admirably
+translated. Meneval also—the patient Meneval—who wrote for untold hours
+to dictation at ordinary talking speed, and yet was expected to be
+legible and to make no mistakes. At least his master could not fairly
+criticize his legibility, for is it not on record that when Napoleon’s
+holograph account of an engagement was laid before the President of the
+Senate, the worthy man thought that it was a drawn plan of the battle?
+Meneval survived his master and has left an excellent and intimate
+account of him. There is Constant’s account, also written from that
+point of view in which it is proverbial that no man is a hero. But of
+all the vivid terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a
+man who never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him.
+I mean Taine’s account of him, in the first volume of “Les Origines de
+la France Contemporaine.” You can never forget it when once you have
+read it. He produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel, way.
+He does not, for example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon had a
+more than mediaeval Italian cunning. He presents a succession of
+documents—gives a series of contemporary instances to prove it. Then,
+having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow, he passes on to
+another phase of his character, his coldhearted amorousness, his power
+of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or some other quality, and piles
+up his illustrations of that. Instead, for example, of saying that the
+Emperor had a marvellous memory for detail, we have the account of the
+head of Artillery laying the list of all the guns in France before his
+master, who looked over it and remarked, “Yes, but you have omitted two
+in a fort near Dieppe.” So the man is gradually etched in with
+indelible ink. It is a wonderful figure of which you are conscious in
+the end, the figure of an archangel, but surely of an archangel of
+darkness.
+
+We will, after Taine’s method, take one fact and let it speak for
+itself. Napoleon left a legacy in a codicil to his will to a man who
+tried to assassinate Wellington. There is the mediaeval Italian again!
+He was no more a Corsican than the Englishman born in India is a
+Hindoo. Read the lives of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the Medicis, and of
+all the lustful, cruel, broad-minded, art-loving, talented despots of
+the little Italian States, including Genoa, from which the Buonapartes
+migrated. There at once you get the real descent of the man, with all
+the stigmata clear upon him—the outward calm, the inward passion, the
+layer of snow above the volcano, everything which characterized the old
+despots of his native land, the pupils of Machiavelli, but all raised
+to the dimensions of genius. You can whitewash him as you may, but you
+will never get a layer thick enough to cover the stain of that
+cold-blooded deliberate endorsement of his noble adversary’s
+assassination.
+
+Another book which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the man is
+this one—the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat. She was in daily contact
+with him at the Court, and she studied him with those quick critical
+eyes of a clever woman, the most unerring things in life when they are
+not blinded by love. If you have read those pages, you feel that you
+know him as if you had yourself seen and talked with him. His singular
+mixture of the small and the great, his huge sweep of imagination, his
+very limited knowledge, his intense egotism, his impatience of
+obstacles, his boorishness, his gross impertinence to women, his
+diabolical playing upon the weak side of every one with whom he came in
+contact—they make up among them one of the most striking of historical
+portraits.
+
+Most of my books deal with the days of his greatness, but here, you
+see, is a three-volume account of those weary years at St. Helena. Who
+can help pitying the mewed eagle? And yet if you play the great game
+you must pay a stake. This was the same man who had a royal duke shot
+in a ditch because he was a danger to his throne. Was not he himself a
+danger to every throne in Europe? Why so harsh a retreat as St. Helena,
+you say? Remember that he had been put in a milder one before, that he
+had broken away from it, and that the lives of fifty thousand men had
+paid for the mistaken leniency. All this is forgotten now, and the
+pathetic picture of the modern Prometheus chained to his rock and
+devoured by the vultures of his own bitter thoughts, is the one
+impression which the world has retained. It is always so much easier to
+follow the emotions than the reason, especially where a cheap
+magnanimity and second-hand generosity are involved. But reason must
+still insist that Europe’s treatment of Napoleon was not vindictive,
+and that Hudson Lowe was a man who tried to live up to the trust which
+had been committed to him by his country.
+
+It was certainly not a post from which any one would hope for credit.
+If he were slack and easy-going all would be well. But there would be
+the chance of a second flight with its consequences. If he were strict
+and assiduous he would be assuredly represented as a petty tyrant. “I
+am glad when you are on outpost,” said Lowe’s general in some campaign,
+“for then I am sure of a sound rest.” He was on outpost at St. Helena,
+and because he was true to his duties Europe (France included) had a
+sound rest. But he purchased it at the price of his own reputation. The
+greatest schemer in the world, having nothing else on which to vent his
+energies, turned them all to the task of vilifying his guardian. It was
+natural enough that he who had never known control should not brook it
+now. It is natural also that sentimentalists who have not thought of
+the details should take the Emperor’s point of view. What is
+deplorable, however, is that our own people should be misled by
+one-sided accounts, and that they should throw to the wolves a man who
+was serving his country in a post of anxiety and danger, with such
+responsibility upon him as few could ever have endured. Let them
+remember Montholon’s remark: “An angel from heaven would not have
+satisfied us.” Let them recall also that Lowe with ample material never
+once troubled to state his own case. “_Je fais mon devoir et suis
+indifférent pour le reste_,” said he, in his interview with the
+Emperor. They were no idle words.
+
+Apart from this particular epoch, French literature, which is so rich
+in all its branches, is richest of all in its memoirs. Whenever there
+was anything of interest going forward there was always some kindly
+gossip who knew all about it, and was ready to set it down for the
+benefit of posterity. Our own history has not nearly enough of these
+charming sidelights. Look at our sailors in the Napoleonic wars, for
+example. They played an epoch-making part. For nearly twenty years
+Freedom was a Refugee upon the seas. Had our navy been swept away, then
+all Europe would have been one organized despotism. At times everybody
+was against us, fighting against their own direct interests under the
+pressure of that terrible hand. We fought on the waters with the
+French, with the Spaniards, with the Danes, with the Russians, with the
+Turks, even with our American kinsmen. Middies grew into post-captains,
+and admirals into dotards during that prolonged struggle. And what have
+we in literature to show for it all? Marryat’s novels, many of which
+are founded upon personal experience, Nelson’s and Collingwood’s
+letters, Lord Cochrane’s biography—that is about all. I wish we had
+more of Collingwood, for he wielded a fine pen. Do you remember the
+sonorous opening of his Trafalgar message to his captains?—
+
+“The ever to be lamented death of Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke of Bronte,
+the Commander-in-Chief, who fell in the action of the 21st, in the arms
+of Victory, covered with glory, whose memory will be ever dear to the
+British Navy and the British Nation; whose zeal for the honour of his
+king and for the interests of his country will be ever held up as a
+shining example for a British seaman—leaves to me a duty to return
+thanks, etc., etc.”
+
+It was a worthy sentence to carry such a message, written too in a
+raging tempest, with sinking vessels all around him. But in the main it
+is a poor crop from such a soil. No doubt our sailors were too busy to
+do much writing, but none the less one wonders that among so many
+thousands there were not some to understand what a treasure their
+experiences would be to their descendants. I can call to mind the old
+three-deckers which used to rot in Portsmouth Harbour, and I have often
+thought, could they tell their tales, what a missing chapter in our
+literature they could supply.
+
+It is not only in Napoleonic memoirs that the French are so fortunate.
+The almost equally interesting age of Louis XIV. produced an even more
+wonderful series. If you go deeply into the subject you are amazed by
+their number, and you feel as if every one at the Court of the Roi
+Soleil had done what he (or she) could to give away their neighbours.
+Just to take the more obvious, there are St. Simon’s Memoirs—those in
+themselves give us a more comprehensive and intimate view of the age
+than anything I know of which treats of the times of Queen Victoria.
+Then there is St. Evremond, who is nearly as complete. Do you want the
+view of a woman of quality? There are the letters of Madame de Sevigne
+(eight volumes of them), perhaps the most wonderful series of letters
+that any woman has ever penned. Do you want the confessions of a rake
+of the period? Here are the too salacious memoirs of the mischievous
+Duc de Roquelaure, not reading for the nursery certainly, not even for
+the boudoir, but a strange and very intimate picture of the times. All
+these books fit into each other, for the characters of the one reappear
+in the others. You come to know them quite familiarly before you have
+finished, their loves and their hates, their duels, their intrigues,
+and their ultimate fortunes. If you do not care to go so deeply into it
+you have only to put Julia Pardoe’s four-volumed “Court of Louis XIV.”
+upon your shelf, and you will find a very admirable condensation—or a
+distillation rather, for most of the salt is left behind. There is
+another book too—that big one on the bottom shelf—which holds it all
+between its brown and gold covers. An extravagance that—for it cost me
+some sovereigns—but it is something to have the portraits of all that
+wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the devout Maintenon, of the frail
+Montespan, of Bossuet, Fénelon, Molière, Racine, Pascal, Condé,
+Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age. If you want to make
+yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of “The Court and Times of
+Louis XIV.,” you will never think that your money has been wasted.
+
+Well, I have bored you unduly, my patient friend, with my love of
+memoirs, Napoleonic and otherwise, which give a touch of human interest
+to the arid records of history. Not that history should be arid. It
+ought to be the most interesting subject upon earth, the story of
+ourselves, of our forefathers, of the human race, the events which made
+us what we are, and wherein, if Weismann’s views hold the field, some
+microscopic fraction of this very body which for the instant we chance
+to inhabit may have borne a part. But unfortunately the power of
+accumulating knowledge and that of imparting it are two very different
+things, and the uninspired historian becomes merely the dignified
+compiler of an enlarged almanac. Worst of all, when a man does come
+along with fancy and imagination, who can breathe the breath of life
+into the dry bones, it is the fashion for the dryasdusts to belabour
+him, as one who has wandered away from the orthodox path and must
+necessarily be inaccurate. So Froude was attacked. So also Macaulay in
+his day. But both will be read when the pedants are forgotten. If I
+were asked my very ideal of how history should be written, I think I
+should point to those two rows on yonder shelf, the one M’Carthy’s
+“History of Our Own Times,” the other Lecky’s “History of England in
+the Eighteenth Century.” Curious that each should have been written by
+an Irishman, and that though of opposite politics and living in an age
+when Irish affairs have caused such bitterness, both should be
+conspicuous not merely for all literary graces, but for that broad
+toleration which sees every side of a question, and handles every
+problem from the point of view of the philosophic observer and never of
+the sectarian partisan.
+
+By the way, talking of history, have you read Parkman’s works? He was,
+I think, among the very greatest of the historians, and yet one seldom
+hears his name. A New England man by birth, and writing principally of
+the early history of the American Settlements and of French Canada, it
+is perhaps excusable that he should have no great vogue in England, but
+even among Americans I have found many who have not read him. There are
+four of his volumes in green and gold down yonder, “The Jesuits in
+Canada,” and “Frontenac,” but there are others, all of them well worth
+reading, “Pioneers of France,” “Montcalm and Wolfe,” “Discovery of the
+Great West,” etc. Some day I hope to have a complete set.
+
+Taking only that one book, “The Jesuits in Canada,” it is worth a
+reputation in itself. And how noble a tribute is this which a man of
+Puritan blood pays to that wonderful Order! He shows how in the heyday
+of their enthusiasm these brave soldiers of the Cross invaded Canada as
+they did China and every other place where danger was to be faced, and
+a horrible death to be found. I don’t care what faith a man may
+profess, or whether he be a Christian at all, but he cannot read these
+true records without feeling that the very highest that man has ever
+evolved in sanctity and devotion was to be found among these marvellous
+men. They were indeed the pioneers of civilization, for apart from
+doctrines they brought among the savages the highest European culture,
+and in their own deportment an object-lesson of how chastely,
+austerely, and nobly men could live. France has sent myriads of brave
+men on to her battlefields, but in all her long record of glory I do
+not think that she can point to any courage so steadfast and so
+absolutely heroic as that of the men of the Iroquois Mission.
+
+How nobly they lived makes the body of the book, how serenely they died
+forms the end to it. It is a tale which cannot even now be read without
+a shudder—a nightmare of horrors. Fanaticism may brace a man to hurl
+himself into oblivion, as the Mahdi’s hordes did before Khartoum, but
+one feels that it is at least a higher development of such emotion,
+where men slowly and in cold blood endure so thankless a life, and
+welcome so dreadful an end. Every faith can equally boast its martyrs—a
+painful thought, since it shows how many thousands must have given
+their blood for error—but in testifying to their faith these brave men
+have testified to something more important still, to the subjugation of
+the body and to the absolute supremacy of the dominating spirit.
+
+The story of Father Jogue is but one of many, and yet it is worth
+recounting, as showing the spirit of the men. He also was on the
+Iroquois Mission, and was so tortured and mutilated by his sweet
+parishioners that the very dogs used to howl at his distorted figure.
+He made his way back to France, not for any reason of personal rest or
+recuperation, but because he needed a special dispensation to say Mass.
+The Catholic Church has a regulation that a priest shall not be
+deformed, so that the savages with their knives had wrought better than
+they knew. He received his dispensation and was sent for by Louis XIV.,
+who asked him what he could do for him. No doubt the assembled
+courtiers expected to hear him ask for the next vacant Bishopric. What
+he did actually ask for, as the highest favour, was to be sent back to
+the Iroquois Mission, where the savages signalized his arrival by
+burning him alive.
+
+Parkman is worth reading, if it were only for his account of the
+Indians. Perhaps the very strangest thing about them, and the most
+unaccountable, is their small numbers. The Iroquois were one of the
+most formidable of tribes. They were of the Five Nations, whose
+scalping-parties wandered over an expanse of thousands of square miles.
+Yet there is good reason to doubt whether the whole five nations could
+have put as many thousand warriors in the field. It was the same with
+all the other tribes of Northern Americans, both in the east, the
+north, and the west. Their numbers were always insignificant. And yet
+they had that huge country to themselves, the best of climates, and
+plenty of food. Why was it that they did not people it thickly? It may
+be taken as a striking example of the purpose and design which run
+through the affairs of men, that at the very moment when the old world
+was ready to overflow the new world was empty to receive it. Had North
+America been peopled as China is peopled, the Europeans might have
+founded some settlements, but could never have taken possession of the
+continent. Buffon has made the striking remark that the creative power
+appeared to have never had great vigour in America. He alluded to the
+abundance of the flora and fauna as compared with that of other great
+divisions of the earth’s surface. Whether the numbers of the Indians
+are an illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special
+cause, is beyond my very modest scientific attainments. When one
+reflects upon the countless herds of bison which used to cover the
+Western plains, or marks in the present day the race statistics of the
+French Canadians at one end of the continent, and of the Southern negro
+at the other, it seems absurd to suppose that there is any geographical
+reason against Nature being as prolific here as elsewhere. However,
+these be deeper waters, and with your leave we will get back into my
+usual six-inch wading-depth once more.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+I don’t know how those two little books got in there. They are Henley’s
+“Song of the Sword” and “Book of Verses.” They ought to be over yonder
+in the rather limited Poetry Section. Perhaps it is that I like his
+work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put them ready to my
+hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was very much greater than his
+work, great as some of his work was. I have seldom known a personality
+more magnetic and stimulating. You left his presence, as a battery
+leaves a generating station, charged up and full. He made you feel what
+a lot of work there was to be done, and how glorious it was to be able
+to do it, and how needful to get started upon it that very hour. With
+the frame and the vitality of a giant he was cruelly bereft of all
+outlet for his strength, and so distilled it off in hot words, in warm
+sympathy, in strong prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating
+emotions. Much of the time and energy which might have built an
+imperishable name for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it
+was not waste, for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed
+beneath it. A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature
+to-day.
+
+Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best was
+the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive lines
+more noble and more strong than those which begin with the well-known
+quatrain—
+
+“Out of the night that covers me,
+    Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,
+I thank whatever Gods there be
+    For my unconquerable soul.”
+
+
+It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from a
+man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned
+again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon’s knife. When he said—
+
+“In the fell clutch of Circumstance
+    I have not winced nor cried aloud,
+Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance
+    My head is bloody but unbowed.”
+
+
+It was not what Lady Byron called “the mimic woe” of the poet, but it
+was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake, whose
+proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.
+
+There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the very
+extreme from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running to large
+sweeping images and thundering words. Such are the “Song of the Sword”
+and much more that he has written, like the wild singing of some
+Northern scald. The other, and to my mind both the more characteristic
+and the finer side of his work, is delicate, precise, finely etched,
+with extraordinarily vivid little pictures drawn in carefully phrased
+and balanced English. Such are the “Hospital Verses,” while the “London
+Voluntaries” stand midway between the two styles. What! you have not
+read the “Hospital Verses!” Then get the “Book of Verses” and read them
+without delay. You will surely find something there which, for good or
+ill, is unique. You can name—or at least I can name—nothing to compare
+it with. Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their
+monotonous, if majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is
+so varied, so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the
+weekly journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused
+such a man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five
+booklets behind him!
+
+However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no
+business in this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles of
+various sorts. Here are three in a line, which carry you over a
+splendid stretch of French (which usually means European) history,
+each, as luck would have it, beginning just about the time when the
+other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de Monstrelet, and
+the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the best
+contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a century—a
+fair slice out of the total written record of the human race.
+
+Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval
+French, which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get
+Lord Berners’ almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English, or
+you can turn to a modern translation, such as this one of Johnes. A
+single page of Lord Berners is delightful; but it is a strain, I think,
+to read bulky volumes in an archaic style. Personally, I prefer the
+modern, and even with that you have shown some patience before you have
+reached the end of that big second tome.
+
+I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea of
+what he was doing—whether it ever flashed across his mind that the day
+might come when his book would be the one great authority, not only
+about the times in which he lived, but about the whole institution of
+chivalry? I fear that it is far more likely that his whole object was
+to gain some mundane advantage from the various barons and knights
+whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left it on record, for
+example, that when he visited the Court of England he took with him a
+handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless, if one could follow
+the good Canon one would find his journeys littered with similar copies
+which were probably expensive gifts to the recipient, for what return
+would a knightly soul make for a book which enshrined his own valour?
+
+But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be admitted
+that the work could not have been done more thoroughly. There is
+something of Herodotus in the Canon’s cheery, chatty, garrulous,
+take-it-or-leave-it manner. But he has the advantage of the old Greek
+in accuracy. Considering that he belonged to the same age which gravely
+accepted the travellers’ tales of Sir John Maundeville, it is, I think,
+remarkable how careful and accurate the chronicler is. Take, for
+example, his description of Scotland and the Scotch. Some would give
+the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that is another matter. Scotch
+descriptions are a subject over which a fourteenth-century Hainaulter
+might fairly be allowed a little scope for his imagination. Yet we can
+see that the account must on the whole have been very correct. The
+Galloway nags, the girdle-cakes, the bagpipes—every little detail rings
+true. Jean-le-Bel was actually present in a Border campaign, and from
+him Froissart got his material; but he has never attempted to embroider
+it, and its accuracy, where we can to some extent test it, must
+predispose us to accept his accounts where they are beyond our
+confirmation.
+
+But the most interesting portion of old Froissart’s work is that which
+deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time, their deeds,
+their habits, their methods of talking. It is true that he lived
+himself just a little after the true heyday of chivalry; but he was
+quite early enough to have met many of the men who had been looked upon
+as the flower of knighthood of the time. His book was read too, and
+commented on by these very men (as many of them as could read), and so
+we may take it that it was no fancy portrait, but a correct picture of
+these soldiers which is to be found in it. The accounts are always
+consistent. If you collate the remarks and speeches of the knights (as
+I have had occasion to do) you will find a remarkable uniformity
+running through them. We may believe then that this really does
+represent the kind of men who fought at Crecy and at Poictiers, in the
+age when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in
+London, and England reached a pitch of military glory which has perhaps
+never been equalled in her history.
+
+In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had
+presented to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme
+romancer, you will find that Scott’s mediaeval knights were usually
+muscular athletes in the prime of life: Bois-Guilbert, Front-de-Bœuf,
+Richard, Ivanhoe, Count Robert—they all were such. But occasionally the
+most famous of Froissart’s knights were old, crippled and blinded.
+Chandos, the best lance of his day, must have been over seventy when he
+lost his life through being charged upon the side on which he had
+already lost an eye. He was well on to that age when he rode out from
+the English army and slew the Spanish champion, big Marten Ferrara,
+upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth and strength were very useful, no
+doubt, especially where heavy armour had to be carried, but once on the
+horse’s back the gallant steed supplied the muscles. In an English
+hunting-field many a doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated
+in his familiar saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game.
+So it was among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could
+still carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms,
+and, above all, their cool and undaunted courage.
+
+Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the knight
+was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little quarter in
+his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed. But with all his
+savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable boy
+playing a dreadful game. He was true also to his own curious code, and,
+so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial and sympathetic,
+even in warfare. There was no personal feeling or bitterness as there
+might be now in a war between Frenchmen and Germans. On the contrary,
+the opponents were very softspoken and polite to each other. “Is there
+any small vow of which I may relieve you?” “Would you desire to attempt
+some small deed of arms upon me?” And in the midst of a fight they
+would stop for a breather, and converse amicably the while, with many
+compliments upon each other’s prowess. When Seaton the Scotsman had
+exchanged as many blows as he wished with a company of French knights,
+he said, “Thank you, gentlemen, thank you!” and galloped away. An
+English knight made a vow, “for his own advancement and the exaltation
+of his lady,” that he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and
+touch with his lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most
+characteristic of the times. As he galloped up, the French knights
+around the barrier, seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon
+him, and called out to him that he had carried himself well. As he
+returned, however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe
+upon the side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him. Here
+ends the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher
+had a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not
+stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy, meet
+so plebeian an end.
+
+De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional than
+Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones out of
+that quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course Quentin
+Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The whole
+history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold, the
+strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the barber
+and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage cruelty
+and of slavish superstition—it is all set forth here. One would imagine
+that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of strange
+qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and yet like
+causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski’s “Life of Ivan
+the Terrible,” and you will find that more than a century later Russia
+produced a monarch even more diabolical, but working exactly on the
+same lines as Louis, even down to small details. The same cruelty, the
+same superstition, the same astrologers, the same low-born associates,
+the same residence outside the influence of the great cities—a parallel
+could hardly be more complete. If you have not supped too full of
+horrors when you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author’s
+account of Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of monarchs!
+Blood and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons. And
+there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which
+gives it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the
+Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent rule
+in Russia.
+
+Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder has
+as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It is
+Washington Irving’s “Conquest of Granada.” I do not know where he got
+his material for this book—from Spanish Chronicles, I presume—but the
+wars between the Moors and the Christian knights must have been among
+the most chivalrous of exploits. I could not name a book which gets the
+beauty and the glamour of it better than this one, the lance-heads
+gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale fires glowing on the crags,
+the stern devotion of the mail-clad Christians, the debonnaire and
+courtly courage of the dashing Moslem. Had Washington Irving written
+nothing else, that book alone should have forced the door of every
+library. I love all his books, for no man wrote fresher English with a
+purer style; but of them all it is still “The Conquest of Granada” to
+which I turn most often.
+
+To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are two
+exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are a
+brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has only
+two books. This green-and-gold volume contains both the works of the
+Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady Wilde. The
+first is “Sidonia the Sorceress,” the second, “The Amber Witch.” I
+don’t know where one may turn for a stranger view of the Middle Ages,
+the quaint details of simple life, with sudden intervals of grotesque
+savagery. The most weird and barbarous things are made human and
+comprehensible. There is one incident which haunts one after one has
+read it, where the executioner chaffers with the villagers as to what
+price they will give him for putting some young witch to the torture,
+running them up from a barrel of apples to a barrel and a half, on the
+grounds that he is now old and rheumatic, and that the stooping and
+straining is bad for his back. It should be done on a sloping hill, he
+explains, so that the “dear little children” may see it easily. Both
+“Sidonia” and “The Amber Witch” give such a picture of old Germany as I
+have never seen elsewhere.
+
+But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in whom
+I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who is, if I
+mistake not, young and with his career still before him. “The
+Forerunner” and “The Death of the Gods” are the only two books of his
+which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of Renaissance Italy
+in the one, and of declining Rome in the other, are in my opinion among
+the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that as I read them I was
+pleased to find how open my mind was to new impressions, for one of the
+greatest mental dangers which comes upon a man as he grows older is
+that he should become so attached to old favourites that he has no room
+for the new-comer, and persuades himself that the days of great things
+are at an end because his own poor brain is getting ossified. You have
+but to open any critical paper to see how common is the disease, but a
+knowledge of literary history assures us that it has always been the
+same, and that if the young writer is discouraged by adverse
+comparisons it has been the common lot from the beginning. He has but
+one resource, which is to pay no heed to criticism, but to try to
+satisfy his own highest standard and leave the rest to time and the
+public. Here is a little bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see, beside my
+bookcase, which may in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to some
+younger brother—
+
+“Critics kind—never mind!
+Critics flatter—no matter!
+Critics blame—all the same!
+Critics curse—none the worse!
+Do your best— —— the rest!”
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants,
+but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been
+explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon
+has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken virtue
+and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to our age,
+and will idealize our romance and—our courage, even as we do that of
+our distant forbears. “It is wonderful what these people did with their
+rude implements and their limited appliances!” That is what they will
+say when they read of our explorations, our voyages, and our wars.
+
+Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight’s “Cruise of
+the _Falcon_.” Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul into a
+body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there is anything
+in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen—solicitors, if I remember
+right—go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a long-shore youth, and
+they embark in a tiny boat in which they put to sea. Where do they turn
+up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they penetrate to Paraguay, return to the
+West Indies, sell their little boat there, and so home. What could the
+Elizabethan mariners have done more? There are no Spanish galleons now
+to vary the monotony of such a voyage, but had there been I am very
+certain our adventurers would have had their share of the doubloons.
+But surely it was the nobler when done out of the pure lust of
+adventure and in answer to the call of the sea, with no golden bait to
+draw them on. The old spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with
+top hats, frock coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also
+will seem romantic when centuries have blurred them.
+
+Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still linger
+upon earth is that large copy of the “Voyage of the _Discovery_ in the
+Antarctic” by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion with no
+attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or perhaps all
+the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one reads it, and
+reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear view of just those
+qualities which make the best kind of Briton. Every nation produces
+brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But there is a certain type
+which mixes its bravery and its energy with a gentle modesty and a
+boyish good-humour, and it is just this type which is the highest. Here
+the whole expedition seem to have been imbued with the spirit of their
+commander. No flinching, no grumbling, every discomfort taken as a
+jest, no thought of self, each working only for the success of the
+enterprise. When you have read of such privations so endured and so
+chronicled, it makes one ashamed to show emotion over the small
+annoyances of daily life. Read of Scott’s blinded, scurvy-struck party
+staggering on to their goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat
+of a northern sun, or the dust of a country road.
+
+That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We
+are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was otherwise—when it
+was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman should always be the
+Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of
+life. “You look cold, sir,” said an English sympathizer to a French
+_emigré_. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat.
+“Sir,” said he, “a gentleman is never cold.” One’s consideration for
+others as well as one’s own self-respect should check the grumble. This
+self-suppression, and also the concealment of pain are two of the old
+_noblesse oblige_ characteristics which are now little more than a
+tradition. Public opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who
+must hop because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his
+knuckles are bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of
+pity, but of contempt.
+
+The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans as
+well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is Greely’s
+“Arctic Service,” and it is a worthy shelf-companion to Scott’s
+“Account of the Voyage of the _Discovery_.” There are incidents in this
+book which one can never forget. The episode of those twenty-odd men
+lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one a day from cold and
+hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our puny tragedies of
+romance. And the gallant starving leader giving lectures on abstract
+science in an attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from
+their sufferings—what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad
+to suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could
+do all these things for six months on end, and that some should live to
+tell the tale, is, indeed, a marvel. What a world of feeling lies in
+the exclamation of the poor dying lieutenant: “Well, this _is_
+wretched,” he groaned, as he turned his face to the wall.
+
+The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there is
+none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of
+discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the
+lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine
+object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the British army who
+went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And this expedition of
+Greely’s gave rise to another example which seems to me hardly less
+remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the book, that even when
+there were only about eight unfortunates still left, hardly able to
+move for weakness and hunger, the seven took the odd man out upon the
+ice, and shot him dead for breach of discipline. The whole grim
+proceeding was carried out with as much method and signing of papers,
+as if they were all within sight of the Capitol at Washington. His
+offence had consisted, so far as I can remember, of stealing and eating
+the thong which bound two portions of the sledge together, something
+about as appetizing as a bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to
+say, however, that it was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the
+thong of a sledge might mean life or death to the whole party.
+
+Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas is
+always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within the
+borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most lovely
+and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain something of its
+glamour. Standing on the confines of known geography I have shot the
+southward flying ducks, and have taken from their gizzards pebbles
+which they have swallowed in some land whose shores no human foot has
+trod. The memory of that inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes
+of deep blue water, of the cloudless sky shading away into a light
+green and then into a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy
+companionable birds, of the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the
+slug-like seals, startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of
+the ice—all of it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem
+little more than some fantastic dream itself, so removed is it from the
+main stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in
+weight, and worth two thousand pounds—but what in the world has all
+this to do with my bookcase?
+
+Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me
+straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen’s “Cruise of the
+_Cachelot_,” a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of the
+sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it in ships.
+This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and very different
+from that Greenland ice groping in which I served a seven-months’
+apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the past—certainly the
+northern fishing is so, for why should men risk their lives to get oil
+when one has but to sink a pipe in the ground. It is the more fortunate
+then that it should have been handled by one of the most virile writers
+who has described a sailor’s life. Bullen’s English at its best rises
+to a great height. If I wished to show how high, I would take that next
+book down, “Sea Idylls.”
+
+How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose? It
+is a simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a long calm
+in the tropics.
+
+“A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue of the
+sea. No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror, the splendour of
+the sun, the sweet silvery glow of the moon, or the coruscating
+clusters of countless stars. Like the ashen-grey hue that bedims the
+countenance of the dying, a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread
+the recent loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant,
+and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour like a breath
+of decay, which clung clammily to the palate and dulled all the senses.
+Drawn by some strange force, from the unfathomable depths below, eerie
+shapes sought the surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar glare
+they had exchanged for their native gloom—uncouth creatures bedight
+with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them,
+fathom-long, medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering all over
+their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like forms of such elusive
+matter that the smallest exposure to the sun melted them, and they were
+not. Lower down, vast pale shadows creep sluggishly along, happily
+undistinguishable as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the
+strange, faint smell that hung about us.”
+
+Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics, or
+take the other one: “Sunrise as seen from the Crow’s-nest,” and you
+must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive English
+in our time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a dozen volumes I
+should certainly give Bullen two places. The others? Well, it is so
+much a matter of individual taste. “Tom Cringle’s Log” should have one
+for certain. I hope boys respond now as they once did to the sharks and
+the pirates, the planters, and all the rollicking high spirits of that
+splendid book. Then there is Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” I
+should find room also for Stevenson’s “Wrecker” and “Ebb Tide.” Clark
+Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself, but anyhow you could not
+miss out “The Wreck of the _Grosvenor_.” Marryat, of course, must be
+represented, and I should pick “Midshipman Easy” and “Peter Simple” as
+his samples. Then throw in one of Melville’s Otaheite books—now far too
+completely forgotten—“Typee” or “Omoo,” and as a quite modern flavour
+Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and Jack London’s “Sea Wolf,” with
+Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus.” Then you will have enough to turn
+your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your ears, if
+written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes when life
+grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to stir! Surely
+it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in an island but had
+an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more must the salt drop
+tingle in the blood of an American when you reflect that in all that
+broad continent there is not one whose forefather did not cross 3000
+miles of ocean. And yet there are in the Central States millions and
+millions of their descendants who have never seen the sea.
+
+I have said that “Omoo” and “Typee,” the books in which the sailor
+Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too rapidly
+into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there is for some
+critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment to undertake rescue
+work among the lost books which would repay salvage! A small volume
+setting forth their names and their claims to attention would be
+interesting in itself, and more interesting in the material to which it
+would serve as an introduction. I am sure there are many good books,
+possibly there are some great ones, which have been swept away for a
+time in the rush. What chance, for example, has any book by an unknown
+author which is published at a moment of great national excitement,
+when some public crisis arrests the popular mind? Hundreds have been
+still-born in this fashion, and are there none which should have lived
+among them? Now, there is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth
+under thirty. It is Snaith’s “Broke of Covenden,” and it scarce
+attained a second edition. I do not say that it is a Classic—I should
+not like to be positive that it is not—but I am perfectly sure that the
+man who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here is
+another novel—“Eight Days,” by Forrest. You can’t buy it. You are lucky
+even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever written will
+bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book will do. Here’s
+another which I will warrant you never heard of. It is Powell’s “Animal
+Episodes.” No, it is not a collection of dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it
+is a series of very singularly told stories which deal with the animal
+side of the human, and which you will feel have an entirely new flavour
+if you have a discriminating palate. The book came out ten years ago,
+and is utterly unknown. If I can point to three in one small shelf, how
+many lost lights must be flitting in the outer darkness!
+
+Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the
+romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have two
+books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these qualities
+as strongly as any I know. I could not choose two better books to put
+into a young man’s hands if you wished to train him first in a gentle
+and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a great love for and
+interest in all that pertains to Nature. The one is Darwin’s “Journal
+of the Voyage of the _Beagle_.” Any discerning eye must have detected
+long before the “Origin of Species” appeared, simply on the strength of
+this book of travel, that a brain of the first order, united with many
+rare qualities of character, had arisen. Never was there a more
+comprehensive mind. Nothing was too small and nothing too great for its
+alert observation. One page is occupied in the analysis of some
+peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next deals with
+the evidence for the subsidence of a continent and the extinction of a
+myriad animals. And his sweep of knowledge was so great—botany,
+geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other. How
+a youth of Darwin’s age—he was only twenty-three when in the year 1831
+he started round the world on the surveying ship _Beagle_—could have
+acquired such a mass of information fills one with the same wonder, and
+is perhaps of the same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by
+instinct the touch of the master. Another quality which one would be
+less disposed to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger,
+which is veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in
+order to detect it. When he was in the Argentine, the country outside
+the Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who
+gave no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles
+between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused to
+accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small things to
+him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.
+
+The second book to which I alluded is Wallace’s “Malay Archipelago.”
+There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same
+courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the same
+catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion for the
+observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition understood and
+described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the Origin of Species at
+the very time when the latter was publishing a book founded upon twenty
+years’ labour to prove the same thesis. What must have been his
+feelings when he read that letter? And yet he had nothing to fear, for
+his book found no more enthusiastic admirer than the man who had in a
+sense anticipated it. Here also one sees that Science has its heroes no
+less than Religion. One of Wallace’s missions in Papua was to examine
+the nature and species of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of
+the years of his wanderings through those islands he made a complete
+investigation of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that
+the Papuans who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed
+cannibals. Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a
+young fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his
+mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+Here we are at the final seance. For the last time, my patient comrade,
+I ask you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green settee, to
+look up at the oaken shelves, and to bear with me as best you may while
+I preach about their contents. The last time! And yet, as I look along
+the lines of the volumes, I have not mentioned one out of ten of those
+to which I owe a debt of gratitude, nor one in a hundred of the
+thoughts which course through my brain as I look at them. As well
+perhaps, for the man who has said all that he has to say has invariably
+said too much.
+
+Let me be didactic for a moment! I assume this solemn—oh, call it not
+pedantic!—attitude because my eye catches the small but select corner
+which constitutes my library of Science. I wanted to say that if I were
+advising a young man who was beginning life, I should counsel him to
+devote one evening a week to scientific reading. Had he the
+perseverance to adhere to his resolution, and if he began it at twenty,
+he would certainly find himself with an unusually well-furnished mind
+at thirty, which would stand him in right good stead in whatever line
+of life he might walk. When I advise him to read science, I do not mean
+that he should choke himself with the dust of the pedants, and lose
+himself in the subdivisions of the Lepidoptera, or the classifications
+of the dicotyledonous plants. These dreary details are the prickly
+bushes in that enchanted garden, and you are foolish indeed if you
+begin your walks by butting your head into one. Keep very clear of them
+until you have explored the open beds and wandered down every easy
+path. For this reason avoid the text-books, which repel, and cultivate
+that popular science which attracts. You cannot hope to be a specialist
+upon all these varied subjects. Better far to have a broad idea of
+general results, and to understand their relations to each other. A
+very little reading will give a man such a knowledge of geology, for
+example, as will make every quarry and railway cutting an object of
+interest. A very little zoology will enable you to satisfy your
+curiosity as to what is the proper name and style of this buff-ermine
+moth which at the present instant is buzzing round the lamp. A very
+little botany will enable you to recognize every flower you are likely
+to meet in your walks abroad, and to give you a tiny thrill of interest
+when you chance upon one which is beyond your ken. A very little
+archaeology will tell you all about yonder British tumulus, or help you
+to fill in the outline of the broken Roman camp upon the downs. A very
+little astronomy will cause you to look more intently at the heavens,
+to pick out your brothers the planets, who move in your own circles,
+from the stranger stars, and to appreciate the order, beauty, and
+majesty of that material universe which is most surely the outward sign
+of the spiritual force behind it. How a man of science can be a
+materialist is as amazing to me as how a sectarian can limit the
+possibilities of the Creator. Show me a picture without an artist, show
+me a bust without a sculptor, show me music without a musician, and
+then you may begin to talk to me of a universe without a
+Universe-maker, call Him by what name you will.
+
+Here is Flammarion’s “L’Atmosphere”—a very gorgeous though
+weather-stained copy in faded scarlet and gold. The book has a small
+history, and I value it. A young Frenchman, dying of fever on the west
+coast of Africa, gave it to me as a professional fee. The sight of it
+takes me back to a little ship’s bunk, and a sallow face with large,
+sad eyes looking out at me. Poor boy, I fear that he never saw his
+beloved Marseilles again!
+
+Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a man’s
+first interest, and giving a broad general view of the subject, than
+these of Samuel Laing. Who would have imagined that the wise savant and
+gentle dreamer of these volumes was also the energetic secretary of a
+railway company? Many men of the highest scientific eminence have begun
+in prosaic lines of life. Herbert Spencer was a railway engineer.
+Wallace was a land surveyor. But that a man with so pronounced a
+scientific brain as Laing should continue all his life to devote his
+time to dull routine work, remaining in harness until extreme old age,
+with his soul still open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring
+new concretions of knowledge, is indeed a remarkable fact. Read those
+books, and you will be a fuller man.
+
+It is an excellent device to talk about what you have recently read.
+Rather hard upon your audience, you may say; but without wishing to be
+personal, I dare bet it is more interesting than your usual small talk.
+It must, of course, be done with some tact and discretion. It is the
+mention of Laing’s works which awoke the train of thought which led to
+these remarks. I had met some one at a _table d’hôte_ or elsewhere who
+made some remark about the prehistoric remains in the valley of the
+Somme. I knew all about those, and showed him that I did. I then threw
+out some allusion to the rock temples of Yucatan, which he instantly
+picked up and enlarged upon. He spoke of ancient Peruvian civilization,
+and I kept well abreast of him. I cited the Titicaca image, and he knew
+all about that. He spoke of Quaternary man, and I was with him all the
+time. Each was more and more amazed at the fulness and the accuracy of
+the information of the other, until like a flash the explanation
+crossed my mind. “You are reading Samuel Laing’s ‘Human Origins’!” I
+cried. So he was, and so by a coincidence was I. We were pouring water
+over each other, but it was all new-drawn from the spring.
+
+There is a big two-volumed book at the end of my science shelf which
+would, even now, have its right to be called scientific disputed by
+some of the pedants. It is Myers’ “Human Personality.” My own opinion,
+for what it is worth, is that it will be recognized a century hence as
+a great root book, one from which a whole new branch of science will
+have sprung. Where between four covers will you find greater evidence
+of patience, of industry, of thought, of discrimination, of that sweep
+of mind which can gather up a thousand separate facts and bind them all
+in the meshes of a single consistent system? Darwin has not been a more
+ardent collector in zoology than Myers in the dim regions of psychic
+research, and his whole hypothesis, so new that a new nomenclature and
+terminology had to be invented to express it, telepathy, the
+subliminal, and the rest of it, will always be a monument of acute
+reasoning, expressed in fine prose and founded upon ascertained fact.
+
+The mere suspicion of scientific thought or scientific methods has a
+great charm in any branch of literature, however far it may be removed
+from actual research. Poe’s tales, for example, owe much to this
+effect, though in his case it was a pure illusion. Jules Verne also
+produces a charmingly credible effect for the most incredible things by
+an adept use of a considerable amount of real knowledge of nature. But
+most gracefully of all does it shine in the lighter form of essay,
+where playful thoughts draw their analogies and illustrations from
+actual fact, each showing up the other, and the combination presenting
+a peculiar piquancy to the reader.
+
+Where could I get better illustration of what I mean than in those
+three little volumes which make up Wendell Holmes’ immortal series,
+“The Autocrat,” “The Poet,” and “The Professor at the Breakfast Table”?
+Here the subtle, dainty, delicate thought is continually reinforced by
+the allusion or the analogy which shows the wide, accurate knowledge
+behind it. What work it is! how wise, how witty, how large-hearted and
+tolerant! Could one choose one’s philosopher in the Elysian fields, as
+once in Athens, I would surely join the smiling group who listened to
+the human, kindly words of the Sage of Boston. I suppose it is just
+that continual leaven of science, especially of medical science, which
+has from my early student days given those books so strong an
+attraction for me. Never have I so known and loved a man whom I had
+never seen. It was one of the ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his
+face, but by the irony of Fate I arrived in his native city just in
+time to lay a wreath upon his newly-turned grave. Read his books again,
+and see if you are not especially struck by the up-to-dateness of them.
+Like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” it seems to me to be work which sprang
+into full flower fifty years before its time. One can hardly open a
+page haphazard without lighting upon some passage which illustrates the
+breadth of view, the felicity of phrase, and the singular power of
+playful but most suggestive analogy. Here, for example, is a
+paragraph—no better than a dozen others—which combines all the rare
+qualities:—
+
+“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good
+mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything
+is thrust upon them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their
+motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself;
+stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons
+in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called
+religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them
+than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and enjoy
+life very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go
+mad if he really holds such and such opinions…. Anything that is
+brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of
+mankind, and perhaps for entire races—anything that assumes the
+necessity for the extermination of instincts which were given to be
+regulated—no matter by what name you call it—no matter whether a fakir,
+or a monk, or a deacon believes it—if received, ought to produce
+insanity in every well-regulated mind.”
+
+There’s a fine bit of breezy polemics for the dreary fifties—a fine bit
+of moral courage too for the University professor who ventured to say
+it.
+
+I put him above Lamb as an essayist, because there is a flavour of
+actual knowledge and of practical acquaintance with the problems and
+affairs of life, which is lacking in the elfin Londoner. I do not say
+that the latter is not the rarer quality. There are my “Essays of
+Elia,” and they are well-thumbed as you see, so it is not because I
+love Lamb less that I love this other more. Both are exquisite, but
+Wendell Holmes is for ever touching some note which awakens an
+answering vibration within my own mind.
+
+The essay must always be a somewhat repellent form of literature,
+unless it be handled with the lightest and deftest touch. It is too
+reminiscent of the school themes of our boyhood—to put a heading and
+then to show what you can get under it. Even Stevenson, for whom I have
+the most profound admiration, finds it difficult to carry the reader
+through a series of such papers, adorned with his original thought and
+quaint turn of phrase. Yet his “Men and Books” and “Virginibus
+Puerisque” are high examples of what may be done in spite of the
+inherent unavoidable difficulty of the task.
+
+But his style! Ah, if Stevenson had only realized how beautiful and
+nervous was his own natural God-given style, he would never have been
+at pains to acquire another! It is sad to read the much-lauded anecdote
+of his imitating this author and that, picking up and dropping, in
+search of the best. The best is always the most natural. When Stevenson
+becomes a conscious stylist, applauded by so many critics, he seems to
+me like a man who, having most natural curls, will still conceal them
+under a wig. The moment he is precious he loses his grip. But when he
+will abide by his own sterling Lowland Saxon, with the direct word and
+the short, cutting sentence, I know not where in recent years we may
+find his mate. In this strong, plain setting the occasional happy word
+shines like a cut jewel. A really good stylist is like Beau Brummell’s
+description of a well-dressed man—so dressed that no one would ever
+observe him. The moment you begin to remark a man’s style the odds are
+that there is something the matter with it. It is a clouding of the
+crystal—a diversion of the reader’s mind from the matter to the manner,
+from the author’s subject to the author himself.
+
+No, I have not the Edinburgh edition. If you think of a
+presentation—but I should be the last to suggest it. Perhaps on the
+whole I would prefer to have him in scattered books, rather than in a
+complete set. The half is more than the whole of most authors, and not
+the least of him. I am sure that his friends who reverenced his memory
+had good warrant and express instructions to publish this complete
+edition—very possibly it was arranged before his lamented end. Yet,
+speaking generally, I would say that an author was best served by being
+very carefully pruned before being exposed to the winds of time. Let
+every weak twig, every immature shoot be shorn away, and nothing but
+strong, sturdy, well-seasoned branches left. So shall the whole tree
+stand strong for years to come. How false an impression of the true
+Stevenson would our critical grandchild acquire if he chanced to pick
+down any one of half a dozen of these volumes! As we watched his hand
+stray down the rank, how we would pray that it might alight upon the
+ones we love, on the “New Arabian Nights” “The Ebb-tide,” “The
+Wrecker,” “Kidnapped,” or “Treasure Island.” These can surely never
+lose their charm.
+
+What noble books of their class are those last, “Kidnapped” and
+“Treasure Island”! both, as you see, shining forth upon my lower shelf.
+“Treasure Island” is the better story, while I could imagine that
+“Kidnapped” might have the more permanent value as being an excellent
+and graphic sketch of the state of the Highlands after the last
+Jacobite insurrection. Each contains one novel and admirable character,
+Alan Breck in the one, and Long John in the other. Surely John Silver,
+with his face the size of a ham, and his little gleaming eyes like
+crumbs of glass in the centre of it, is the king of all seafaring
+desperadoes. Observe how the strong effect is produced in his case:
+seldom by direct assertion on the part of the story-teller, but usually
+by comparison, innuendo, or indirect reference. The objectionable Billy
+Bones is haunted by the dread of “a seafaring man with one leg.”
+Captain Flint, we are told, was a brave man; “he was afraid of none,
+not he, only Silver—Silver was that genteel.” Or, again, where John
+himself says, “there was some that was feared of Pew, and some that was
+feared of Flint; but Flint his own self was feared of me. Feared he
+was, and proud. They was the roughest crew afloat was Flint’s. The
+devil himself would have been feared to go to sea with them. Well, now,
+I will tell you. I’m not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy
+I keep company; but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasn’t the word for
+Flint’s old buccaneers.” So, by a touch here and a hint there, there
+grows upon us the individuality of the smooth-tongued, ruthless,
+masterful, one-legged devil. He is to us not a creation of fiction, but
+an organic living reality with whom we have come in contact; such is
+the effect of the fine suggestive strokes with which he is drawn. And
+the buccaneers themselves, how simple and yet how effective are the
+little touches which indicate their ways of thinking and of acting. “I
+want to go in that cabin, I do; I want their pickles and wine and
+that.” “Now, if you had sailed along o’ Bill you wouldn’t have stood
+there to be spoke twice—not you. That was never Bill’s way, not the way
+of sich as sailed with him.” Scott’s buccaneers in “The Pirate” are
+admirable, but they lack something human which we find here. It will be
+long before John Silver loses his place in sea fiction, “and you may
+lay to that.”
+
+Stevenson was deeply influenced by Meredith, and even in these books
+the influence of the master is apparent. There is the apt use of an
+occasional archaic or unusual word, the short, strong descriptions, the
+striking metaphors, the somewhat staccato fashion of speech. Yet, in
+spite of this flavour, they have quite individuality enough to
+constitute a school of their own. Their faults, or rather perhaps their
+limitations, lie never in the execution, but entirely in the original
+conception. They picture only one side of life, and that a strange and
+exceptional one. There is no female interest. We feel that it is an
+apotheosis of the boy-story—the penny number of our youth _in
+excelsis_. But it is all so good, so fresh, so picturesque, that,
+however limited its scope, it still retains a definite and well-assured
+place in literature. There is no reason why “Treasure Island” should
+not be to the rising generation of the twenty-first century what
+“Robinson Crusoe” has been to that of the nineteenth. The balance of
+probability is all in that direction.
+
+The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the
+rougher, more stirring side of life, with the objective rather than the
+subjective, marks the reaction against the abuse of love in fiction.
+This one phase of life in its orthodox aspect, and ending in the
+conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed and worn to a shadow, that
+it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency sometimes to swing
+to the other extreme, and to give it less than its fair share in the
+affairs of men. In British fiction nine books out of ten have held up
+love and marriage as the be-all and end-all of life. Yet we know, in
+actual practice, that this may not be so. In the career of the average
+man his marriage is an incident, and a momentous incident; but it is
+only one of several. He is swayed by many strong emotions—his business,
+his ambitions, his friendships, his struggles with the recurrent
+dangers and difficulties which tax a man’s wisdom and his courage. Love
+will often play a subordinate part in his life. How many go through the
+world without ever loving at all? It jars upon us then to have it
+continually held up as the predominating, all-important fact in life;
+and there is a not unnatural tendency among a certain school, of which
+Stevenson is certainly the leader, to avoid altogether a source of
+interest which has been so misused and overdone. If all love-making
+were like that between Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough, then indeed
+we could not have too much of it; but to be made attractive once more,
+the passion must be handled by some great master who has courage to
+break down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for his
+inspiration.
+
+The use of novel and piquant forms of speech is one of the most obvious
+of Stevenson’s devices. No man handles his adjectives with greater
+judgment and nicer discrimination. There is hardly a page of his work
+where we do not come across words and expressions which strike us with
+a pleasant sense of novelty, and yet express the meaning with admirable
+conciseness. “His eyes came coasting round to me.” It is dangerous to
+begin quoting, as the examples are interminable, and each suggests
+another. Now and then he misses his mark, but it is very seldom. As an
+example, an “eye-shot” does not commend itself as a substitute for “a
+glance,” and “to tee-hee” for “to giggle” grates somewhat upon the ear,
+though the authority of Chaucer might be cited for the expressions.
+
+Next in order is his extraordinary faculty for the use of pithy
+similes, which arrest the attention and stimulate the imagination. “His
+voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock.” “I saw her sway,
+like something stricken by the wind.” “His laugh rang false, like a
+cracked bell.” “His voice shook like a taut rope.” “My mind flying like
+a weaver’s shuttle.” “His blows resounded on the grave as thick as
+sobs.” “The private guilty considerations I would continually observe
+to peep forth in the man’s talk like rabbits from a hill.” Nothing
+could be more effective than these direct and homely comparisons.
+
+After all, however, the main characteristic of Stevenson is his curious
+instinct for saying in the briefest space just those few words which
+stamp the impression upon the reader’s mind. He will make you see a
+thing more clearly than you would probably have done had your eyes
+actually rested upon it. Here are a few of these word-pictures, taken
+haphazard from among hundreds of equal merit—
+
+“Not far off Macconochie was standing with his tongue out of his mouth,
+and his hand upon his chin, like a dull fellow thinking hard.
+
+“Stewart ran after us for more than a mile, and I could not help
+laughing as I looked back at last and saw him on a hill, holding his
+hand to his side, and nearly burst with running.
+
+“Ballantrae turned to me with a face all wrinkled up, and his teeth all
+showing in his mouth…. He said no word, but his whole appearance was a
+kind of dreadful question.
+
+“Look at him, if you doubt; look at him, grinning and gulping, a
+detected thief.
+
+“He looked me all over with a warlike eye, and I could see the
+challenge on his lips.”
+
+What could be more vivid than the effect produced by such sentences as
+these?
+
+There is much more that might be said as to Stevenson’s peculiar and
+original methods in fiction. As a minor point, it might be remarked
+that he is the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain. It
+is true that Mr. Wilkie Collins has described one gentleman who had not
+only been deprived of all his limbs, but was further afflicted by the
+insupportable name of Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson, however, has used
+the effect so often, and with such telling results, that he may be said
+to have made it his own. To say nothing of Hyde, who was the very
+impersonation of deformity, there is the horrid blind Pew, Black Dog
+with two fingers missing, Long John with his one leg, and the sinister
+catechist who is blind but shoots by ear, and smites about him with his
+staff. In “The Black Arrow,” too, there is another dreadful creature
+who comes tapping along with a stick. Often as he has used the device,
+he handles it so artistically that it never fails to produce its
+effect.
+
+Is Stevenson a classic? Well, it is a large word that. You mean by a
+classic a piece of work which passes into the permanent literature of
+the country. As a rule, you only know your classics when they are in
+their graves. Who guessed it of Poe, and who of Borrow? The Roman
+Catholics only canonize their saints a century after their death. So
+with our classics. The choice lies with our grandchildren. But I can
+hardly think that healthy boys will ever let Stevenson’s books of
+adventure die, nor do I think that such a short tale as “The Pavilion
+on the Links” nor so magnificent a parable as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
+will ever cease to be esteemed. How well I remember the eagerness, the
+delight with which I read those early tales in “Cornhill” away back in
+the late seventies and early eighties. They were unsigned, after the
+old unfair fashion, but no man with any sense of prose could fail to
+know that they were all by the same author. Only years afterwards did I
+learn who that author was.
+
+I have Stevenson’s collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet.
+Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful
+sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic, for
+it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of the last
+century—that is if I am right in supposing that “The Ancient Mariner”
+appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. I would put Coleridge’s
+tour de force of grim fancy first, but I know none other to compare in
+glamour and phrase and easy power with “Ticonderoga.” Then there is his
+immortal epitaph. The two pieces alone give him a niche of his own in
+our poetical literature, just as his character gives him a niche of his
+own in our affections. No, I never met him. But among my most prized
+possessions are several letters which I received from Samoa. From that
+distant tower he kept a surprisingly close watch upon what was doing
+among the bookmen, and it was his hand which was among the first held
+out to the striver, for he had quick appreciation and keen sympathies
+which met another man’s work half-way, and wove into it a beauty from
+his own mind.
+
+And now, my very patient friend, the time has come for us to part, and
+I hope my little sermons have not bored you over-much. If I have put
+you on the track of anything which you did not know before, then verify
+it and pass it on. If I have not, there is no harm done, save that my
+breath and your time have been wasted. There may be a score of mistakes
+in what I have said—is it not the privilege of the conversationalist to
+misquote? My judgments may differ very far from yours, and my likings
+may be your abhorrence; but the mere thinking and talking of books is
+in itself good, be the upshot what it may. For the time the magic door
+is still shut. You are still in the land of faerie. But, alas, though
+you shut that door, you cannot seal it. Still come the ring of bell,
+the call of telephone, the summons back to the sordid world of work and
+men and daily strife. Well, that’s the real life after all—this only
+the imitation. And yet, now that the portal is wide open and we stride
+out together, do we not face our fate with a braver heart for all the
+rest and quiet and comradeship that we found behind the Magic Door?
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through the Magic Door, by Arthur Conan Doyle</title>
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through the Magic Door, by Arthur Conan Doyle</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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 <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Through the Magic Door</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Arthur Conan Doyle</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: June 30, 2002 [eBook #5317]<br />
+[Most recently updated: June 14, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Anders Thulin and Andrew Sly</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>Through the Magic Door</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Arthur Conan Doyle</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">I.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">II.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">III.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">IV.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">V.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">VI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">VII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">VIII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">IX.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">X.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">XI.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">XII.</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>I.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it
+adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares
+of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead,
+and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and
+vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that
+is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their
+ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but
+to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely
+there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that
+familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in
+cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer&rsquo;s ink. Each cover of a true
+book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the
+writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable
+dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the miraculous
+good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were suddenly to learn that
+Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that he would favour any of us with an
+hour of his wit and his fancy. How eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we
+have him&mdash;the very best of him&mdash;at our elbows from week to week, and
+hardly trouble ourselves to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter
+what mood a man may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he
+can summon the world&rsquo;s greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be
+thoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are the
+masters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one of
+the world&rsquo;s great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds him
+enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may come to
+think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of
+us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever
+obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are
+surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of
+the human race. But best of all when the dead man&rsquo;s wisdom and the dead
+man&rsquo;s example give us guidance and strength and in the living of our own
+strenuous days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green settee, where
+you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of volumes. Smoking is not
+forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of them? Well, I ask nothing better,
+for there is no volume there which is not a dear, personal friend, and what can
+a man talk of more pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but
+these are my own favourites&mdash;the ones I care to re-read and to have near
+my elbow. There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow
+memories to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a possession dearer.
+You see the line of old, brown volumes at the bottom? Every one of those
+represents a lunch. They were bought in my student days, when times were not
+too affluent. Threepence was my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and
+glass of beer; but, as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the
+most fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a large
+tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books, with a card above
+which announced that any volume therein could be purchased for the identical
+sum which I carried in my pocket. As I approached it a combat ever raged
+betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous
+mind. Five times out of six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then
+there was an entrancing five minutes&rsquo; digging among out-of-date almanacs,
+volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found something
+which made it all worth while. If you will look over these titles, you will see
+that I did not do so very badly. Four volumes of Gordon&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Tacitus&rdquo; (life is too short to read originals, so long as there
+are good translations), Sir William Temple&rsquo;s Essays, Addison&rsquo;s
+works, Swift&rsquo;s &ldquo;Tale of a Tub,&rdquo; Clarendon&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;History,&rdquo; &ldquo;Gil Blas,&rdquo; Buckingham&rsquo;s Poems,
+Churchill&rsquo;s Poems, &ldquo;Life of Bacon&rdquo;&mdash;not so bad for the
+old threepenny tub.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness of the
+rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering. Once they adorned the
+shelves of some noble library, and even among the odd almanacs and the sermons
+they bore the traces of their former greatness, like the faded silk dress of
+the reduced gentlewoman, a present pathos but a glory of the past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and free
+libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the thing that comes to
+him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill which Carlyle felt when he
+hurried home with the six volumes of Gibbon&rsquo;s &ldquo;History&rdquo; under
+his arm, his mind just starving for want of food, to devour them at the rate of
+one a day? A book should be your very own before you can really get the taste
+of it, and unless you have worked for it, you will never have the true inward
+pride of possession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I have had most
+pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder stained copy of
+Macaulay&rsquo;s &ldquo;Essays.&rdquo; It seems entwined into my whole life as
+I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it has been with me on
+the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble kit when I went
+a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their brains over
+it, and you may still see the grease stains where the second engineer grappled
+with Frederick the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged
+morocco-bound volume could ever take its place for me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach the study
+either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli, Hallam, Southey, Bunyan,
+Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive, Hastings, Chatham&mdash;what nuclei for
+thought! With a good grip of each how pleasant and easy to fill in all that
+lies between! The short, vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the
+exact detail, they all throw a glamour round the subject and should make the
+least studious of readers desire to go further. If Macaulay&rsquo;s hand cannot
+lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up all hope of
+ever finding them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I was a senior schoolboy this book&mdash;not this very volume, for it had
+an even more tattered predecessor&mdash;opened up a new world to me. History
+had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and the drudgery became an
+incursion into an enchanted land, a land of colour and beauty, with a kind,
+wise guide to point the path. In that great style of his I loved even the
+faults&mdash;indeed, now that I come to think of it, it was the faults which I
+loved best. No sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no
+antithesis too flowery. It pleased me to read that &ldquo;a universal shout of
+laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the days of the
+crusades were past,&rdquo; and I was delighted to learn that &ldquo;Lady
+Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses, and Mr. Dash
+wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady Jerningham&rsquo;s
+vase.&rdquo; Those were the kind of sentences which used to fill me with a
+vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger in the musician&rsquo;s
+ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as he grows older, but still as I
+glance over the Essays I am filled with admiration and wonder at the alternate
+power of handling a great subject, and of adorning it by delightful
+detail&mdash;just a bold sweep of the brush, and then the most delicate
+stippling. As he leads you down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring
+side-tracks which branch away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
+literary and historical education might be effected by working through every
+book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be curious, however, to know
+the exact age of the youth when he came to the end of his studies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that it would
+have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power of drawing an
+imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift of reconstructing a dead
+celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look at the simple half-paragraph in which he
+gives us Johnson and his atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture given in
+a shorter space&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stand
+the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those
+heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles
+of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and
+the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with
+his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as
+familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought
+up&mdash;the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of
+disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the
+scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We
+see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form
+rolling; we hear it puffing, and then comes the &lsquo;Why, sir!&rsquo; and the
+&lsquo;What then, sir?&rsquo; and the &lsquo;No, sir!&rsquo; and the &lsquo;You
+don&rsquo;t see your way through the question, sir!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is etched into your memory for ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the first thing
+I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage to Macaulay&rsquo;s
+grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under the shadow of Addison,
+and amid the dust of the poets whom he had loved so well. It was the one great
+object of interest which London held for me. And so it might well be, when I
+think of all I owe him. It is not merely the knowledge and the stimulation of
+fresh interests, but it is the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal
+outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of prejudice. My judgment now
+confirms all that I felt for him then.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the right of the
+Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that work&mdash;the one which
+reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has always seemed to me
+the very high-water mark of Macaulay&rsquo;s powers, with its marvellous
+mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the
+statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into
+wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have
+cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take
+a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner in the
+country, or a countryman in London, felt equally out of place in those days of
+difficult travel, would seem to hardly require stating, and to afford no
+opportunity of leaving a strong impression upon the reader&rsquo;s mind. See
+what Macaulay makes of it, though it is no more than a hundred other paragraphs
+which discuss a hundred various points&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he had intruded
+into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of a Lincolnshire
+or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished
+from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his
+accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled into gutters, ran
+against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an
+excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies
+jostled him into the kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
+thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman&rsquo;s
+coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor&rsquo;s Show.
+Money-droppers, sore from the cart&rsquo;s tail, introduced themselves to him,
+and appeared to him the most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen.
+Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves
+on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he asked his way to St.
+James&rsquo;, his informants sent him to Mile End. If he went into a shop, he
+was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else
+would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not
+go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he became a mark for the
+insolent derision of fops, and the grave waggery of Templars. Enraged and
+mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his
+tenants and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the
+vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a
+great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his
+seat on the bench near the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he
+saluted the Lord Lieutenant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at the very
+head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another volume. The History
+as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach the same level as the shorter
+articles. One cannot but feel that it is a brilliant piece of special pleading
+from a fervid Whig, and that there must be more to be said for the other side
+than is there set forth. Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his
+own political and religious limitations. The best are those which get right
+away into the broad fields of literature and philosophy. Johnson, Walpole,
+Madame D&rsquo;Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian ones, Clive and Warren
+Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick the Great, too, must surely stand in
+the first rank. Only one would I wish to eliminate. It is the diabolically
+clever criticism upon Montgomery. One would have wished to think that
+Macaulay&rsquo;s heart was too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter
+an attack. Bad work will sink of its own weight. It is not necessary to souse
+the author as well. One would think more highly of the man if he had not done
+that savage bit of work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I don&rsquo;t know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott,
+whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of their own.
+Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence, and woke such
+admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity in the minds and
+characters of the two men. You don&rsquo;t see it, you say? Well, just think of
+Scott&rsquo;s &ldquo;Border Ballads,&rdquo; and then of Macaulay&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Lays.&rdquo; The machines must be alike, when the products are so
+similar. Each was the only man who could possibly have written the poems of the
+other. What swing and dash in both of them! What a love of all that is manly
+and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so strong. But there are minds on
+which strength and simplicity are thrown away. They think that unless a thing
+is obscure it must be superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which
+is turbid, and the deep which is clear. Do you remember the fatuous criticism
+of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious &ldquo;Lays,&rdquo; where he calls out
+&ldquo;is this poetry?&rdquo; after quoting&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;And how can man die better<br/>
+    Than facing fearful odds<br/>
+For the ashes of his fathers<br/>
+    And the Temples of his Gods?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was really showing
+that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The baldness of the idea and of the
+language had evidently offended him. But this is exactly where the true merit
+lies. Macaulay is giving the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded
+soldier appeals to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
+sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines are, I think,
+taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and have just the dramatic
+quality and sense which a ballad poet must have. That opinion of Arnold&rsquo;s
+shook my faith in his judgment, and yet I would forgive a good deal to the man
+who wrote&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;One more charge and then be dumb,<br/>
+    When the forts of Folly fall,<br/>
+May the victors when they come<br/>
+    Find my body near the wall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Not a bad verse that for one&rsquo;s life aspiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is one of the things which human society has not yet understood&mdash;the
+value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does we shall meet them everywhere
+engraved on appropriate places, and our progress through the streets will be
+brightened and ennobled by one continual series of beautiful mental impulses
+and images, reflected into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our
+eyes. To think that we should walk with empty, listless minds while all this
+splendid material is running to waste. I do not mean mere Scriptural texts, for
+they do not bear the same meaning to all, though what human creature can fail
+to be spurred onwards by &ldquo;Work while it is day, for the night cometh when
+no man can work.&rdquo; But I mean those beautiful thoughts&mdash;who can say
+that they are uninspired thoughts?&mdash;which may be gathered from a hundred
+authors to match a hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most
+precious jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and
+ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a horse-trough across the road
+from my house, a plain stone trough, and no man could pass it with any feelings
+save vague discontent at its ugliness. But suppose that on its front slab you
+print the verse of Coleridge&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;He prayeth best who loveth best<br/>
+    All things, both great and small<br/>
+For the dear Lord who fashioned him<br/>
+    He knows and loveth all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I fear I may misquote, for I have not &ldquo;The Ancient Mariner&rdquo; at my
+elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough? We all do
+this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There are few men who have not
+some chosen quotations printed on their study mantelpieces, or, better still,
+in their hearts. Carlyle&rsquo;s transcription of &ldquo;Rest! Rest! Shall I
+not have all Eternity to rest in!&rdquo; is a pretty good spur to a weary man.
+But what we need is a more general application of the same thing for public and
+not for private use, until people understand that a graven thought is as
+beautiful an ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye right deep
+down into the soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay&rsquo;s glorious lays, save
+that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you can pluck quite
+a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to learn the Lay of Horatius off
+by heart when I was a child, and it stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that
+even now I can reel off almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in
+conversation he was like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but
+could not compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So the
+ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf which waits for
+reference. But I want you now to move your eye a little farther down the shelf
+to the line of olive-green volumes. That is my edition of Scott. But surely I
+must give you a little breathing space before I venture upon them.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>II.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books
+which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for
+your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the
+preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and
+always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy
+books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day
+which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like
+a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From
+that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with
+some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were
+before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds
+itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and
+so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all
+that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green line of
+Scott&rsquo;s novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were the first books
+I ever owned&mdash;long, long before I could appreciate or even understand
+them. But at last I realized what a treasure they were. In my boyhood I read
+them by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of
+crime added a new zest to the story. Perhaps you have observed that my
+&ldquo;Ivanhoe&rdquo; is of a different edition from the others. The first copy
+was left in the grass by the side of a stream, fell into the water, and was
+eventually picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank.
+I think I may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed, it
+was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was replaced, for my
+instinct was always to read it again instead of breaking fresh ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two literary
+friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they thought the most
+dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was found that all three had
+chosen the same. It was the moment when the unknown knight, at
+Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions of the lesser men, strikes with
+the sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the
+formidable Templar. It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no
+Templar was allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
+frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great masters to
+make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. Was it not Wendell
+Holmes who described the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room with a couple
+of facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose
+on any play of fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives
+a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English prize-fighter Mr.
+Jim-John-Jack&mdash;well, it <i>was</i> so, and that&rsquo;s an end of it.
+&ldquo;There is no second line of rails at that point,&rdquo; said an editor to
+a minor author. &ldquo;I make a second line,&rdquo; said the author; and he was
+within his rights, if he can carry his readers&rsquo; conviction with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this is a digression from &ldquo;Ivanhoe.&rdquo; What a book it is! The
+second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every successive
+reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott&rsquo;s soldiers are always as
+good as his women (with exceptions) are weak; but here, while the soldiers are
+at their very best, the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of
+the story from the usual commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he
+was a manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he had never the
+hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for a dozen chapters on end with
+a minimum of petticoat&mdash;in the long stretch, for example, from the
+beginning of the Tournament to the end of the Friar Tuck incident&mdash;that we
+realize the height of continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I
+don&rsquo;t think in the whole range of our literature we have a finer
+sustained flight than that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in Scott&rsquo;s
+novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the shell very thick
+before you come to the oyster. They are often admirable in themselves, learned,
+witty, picturesque, but with no relation or proportion to the story which they
+are supposed to introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very
+good matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order are
+traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on nothing
+a year as Thackeray did in &ldquo;Vanity Fair,&rdquo; or sandwiching in a ghost
+story as Dickens has dared to do. As well might a dramatic author rush up to
+the footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its
+action and his characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though
+every great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
+lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get past all that
+to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase, the short
+fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when the reckless Sergeant of
+Dragoons stands at last before the grim Puritan, upon whose head a price has
+been set: &ldquo;A thousand marks or a bed of heather!&rdquo; says he, as he
+draws. The Puritan draws also: &ldquo;The Sword of the Lord and of
+Gideon!&rdquo; says he. No verbiage there! But the very spirit of either man
+and of either party, in the few stern words, which haunt your mind. &ldquo;Bows
+and Bills!&rdquo; cry the Saxon Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home.
+You feel it is just what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike
+was the actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day
+when they fought under the &ldquo;Red Dragon of Wessex&rdquo; on the low ridge
+at Hastings. &ldquo;Out! Out!&rdquo; they roared, as the Norman chivalry broke
+upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic&mdash;the very genius of the race was in the
+cry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they are damped
+down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited? Something of each,
+perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as a young signal midshipman, had
+taken Nelson&rsquo;s famous message from the Signal Yeoman and communicated it
+to the ship&rsquo;s company. The officers were impressed. The men were not.
+&ldquo;Duty!&rdquo; they muttered. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve always done it. Why
+not?&rdquo; Anything in the least highfalutin&rsquo; would depress, not exalt,
+a British company. It is the under statement which delights them. German troops
+can march to battle singing Luther&rsquo;s hymns. Frenchmen will work
+themselves into a frenzy by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial
+poets need not trouble to imitate&mdash;or at least need not imagine that if
+they do so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
+working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s another lump
+of sugar for the Bird.&rdquo; I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain of
+&ldquo;A little bit off the top.&rdquo; The martial poet aforesaid, unless he
+had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a good deal of
+ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The Russians are not unlike
+us in this respect. I remember reading of some column ascending a breach and
+singing lustily from start to finish, until a few survivors were left
+victorious upon the crest with the song still going. A spectator inquired what
+wondrous chant it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he
+found that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was &ldquo;Ivan
+is in the garden picking cabbages.&rdquo; The fact is, I suppose, that a mere
+monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage warfare, and
+hypnotize the soldier into valour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic with their
+most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during the most bloody war
+which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged&mdash;the only war in which it could
+have been said that they were stretched to their uttermost and showed their
+true form&mdash;&ldquo;Tramp, tramp, tramp,&rdquo; &ldquo;John Brown&rsquo;s
+Body,&rdquo; &ldquo;Marching through Georgia&rdquo;&mdash;all had a playful
+humour running through them. Only one exception do I know, and that is the most
+tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an outsider in time of peace can hardly
+read it without emotion. I mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;War-Song of the Republic,&rdquo; with the choral opening line:
+&ldquo;Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.&rdquo; If that
+were ever sung upon a battle-field the effect must have been terrific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts at the
+other side of the Magic Door. You can&rsquo;t pull one out without a dozen
+being entangled with it. But it was Scott&rsquo;s soldiers that I was talking
+of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical, no posing, no heroics
+(the thing of all others which the hero abominates), but just the short bluff
+word and the simple manly ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from
+within his natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
+appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who were his
+own contemporaries&mdash;the finest, perhaps, that the world has ever seen! It
+is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier Emperor, but that was the one
+piece of hackwork of his career. How could a Tory patriot, whose whole training
+had been to look upon Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a
+theme? But the Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men
+could have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a portrait
+of one of Murat&rsquo;s light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of the Old Guard,
+drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister of Gustavus or the archers
+of the French King&rsquo;s Guard in &ldquo;Quentin Durward&rdquo;?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men who during
+the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also the redemption of
+Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from the sidewalks in 1814 would
+have been as interesting and as much romantic figures of the past as the
+mail-clad knights or ruffling cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life
+of a Peninsular veteran, with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as
+Dugald Dalgetty from the German wars. But then no man ever does realize the
+true interest of the age in which he happens to live. All sense of proportion
+is lost, and the little thing hard-by obscures the great thing at a distance.
+It is easy in the dark to confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for
+example, the Old Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St.
+Sebastians, while Columbus was discovering America before their very faces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that I think &ldquo;Ivanhoe&rdquo; the best of Scott&rsquo;s
+novels. I suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the second
+best? It speaks well for their general average that there is hardly one among
+them which might not find some admirers who would vote it to a place of honour.
+To the Scottish-born man those novels which deal with Scottish life and
+character have a quality of raciness which gives them a place apart. There is a
+rich humour of the soil in such books as &ldquo;Old Mortality,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Antiquary,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Rob Roy,&rdquo; which puts them in a
+different class from the others. His old Scottish women are, next to his
+soldiers, the best series of types that he has drawn. At the same time it must
+be admitted that merit which is associated with dialect has such limitations
+that it can never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to
+all the world. On the whole, perhaps, &ldquo;Quentin Durward,&rdquo; on account
+of its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
+importance of the events and people described, would have my vote for the
+second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape novels which have
+formed so numerous an addition to the light literature of the last century. The
+pictures of Charles the Bold and of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily
+vivid. I can see those two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the
+herald, and clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
+clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his superstition and
+his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and is the more effective when
+set up against his bluff and war-like rival. It is not often that historical
+characters work out in their actual physique exactly as one would picture them
+to be, but in the High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and
+Charles which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
+ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It is hard on
+us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas, when, for example, we see
+in the National Portrait Gallery a man with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face,
+and with a start read beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys.
+Occasionally, however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have
+before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which represents
+Queen Mary&rsquo;s Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark the big head,
+fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face, made to captivate a
+sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful features&mdash;the mouth with
+a suggestion of wild boars&rsquo; tusks behind it, the beard which could
+bristle with fury: the whole man and his life-history are revealed in that
+picture. I wonder if Scott had ever seen the original which hangs at the
+Hepburn family seat?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which the critics
+have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the last from his tired pen.
+I mean &ldquo;Count Robert of Paris.&rdquo; I am convinced that if it had been
+the first, instead of the last, of the series it would have attracted as much
+attention as &ldquo;Waverley.&rdquo; I can understand the state of mind of the
+expert, who cried out in mingled admiration and despair: &ldquo;I have studied
+the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer
+who makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!&rdquo; Many men could draw
+with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but to
+reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with such dignity
+and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think, a most wonderful <i>tour de
+force</i>. His failing health showed itself before the end of the novel, but
+had the latter half equalled the first, and contained scenes of such humour as
+Anna Comnena reading aloud her father&rsquo;s exploits, or of such majesty as
+the account of the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus,
+then the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very front
+rank of the novels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse of the
+actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was ever anything in
+the world&rsquo;s history like it? It had what historical incidents seldom
+have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from the half-crazed preaching of
+Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem. Those leaders! It would take a second
+Homer to do them justice. Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the
+unscrupulous and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of
+Normandy the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is not
+worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve anything more
+marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical facts?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure romance of
+&ldquo;The Talisman&rdquo;; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life in
+&ldquo;The Pirate&rdquo;; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England in
+&ldquo;Kenilworth&rdquo;; the rich humour of the &ldquo;Legend of
+Montrose&rdquo;; above all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series,
+written in a coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive
+ear, and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter Scott,
+and how high the service which he did for literature and for humanity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the same shelf as
+the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his admiring friend.
+The ideal biographer should be a perfectly impartial man, with a sympathetic
+mind, but a stern determination to tell the absolute truth. One would like the
+frail, human side of a man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone
+in the world was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
+Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen eye for a
+pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would have done better to
+stop at the first, or did something to make us feel that they were men and
+brothers. They need not go the length of the lady who began a biography of her
+deceased husband with the words&mdash;&ldquo;D&mdash;&mdash; was a dirty
+man,&rdquo; but the books certainly would be more readable, and the subjects
+more lovable too, if we had greater light and shade in the picture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would have admired
+him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country, and I have not a
+doubt that he took an allowance of toddy occasionally of an evening which would
+have laid his feeble successors under the table. His last years, at least, poor
+fellow, were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while the
+others passed the decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous gentleman he was,
+with how fine a sense of honour, translating itself not into empty phrases, but
+into years of labour and denial! You remember how he became sleeping partner in
+a printing house, and so involved himself in its failure. There was a legal,
+but very little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him had
+he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled him to become
+a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took the whole burden upon himself
+and bore it for the rest of his life, spending his work, his time, and his
+health in the one long effort to save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It
+was nearly a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the
+creditors&mdash;a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his life thrown
+in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who has tried
+to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is recorded that Scott
+produced two of his long novels in one single year. I remember reading in some
+book of reminiscences&mdash;on second thoughts it was in Lockhart
+himself&mdash;how the writer had lodged in some rooms in Castle Street,
+Edinburgh, and how he had seen all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on
+the blind of the opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer
+could see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to the
+pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still the hand was
+moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the rooms opposite were
+occupied by Walter Scott.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction is shown by the
+fact that he wrote two of his books&mdash;good ones, too&mdash;at a time when
+his health was such that he could not afterwards remember one word of them, and
+listened to them when they were read to him as if he were hearing the work of
+another man. Apparently the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary
+memory, were in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
+faculty&mdash;imagination in its supreme form&mdash;was absolutely unimpaired.
+It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives some support
+to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work must have, that his
+supreme work comes to him in some strange way from without, and that he is only
+the medium for placing it upon the paper. The creative thought&mdash;the germ
+thought from which a larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a
+bullet. He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
+originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain functions
+paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible that we are indeed
+but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of the unknown? Certainly it is
+always our best work which leaves the least sense of personal effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail physical powers
+and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man&rsquo;s materialism at its
+lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these spiritual uses? It is an old
+tag that
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Great Genius is to madness close allied,<br/>
+And thin partitions do those rooms divide.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work seems to
+me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns, Shelley, Keats,
+Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band, yet Burns was only
+thirty-eight when he passed away, &ldquo;burned out,&rdquo; as his brother
+terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died by accident, and Chatterton by
+poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid state. It is true that
+Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet
+afterwards. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age
+of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late years, have
+a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled with the white-lead
+workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the really shocking case of the
+young Americans, for example. What a band of promising young writers have in a
+few years been swept away! There was the author of that admirable book,
+&ldquo;David Harum&rdquo;; there was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I
+think, the seeds of greatness more than almost any living writer. His
+&ldquo;Pit&rdquo; seemed to me one of the finest American novels. He also died
+a premature death. Then there was Stephen Crane&mdash;a man who had also done
+most brilliant work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman.
+Is there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers could
+show such losses as that? In the meantime, out of our own men Robert Louis
+Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had rounded off their
+career were really premature in their end. Thackeray, for example, in spite of
+his snowy head, was only 52; Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir
+Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was
+over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of
+his brethren.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is as much, I
+suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another example of the limited
+tenure which Genius has of life, though I believe that he outlived the greater
+part of his own family, who were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge,
+of some nervous disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his
+signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special scourge of the
+imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more, were its victims. As to the
+tradition, first mentioned long after his death, that he died of a fever
+contracted from a drinking bout, it is absurd on the face of it, since no such
+fever is known to science. But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
+likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green volumes
+which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account of his character
+is complete which does not deal with the strange, secretive vein which ran
+through his nature. Not only did he stretch the truth on many occasions in
+order to conceal the fact that he was the author of the famous novels, but even
+intimate friends who met him day by day were not aware that he was the man
+about whom the whole of Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his
+pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the
+first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A psychologist might trace this
+strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who
+flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so
+many of his novels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It&rsquo;s a sad book, Lockhart&rsquo;s &ldquo;Life.&rdquo; It leaves gloom in
+the mind. The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
+overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing intact but
+his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of literature. But they
+pass, these clouds, and all that is left is the memory of the supremely noble
+man, who would not be bent, but faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks
+without a whimper. He sampled every human emotion. Great was his joy and great
+his success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the sons
+of men I don&rsquo;t think there are many greater than he who lies under the
+great slab at Dryburgh.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>III.</h2>
+
+<p>
+We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and Lockhart&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Life&rdquo; which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the four big
+grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print edition of
+Boswell&rsquo;s &ldquo;Life of Johnson.&rdquo; I emphasize the large print, for
+that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English Classics which
+come now into the market. With subjects which are in the least archaic or
+abstruse you need good clear type to help you on your way. The other is good
+neither for your eyes nor for your temper. Better pay a little more and have a
+book that is made for use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That book interests me&mdash;fascinates me&mdash;and yet I wish I could join
+heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully has enjoyed.
+It is difficult to follow his own advice and to &ldquo;clear one&rsquo;s mind
+of cant&rdquo; upon the subject, for when you have been accustomed to look at
+him through the sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to
+take them off, to rub one&rsquo;s eyes, and to have a good honest stare on
+one&rsquo;s own account at the man&rsquo;s actual words, deeds, and
+limitations. If you try it you are left with the oddest mixture of impressions.
+How could one express it save that this is John Bull taken to
+literature&mdash;the exaggerated John Bull of the caricaturists&mdash;with
+every quality, good or evil, at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a
+kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the
+want of sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness, the
+overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle, and every
+other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who was the great
+grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his huge
+friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating the whole world
+with his hero worship. It was most natural that he should himself admire him.
+The relations between the two men were delightful and reflect all credit upon
+each. But they are not a safe basis from which any third person could argue.
+When they met, Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth
+year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and
+impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation with his fame
+already made. From the moment of meeting the one was bound to exercise an
+absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed criticism far more
+difficult than it would be between ordinary father and son. Up to the end this
+was the unbroken relation between them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but it is not by
+chance that a man writes the best biography in the language. He had some great
+and rare literary qualities. One was a clear and vivid style, more flexible and
+Saxon than that of his great model. Another was a remarkable discretion which
+hardly once permitted a fault of taste in this whole enormous book where he
+must have had to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They say
+that he was a fool and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so with a pen in
+his hand. Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson, where he ventured some
+little squeak of remonstrance, before the roaring &ldquo;No, sir!&rdquo; came
+to silence him, there are few in which his views were not, as experience
+proved, the wiser. On the question of slavery he was in the wrong. But I could
+quote from memory at least a dozen cases, including such vital subjects as the
+American Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and so on,
+where Boswell&rsquo;s views were those which survived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those little things
+that you want to know. How often you read the life of a man and are left
+without the remotest idea of his personality. It is not so here. The man lives
+again. There is a short description of Johnson&rsquo;s person&mdash;it is not
+in the Life, but in the Tour to the Hebrides, the very next book upon the
+shelf, which is typical of his vivid portraiture. May I take it down, and read
+you a paragraph of it?&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and
+grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of the cast of an
+ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of King&rsquo;s evil. He
+was now in his sixty-fourth year and was become a little dull of hearing. His
+sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind govern and even
+supply the deficiencies of organs that his perceptions were uncommonly quick
+and accurate. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of
+motion like the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed by
+cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that distemper called St.
+Vitus&rsquo; dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted
+hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt,
+black worsted stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
+wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets which might
+almost have held the two volumes of his folio dictionary, and he carried in his
+hand a large English oak stick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after that it is
+not Mr. Boswell&rsquo;s fault&mdash;and it is but one of a dozen equally vivid
+glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just these pen-pictures of his of
+the big, uncouth man, with his grunts and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite,
+his twenty cups of tea, and his tricks with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts,
+which fascinate the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue
+than his writings could have done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day?
+Not &ldquo;Rasselas,&rdquo; surely&mdash;that stilted romance. &ldquo;The Lives
+of the Poets&rdquo; are but a succession of prefaces, and the
+&ldquo;Ramblers&rdquo; of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of
+the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but
+inconceivable to genius. &ldquo;London&rdquo; has a few vigorous lines, and the
+&ldquo;Journey to the Hebrides&rdquo; some spirited pages. This, with a number
+of political and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely
+it must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant place in
+English literature, and that we must turn to his humble, much-ridiculed
+biographer for the real explanation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such distinction? His
+clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this is a sign of a narrow
+finality&mdash;impossible to the man of sympathy and of imagination, who sees
+the other side of every question and understands what a little island the
+greatest human knowledge must be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which
+surround us. Look at the results. Did ever any single man, the very dullest of
+the race, stand convicted of so many incredible blunders? It recalls the remark
+of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned could be stamped
+upon the whole human race the result would be to propagate the most absurd
+errors. He was asked what became of swallows in the winter. Rolling and
+wheezing, the oracle answered: &ldquo;Swallows,&rdquo; said he,
+&ldquo;certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them conglobulate together
+by flying round and round, and then all in a heap throw themselves under water
+and lie in the bed of a river.&rdquo; Boswell gravely dockets the information.
+However, if I remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne
+had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson&rsquo;s
+misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would have expected
+to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions would seem monstrous to a
+modern taste. &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;never wrote six
+consecutive good lines.&rdquo; He would only admit two good verses in
+Gray&rsquo;s exquisite &ldquo;Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,&rdquo;
+where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad ones. &ldquo;Tristram
+Shandy&rdquo; would not live. &ldquo;Hamlet&rdquo; was gabble. Swift&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Gulliver&rsquo;s Travels&rdquo; was poor stuff, and he never wrote
+anything good except &ldquo;A Tale of a Tub.&rdquo; Voltaire was illiterate.
+Rousseau was a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be
+honest men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I suppose even in
+those days they were reactionary. &ldquo;A poor man has no honour.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Charles the Second was a good King.&rdquo; &ldquo;Governments should
+turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Judges in India should be encouraged to trade.&rdquo; &ldquo;No country
+is the richer on account of trade.&rdquo; (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the
+company when this proposition was laid down!) &ldquo;A landed proprietor should
+turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished.&rdquo; &ldquo;It is not
+good for a labourer to have his wages raised.&rdquo; &ldquo;When the balance of
+trade is against a country, the margin <i>must</i> be paid in current
+coin.&rdquo; Those were a few of his convictions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion. In our more
+generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider those of Johnson! When
+they were all eliminated there was not so very much left. He hated Whigs. He
+disliked Scotsmen. He detested Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was
+&ldquo;an odious wench&rdquo;). He loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow
+line, belching fire and fury at everything to the right or the left of it.
+Macaulay&rsquo;s posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in
+life Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly everything
+that Johnson abominated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong principle,
+or that they could not be altered where his own personal interests demanded it.
+This is one of the weak points of his record. In his dictionary he abused
+pensions and pensioners as a means by which the State imposed slavery upon
+hirelings. When he wrote the unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed
+a most improbable contingency, but when George III., either through policy or
+charity, offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting it.
+One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his convictions
+represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts in this instance seem
+against it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a great talker&mdash;but his talk was more properly a monologue. It was
+a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from his subdued
+audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man who could not brook
+contradiction or even argument upon the most vital questions in life? Would
+Goldsmith defend his literary views, or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his
+Deism? There was no common ground of philosophic toleration on which one could
+stand. If he could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it:
+&ldquo;If his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt
+end.&rdquo; In the face of that &ldquo;rhinoceros laugh&rdquo; there was an end
+of gentle argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say
+&ldquo;Ouf!&rdquo; when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking
+that the older men of Johnson&rsquo;s circle must have given a sigh of relief
+when at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
+without the danger of a scene where &ldquo;Why, no, sir!&rdquo; was very likely
+to ripen into &ldquo;Let us have no more on&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Certainly one would
+like to get behind Boswell&rsquo;s account, and to hear a chat between such men
+as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and atmosphere of
+the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was not there, as compared to
+one when he was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not make due allowance
+for the terrible experiences of his youth and early middle age. His spirit was
+as scarred as his face. He was fifty-three when the pension was given him, and
+up to then his existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first
+necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed. He had seen his
+comrades of letters die of actual privation. From childhood he had known no
+happiness. The half blind gawky youth, with dirty linen and twitching limbs,
+had always, whether in the streets of Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or
+the coffee-houses of London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement. With
+a proud and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some bitter
+humiliation. Such an experience must either break a man&rsquo;s spirit or
+embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that roughness, that
+carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which caused Boswell&rsquo;s
+father to christen him &ldquo;Ursa Major.&rdquo; If his nature was in any way
+warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had gone to the rending of it.
+His good was innate, his evil the result of a dreadful experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He had read
+omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not merely in the vague,
+general way in which we remember what we read, but with every particular of
+place and date. If it were poetry, he could quote it by the page, Latin or
+English. Such a memory has its enormous advantage, but it carries with it its
+corresponding defect. With the mind so crammed with other people&rsquo;s goods,
+how can you have room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory
+is, I think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other
+exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing upon it.
+When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when did he ever reach
+forward into the future, or throw any fresh light upon those enigmas with which
+mankind is faced? Overloaded with the past, he had space for nothing else.
+Modern developments of every sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He
+journeyed in France a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world
+has ever known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once
+responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible around him.
+We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery and
+supplied him with statistics as to his output of beer. It was the same
+foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the drums to drown Louis&rsquo; voice at
+the scaffold. The association shows how near the unconscious sage was to the
+edge of that precipice and how little his learning availed him in discerning
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would think, could
+have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In either case his memory,
+his learning, his dignity, and his inherent sense of piety and justice, would
+have sent him straight to the top. His brain, working within its own
+limitations, was remarkable. There is no more wonderful proof of this than his
+opinions on questions of Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the
+latter before the Scotch judges. That an outsider with no special training
+should at short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and
+reason, is, I think, as remarkable a <i>tour de force</i> as literature can
+show.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must count for much.
+His was a large charity, and it came from a small purse. The rooms of his house
+became a sort of harbour of refuge in which several strange battered hulks
+found their last moorings. There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous
+Mrs. Williams, and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing&mdash;a
+trying group amid which to spend one&rsquo;s days. His guinea was always ready
+for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might not preface
+his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous sentences bore the
+hall-mark of their maker. It is the rough, kindly man, the man who bore the
+poor street-walker home upon his shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least
+forgive, the dogmatic pedantic Doctor of the Club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is always to me something of interest in the view which a great man takes
+of old age and death. It is the practical test of how far the philosophy of his
+life has been a sound one. Hume saw death afar, and met it with unostentatious
+calm. Johnson&rsquo;s mind flinched from that dread opponent. His letters and
+his talk during his latter years are one long cry of fear. It was not
+cowardice, for physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever
+lived. There were no limits to his courage. It was spiritual diffidence,
+coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other world, which a
+more humane and liberal theology has done something to soften. How strange to
+see him cling so desperately to that crazy body, with its gout, its asthma, its
+St. Vitus&rsquo; dance, and its six gallons of dropsy! What could be the
+attraction of an existence where eight hours of every day were spent groaning
+in a chair, and sixteen wheezing in a bed? &ldquo;I would give one of these
+legs,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;for another year of life.&rdquo; None the less,
+when the hour did at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more
+simple dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent him how you
+may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting some mental
+stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight into human learning or
+character, which should leave you a better and a wiser man.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons&mdash;two editions, if you please, for my
+old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting
+a set of Bury&rsquo;s new six-volume presentment of the History. In reading
+that book you don&rsquo;t want to be handicapped in any way. You want fair
+type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not to read it lightly, but with
+some earnestness of purpose and keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas
+at your elbow and a note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back
+every now and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what
+follows. There are no thrills in it. You won&rsquo;t be kept out of your bed at
+night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day, but you will feel
+a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and when it is done you will have
+gained something which you can never lose&mdash;something solid, something
+definite, something that will make you broader and deeper than before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed only one book
+for my companion, it is certainly that which I should choose. For consider how
+enormous is its scope, and what food for thought is contained within those
+volumes. It covers a thousand years of the world&rsquo;s history, it is full
+and good and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style
+dignified. With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous,
+but he lived in an age when Johnson&rsquo;s turgid periods had corrupted our
+literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon&rsquo;s pomposity. A
+paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the
+advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted
+upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side upholding and instructing
+you. Beneath you are warring nations, the clash of races, the rise and fall of
+dynasties, the conflict of creeds. Serene you float above them all, and ever as
+the panorama flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the
+true meaning of the scene into your ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description of the
+state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the throne, and when
+it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass down the line of the Emperors
+with their strange alternations of greatness and profligacy, descending
+occasionally to criminal lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the
+top, and it took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a
+religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of
+Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood. The new creed had only
+added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the many which already existed,
+and the wars of angry nations were mild compared to those of excited sectaries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the waste places
+of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly through the old order,
+leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally cleansing and purifying that which
+was stale and corrupt. A storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did
+suddenly what it may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off,
+and Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is that it
+was not the conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it was the terrified
+fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle, blundered over everything
+which barred their way. It was a wild, dramatic time&mdash;the time of the
+formation of the modern races of Europe. The nations came whirling in out of
+the north and east like dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was
+blended with its neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle
+Gaul got his steadying from the Franks, the steady Saxon got his touch of
+refinement from the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life from the
+Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt Greek made way for the manly and earnest
+Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a great hand blending the seeds. And so
+one can now, save only that emigration has taken the place of war. It does not,
+for example, take much prophetic power to say that something very great is
+being built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic basis
+you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian being added, you feel that
+there is no human quality which may not be thereby evolved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from Rome to
+Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its centre some day not in
+London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is the whole strange story of the tidal
+wave of Mahommedanism from the south, submerging all North Africa, spreading
+right and left to India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally
+washing right over the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
+Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced European fortress of the
+Moslem. Such is the tremendous narrative covering half the world&rsquo;s known
+history, which can all be acquired and made part of yourself by the aid of that
+humble atlas, pencil, and note-book already recommended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me there has
+always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in the first entrance of a
+new race on to the stage of history. It has something of the glamour which
+hangs round the early youth of a great man. You remember how the Russians made
+their debut&mdash;came down the great rivers and appeared at the Bosphorus in
+two hundred canoes, from which they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys.
+Singular that a thousand years have passed and that the ambition of the
+Russians is still to carry out the task at which their skin-clad ancestors
+failed. Or the Turks again; you may recall the characteristic ferocity with
+which they opened their career. A handful of them were on some mission to the
+Emperor. The town was besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and
+the Asiatics obtained leave to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk galloped
+out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside him,
+proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man&rsquo;s comrades that
+they could not be brought to face such uncanny adversaries. So, from opposite
+sides, those two great races arrived at the city which was to be the stronghold
+of the one and the ambition of the other for so many centuries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are those that
+disappear. There is something there which appeals most powerfully to the
+imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those Vandals who conquered the
+north of Africa. They were a German tribe, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from
+somewhere in the Elbe country. Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange
+wandering madness which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of
+least resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to west.
+South-west was the course of the Vandals&mdash;a course which must have been
+continued through pure love of adventure, since in the thousands of miles which
+they traversed there were many fair resting-places, if that were only their
+quest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the more
+adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the old Roman
+province. For two or three generations they held it, much as the English hold
+India, and their numbers were at the least some hundreds of thousands.
+Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those flickers which showed that there
+was still some fire among the ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and
+reconquered the province. The Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled
+inland. Whither did they carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair? Were they
+exterminated by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
+brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid race with
+light eyes and hair. Is it possible that here we have some trace of the
+vanished Germans?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland. That also
+has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic questions in
+history&mdash;the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my eyes to see across
+the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point (or near it) where the old
+&ldquo;Eyrbyggia&rdquo; must have stood. That was the Scandinavian city,
+founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to be a considerable place, so
+much so that they sent to Denmark for a bishop. That would be in the fourteenth
+century. The bishop, coming out to his see, found that he was unable to reach
+it on account of a climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled
+the strait between Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been
+able to say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were at the time,
+be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced race in Europe. They may have
+been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux, the despised Skroeling&mdash;or they may
+have amalgamated with them&mdash;or conceivably they might have held their own.
+Very little is known yet of that portion of the coast. It would be strange if
+some Nansen or Peary were to stumble upon the remains of the old colony, and
+find possibly in that antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of some bygone
+civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been which first
+planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty years, carried out that
+enormous work! There was no classical author so little known, no Byzantine
+historian so diffuse, no monkish chronicle so crabbed, that they were not
+assimilated and worked into their appropriate place in the huge framework.
+Great application, great perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in
+all this, but the coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in the heart
+of his own creation the individuality of the man himself becomes as
+insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the little creature that builds
+the reef. A thousand know Gibbon&rsquo;s work for one who cares anything for
+Gibbon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are greater than
+their work. Their work only represents one facet of their character, and there
+may be a dozen others, all remarkable, and uniting to make one complex and
+unique creature. It was not so with Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a
+brain which seemed to have grown at the expense of his heart. I cannot recall
+in his life one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics.
+His excellent judgment was never clouded by the haze of human emotion&mdash;or,
+at least, it was such an emotion as was well under the control of his will.
+Could anything be more laudable&mdash;or less lovable? He abandons his girl at
+the order of his father, and sums it up that he &ldquo;sighs as a lover but
+obeys as a son.&rdquo; The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark
+that &ldquo;the tears of a son are seldom lasting.&rdquo; The terrible
+spectacle of the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of
+self-pity because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy
+refugees, just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
+was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the allusions
+which Boswell makes to Gibbon&mdash;often without even mentioning his
+name&mdash;and one cannot read the great historian&rsquo;s life without
+understanding why.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I should think that few men have been born with the material for
+self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than Edward Gibbon.
+He had every gift which a great scholar should have, an insatiable thirst for
+learning in every form, immense industry, a retentive memory, and that broadly
+philosophic temperament which enables a man to rise above the partisan and to
+become the impartial critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he
+was looked upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but
+his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
+susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days. Turn him up in
+that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is upon his contentions.
+&ldquo;Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth chapters it is not necessary to
+dwell,&rdquo; says the biographer, &ldquo;because at this time of day no
+Christian apologist dreams of denying the substantial truth of any of the more
+important allegations of Gibbon. Christians may complain of the suppression of
+some circumstances which might influence the general result, and they must
+remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case. But they no longer
+refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to show that persecution was
+less severe than had been once believed, and they have slowly learned that they
+can afford to concede the validity of all the secondary causes assigned by
+Gibbon and even of others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the
+historian has again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary
+causes which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity
+leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of Christianity
+practically untouched.&rdquo; This is all very well, but in that case how about
+the century of abuse which has been showered upon the historian? Some
+posthumous apology would seem to be called for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was a curious
+affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth, was ulcerated and
+tortured by the king&rsquo;s evil, in spite of the Royal touch. Gibbon gives us
+a concise but lurid account of his own boyhood.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by opposite
+tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit, by a contraction of my nerves,
+a fistula in my eye, and the bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of
+madness. Every practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors were
+swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons. There was a time when I
+swallowed more physic than food, and my body is still marked by the indelible
+scars of lancets, issues, and caustics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that day seems
+to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic ill-health which we
+call by the general name of struma. How far the hard-drinking habits in vogue
+for a century or so before had anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I
+trace a connection between struma and learning; but one has only to compare
+this account of Gibbon with Johnson&rsquo;s nervous twitches, his scarred face
+and his St. Vitus&rsquo; dance, to realize that these, the two most solid
+English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same gruesome
+inheritance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character of subaltern
+in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame, his huge head, his round,
+chubby face, and the pretentious uniform, he must have looked a most
+extraordinary figure. Never was there so round a peg in a square hole! His
+father, a man of a very different type, held a commission, and this led to poor
+Gibbon becoming a soldier in spite of himself. War had broken out, the regiment
+was mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was kept
+under arms until the conclusion of hostilities. For three years he was divorced
+from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he resent it. The South Hampshire
+Militia never saw the enemy, which is perhaps as well for them. Even Gibbon
+himself pokes fun at them; but after three years under canvas it is probable
+that his men had more cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his
+men. His hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt. In
+his lament, one of the items is that his colonel&rsquo;s example encouraged the
+daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking, which gave him the gout.
+&ldquo;The loss of so many busy and idle hours were not compensated for by any
+elegant pleasure,&rdquo; says he; &ldquo;and my temper was insensibly soured by
+the society of rustic officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of
+scholars and the manners of gentlemen.&rdquo; The picture of Gibbon flushed
+with wine at the mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must
+certainly have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he found
+consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering. It made him an
+Englishman once more, it improved his health, it changed the current of his
+thoughts. It was even useful to him as an historian. In a celebrated and
+characteristic sentence, he says, &ldquo;The discipline and evolutions of a
+modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and
+the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian
+of the Roman Empire.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If we don&rsquo;t know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote no
+fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from the other, and
+all equally bad. A man must have more heart and soul than Gibbon to write a
+good autobiography. It is the most difficult of all human compositions, calling
+for a mixture of tact, discretion, and frankness which make an almost
+impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical
+Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and
+self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever been frank,
+and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good. Trollope&rsquo;s,
+perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is
+the one least adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British
+Rousseau, still less a British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the
+credit of the race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our
+neighbours we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress
+its publication.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke&rsquo;s) of
+Pepys&rsquo; Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in our
+language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When Mr. Pepys
+jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought which came into his
+head he would have been very much surprised had any one told him that he was
+doing a work quite unique in our literature. Yet his involuntary autobiography,
+compiled for some obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never
+meant for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature as
+Boswell&rsquo;s book among biographies or Gibbon&rsquo;s among histories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce a good
+autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy, and yet of all
+nations we are the least frank as to our own emotions&mdash;especially on
+certain sides of them. Those affairs of the heart, for example, which are such
+an index to a man&rsquo;s character, and so profoundly modify his
+life&mdash;what space do they fill in any man&rsquo;s autobiography? Perhaps in
+Gibbon&rsquo;s case the omission matters little, for, save in the instance of
+his well-controlled passion for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never
+an organ which gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author
+tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the more
+respectable a man is the less interesting does he become. Rousseau may prove
+himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand self-convicted as an amorous
+ruffian. If they are not respectable they are thoroughly human and interesting
+all the same.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in making
+himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been a man of
+considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these
+trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane
+domestic confidences&mdash;all the more interesting for their inanity! The
+effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy,
+self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud,
+purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed
+always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, the
+year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil servant, an
+eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable musician, and a ripe scholar
+who accumulated 3000 volumes&mdash;a large private library in those
+days&mdash;and had the public spirit to leave them all to his University. You
+can forgive old Pepys a good deal of his philandering when you remember that he
+was the only official of the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst
+days of the Plague. He may have been&mdash;indeed, he assuredly was&mdash;a
+coward, but the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
+is the most truly brave of mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys is what on
+earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of writing down in shorthand
+cipher not only all the trivialities of his life, but even his own very gross
+delinquencies which any other man would have been only too glad to forget. The
+Diary was kept for about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon
+his eyes of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
+that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as easily as he
+did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour to compile these books
+of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to leave some memorial of his own
+existence to single him out from all the countless sons of men? In such a case
+he would assuredly have left directions in somebody&rsquo;s care with a
+reference to it in the deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In
+that way he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
+name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had not been
+for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar the dusty volumes would
+still lie unread in some top shelf of the Pepysian Library. Publicity, then,
+was not his object. What could it have been? The only alternative is reference
+and self-information. You will observe in his character a curious vein of
+method and order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
+wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions. It is conceivable
+that this systematic recording of his deeds&mdash;even of his
+misdeeds&mdash;was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness of
+mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to advance another one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical a nation
+the English of that day appear to have been. Every one seems to have had
+command of some instrument, many of several. Part-singing was common. There is
+not much of Charles the Second&rsquo;s days which we need envy, but there, at
+least, they seem to have had the advantage of us. It was real music,
+too&mdash;music of dignity and tenderness&mdash;with words which were worthy of
+such treatment. This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval
+pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have read
+somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange thing this for a land which in
+the whole of last century has produced no single master of the first rank!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has life
+become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern climes one hears
+poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In England, alas, the sound of a
+poor man&rsquo;s voice raised in song means only too surely that he is drunk.
+And yet it is consoling to know that the germ of the old powers is always there
+ready to sprout forth if they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral
+choirs were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I believe,
+that our orchestral associations are now the best in Europe. So, at least, the
+German papers said on the occasion of the recent visit of a north of England
+choir. But one cannot read Pepys without knowing that the general musical habit
+is much less cultivated now than of old.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>V.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow&mdash;from one pole of the
+human character to the other&mdash;and yet they are in contact on the shelf of
+my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I think, about the land of
+Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out into the ocean has caught all sorts
+of strange floating things, and has held them there in isolation until they
+have woven themselves into the texture of the Cornish race. What is this
+strange strain which lurks down yonder and every now and then throws up a great
+man with singular un-English ways and features for all the world to marvel at?
+It is not Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further and deeper lie the
+springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving men of Tyre, with noble
+Southern faces and Oriental imaginations, who have in far-off days forgotten
+their blue Mediterranean and settled on the granite shores of the Northern Sea?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry Irving? How
+strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know that his mother was a
+Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination of the
+Brontes&mdash;so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors? Again,
+I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin
+creature, George Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders,
+brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable
+face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature?
+Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is something strange, and
+weird, and great, lurking down yonder in the great peninsula which juts into
+the western sea. Borrow may, if he so pleases, call himself an East
+Anglian&mdash;&ldquo;an English Englishman,&rdquo; as he loved to term
+it&mdash;but is it a coincidence that the one East Anglian born of Cornish
+blood was the one who showed these strange qualities? The birth was accidental.
+The qualities throw back to the twilight of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so voluminous that I
+feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be well read in their works.
+Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them altogether. There is Balzac, for
+example, with his hundred odd volumes. I am told that some of them are
+masterpieces and the rest pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is
+which. Such an author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal
+years. Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all.
+Dumas, too! I stand on the edge of him, and look at that huge crop, and content
+myself with a sample here and there. But no one could raise this objection to
+Borrow. A month&rsquo;s reading&mdash;even for a leisurely reader&mdash;will
+master all that he has written. There are &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; &ldquo;The
+Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo; and, finally, if you wish to
+go further, &ldquo;Wild Wales.&rdquo; Only four books&mdash;not much to found a
+great reputation upon&mdash;but, then, there are no other four books quite like
+them in the language.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined to be
+sulky, as wayward as a man could be. So far his catalogue of qualities does not
+seem to pick him as a winner. But he had one great and rare gift. He preserved
+through all his days a sense of the great wonder and mystery of life&mdash;the
+child sense which is so quickly dulled. Not only did he retain it himself, but
+he was word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he
+writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw
+or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was all strange, mystic, with
+some deeper meaning struggling always to the light. If he chronicled his
+conversation with a washer-woman there was something arresting in the words he
+said, something singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house one
+felt, after reading his account, that one would wish to know more of that man.
+If he approached a town he saw and made you see&mdash;not a collection of
+commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but something very strange and wonderful,
+the winding river, the noble bridge, the old castle, the shadows of the dead.
+Every human being, every object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol
+and reminder of the past. He looked through a man at that which the man
+represented. Was his name Welsh? Then in an instant the individual is forgotten
+and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient Britons, intrusive Saxons,
+unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower, mountain raiders and a thousand fascinating
+things. Or is it a Danish name? He leaves the individual in all his modern
+commonplace while he flies off to huge skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may
+remark that I have examined the said skulls with some care, and they seemed to
+me to be rather below the human average), to Vikings, Berserkers, Varangians,
+Harald Haardraada, and the innate wickedness of the Pope. To Borrow all roads
+lead to Rome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, my word, what English the fellow could write! What an organ-roll he could
+get into his sentences! How nervous and vital and vivid it all is!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an ear for the
+music of prose. Take the chapter in &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; of how the screaming
+horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped in the Dingle. The man who
+wrote that has caught the true mantle of Bunyan and Defoe. And, observe the art
+of it, under all the simplicity&mdash;notice, for example, the curious weird
+effect produced by the studied repetition of the word &ldquo;dingle&rdquo;
+coming ever round and round like the master-note in a chime. Or take the
+passage about Britain towards the end of &ldquo;The Bible in Spain.&rdquo; I
+hate quoting from these masterpieces, if only for the very selfish reason that
+my poor setting cannot afford to show up brilliants. None the less, cost what
+it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of impassioned prose&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath
+the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now gathering
+rapidly around thee, still, still may it please the Almighty to disperse them,
+and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown
+than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be a noble one, and
+worthy of her who has been styled the Old Queen of the waters! May thou sink,
+if thou dost sink, amidst blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more
+than one nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it please the
+Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming, ere
+extinct, a scorn and a mockery for those self-same foes who now, though they
+envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and
+respect thee…. Remove from thee the false prophets, who have seen vanity and
+divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may
+fall; who see visions of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened
+the hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad. Oh, do this,
+and fear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic and an enviable
+one; or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters, thou Old Queen!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. It&rsquo;s too long for
+quotation&mdash;but read it, read every word of it. Where in the language can
+you find a stronger, more condensed and more restrained narrative? I have seen
+with my own eyes many a noble fight, more than one international battle, where
+the best of two great countries have been pitted against each other&mdash;yet
+the second-hand impression of Borrow&rsquo;s description leaves a more vivid
+remembrance upon my mind than any of them. This is the real witchcraft of
+letters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in other than
+literary circles&mdash;circles which would have been amazed to learn that he
+was a writer of books. With his natural advantages, his six foot three of
+height and his staglike agility, he could hardly fail to be formidable. But he
+was a scientific sparrer as well, though he had, I have been told, a curious
+sprawling fashion of his own. And how his heart was in it&mdash;how he loved
+the fighting men! You remember his thumb-nail sketches of his heroes. If you
+don&rsquo;t I must quote one, and if you do you will be glad to read it
+again&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best man
+in England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure, and face wonderfully
+like that of a lion. There is Belcher, the younger, not the mighty one, who is
+gone to his place, but the Teucer Belcher, the most scientific pugilist that
+ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to be I won&rsquo;t say what. He
+appears to walk before me now, as he did that evening, with his white hat,
+white great coat, thin genteel figure, springy step, and keen determined eye.
+Crosses him, what a contrast! Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word for
+nobody, and a hard blow for anybody. Hard! One blow given with the proper play
+of his athletic arm will unsense a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about
+with his hands behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized, and
+who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the light-weights,
+so-called&mdash;Randall! The terrible Randall, who has Irish blood in his
+veins; not the better for that, nor the worse; and not far from him is his last
+antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself as good
+a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was a near thing. But how shall I
+name them all? They were there by dozens, and all tremendous in their way.
+There was Bulldog Hudson, and fearless Scroggins, who beat the conqueror of Sam
+the Jew. There was Black Richmond&mdash;no, he was not there, but I knew him
+well; he was the most dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was
+Purcell, who could never conquer until all seemed over with him. There
+was&mdash;what! shall I name thee last? Ay, why not? I believe that thou art
+the last of all that strong family still above the sod, where mayst thou long
+continue&mdash;true piece of English stuff&mdash;Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee,
+Tom of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be called, Spring or
+Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown eye, worthy to have
+carried a six-foot bow at Flodden, where England&rsquo;s yeomen triumphed over
+Scotland&rsquo;s King, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee, last of English
+bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast achieved&mdash;true
+English victories, unbought by yellow gold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Those are words from the heart. Long may it be before we lose the fighting
+blood which has come to us from of old! In a world of peace we shall at last be
+able to root it from our natures. In a world which is armed to the teeth it is
+the last and only guarantee of our future. Neither our numbers, nor our wealth,
+nor the waters which guard us can hold us safe if once the old iron passes from
+our spirit. Barbarous, perhaps&mdash;but there are possibilities for barbarism,
+and none in this wide world for effeminacy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Borrow&rsquo;s views of literature and of literary men were curious. Publisher
+and brother author, he hated them with a fine comprehensive hatred. In all his
+books I cannot recall a word of commendation to any living writer, nor has he
+posthumous praise for those of the generation immediately preceding. Southey,
+indeed, he commends with what most would regard as exaggerated warmth, but for
+the rest he who lived when Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all in their
+glorious prime, looks fixedly past them at some obscure Dane or forgotten
+Welshman. The reason was, I expect, that his proud soul was bitterly wounded by
+his own early failures and slow recognition. He knew himself to be a chief in
+the clan, and when the clan heeded him not he withdrew in haughty disdain. Look
+at his proud, sensitive face and you hold the key to his life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which gave me
+pleasure. A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called &ldquo;Rodney
+Stone&rdquo; to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon a bed of
+mortal sickness. The dying gladiator listened with intent interest but keen,
+professional criticism to the combats of the novel. The reader had got to the
+point where the young amateur fights the brutal Berks. Berks is winded, but
+holds his adversary off with a stiff left arm. The amateur&rsquo;s second in
+the story, an old prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal
+with the situation. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right. By &mdash;&mdash; he&rsquo;s got
+him!&rdquo; yelled the stricken man in the bed. Who cares for critics after
+that?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown volumes which
+stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow. They are the three
+volumes of &ldquo;Pugilistica,&rdquo; given me years ago by my old friend,
+Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for half an hour without
+striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang of those days, the vapid witless
+Corinthian talk, with its ogles and its fogles, its pointless jokes, its
+maddening habit of italicizing a word or two in every sentence. Even these
+stern and desperate encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo,
+become dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. You have to turn to
+Hazlitt&rsquo;s account of the encounter between the Gasman and the Bristol
+Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is a hardened reader who does
+not wince even in print before that frightful right-hander which felled the
+giant, and left him in &ldquo;red ruin&rdquo; from eyebrow to jaw. But even if
+there be no Hazlitt present to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination
+which is not fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly
+upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these little-read pages.
+They were picturesque creatures, men of great force of character and will, who
+reached the limits of human bravery and endurance. There is Jackson on the
+cover, gold upon brown, &ldquo;gentleman Jackson,&rdquo; Jackson of the
+balustrade calf and the noble head, who wrote his name with an 88-pound weight
+dangling from his little finger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I can see him now as I saw him in &rsquo;84 walking down Holborn Hill,
+towards Smithfield. He had on a scarlet coat worked in gold at the buttonholes,
+ruffles and frill of fine lace, a small white stock, no collar (they were not
+then invented), a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches and
+long silk strings, striped white silk stockings, pumps and paste buckles; his
+waistcoat was pale blue satin, sprigged with white. It was impossible to look
+on his fine ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything too
+small), his large but not too large hips, his balustrade calf and beautifully
+turned but not over delicate ankle, his firm foot and peculiarly small hand,
+without thinking that nature had sent him on earth as a model. On he went at a
+good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all men and the admiration of
+all women.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Now, that is a discriminating portrait&mdash;a portrait which really helps you
+to see that which the writer sets out to describe. After reading it one can
+understand why even in reminiscent sporting descriptions of those old days,
+amid all the Tonis and Bills and Jacks, it is always Mr. John Jackson. He was
+the friend and instructor of Byron and of half the bloods in town. Jackson it
+was who, in the heat of combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair, and so
+ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a close-cropped race.
+Inside you see the square face of old Broughton, the supreme fighting man of
+the eighteenth century, the man whose humble ambition it was to begin with the
+pivot man of the Prussian Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had
+a chronicler, the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which
+would take some beating. How about this passage?&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows truly in
+the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself, to stop a blow, and puddle
+in the return, with an arm unaided by his body, producing but fly-flap blows.
+No! Broughton steps boldly and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow;
+receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general summons of his swelling
+muscles, and his firm body seconding his arm, and supplying it with all its
+weight, pours the pile-driving force upon his man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+One would like a little more from the gallant Captain. Poor Broughton! He
+fought once too often. &ldquo;Why, damn you, you&rsquo;re beat!&rdquo; cried
+the Royal Duke. &ldquo;Not beat, your highness, but I can&rsquo;t see my
+man!&rdquo; cried the blinded old hero. Alas, there is the tragedy of the ring
+as it is of life! The wave of youth surges ever upwards, and the wave that went
+before is swept sobbing on to the shingle. &ldquo;Youth will be served,&rdquo;
+said the terse old pugs. But what so sad as the downfall of the old champion!
+Wise Tom Spring&mdash;Tom of Bedford, as Borrow calls him&mdash;had the wit to
+leave the ring unconquered in the prime of his fame. Cribb also stood out as a
+champion. But Broughton, Slack, Belcher, and the rest&mdash;their end was one
+common tragedy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The latter days of the fighting men were often curious and unexpected, though
+as a rule they were short-lived, for the alternation of the excess of their
+normal existence and the asceticism of their training undermined their
+constitution. Their popularity among both men and women was their undoing, and
+the king of the ring went down at last before that deadliest of light-weights,
+the microbe of tubercle, or some equally fatal and perhaps less reputable
+bacillus. The crockiest of spectators had a better chance of life than the
+magnificent young athlete whom he had come to admire. Jem Belcher died at 30,
+Hooper at 31, Pearce, the Game Chicken, at 32, Turner at 35, Hudson at 38,
+Randall, the Nonpareil, at 34. Occasionally, when they did reach mature age,
+their lives took the strangest turns. Gully, as is well known, became a wealthy
+man, and Member for Pontefract in the Reform Parliament. Humphries developed
+into a successful coal merchant. Jack Martin became a convinced teetotaller and
+vegetarian. Jem Ward, the Black Diamond, developed considerable powers as an
+artist. Cribb, Spring, Langan, and many others, were successful publicans.
+Strangest of all, perhaps, was Broughton, who spent his old age haunting every
+sale of old pictures and bric-a-brac. One who saw him has recorded his
+impression of the silent old gentleman, clad in old-fashioned garb, with his
+catalogue in his hand&mdash;Broughton, once the terror of England, and now the
+harmless and gentle collector.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many of them, as was but natural, died violent deaths, some by accident and a
+few by their own hands. No man of the first class ever died in the ring. The
+nearest approach to it was the singular and mournful fate which befell Simon
+Byrne, the brave Irishman, who had the misfortune to cause the death of his
+antagonist, Angus Mackay, and afterwards met his own end at the hands of Deaf
+Burke. Neither Byrne nor Mackay could, however, be said to be boxers of the
+very first rank. It certainly would appear, if we may argue from the
+prize-ring, that the human machine becomes more delicate and is more sensitive
+to jar or shock. In the early days a fatal end to a fight was exceedingly rare.
+Gradually such tragedies became rather more common, until now even with the
+gloves they have shocked us by their frequency, and we feel that the rude play
+of our forefathers is indeed too rough for a more highly organized generation.
+Still, it may help us to clear our minds of cant if we remember that within two
+or three years the hunting-field and the steeple-chase claim more victims than
+the prize-ring has done in two centuries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many of these men had served their country well with that strength and courage
+which brought them fame. Cribb was, if I mistake not, in the Royal Navy. So was
+the terrible dwarf Scroggins, all chest and shoulders, whose springing hits for
+many a year carried all before them until the canny Welshman, Ned Turner,
+stopped his career, only to be stopped in turn by the brilliant Irishman, Jack
+Randall. Shaw, who stood high among the heavy-weights, was cut to pieces by the
+French Cuirassiers in the first charge at Waterloo. The brutal Berks died
+greatly in the breach of Badajos. The lives of these men stood for something,
+and that was just the one supreme thing which the times called for&mdash;an
+unflinching endurance which could bear up against a world in arms. Look at Jem
+Belcher&mdash;beautiful, heroic Jem, a manlier Byron&mdash;but there, this is
+not an essay on the old prize-ring, and one man&rsquo;s lore is another
+man&rsquo;s bore. Let us pass those three low-down, unjustifiable, fascinating
+volumes, and on to nobler topics beyond!
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>VI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Which are the great short stories of the English language? Not a bad basis for
+a debate! This I am sure of: that there are far fewer supremely good short
+stories than there are supremely good long books. It takes more exquisite skill
+to carve the cameo than the statue. But the strangest thing is that the two
+excellences seem to be separate and even antagonistic. Skill in the one by no
+means ensures skill in the other. The great masters of our literature,
+Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, have left no single short story of
+outstanding merit behind them, with the possible exception of Wandering
+Willie&rsquo;s Tale in &ldquo;Red Gauntlet.&rdquo; On the other hand, men who
+have been very great in the short story, Stevenson, Poe, and Bret Harte, have
+written no great book. The champion sprinter is seldom a five-miler as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, now, if you had to choose your team whom would you put in? You have not
+really a large choice. What are the points by which you judge them? You want
+strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a single vivid
+impression left upon the mind. Poe is the master of all. I may remark by the
+way that it is the sight of his green cover, the next in order upon my
+favourite shelf, which has started this train of thought. Poe is, to my mind,
+the supreme original short story writer of all time. His brain was like a
+seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which have sprung
+nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand,
+prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some
+new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on
+the detection of crime&mdash;&ldquo;<i>quorum pars parva fui!</i>&rdquo; Each
+may find some little development of his own, but his main art must trace back
+to those admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful
+force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point. After all, mental acuteness
+is the one quality which can be ascribed to the ideal detective, and when that
+has once been admirably done, succeeding writers must necessarily be content
+for all time to follow in the same main track. But not only is Poe the
+originator of the detective story; all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving
+yarns trace back to his &ldquo;Gold Bug,&rdquo; just as all pseudo-scientific
+Verne-and-Wells stories have their prototypes in the &ldquo;Voyage to the
+Moon,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Case of Monsieur Valdemar.&rdquo; If every man who
+receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay tithe
+to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet I could only give him two places in my team. One would be for the
+&ldquo;Gold Bug,&rdquo; the other for the &ldquo;Murder in the Rue
+Morgue.&rdquo; I do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would
+not admit <i>perfect</i> excellence to any other of his stories. These two have
+a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or
+weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the
+principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other. The same may
+be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short story tellers who proved
+himself incapable of a longer flight. He was always like one of his own
+gold-miners who struck a rich pocket, but found no continuous reef. The pocket
+was, alas, a very limited one, but the gold was of the best. &ldquo;The Luck of
+Roaring Camp&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tennessee&rsquo;s Partner&rdquo; are both, I
+think, worthy of a place among my immortals. They are, it is true, so tinged
+with Dickens as to be almost parodies of the master, but they have a symmetry
+and satisfying completeness as short stories to which Dickens himself never
+attained. The man who can read those two stories without a gulp in the throat
+is not a man I envy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two places also, for where is a finer sense
+of what the short story can do? He wrote, in my judgment, two masterpieces in
+his life, and each of them is essentially a short story, though the one
+happened to be published as a volume. The one is &ldquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde,&rdquo; which, whether you take it as a vivid narrative or as a
+wonderfully deep and true allegory, is a supremely fine bit of work. The other
+story of my choice would be &ldquo;The Pavilion on the Links&rdquo;&mdash;the
+very model of dramatic narrative. That story stamped itself so clearly on my
+brain when I read it in <i>Cornhill</i> that when I came across it again many
+years afterwards in volume form, I was able instantly to recognize two small
+modifications of the text&mdash;each very much for the worse&mdash;from the
+original form. They were small things, but they seemed somehow like a chip on a
+perfect statue. Surely it is only a very fine work, of art which could leave so
+definite an impression as that. Of course, there are a dozen other of his
+stories which would put the average writer&rsquo;s best work to shame, all with
+the strange Stevenson glamour upon them, of which I may discourse later, but
+only to those two would I be disposed to admit that complete excellence which
+would pass them into such a team as this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And who else? If it be not an impertinence to mention a contemporary, I should
+certainly have a brace from Rudyard Kipling. His power, his compression, his
+dramatic sense, his way of glowing suddenly into a vivid flame, all mark him as
+a great master. But which are we to choose from that long and varied
+collection, many of which have claims to the highest? Speaking from memory, I
+should say that the stories of his which have impressed me most are &ldquo;The
+Drums of the Fore and Aft,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Man who Would be King,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Man who Was,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Brushwood Boy.&rdquo; Perhaps, on
+the whole, it is the first two which I should choose to add to my list of
+masterpieces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They are stories which invite criticism and yet defy it. The great batsman at
+cricket is the man who can play an unorthodox game, take every liberty which is
+denied to inferior players, and yet succeed brilliantly in the face of his
+disregard of law. So it is here. I should think the model of these stories is
+the most dangerous that any young writer could follow. There is digression,
+that most deadly fault in the short narrative; there is incoherence, there is
+want of proportion which makes the story stand still for pages and bound
+forward in a few sentences. But genius overrides all that, just as the great
+cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the straight one to leg. There is a
+dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded, confident mastery which carries everything
+before it. Yes, no team of immortals would be complete which did not contain at
+least two representatives of Kipling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree to me.
+The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare
+than he gave me. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect. Indeed, I have
+been more affected by some of the short work of his son Julian, though I can
+quite understand the high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the
+delicate charm of his style. There is Bulwer Lytton as a claimant. His
+&ldquo;Haunted and the Haunters&rdquo; is the very best ghost story that I
+know. As such I should include it in my list. There was a story, too, in one of
+the old Blackwoods&mdash;&ldquo;Metempsychosis&rdquo; it was called, which left
+so deep an impression upon my mind that I should be inclined, though it is many
+years since I read it, to number it with the best. Another story which has the
+characteristics of great work is Grant Allen&rsquo;s &ldquo;John Creedy.&rdquo;
+So good a story upon so philosophic a basis deserves a place among the best.
+There is some first-class work to be picked also from the contemporary work of
+Wells and of Quiller-Couch which reaches a high standard. One little
+sketch&mdash;&ldquo;Old Œson&rdquo; in &ldquo;Noughts and
+Crosses&rdquo;&mdash;is, in my opinion, as good as anything of the kind which I
+have ever read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green cover of Poe. I
+am sure that if I had to name the few books which have really influenced my own
+life I should have to put this one second only to Macaulay&rsquo;s Essays. I
+read it young when my mind was plastic. It stimulated my imagination and set
+before me a supreme example of dignity and force in the methods of telling a
+story. It is not altogether a healthy influence, perhaps. It turns the thoughts
+too forcibly to the morbid and the strange.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a saturnine creature, devoid of humour and geniality, with a love for
+the grotesque and the terrible. The reader must himself furnish the
+counteracting qualities or Poe may become a dangerous comrade. We know along
+what perilous tracks and into what deadly quagmires his strange mind led him,
+down to that grey October Sunday morning when he was picked up, a dying man, on
+the side-walk at Baltimore, at an age which should have seen him at the very
+prime of his strength and his manhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that I look upon Poe as the world&rsquo;s supreme short story
+writer. His nearest rival, I should say, was Maupassant. The great Norman never
+rose to the extreme force and originality of the American, but he had a natural
+inherited power, an inborn instinct towards the right way of making his
+effects, which mark him as a great master. He produced stories because it was
+in him to do so, as naturally and as perfectly as an apple tree produces
+apples. What a fine, sensitive, artistic touch it is! How easily and delicately
+the points are made! How clear and nervous is his style, and how free from that
+redundancy which disfigures so much of our English work! He pares it down to
+the quick all the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I cannot write the name of Maupassant without recalling what was either a
+spiritual interposition or an extraordinary coincidence in my own life. I had
+been travelling in Switzerland and had visited, among other places, that Gemmi
+Pass, where a huge cliff separates a French from a German canton. On the summit
+of this cliff was a small inn, where we broke our journey. It was explained to
+us that, although the inn was inhabited all the year round, still for about
+three months in winter it was utterly isolated, because it could at any time
+only be approached by winding paths on the mountain side, and when these became
+obliterated by snow it was impossible either to come up or to descend. They
+could see the lights in the valley beneath them, but were as lonely as if they
+lived in the moon. So curious a situation naturally appealed to one&rsquo;s
+imagination, and I speedily began to build up a short story in my own mind,
+depending upon a group of strong antagonistic characters being penned up in
+this inn, loathing each other and yet utterly unable to get away from each
+other&rsquo;s society, every day bringing them nearer to tragedy. For a week or
+so, as I travelled, I was turning over the idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to read I
+happened to buy a volume of Maupassant&rsquo;s Tales which I had never seen
+before. The first story was called &ldquo;L&rsquo;Auberge&rdquo; (The
+Inn)&mdash;and as I ran my eye down the printed page I was amazed to see the
+two words, &ldquo;Kandersteg&rdquo; and &ldquo;Gemmi Pass.&rdquo; I settled
+down and read it with ever-growing amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I
+had visited. The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people through
+the snowfall. Everything that I imagined was there, save that Maupassant had
+brought in a savage hound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced to visit
+the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same train of thought. All
+that is quite intelligible. But what is perfectly marvellous is that in that
+short journey I should have chanced to buy the one book in all the world which
+would prevent me from making a public fool of myself, for who would ever have
+believed that my work was not an imitation? I do not think that the hypothesis
+of coincidence can cover the facts. It is one of several incidents in my life
+which have convinced me of spiritual interposition&mdash;of the promptings of
+some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.
+The old Catholic doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a beautiful one,
+but has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or is it that our subliminal ego, to use the jargon of the new psychology, or
+our astral, in the terms of the new theology, can learn and convey to the mind
+that which our own known senses are unable to apprehend? But that is too long a
+side track for us to turn down it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Maupassant chose he could run Poe close in that domain of the strange and
+weird which the American had made so entirely his own. Have you read
+Maupassant&rsquo;s story called &ldquo;Le Horla&rdquo;? That is as good a bit
+of <i>diablerie</i> as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has, of course,
+far the broader range. He has a keen sense of humour, breaking out beyond all
+decorum in some of his stories, but giving a pleasant sub-flavour to all of
+them. And yet, when all is said, who can doubt that the austere and dreadful
+American is far the greater and more original mind of the two?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Talking of weird American stories, have you ever read any of the works of
+Ambrose Bierce? I have one of his works there, &ldquo;In the Midst of
+Life.&rdquo; This man had a flavour quite his own, and was a great artist in
+his way. It is not cheering reading, but it leaves its mark upon you, and that
+is the proof of good work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have often wondered where Poe got his style. There is a sombre majesty about
+his best work, as if it were carved from polished jet, which is peculiarly his
+own. I dare say if I took down that volume I could light anywhere upon a
+paragraph which would show you what I mean. This is the kind of thing&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi&mdash;in the
+iron-bound melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious
+histories of the heaven and of the earth, and of the mighty sea&mdash;and of
+the genius that overruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There
+were much lore, too, in the sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy,
+holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled round Dodona,
+but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by my side in
+the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all.&rdquo; Or this
+sentence: &ldquo;And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror,
+and stand trembling and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were
+not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in
+their cadences from syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the
+well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Is there not a sense of austere dignity? No man invents a style. It always
+derives back from some influence, or, as is more usual, it is a compromise
+between several influences. I cannot trace Poe&rsquo;s. And yet if Hazlitt and
+De Quincey had set forth to tell weird stories they might have developed
+something of the kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, by your leave, we will pass on to my noble edition of &ldquo;The Cloister
+and the Hearth,&rdquo; the next volume on the left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I notice, in glancing over my rambling remarks, that I classed
+&ldquo;Ivanhoe&rdquo; as the second historical novel of the century. I dare say
+there are many who would give &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo; the first place, and I can
+quite understand their position, although it is not my own. I recognize the
+beauty of the style, the consistency of the character-drawing, the absolutely
+perfect Queen Anne atmosphere. There was never an historical novel written by a
+man who knew his period so thoroughly. But, great as these virtues are, they
+are not the essential in a novel. The essential in a novel is interest, though
+Addison unkindly remarked that the real essential was that the pastrycooks
+should never run short of paper. Now &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo; is, in my opinion,
+exceedingly interesting during the campaigns in the Lowlands, and when our
+Machiavelian hero, the Duke, comes in, and also whenever Lord Mohun shows his
+ill-omened face; but there are long stretches of the story which are heavy
+reading. A pre-eminently good novel must always advance and never mark time.
+&ldquo;Ivanhoe&rdquo; never halts for an instant, and that just makes its
+superiority as a novel over &ldquo;Esmond,&rdquo; though as a piece of
+literature I think the latter is the more perfect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, if I had three votes, I should plump them all for &ldquo;The Cloister and
+the Hearth,&rdquo; as being our greatest historical novel, and, indeed, as
+being our greatest novel of any sort. I think I may claim to have read most of
+the more famous foreign novels of last century, and (speaking only for myself
+and within the limits of my reading) I have been more impressed by that book of
+Reade&rsquo;s and by Tolstoi&rsquo;s &ldquo;Peace and War&rdquo; than by any
+others. They seem to me to stand at the very top of the century&rsquo;s
+fiction. There is a certain resemblance in the two&mdash;the sense of space,
+the number of figures, the way in which characters drop in and drop out. The
+Englishman is the more romantic. The Russian is the more real and earnest. But
+they are both great.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Think of what Reade does in that one book. He takes the reader by the hand, and
+he leads him away into the Middle Ages, and not a conventional study-built
+Middle Age, but a period quivering with life, full of folk who are as human and
+real as a &rsquo;bus-load in Oxford Street. He takes him through Holland, he
+shows him the painters, the dykes, the life. He leads him down the long line of
+the Rhine, the spinal marrow of Mediaeval Europe. He shows him the dawn of
+printing, the beginnings of freedom, the life of the great mercantile cities of
+South Germany, the state of Italy, the artist-life of Rome, the monastic
+institutions on the eve of the Reformation. And all this between the covers of
+one book, so naturally introduced, too, and told with such vividness and
+spirit. Apart from the huge scope of it, the mere study of Gerard&rsquo;s own
+nature, his rise, his fall, his regeneration, the whole pitiable tragedy at the
+end, make the book a great one. It contains, I think, a blending of knowledge
+with imagination, which makes it stand alone in our literature. Let any one
+read the &ldquo;Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,&rdquo; and then Charles
+Reade&rsquo;s picture of Mediaeval Roman life, if he wishes to appreciate the
+way in which Reade has collected his rough ore and has then smelted it all down
+in his fiery imagination. It is a good thing to have the industry to collect
+facts. It is a greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them
+when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough without
+being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer of historical romance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reade is one of the most perplexing figures in our literature. Never was there
+a man so hard to place. At his best he is the best we have. At his worst he is
+below the level of Surreyside melodrama. But his best have weak pieces, and his
+worst have good. There is always silk among his cotton, and cotton among his
+silk. But, for all his flaws, the man who, in addition to the great book, of
+which I have already spoken, wrote &ldquo;It is Never Too Late to Mend,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Hard Cash,&rdquo; &ldquo;Foul Play,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Griffith
+Gaunt,&rdquo; must always stand in the very first rank of our novelists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a quality of heart about his work which I recognize nowhere else. He
+so absolutely loves his own heroes and heroines, while he so cordially detests
+his own villains, that he sweeps your emotions along with his own. No one has
+ever spoken warmly enough of the humanity and the lovability of his women. It
+is a rare gift&mdash;very rare for a man&mdash;this power of drawing a human
+and delightful girl. If there is a better one in nineteenth-century fiction
+than Julia Dodd I have never had the pleasure of meeting her. A man who could
+draw a character so delicate and so delightful, and yet could write such an
+episode as that of the Robber Inn in &ldquo;The Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo;
+adventurous romance in its highest form, has such a range of power as is
+granted to few men. My hat is always ready to come off to Charles Reade.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>VII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other side of that
+door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears, headaches and heartaches,
+ambitions and disappointments; but within, as you lie back on the green settee,
+and face the long lines of your silent soothing comrades, there is only peace
+of spirit and rest of mind in the company of the great dead. Learn to love,
+learn to admire them; learn to know what their comradeship means; for until you
+have done so the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to man have not yet
+shed their blessing upon you. Here behind this magic door is the rest house,
+where you may forget the past, enjoy the present, and prepare for the future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with the
+upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell,
+the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub
+shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one&rsquo;s dear friends
+would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so
+churlishly at Scott? One would have thought that noble spirit and romantic
+fancy would have charmed the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter
+for the younger man to use towards the elder. The fact is that Borrow had one
+dangerous virus in him&mdash;a poison which distorts the whole vision&mdash;for
+he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue outside his own
+interpretation of the great riddle. Downright heathendom, the blood-stained
+Berserk or the chaunting Druid, appealed to his mind through his imagination,
+but the man of his own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of
+ritual, or in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil to the
+bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott therefore,
+with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once hateful in his eyes. In
+any case he was a disappointed man, the big Borrow, and I cannot remember that
+he ever had much to say that was good of any brother author. Only in the bards
+of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred
+spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means
+of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we must
+not be unkind behind the magic door&mdash;and yet to be charitable to the
+uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped for six
+sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as you see there is a
+second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to my heart, and all appealing
+in the same degree to my emotions and to my memory. Be as patient as you may,
+while I talk of these old friends, and tell you why I love them, and all that
+they have meant to me in the past. If you picked any book from that line you
+would be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small, no doubt, and
+yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself. Hereditary impulses,
+personal experiences, books&mdash;those are the three forces which go to the
+making of man. These are the books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the eighteenth century,
+or those of them whom I regard as essential. After all, putting aside single
+books, such as Sterne&rsquo;s &ldquo;Tristram Shandy,&rdquo; Goldsmith&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Vicar of Wakefield,&rdquo; and Miss Burney&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Evelina,&rdquo; there are only three authors who count, and they in turn
+wrote only three books each, of first-rate importance, so that by the mastery
+of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad view of this most
+important and distinctive branch of English literature. The three men are, of
+course, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. The books are: Richardson&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Clarissa Harlowe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Pamela,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Sir Charles
+Grandison&rdquo;; Fielding&rsquo;s &ldquo;Tom Jones&rdquo;, &ldquo;Joseph
+Andrews,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Amelia&rdquo;; Smollett&rsquo;s &ldquo;Peregrine
+Pickle,&rdquo; &ldquo;Humphrey Clinker,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Roderick
+Random.&rdquo; There we have the real work of the three great contemporaries
+who illuminated the middle of the eighteenth century&mdash;only nine volumes in
+all. Let us walk round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
+discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a hundred and
+fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far they have justified them
+by the permanent value of their work. A fat little bookseller in the City, a
+rakehell wit of noble blood, and a rugged Scotch surgeon from the
+navy&mdash;those are the three strange immortals who now challenge a
+comparison&mdash;the three men who dominate the fiction of their century, and
+to whom we owe it that the life and the types of that century are familiar to
+us, their fifth generation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that these three
+writers would appeal quite differently to every temperament, and that whichever
+one might desire to champion one could find arguments to sustain one&rsquo;s
+choice. Yet I cannot think that any large section of the critical public could
+maintain that Smollett was on the same level as the other two. Ethically he is
+gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour which is
+more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his rivals. I can remember
+in callow boyhood&mdash;<i>puris omnia pura</i>&mdash;reading &ldquo;Peregrine
+Pickle,&rdquo; and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in the Fashion of
+the Ancients. I read it again in my manhood with the same effect, though with a
+greater appreciation of its inherent bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive
+merit, he has in a high degree, but in no other respect can he challenge
+comparison with either Fielding or Richardson. His view of life is far more
+limited, his characters less varied, his incidents less distinctive, and his
+thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one, should award him the third place in
+the trio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition of giants.
+Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare them with each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which each of them
+had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most delightful women&mdash;the
+most perfect women, I think, in the whole range of our literature. If the
+eighteenth-century women were like that, then the eighteenth-century men got a
+great deal more than they ever deserved. They had such a charming little
+dignity of their own, such good sense, and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways,
+so human and so charming, that even now they become our ideals. One cannot come
+to know them without a double emotion, one of respectful devotion towards
+themselves, and the other of abhorrence for the herd of swine who surrounded
+them. Pamela, Harriet Byron, Clarissa, Amelia, and Sophia Western were all
+equally delightful, and it was not the negative charm of the innocent and
+colourless woman, the amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it was a
+beauty of nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong principles,
+true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this respect our rival
+authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a preference to one set of these
+perfect creatures over another. The plump little printer and the worn-out
+man-about-town had each a supreme woman in his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all capable of
+doing what Tom Jones did&mdash;as I have seen stated&mdash;is the worst form of
+inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than we are. It is a libel on
+mankind to say that a man who truly loves a woman is usually false to her, and,
+above all, a libel that he should be false in the vile fashion which aroused
+good Tom Newcome&rsquo;s indignation. Tom Jones was no more fit to touch the
+hem of Sophia&rsquo;s dress than Captain Booth was to be the mate of Amelia.
+Never once has Fielding drawn a gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A
+lusty, brawling, good-hearted, material creature was the best that he could
+fashion. Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of distinction, of
+spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the plebeian printer has done very
+much better than the aristocrat. Sir Charles Grandison is a very noble
+type&mdash;spoiled a little by over-coddling on the part of his creator,
+perhaps, but a very high-souled and exquisite gentleman all the same. Had
+<i>he</i> married Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden the banns. Even
+the persevering Mr. B&mdash;&mdash; and the too amorous Lovelace were, in spite
+of their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had possibilities of greatness
+and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot doubt that Richardson drew the higher
+type of man&mdash;and that in Grandison he has done what has seldom or never
+been bettered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He concerns
+himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a very searching
+analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily, and in such simple
+English, that the depth and truth of it only come upon reflection. He
+condescends to none of those scuffles and buffetings and pantomime rallies
+which enliven, but cheapen, many of Fielding&rsquo;s pages. The latter has, it
+may be granted, a broader view of life. He had personal acquaintance of circles
+far above, and also far below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival,
+had ever been able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London life, the
+prison scenes in &ldquo;Amelia,&rdquo; the thieves&rsquo; kitchens in
+&ldquo;Jonathan Wild,&rdquo; the sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid
+and as complete as those of his friend Hogarth&mdash;the most British of
+artists, even as Fielding was the most British of writers. But the greatest and
+most permanent facts of life are to be found in the smallest circles. Two men
+and a woman may furnish either the tragedian or the comedian with the most
+satisfying theme. And so, although his range was limited, Richardson knew very
+clearly and very thoroughly just that knowledge which was essential for his
+purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life, Clarissa, the perfect lady,
+Grandison the ideal gentleman&mdash;these were the three figures on which he
+lavished his most loving art. And now, after one hundred and fifty years, I do
+not know where we may find more satisfying types.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him cut? He loved
+to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of letters for his
+narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First <i>he</i> writes and he
+tells all that passed. You have his letter. <i>She</i> at the same time writes
+to her friend, and also states her views. This also you see. The friends in
+each case reply, and you have the advantage of their comments and advice. You
+really do know all about it before you finish. It may be a little wearisome at
+first, if you have been accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in
+every chapter. But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you live, and
+you come to know these people, with their characters and their troubles, as you
+know no others of the dream-folk of fiction. Three times as long as an ordinary
+book, no doubt, but why grudge the time? What is the hurry? Surely it is better
+to read one masterpiece than three books which will leave no permanent
+impression on the mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet centuries.
+In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer papers, do you suppose
+that the readers ever complained of the length of a book, or could have too
+much of the happy Pamela or of the unhappy Clarissa? It is only under
+extraordinary circumstances that one can now get into that receptive frame of
+mind which was normal then. Such an occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he
+tells how in some Indian hill station, where books were rare, he let loose a
+copy of &ldquo;Clarissa.&rdquo; The effect was what might have been expected.
+Richardson in a suitable environment went through the community like a mild
+fever. They lived him, and dreamed him, until the whole episode passed into
+literary history, never to be forgotten by those who experienced it. It is
+tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style is so correct and yet so simple that
+there is no page which a scholar may not applaud nor a servant-maid understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told in
+letters. Scott reverted to it in &ldquo;Guy Mannering,&rdquo; and there are
+other conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the expense of a
+strain upon the reader&rsquo;s good-nature and credulity. One feels that these
+constant details, these long conversations, could not possibly have been
+recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and dishevelled heroine could not sit
+down and record her escape with such cool minuteness of description. Richardson
+does it as well as it could be done, but it remains intrinsically faulty.
+Fielding, using the third person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival,
+and gave a freedom and personal authority to the novel which it had never
+before enjoyed. There at least he is the master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson, though I dare
+say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of all, beyond anything I may
+have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having been the first. Surely
+the originator should have a higher place than the imitator, even if in
+imitating he should also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding
+who is the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without
+romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be
+made from everyday life, told in everyday language. This was his great new
+departure. So entirely was Fielding his imitator, or rather perhaps his
+parodist, that with supreme audacity (some would say brazen impudence) he used
+poor Richardson&rsquo;s own characters, taken from &ldquo;Pamela,&rdquo; in his
+own first novel, &ldquo;Joseph Andrews,&rdquo; and used them too for the unkind
+purpose of ridiculing them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if
+Thackeray wrote a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to show
+what faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the gentle little
+printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a somewhat unscrupulous man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking of this also
+there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain class of critics. The
+inference appears to be that there is some subtle connection between immorality
+and art, as if the handling of the lewd, or the depicting of it, were in some
+sort the hallmark of the true artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict.
+On the contrary, it is so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its
+forms, that the temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the easiest and
+cheapest of all methods of creating a spurious effect. The difficulty does not
+lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in avoiding it. But one tries to avoid it
+because on the face of it there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a
+gentleman, or that he should write for a woman&rsquo;s eyes that which he would
+be justly knocked down for having said in a woman&rsquo;s ears. But &ldquo;you
+must draw the world as it is.&rdquo; Why must you? Surely it is just in
+selection and restraint that the artist is shown. It is true that in a coarser
+age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself had fewer
+restrictions then. We are of our own age, and must live up to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means. Our decency
+need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit in which it is done. No
+one who wished to lecture on these various spirits could preach on a better
+text than these three great rivals, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is
+possible to draw vice with some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such
+a writer is a moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again,
+it is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but
+simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and such was
+Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to extract amusement
+from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such was Smollett. Lastly, it is
+possible to draw vice in order to show sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked
+man, and there were many among the writers of the Restoration. But of all
+reasons that exist for treating this side of life, Richardson&rsquo;s were the
+best, and nowhere do we find it more deftly done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble about
+Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew. Alone he
+accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the most dangerous and
+lawless of European capitals. Hogarth&rsquo;s pictures give some notion of it
+in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs, the high-born bullies, the
+drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves&rsquo; kitchens with their riverside
+trapdoors, down which the body is thrust. This was the Augean stable which had
+to be cleaned, and poor Hercules was weak and frail and physically more fitted
+for a sick-room than for such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at 47,
+worn out with his own exertions. It might well have cost him his life in more
+dramatic fashion, for he had become a marked man to the criminal classes, and
+he headed his own search-parties when, on the information of some bribed
+rascal, a new den of villainy was exposed. But he carried his point. In little
+more than a year the thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to
+what it has ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals. Has
+any man ever left a finer monument behind him?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the novels, where
+his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock cynicism, but in his
+&ldquo;Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon.&rdquo; He knew that his health was
+irretrievably ruined and that his years were numbered. Those are the days when
+one sees a man as he is, when he has no longer a motive for affectation or
+pretence in the immediate presence of the most tremendous of all realities.
+Yet, sitting in the shadow of death, Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage
+and constancy of mind, which show how splendid a nature had been shrouded by
+his earlier frailties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish this
+somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed so much before,
+but the period and the subject seem to encourage it. I skip Sterne, for I have
+no great sympathy with his finicky methods. And I skip Miss Burney&rsquo;s
+novels, as being feminine reflections of the great masters who had just
+preceded her. But Goldsmith&rsquo;s &ldquo;Vicar of Wakefield&rdquo; surely
+deserves one paragraph to itself. There is a book which is tinged throughout,
+as was all Goldsmith&rsquo;s work, with a beautiful nature. No one who had not
+a fine heart could have written it, just as no one without a fine heart could
+have written &ldquo;The Deserted Village.&rdquo; How strange it is to think of
+old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the shrinking Irishman, when both in
+poetry, in fiction, and in the drama the latter has proved himself far the
+greater man. But here is an object-lesson of how the facts of life may be
+treated without offence. Nothing is shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded.
+Yet if I wished to set before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which
+would prepare her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
+feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as &ldquo;The Vicar
+of Wakefield.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of their own in
+the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For years you may never think
+of them, and then suddenly some stray word or train of thought leads straight
+to them, and you look at them and love them, and rejoice that you know them.
+But let us pass to something which may interest you more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the kingdom to
+prove the comparative popularity of different novelists with the public, I
+think that it is quite certain that Mr. George Meredith would come out very low
+indeed. If, on the other hand, a number of authors were convened to determine
+which of their fellow-craftsmen they considered the greatest and the most
+stimulating to their own minds, I am equally confident that Mr. Meredith would
+have a vast preponderance of votes. Indeed, his only conceivable rival would be
+Mr. Hardy. It becomes an interesting study, therefore, why there should be such
+a divergence of opinion as to his merits, and what the qualities are which have
+repelled so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose opinion must be
+allowed to have a special weight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The public read to
+be amused. The novelist reads to have new light thrown upon his art. To read
+Meredith is <i>not</i> a mere amusement; it is an intellectual exercise, a kind
+of mental dumb-bell with which you develop your thinking powers. Your mind is
+in a state of tension the whole time that you are reading him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his pointer, you
+will observe that these remarks are excited by the presence of my beloved
+&ldquo;Richard Feverel,&rdquo; which lurks in yonder corner. What a great book
+it is, how wise and how witty! Others of the master&rsquo;s novels may be more
+characteristic or more profound, but for my own part it is the one which I
+would always present to the new-comer who had not yet come under the influence.
+I think that I should put it third after &ldquo;Vanity Fair&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;The Cloister and the Hearth&rdquo; if I had to name the three novels
+which I admire most in the Victorian era. The book was published, I believe, in
+1859, and it is almost incredible, and says little for the discrimination of
+critics or public, that it was nearly twenty years before a second edition was
+needed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate the cause may
+be. What was it that stood in the way of the book&rsquo;s success? Undoubtedly
+it was the style. And yet it is subdued and tempered here with little of the
+luxuriance and exuberance which it attained in the later works. But it was an
+innovation, and it stalled off both the public and the critics. They regarded
+it, no doubt, as an affectation, as Carlyle&rsquo;s had been considered twenty
+years before, forgetting that in the case of an original genius style is an
+organic thing, part of the man as much as the colour of his eyes. It is not, to
+quote Carlyle, a shirt to be taken on and off at pleasure, but a skin,
+eternally fixed. And this strange, powerful style, how is it to be described?
+Best, perhaps, in his own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with perhaps
+the <i>arrière pensée</i> that the words would apply as strongly to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His favourite author,&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;was one writing on heroes
+in a style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so loose
+and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled down here and
+there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster, sentences without
+commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a
+sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street slang, and accents
+falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages
+in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the
+mind and joints.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid is the
+impression left by such expressions as &ldquo;all the pages in a breeze.&rdquo;
+As a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the passage is equally
+perfect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, &ldquo;Richard Feverel&rdquo; has come into its own at last. I confess to
+having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I do not
+think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water, finds its true
+level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at last. I am sure that if the
+critics were to unite to praise a bad book or to damn a good one they could
+(and continually do) have a five-year influence, but it would in no wise affect
+the final result. Sheridan said that if all the fleas in his bed had been
+unanimous, they could have pushed him out of it. I do not think that any
+unanimity of critics has ever pushed a good book out of literature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the minor excellences of &ldquo;Richard Feverel&rdquo;&mdash;excuse the
+prolixity of an enthusiast&mdash;are the scattered aphorisms which are worthy
+of a place among our British proverbs. What could be more exquisite than this,
+&ldquo;Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer is answered&rdquo;; or
+this, &ldquo;Expediency is man&rsquo;s wisdom. Doing right is
+God&rsquo;s&rdquo;; or, &ldquo;All great thoughts come from the heart&rdquo;?
+Good are the words &ldquo;The coward amongst us is he who sneers at the
+failings of humanity,&rdquo; and a healthy optimism rings in the phrase
+&ldquo;There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness; from that uppermost
+pinnacle of wisdom whence we see that this world is well designed.&rdquo; In
+more playful mood is &ldquo;Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by
+man.&rdquo; Let us hurry away abruptly, for he who starts quotation from
+&ldquo;Richard Feverel&rdquo; is lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There are the
+Italian ones, &ldquo;Sandra Belloni,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Vittoria&rdquo;; there
+is &ldquo;Rhoda Fleming,&rdquo; which carried Stevenson off his critical feet;
+&ldquo;Beauchamp&rsquo;s Career,&rdquo; too, dealing with obsolete politics. No
+great writer should spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the beauty
+who is painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends to become obsolete
+along with her frame. Here also is the dainty &ldquo;Diana,&rdquo; the egoist
+with immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type of masculine selfishness, and
+&ldquo;Harry Richmond,&rdquo; the first chapters of which are, in my opinion,
+among the finest pieces of narrative prose in the language. That great mind
+would have worked in any form which his age had favoured. He is a novelist by
+accident. As an Elizabethan he would have been a great dramatist; under Queen
+Anne a great essayist. But whatever medium he worked in, he must equally have
+thrown the image of a great brain and a great soul.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>VIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+We have left our eighteenth-century novelists&mdash;Fielding, Richardson, and
+Smollett&mdash;safely behind us, with all their solidity and their audacity,
+their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre. They have brought us, as you
+perceive, to the end of the shelf. What, not wearied? Ready for yet another?
+Let us run down this next row, then, and I will tell you a few things which may
+be of interest, though they will be dull enough if you have not been born with
+that love of books in your heart which is among the choicest gifts of the gods.
+If that is wanting, then one might as well play music to the deaf, or walk
+round the Academy with the colour-blind, as appeal to the book-sense of an
+unfortunate who has it not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is this old brown volume in the corner. How it got there I cannot
+imagine, for it is one of those which I bought for threepence out of the
+remnant box in Edinburgh, and its weather-beaten comrades are up yonder in the
+back gallery, while this one has elbowed its way among the quality in the
+stalls. But it is worth a word or two. Take it out and handle it! See how
+swarthy it is, how squat, with how bullet-proof a cover of scaling leather. Now
+open the fly-leaf &ldquo;<i>Ex libris</i> Guilielmi Whyte. 1672&rdquo; in faded
+yellow ink. I wonder who William Whyte may have been, and what he did upon
+earth in the reign of the merry monarch. A pragmatical seventeenth-century
+lawyer, I should judge, by that hard, angular writing. The date of issue is
+1642, so it was printed just about the time when the Pilgrim Fathers were
+settling down into their new American home, and the first Charles&rsquo;s head
+was still firm upon his shoulders, though a little puzzled, no doubt, at what
+was going on around it. The book is in Latin&mdash;though Cicero might not have
+admitted it&mdash;and it treats of the laws of warfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I picture some pedantic Dugald Dalgetty bearing it about under his buff coat,
+or down in his holster, and turning up the reference for every fresh emergency
+which occurred. &ldquo;Hullo! here&rsquo;s a well!&rdquo; says he. &ldquo;I
+wonder if I may poison it?&rdquo; Out comes the book, and he runs a dirty
+forefinger down the index. &ldquo;<i>Ob fas est aquam hostis venere</i>,&rdquo;
+etc. &ldquo;Tut, tut, it&rsquo;s not allowed. But here are some of the enemy in
+a barn? What about that?&rdquo; &ldquo;<i>Ob fas est hostem
+incendio</i>,&rdquo; etc. &ldquo;Yes; he says we may. Quick, Ambrose, up with
+the straw and the tinder box.&rdquo; Warfare was no child&rsquo;s play about
+the time when Tilly sacked Magdeburg, and Cromwell turned his hand from the
+mash tub to the sword. It might not be much better now in a long campaign, when
+men were hardened and embittered. Many of these laws are unrepealed, and it is
+less than a century since highly disciplined British troops claimed their
+dreadful rights at Badajos and Rodrigo. Recent European wars have been so short
+that discipline and humanity have not had time to go to pieces, but a long war
+would show that man is ever the same, and that civilization is the thinnest of
+veneers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now you see that whole row of books which takes you at one sweep nearly across
+the shelf? I am rather proud of those, for they are my collection of Napoleonic
+military memoirs. There is a story told of an illiterate millionaire who gave a
+wholesale dealer an order for a copy of all books in any language treating of
+any aspect of Napoleon&rsquo;s career. He thought it would fill a case in his
+library. He was somewhat taken aback, however, when in a few weeks he received
+a message from the dealer that he had got 40,000 volumes, and awaited
+instructions as to whether he should send them on as an instalment, or wait for
+a complete set. The figures may not be exact, but at least they bring home the
+impossibility of exhausting the subject, and the danger of losing one&rsquo;s
+self for years in a huge labyrinth of reading, which may end by leaving no very
+definite impression upon your mind. But one might, perhaps, take a corner of
+it, as I have done here in the military memoirs, and there one might hope to
+get some finality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is Marbot at this end&mdash;the first of all soldier books in the world.
+This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red and gold cover,
+smart and <i>débonnaire</i> like its author. Here he is in one frontispiece
+with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a Captain of his beloved Chasseurs.
+And here in the other is the grizzled old bull-dog as a full general, looking
+as full of fight as ever. It was a real blow to me when some one began to throw
+doubts upon the authenticity of Marbot&rsquo;s memoirs. Homer may be dissolved
+into a crowd of skin-clad bards. Even Shakespeare may be jostled in his throne
+of honour by plausible Baconians; but the human, the gallant, the inimitable
+Marbot! His book is that which gives us the best picture by far of the
+Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are even more interesting than their great
+leader, though his must ever be the most singular figure in history. But those
+soldiers, with their huge shakoes, their hairy knapsacks, and their hearts of
+steel&mdash;what men they were! And what a latent power there must be in this
+French nation which could go on pouring out the blood of its sons for
+twenty-three years with hardly a pause!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It took all that time to work off the hot ferment which the Revolution had left
+in men&rsquo;s veins. And they were not exhausted, for the very last fight
+which the French fought was the finest of all. Proud as we are of our infantry
+at Waterloo, it was really with the French cavalry that the greenest laurels of
+that great epic rested. They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our
+guns again and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field,
+and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever. Read
+Gronow&rsquo;s &ldquo;Memoirs,&rdquo; that chatty little yellow volume yonder
+which brings all that age back to us more vividly than any more pretentious
+work, and you will find the chivalrous admiration which our officers expressed
+at the fine performance of the French horsemen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It must be admitted that, looking back upon history, we have not always been
+good allies, nor yet generous co-partners in the battlefield. The first is the
+fault of our politics, where one party rejoices to break what the other has
+bound. The makers of the Treaty are staunch enough, as the Tories were under
+Pitt and Castlereagh, or the Whigs at the time of Queen Anne, but sooner or
+later the others must come in. At the end of the Marlborough wars we suddenly
+vamped up a peace and, left our allies in the lurch, on account of a change in
+domestic politics. We did the same with Frederick the Great, and would have
+done it in the Napoleonic days if Fox could have controlled the country. And as
+to our partners of the battlefield, how little we have ever said that is hearty
+as to the splendid staunchness of the Prussians at Waterloo. You have to read
+the Frenchman, Houssaye, to get a central view and to understand the part they
+played. Think of old Blucher, seventy years old, and ridden over by a regiment
+of charging cavalry the day before, yet swearing that he would come to
+Wellington if he had to be strapped to his horse. He nobly redeemed his
+promise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The loss of the Prussians at Waterloo was not far short of our own. You would
+not know it, to read our historians. And then the abuse of our Belgian allies
+has been overdone. Some of them fought splendidly, and one brigade of infantry
+had a share in the critical instant when the battle was turned. This also you
+would not learn from British sources. Look at our Portuguese allies also! They
+trained into magnificent troops, and one of Wellington&rsquo;s earnest desires
+was to have ten thousand of them for his Waterloo campaign. It was a Portuguese
+who first topped the rampart of Badajos. They have never had their due credit,
+nor have the Spaniards either, for, though often defeated, it was their
+unconquerable pertinacity which played a great part in the struggle. No; I do
+not think that we are very amiable partners, but I suppose that all national
+history may be open to a similar charge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It must be confessed that Marbot&rsquo;s details are occasionally a little hard
+to believe. Never in the pages of Lever has there been such a series of
+hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits. Surely he stretched it a little
+sometimes. You may remember his adventure at Eylau&mdash;I think it was
+Eylau&mdash;how a cannon-ball, striking the top of his helmet, paralyzed him by
+the concussion of his spine; and how, on a Russian officer running forward to
+cut him down, his horse bit the man&rsquo;s face nearly off. This was the
+famous charger which savaged everything until Marbot, having bought it for next
+to nothing, cured it by thrusting a boiling leg of mutton into its mouth when
+it tried to bite him. It certainly does need a robust faith to get over these
+incidents. And yet, when one reflects upon the hundreds of battles and
+skirmishes which a Napoleonic officer must have endured&mdash;how they must
+have been the uninterrupted routine of his life from the first dark hair upon
+his lip to the first grey one upon his head, it is presumptuous to say what may
+or may not have been possible in such unparalleled careers. At any rate, be it
+fact or fiction&mdash;fact it is, in my opinion, with some artistic touching up
+of the high lights&mdash;there are few books which I could not spare from my
+shelves better than the memoirs of the gallant Marbot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I dwell upon this particular book because it is the best; but take the whole
+line, and there is not one which is not full of interest. Marbot gives you the
+point of view of the officer. So does De Segur and De Fezensac and Colonel
+Gonville, each in some different branch of the service. But some are from the
+pens of the men in the ranks, and they are even more graphic than the others.
+Here, for example, are the papers of good old Cogniet, who was a grenadier of
+the Guard, and could neither read nor write until after the great wars were
+over. A tougher soldier never went into battle. Here is Sergeant Bourgogne,
+also with his dreadful account of that nightmare campaign in Russia, and the
+gallant Chevillet, trumpeter of Chasseurs, with his matter-of-fact account of
+all that he saw, where the daily &ldquo;combat&rdquo; is sandwiched in betwixt
+the real business of the day, which was foraging for his frugal breakfast and
+supper. There is no better writing, and no easier reading, than the records of
+these men of action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Briton cannot help asking himself, as he realizes what men these were, what
+would have happened if 150,000 Cogniets and Bourgognes, with Marbots to lead
+them, and the great captain of all time in the prime of his vigour at their
+head, had made their landing in Kent? For months it was touch-and-go. A single
+naval slip which left the Channel clear would have been followed by an
+embarkation from Boulogne, which had been brought by constant practice to so
+incredibly fine a point that the last horse was aboard within two hours of the
+start. Any evening might have seen the whole host upon the Pevensey Flats. What
+then? We know what Humbert did with a handful of men in Ireland, and the story
+is not reassuring. Conquest, of course, is unthinkable. The world in arms could
+not do that. But Napoleon never thought of the conquest of Britain. He has
+expressly disclaimed it. What he did contemplate was a gigantic raid in which
+he would do so much damage that for years to come England would be occupied at
+home in picking up the pieces, instead of having energy to spend abroad in
+thwarting his Continental plans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Sheerness in flames, with London either levelled to
+the ground or ransomed at his own figure&mdash;that was a more feasible
+programme. Then, with the united fleets of conquered Europe at his back,
+enormous armies and an inexhaustible treasury, swollen with the ransom of
+Britain, he could turn to that conquest of America which would win back the old
+colonies of France and leave him master of the world. If the worst happened and
+he had met his Waterloo upon the South Downs, he would have done again what he
+did in Egypt and once more in Russia: hurried back to France in a swift vessel,
+and still had force enough to hold his own upon the Continent. It would, no
+doubt, have been a big stake to lay upon the table&mdash;150,000 of his
+best&mdash;but he could play again if he lost; while, if he won, he cleared the
+board. A fine game&mdash;if little Nelson had not stopped it, and with one blow
+fixed the edge of salt water as the limit of Napoleon&rsquo;s power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There&rsquo;s the cast of a medal on the top of that cabinet which will bring
+it all close home to you. It is taken from the die of the medal which Napoleon
+had arranged to issue on the day that he reached London. It serves, at any
+rate, to show that his great muster was not a bluff, but that he really did
+mean serious business. On one side is his head. On the other France is engaged
+in strangling and throwing to earth a curious fish-tailed creature, which
+stands for perfidious Albion. &ldquo;Frappe a Londres&rdquo; is printed on one
+part of it, and &ldquo;La Descente dans Angleterre&rdquo; upon another. Struck
+to commemorate a conquest, it remains now as a souvenir of a fiasco. But it was
+a close call.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the way, talking of Napoleon&rsquo;s flight from Egypt, did you ever see a
+curious little book called, if I remember right, &ldquo;Intercepted
+Letters&rdquo;? No; I have no copy upon this shelf, but a friend is more
+fortunate. It shows the almost incredible hatred which existed at the end of
+the eighteenth century between the two nations, descending even to the most
+petty personal annoyance. On this occasion the British Government intercepted a
+mail-bag of letters coming from French officers in Egypt to their friends at
+home, and they either published them, or at least allowed them to be published,
+in the hope, no doubt, of causing domestic complications. Was ever a more
+despicable action? But who knows what other injuries had been inflicted to draw
+forth such a retaliation? I have myself seen a burned and mutilated British
+mail lying where De Wet had left it; but suppose the refinement of his
+vengeance had gone so far as to publish it, what a thunder-bolt it might have
+been!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As to the French officers, I have read their letters, though even after a
+century one had a feeling of guilt when one did so. But, on the whole, they are
+a credit to the writers, and give the impression of a noble and chivalrous set
+of men. Whether they were all addressed to the right people is another matter,
+and therein lay the poisoned sting of this most un-British affair. As to the
+monstrous things which were done upon the other side, remember the arrest of
+all the poor British tourists and commercials who chanced to be in France when
+the war was renewed in 1803. They had run over in all trust and confidence for
+a little outing and change of air. They certainly got it, for Napoleon&rsquo;s
+steel grip fell upon them, and they rejoined their families in 1814. He must
+have had a heart of adamant and a will of iron. Look at his conduct over the
+naval prisoners. The natural proceeding would have been to exchange them. For
+some reason he did not think it good policy to do so. All representations from
+the British Government were set aside, save in the case of the higher officers.
+Hence the miseries of the hulks and the dreadful prison barracks in England.
+Hence also the unhappy idlers of Verdun. What splendid loyalty there must have
+been in those humble Frenchmen which never allowed them for one instant to turn
+bitterly upon the author of all their great misfortunes. It is all brought
+vividly home by the description of their prisons given by Borrow in
+&ldquo;Lavengro.&rdquo; This is the passage&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with their blank,
+blind walls, without windows or grating, and their slanting roofs, out of
+which, through orifices where the tiles had been removed, would be protruded
+dozens of grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide expanse of
+country unfolded from their airy height. Ah! there was much misery in those
+casernes; and from those roofs, doubtless, many a wistful look was turned in
+the direction of lovely France. Much had the poor inmates to endure, and much
+to complain of, to the disgrace of England be it said&mdash;of England, in
+general so kind and bountiful. Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I
+have seen the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy entertainment
+even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless and captive; and such, alas! was
+the fare in those casernes. And then, those visits, or rather ruthless inroads,
+called in the slang of the place &lsquo;straw-plait hunts,&rsquo; when in
+pursuit of a contraband article, which the prisoners, in order to procure
+themselves a few of the necessaries and comforts of existence, were in the
+habit of making, red-coated battalions were marched into the prisons, who, with
+the bayonet&rsquo;s point, carried havoc and ruin into every poor convenience
+which ingenious wretchedness had been endeavouring to raise around it; and then
+the triumphant exit with the miserable booty, and worst of all, the accursed
+bonfire, on the barrack parade of the plait contraband, beneath the view of
+glaring eyeballs from those lofty roofs, amid the hurrahs of the troops
+frequently drowned in the curses poured down from above like a tempest-shower,
+or in the terrific war-whoop of &lsquo;Vive l&rsquo;Empereur!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+There is a little vignette of Napoleon&rsquo;s men in captivity. Here is
+another which is worth preserving of the bearing of his veterans when wounded
+on the field of battle. It is from Mercer&rsquo;s recollections of the Battle
+of Waterloo. Mercer had spent the day firing case into the French cavalry at
+ranges from fifty to two hundred yards, losing two-thirds of his own battery in
+the process. In the evening he had a look at some of his own grim handiwork.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;I had satisfied my curiosity at Hougoumont, and was retracing my steps
+up the hill when my attention was called to a group of wounded Frenchmen by the
+calm, dignified, and soldier-like oration addressed by one of them to the rest.
+I cannot, like Livy, compose a fine harangue for my hero, and, of course, I
+could not retain the precise words, but the import of them was to exhort them
+to bear their sufferings with fortitude; not to repine, like women or children,
+at what every soldier should have made up his mind to suffer as the fortune of
+war, but above all, to remember that they were surrounded by Englishmen, before
+whom they ought to be doubly careful not to disgrace themselves by displaying
+such an unsoldier-like want of fortitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The speaker was sitting on the ground with his lance stuck upright
+beside him&mdash;an old veteran with thick bushy, grizzly beard, countenance
+like a lion&mdash;a lancer of the old guard, and no doubt had fought in many a
+field. One hand was flourished in the air as he spoke, the other, severed at
+the wrist, lay on the earth beside him; one ball (case-shot, probably) had
+entered his body, another had broken his leg. His suffering, after a night of
+exposure so mangled, must have been great; yet he betrayed it not. His bearing
+was that of a Roman, or perhaps an Indian warrior, and I could fancy him
+concluding appropriately his speech in the words of the Mexican king,
+&lsquo;And I too; am I on a bed of roses?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+What a load of moral responsibility upon one man! But his mind was insensible
+to moral responsibility. Surely if it had not been it must have been crushed
+beneath it. Now, if you want to understand the character of Napoleon&mdash;but
+surely I must take a fresh start before I launch on so portentous a subject as
+that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But before I leave the military men let me, for the credit of my own country,
+after that infamous incident of the letters, indicate these six well-thumbed
+volumes of &ldquo;Napier&rsquo;s History.&rdquo; This is the story of the great
+Peninsular War, by one who fought through it himself, and in no history has a
+more chivalrous and manly account been given of one&rsquo;s enemy. Indeed,
+Napier seems to me to push it too far, for his admiration appears to extend not
+only to the gallant soldiers who opposed him, but to the character and to the
+ultimate aims of their leader. He was, in fact, a political follower of Charles
+James Fox, and his heart seems to have been with the enemy even at the moment
+when he led his men most desperately against them. In the verdict of history
+the action of those men who, in their honest zeal for freedom, inflamed
+somewhat by political strife, turned against their own country, when it was in
+truth the Champion of Freedom, and approved of a military despot of the most
+uncompromising kind, seems wildly foolish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if Napier&rsquo;s politics may seem strange, his soldiering was splendid,
+and his prose among the very best that I know. There are passages in that
+work&mdash;the one which describes the breach of Badajos, that of the charge of
+the Fusiliers at Albuera, and that of the French advance at Fuentes
+d&rsquo;Onoro&mdash;which once read haunt the mind for ever. The book is a
+worthy monument of a great national epic. Alas! for the pregnant sentence with
+which it closes, &ldquo;So ended the great war, and with it all memory of the
+services of the veterans.&rdquo; Was there ever a British war of which the same
+might not have been written?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The quotation which I have given from Mercer&rsquo;s book turns my thoughts in
+the direction of the British military reminiscences of that period, less
+numerous, less varied, and less central than the French, but full of character
+and interest all the same. I have found that if I am turned loose in a large
+library, after hesitating over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a
+book of soldier memoirs which I take down. Man is never so interesting as when
+he is thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is at
+stake upon the event. But of all types of soldier the best is the man who is
+keen upon his work, and yet has general culture which enables him to see that
+work in its due perspective, and to sympathize with the gentler aspirations of
+mankind. Such a man is Mercer, an ice-cool fighter, with a sense of discipline
+and decorum which prevented him from moving when a bombshell was fizzing
+between his feet, and yet a man of thoughtful and philosophic temperament, with
+a weakness for solitary musings, for children, and for flowers. He has written
+for all time the classic account of a great battle, seen from the point of view
+of a battery commander. Many others of Wellington&rsquo;s soldiers wrote their
+personal reminiscences. You can get them, as I have them there, in the pleasant
+abridgement of &ldquo;Wellington&rsquo;s Men&rdquo; (admirably edited by Dr.
+Fitchett)&mdash;Anton the Highlander, Harris the rifleman, and Kincaid of the
+same corps. It is a most singular fate which has made an Australian
+nonconformist clergyman the most sympathetic and eloquent reconstructor of
+those old heroes, but it is a noble example of that unity of the British race,
+which in fifty scattered lands still mourns or rejoices over the same historic
+record.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And just one word, before I close down this over-long and too discursive
+chatter, on the subject of yonder twin red volumes which flank the shelf. They
+are Maxwell&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of Wellington,&rdquo; and I do not think you
+will find a better or more readable one. The reader must ever feel towards the
+great soldier what his own immediate followers felt, respect rather than
+affection. One&rsquo;s failure to attain a more affectionate emotion is
+alleviated by the knowledge that it was the last thing which he invited or
+desired. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be a damned fool, sir!&rdquo; was his exhortation
+to the good citizen who had paid him a compliment. It was a curious, callous
+nature, brusque and limited. The hardest huntsman learns to love his hounds,
+but he showed no affection and a good deal of contempt for the men who had been
+his instruments. &ldquo;They are the scum of the earth,&rdquo; said he.
+&ldquo;All English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink. That is
+the plain fact&mdash;they have all enlisted for drink.&rdquo; His general
+orders were full of undeserved reproaches at a time when the most lavish praise
+could hardly have met the real deserts of his army. When the wars were done he
+saw little, save in his official capacity, of his old comrades-in-arms. And
+yet, from major-general to drummer-boy, he was the man whom they would all have
+elected to serve under, had the work to be done once more. As one of them said,
+&ldquo;The sight of his long nose was worth ten thousand men on a field of
+battle.&rdquo; They were themselves a leathery breed, and cared little for the
+gentler amenities so long as the French were well drubbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mind, which was comprehensive and alert in warfare, was singularly limited
+in civil affairs. As a statesman he was so constant an example of devotion to
+duty, self-sacrifice, and high disinterested character, that the country was
+the better for his presence. But he fiercely opposed Catholic Emancipation, the
+Reform Bill, and everything upon which our modern life is founded. He could
+never be brought to see that a pyramid should stand on its base and not on its
+apex, and that the larger the pyramid, the broader should be the base. Even in
+military affairs he was averse from every change, and I know of no improvements
+which came from his initiative during all those years when his authority was
+supreme. The floggings which broke a man&rsquo;s spirit and self-respect, the
+leathern stock which hampered his movements, all the old traditional regime
+found a champion in him. On the other hand, he strongly opposed the
+introduction of the percussion cap as opposed to the flint and steel in the
+musket. Neither in war nor in politics did he rightly judge the future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet in reading his letters and dispatches, one is surprised sometimes at
+the incisive thought and its vigorous expression. There is a passage in which
+he describes the way in which his soldiers would occasionally desert into some
+town which he was besieging. &ldquo;They knew,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;that
+they must be taken, for when we lay our bloody hands upon a place we are sure
+to take it, sooner or later; but they liked being dry and under cover, and then
+that extraordinary caprice which always pervades the English character! Our
+deserters are very badly treated by the enemy; those who deserted in France
+were treated as the lowest of mortals, slaves and scavengers. Nothing but
+English caprice can account for it; just what makes our noblemen associate with
+stage-coach drivers, and become stage-coach drivers themselves.&rdquo; After
+reading that passage, how often does the phrase &ldquo;the extraordinary
+caprice which always pervades the English character&rdquo; come back as one
+observes some fresh manifestation of it!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But let not my last note upon the great duke be a carping one. Rather let my
+final sentence be one which will remind you of his frugal and abstemious life,
+his carpetless floor and little camp bed, his precise courtesy which left no
+humblest letter unanswered, his courage which never flinched, his tenacity
+which never faltered, his sense of duty which made his life one long unselfish
+effort on behalf of what seemed to him to be the highest interest of the State.
+Go down and stand by the huge granite sarcophagus in the dim light of the crypt
+of St. Paul&rsquo;s, and in the hush of that austere spot, cast back your mind
+to the days when little England alone stood firm against the greatest soldier
+and the greatest army that the world has ever known. Then you feel what this
+dead man stood for, and you pray that we may still find such another amongst us
+when the clouds gather once again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You see that the literature of Waterloo is well represented in my small
+military library. Of all books dealing with the personal view of the matter, I
+think that &ldquo;Siborne&rsquo;s Letters,&rdquo; which is a collection of the
+narratives of surviving officers made by Siborne in the year 1827, is the most
+interesting. Gronow&rsquo;s account is also very vivid and interesting. Of the
+strategical narratives, Houssaye&rsquo;s book is my favourite. Taken from the
+French point of view, it gets the actions of the allies in truer perspective
+than any English or German account can do; but there is a fascination about
+that great combat which makes every narrative that bears upon it of enthralling
+interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wellington used to say that too much was made of it, and that one would imagine
+that the British Army had never fought a battle before. It was a characteristic
+speech, but it must be admitted that the British Army never had, as a matter of
+fact, for many centuries fought a battle which was finally decisive of a great
+European war. There lies the perennial interest of the incident, that it was
+the last act of that long-drawn drama, and that to the very fall of the curtain
+no man could tell how the play would end&mdash;&ldquo;the nearest run thing
+that ever you saw&rdquo;&mdash;that was the victor&rsquo;s description. It is a
+singular thing that during those twenty-five years of incessant fighting the
+material and methods of warfare made so little progress. So far as I know,
+there was no great change in either between 1789 and 1805. The breech-loader,
+heavy artillery, the ironclad, all great advances in the art of war, have been
+invented in time of peace. There are some improvements so obvious, and at the
+same time so valuable, that it is extraordinary that they were not adopted.
+Signalling, for example, whether by heliograph or by flag-waving, would have
+made an immense difference in the Napoleonic campaigns. The principle of the
+semaphore was well known, and Belgium, with its numerous windmills, would seem
+to be furnished with natural semaphores. Yet in the four days during which the
+campaign of Waterloo was fought, the whole scheme of military operations on
+both sides was again and again imperilled, and finally in the case of the
+French brought to utter ruin by lack of that intelligence which could so easily
+have been conveyed. June 18th was at intervals a sunshiny day&mdash;a four-inch
+glass mirror would have put Napoleon in communication with Gruchy, and the
+whole history of Europe might have been altered. Wellington himself suffered
+dreadfully from defective information which might have been easily supplied.
+The unexpected presence of the French army was first discovered at four in the
+morning of June 15. It was of enormous importance to get the news rapidly to
+Wellington at Brussels that he might instantly concentrate his scattered forces
+on the best line of resistance&mdash;yet, through the folly of sending only a
+single messenger, this vital information did not reach him until three in the
+afternoon, the distance being thirty miles. Again, when Blucher was defeated at
+Ligny on the 16th, it was of enormous importance that Wellington should know at
+once the line of his retreat so as to prevent the French from driving a wedge
+between them. The single Prussian officer who was despatched with this
+information was wounded, and never reached his destination, and it was only
+next day that Wellington learned the Prussian plans. On what tiny things does
+History depend!
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>IX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The contemplation of my fine little regiment of French military memoirs had
+brought me to the question of Napoleon himself, and you see that I have a very
+fair line dealing with him also. There is Scott&rsquo;s life, which is not
+entirely a success. His ink was too precious to be shed in such a venture. But
+here are the three volumes of the physician Bourrienne&mdash;that Bourrienne
+who knew him so well. Does any one ever know a man so well as his doctor? They
+are quite excellent and admirably translated. Meneval also&mdash;the patient
+Meneval&mdash;who wrote for untold hours to dictation at ordinary talking
+speed, and yet was expected to be legible and to make no mistakes. At least his
+master could not fairly criticize his legibility, for is it not on record that
+when Napoleon&rsquo;s holograph account of an engagement was laid before the
+President of the Senate, the worthy man thought that it was a drawn plan of the
+battle? Meneval survived his master and has left an excellent and intimate
+account of him. There is Constant&rsquo;s account, also written from that point
+of view in which it is proverbial that no man is a hero. But of all the vivid
+terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who never saw him
+and whose book was not directly dealing with him. I mean Taine&rsquo;s account
+of him, in the first volume of &ldquo;Les Origines de la France
+Contemporaine.&rdquo; You can never forget it when once you have read it. He
+produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel, way. He does not, for
+example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon had a more than mediaeval
+Italian cunning. He presents a succession of documents&mdash;gives a series of
+contemporary instances to prove it. Then, having got that fixed in your head by
+blow after blow, he passes on to another phase of his character, his
+coldhearted amorousness, his power of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or
+some other quality, and piles up his illustrations of that. Instead, for
+example, of saying that the Emperor had a marvellous memory for detail, we have
+the account of the head of Artillery laying the list of all the guns in France
+before his master, who looked over it and remarked, &ldquo;Yes, but you have
+omitted two in a fort near Dieppe.&rdquo; So the man is gradually etched in
+with indelible ink. It is a wonderful figure of which you are conscious in the
+end, the figure of an archangel, but surely of an archangel of darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will, after Taine&rsquo;s method, take one fact and let it speak for itself.
+Napoleon left a legacy in a codicil to his will to a man who tried to
+assassinate Wellington. There is the mediaeval Italian again! He was no more a
+Corsican than the Englishman born in India is a Hindoo. Read the lives of the
+Borgias, the Sforzas, the Medicis, and of all the lustful, cruel, broad-minded,
+art-loving, talented despots of the little Italian States, including Genoa,
+from which the Buonapartes migrated. There at once you get the real descent of
+the man, with all the stigmata clear upon him&mdash;the outward calm, the
+inward passion, the layer of snow above the volcano, everything which
+characterized the old despots of his native land, the pupils of Machiavelli,
+but all raised to the dimensions of genius. You can whitewash him as you may,
+but you will never get a layer thick enough to cover the stain of that
+cold-blooded deliberate endorsement of his noble adversary&rsquo;s
+assassination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another book which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the man is this
+one&mdash;the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat. She was in daily contact with him
+at the Court, and she studied him with those quick critical eyes of a clever
+woman, the most unerring things in life when they are not blinded by love. If
+you have read those pages, you feel that you know him as if you had yourself
+seen and talked with him. His singular mixture of the small and the great, his
+huge sweep of imagination, his very limited knowledge, his intense egotism, his
+impatience of obstacles, his boorishness, his gross impertinence to women, his
+diabolical playing upon the weak side of every one with whom he came in
+contact&mdash;they make up among them one of the most striking of historical
+portraits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of my books deal with the days of his greatness, but here, you see, is a
+three-volume account of those weary years at St. Helena. Who can help pitying
+the mewed eagle? And yet if you play the great game you must pay a stake. This
+was the same man who had a royal duke shot in a ditch because he was a danger
+to his throne. Was not he himself a danger to every throne in Europe? Why so
+harsh a retreat as St. Helena, you say? Remember that he had been put in a
+milder one before, that he had broken away from it, and that the lives of fifty
+thousand men had paid for the mistaken leniency. All this is forgotten now, and
+the pathetic picture of the modern Prometheus chained to his rock and devoured
+by the vultures of his own bitter thoughts, is the one impression which the
+world has retained. It is always so much easier to follow the emotions than the
+reason, especially where a cheap magnanimity and second-hand generosity are
+involved. But reason must still insist that Europe&rsquo;s treatment of
+Napoleon was not vindictive, and that Hudson Lowe was a man who tried to live
+up to the trust which had been committed to him by his country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was certainly not a post from which any one would hope for credit. If he
+were slack and easy-going all would be well. But there would be the chance of a
+second flight with its consequences. If he were strict and assiduous he would
+be assuredly represented as a petty tyrant. &ldquo;I am glad when you are on
+outpost,&rdquo; said Lowe&rsquo;s general in some campaign, &ldquo;for then I
+am sure of a sound rest.&rdquo; He was on outpost at St. Helena, and because he
+was true to his duties Europe (France included) had a sound rest. But he
+purchased it at the price of his own reputation. The greatest schemer in the
+world, having nothing else on which to vent his energies, turned them all to
+the task of vilifying his guardian. It was natural enough that he who had never
+known control should not brook it now. It is natural also that sentimentalists
+who have not thought of the details should take the Emperor&rsquo;s point of
+view. What is deplorable, however, is that our own people should be misled by
+one-sided accounts, and that they should throw to the wolves a man who was
+serving his country in a post of anxiety and danger, with such responsibility
+upon him as few could ever have endured. Let them remember Montholon&rsquo;s
+remark: &ldquo;An angel from heaven would not have satisfied us.&rdquo; Let
+them recall also that Lowe with ample material never once troubled to state his
+own case. &ldquo;<i>Je fais mon devoir et suis indifférent pour le
+reste</i>,&rdquo; said he, in his interview with the Emperor. They were no idle
+words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Apart from this particular epoch, French literature, which is so rich in all
+its branches, is richest of all in its memoirs. Whenever there was anything of
+interest going forward there was always some kindly gossip who knew all about
+it, and was ready to set it down for the benefit of posterity. Our own history
+has not nearly enough of these charming sidelights. Look at our sailors in the
+Napoleonic wars, for example. They played an epoch-making part. For nearly
+twenty years Freedom was a Refugee upon the seas. Had our navy been swept away,
+then all Europe would have been one organized despotism. At times everybody was
+against us, fighting against their own direct interests under the pressure of
+that terrible hand. We fought on the waters with the French, with the
+Spaniards, with the Danes, with the Russians, with the Turks, even with our
+American kinsmen. Middies grew into post-captains, and admirals into dotards
+during that prolonged struggle. And what have we in literature to show for it
+all? Marryat&rsquo;s novels, many of which are founded upon personal
+experience, Nelson&rsquo;s and Collingwood&rsquo;s letters, Lord
+Cochrane&rsquo;s biography&mdash;that is about all. I wish we had more of
+Collingwood, for he wielded a fine pen. Do you remember the sonorous opening of
+his Trafalgar message to his captains?&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;The ever to be lamented death of Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke of Bronte,
+the Commander-in-Chief, who fell in the action of the 21st, in the arms of
+Victory, covered with glory, whose memory will be ever dear to the British Navy
+and the British Nation; whose zeal for the honour of his king and for the
+interests of his country will be ever held up as a shining example for a
+British seaman&mdash;leaves to me a duty to return thanks, etc., etc.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+It was a worthy sentence to carry such a message, written too in a raging
+tempest, with sinking vessels all around him. But in the main it is a poor crop
+from such a soil. No doubt our sailors were too busy to do much writing, but
+none the less one wonders that among so many thousands there were not some to
+understand what a treasure their experiences would be to their descendants. I
+can call to mind the old three-deckers which used to rot in Portsmouth Harbour,
+and I have often thought, could they tell their tales, what a missing chapter
+in our literature they could supply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not only in Napoleonic memoirs that the French are so fortunate. The
+almost equally interesting age of Louis XIV. produced an even more wonderful
+series. If you go deeply into the subject you are amazed by their number, and
+you feel as if every one at the Court of the Roi Soleil had done what he (or
+she) could to give away their neighbours. Just to take the more obvious, there
+are St. Simon&rsquo;s Memoirs&mdash;those in themselves give us a more
+comprehensive and intimate view of the age than anything I know of which treats
+of the times of Queen Victoria. Then there is St. Evremond, who is nearly as
+complete. Do you want the view of a woman of quality? There are the letters of
+Madame de Sevigne (eight volumes of them), perhaps the most wonderful series of
+letters that any woman has ever penned. Do you want the confessions of a rake
+of the period? Here are the too salacious memoirs of the mischievous Duc de
+Roquelaure, not reading for the nursery certainly, not even for the boudoir,
+but a strange and very intimate picture of the times. All these books fit into
+each other, for the characters of the one reappear in the others. You come to
+know them quite familiarly before you have finished, their loves and their
+hates, their duels, their intrigues, and their ultimate fortunes. If you do not
+care to go so deeply into it you have only to put Julia Pardoe&rsquo;s
+four-volumed &ldquo;Court of Louis XIV.&rdquo; upon your shelf, and you will
+find a very admirable condensation&mdash;or a distillation rather, for most of
+the salt is left behind. There is another book too&mdash;that big one on the
+bottom shelf&mdash;which holds it all between its brown and gold covers. An
+extravagance that&mdash;for it cost me some sovereigns&mdash;but it is
+something to have the portraits of all that wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the
+devout Maintenon, of the frail Montespan, of Bossuet, Fénelon, Molière, Racine,
+Pascal, Condé, Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age. If you want
+to make yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of &ldquo;The Court and
+Times of Louis XIV.,&rdquo; you will never think that your money has been
+wasted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, I have bored you unduly, my patient friend, with my love of memoirs,
+Napoleonic and otherwise, which give a touch of human interest to the arid
+records of history. Not that history should be arid. It ought to be the most
+interesting subject upon earth, the story of ourselves, of our forefathers, of
+the human race, the events which made us what we are, and wherein, if
+Weismann&rsquo;s views hold the field, some microscopic fraction of this very
+body which for the instant we chance to inhabit may have borne a part. But
+unfortunately the power of accumulating knowledge and that of imparting it are
+two very different things, and the uninspired historian becomes merely the
+dignified compiler of an enlarged almanac. Worst of all, when a man does come
+along with fancy and imagination, who can breathe the breath of life into the
+dry bones, it is the fashion for the dryasdusts to belabour him, as one who has
+wandered away from the orthodox path and must necessarily be inaccurate. So
+Froude was attacked. So also Macaulay in his day. But both will be read when
+the pedants are forgotten. If I were asked my very ideal of how history should
+be written, I think I should point to those two rows on yonder shelf, the one
+M&rsquo;Carthy&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of Our Own Times,&rdquo; the other
+Lecky&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of England in the Eighteenth Century.&rdquo;
+Curious that each should have been written by an Irishman, and that though of
+opposite politics and living in an age when Irish affairs have caused such
+bitterness, both should be conspicuous not merely for all literary graces, but
+for that broad toleration which sees every side of a question, and handles
+every problem from the point of view of the philosophic observer and never of
+the sectarian partisan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the way, talking of history, have you read Parkman&rsquo;s works? He was, I
+think, among the very greatest of the historians, and yet one seldom hears his
+name. A New England man by birth, and writing principally of the early history
+of the American Settlements and of French Canada, it is perhaps excusable that
+he should have no great vogue in England, but even among Americans I have found
+many who have not read him. There are four of his volumes in green and gold
+down yonder, &ldquo;The Jesuits in Canada,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Frontenac,&rdquo;
+but there are others, all of them well worth reading, &ldquo;Pioneers of
+France,&rdquo; &ldquo;Montcalm and Wolfe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Discovery of the Great
+West,&rdquo; etc. Some day I hope to have a complete set.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking only that one book, &ldquo;The Jesuits in Canada,&rdquo; it is worth a
+reputation in itself. And how noble a tribute is this which a man of Puritan
+blood pays to that wonderful Order! He shows how in the heyday of their
+enthusiasm these brave soldiers of the Cross invaded Canada as they did China
+and every other place where danger was to be faced, and a horrible death to be
+found. I don&rsquo;t care what faith a man may profess, or whether he be a
+Christian at all, but he cannot read these true records without feeling that
+the very highest that man has ever evolved in sanctity and devotion was to be
+found among these marvellous men. They were indeed the pioneers of
+civilization, for apart from doctrines they brought among the savages the
+highest European culture, and in their own deportment an object-lesson of how
+chastely, austerely, and nobly men could live. France has sent myriads of brave
+men on to her battlefields, but in all her long record of glory I do not think
+that she can point to any courage so steadfast and so absolutely heroic as that
+of the men of the Iroquois Mission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How nobly they lived makes the body of the book, how serenely they died forms
+the end to it. It is a tale which cannot even now be read without a
+shudder&mdash;a nightmare of horrors. Fanaticism may brace a man to hurl
+himself into oblivion, as the Mahdi&rsquo;s hordes did before Khartoum, but one
+feels that it is at least a higher development of such emotion, where men
+slowly and in cold blood endure so thankless a life, and welcome so dreadful an
+end. Every faith can equally boast its martyrs&mdash;a painful thought, since
+it shows how many thousands must have given their blood for error&mdash;but in
+testifying to their faith these brave men have testified to something more
+important still, to the subjugation of the body and to the absolute supremacy
+of the dominating spirit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story of Father Jogue is but one of many, and yet it is worth recounting,
+as showing the spirit of the men. He also was on the Iroquois Mission, and was
+so tortured and mutilated by his sweet parishioners that the very dogs used to
+howl at his distorted figure. He made his way back to France, not for any
+reason of personal rest or recuperation, but because he needed a special
+dispensation to say Mass. The Catholic Church has a regulation that a priest
+shall not be deformed, so that the savages with their knives had wrought better
+than they knew. He received his dispensation and was sent for by Louis XIV.,
+who asked him what he could do for him. No doubt the assembled courtiers
+expected to hear him ask for the next vacant Bishopric. What he did actually
+ask for, as the highest favour, was to be sent back to the Iroquois Mission,
+where the savages signalized his arrival by burning him alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Parkman is worth reading, if it were only for his account of the Indians.
+Perhaps the very strangest thing about them, and the most unaccountable, is
+their small numbers. The Iroquois were one of the most formidable of tribes.
+They were of the Five Nations, whose scalping-parties wandered over an expanse
+of thousands of square miles. Yet there is good reason to doubt whether the
+whole five nations could have put as many thousand warriors in the field. It
+was the same with all the other tribes of Northern Americans, both in the east,
+the north, and the west. Their numbers were always insignificant. And yet they
+had that huge country to themselves, the best of climates, and plenty of food.
+Why was it that they did not people it thickly? It may be taken as a striking
+example of the purpose and design which run through the affairs of men, that at
+the very moment when the old world was ready to overflow the new world was
+empty to receive it. Had North America been peopled as China is peopled, the
+Europeans might have founded some settlements, but could never have taken
+possession of the continent. Buffon has made the striking remark that the
+creative power appeared to have never had great vigour in America. He alluded
+to the abundance of the flora and fauna as compared with that of other great
+divisions of the earth&rsquo;s surface. Whether the numbers of the Indians are
+an illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special cause, is
+beyond my very modest scientific attainments. When one reflects upon the
+countless herds of bison which used to cover the Western plains, or marks in
+the present day the race statistics of the French Canadians at one end of the
+continent, and of the Southern negro at the other, it seems absurd to suppose
+that there is any geographical reason against Nature being as prolific here as
+elsewhere. However, these be deeper waters, and with your leave we will get
+back into my usual six-inch wading-depth once more.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>X.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I don&rsquo;t know how those two little books got in there. They are
+Henley&rsquo;s &ldquo;Song of the Sword&rdquo; and &ldquo;Book of
+Verses.&rdquo; They ought to be over yonder in the rather limited Poetry
+Section. Perhaps it is that I like his work so, whether it be prose or verse,
+and so have put them ready to my hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was
+very much greater than his work, great as some of his work was. I have seldom
+known a personality more magnetic and stimulating. You left his presence, as a
+battery leaves a generating station, charged up and full. He made you feel what
+a lot of work there was to be done, and how glorious it was to be able to do
+it, and how needful to get started upon it that very hour. With the frame and
+the vitality of a giant he was cruelly bereft of all outlet for his strength,
+and so distilled it off in hot words, in warm sympathy, in strong prejudices,
+in all manner of human and stimulating emotions. Much of the time and energy
+which might have built an imperishable name for himself was spent in
+encouraging others; but it was not waste, for he left his broad thumb-mark upon
+all that passed beneath it. A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our
+literature to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best was the finest
+of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive lines more noble and more
+strong than those which begin with the well-known quatrain&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Out of the night that covers me,<br/>
+    Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,<br/>
+I thank whatever Gods there be<br/>
+    For my unconquerable soul.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from a man who,
+through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned again, like an
+ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon&rsquo;s knife. When he said&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;In the fell clutch of Circumstance<br/>
+    I have not winced nor cried aloud,<br/>
+Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance<br/>
+    My head is bloody but unbowed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+It was not what Lady Byron called &ldquo;the mimic woe&rdquo; of the poet, but
+it was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake, whose
+proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the very extreme
+from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running to large sweeping images
+and thundering words. Such are the &ldquo;Song of the Sword&rdquo; and much
+more that he has written, like the wild singing of some Northern scald. The
+other, and to my mind both the more characteristic and the finer side of his
+work, is delicate, precise, finely etched, with extraordinarily vivid little
+pictures drawn in carefully phrased and balanced English. Such are the
+&ldquo;Hospital Verses,&rdquo; while the &ldquo;London Voluntaries&rdquo; stand
+midway between the two styles. What! you have not read the &ldquo;Hospital
+Verses!&rdquo; Then get the &ldquo;Book of Verses&rdquo; and read them without
+delay. You will surely find something there which, for good or ill, is unique.
+You can name&mdash;or at least I can name&mdash;nothing to compare it with.
+Goldsmith and Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if
+majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied, so flexible,
+so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly journals and all the
+other lightning conductors which caused such a man to pass away, and to leave a
+total output of about five booklets behind him!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no business in
+this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles of various sorts. Here
+are three in a line, which carry you over a splendid stretch of French (which
+usually means European) history, each, as luck would have it, beginning just
+about the time when the other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de
+Monstrelet, and the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the
+best contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a
+century&mdash;a fair slice out of the total written record of the human race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval French,
+which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get Lord Berners&rsquo;
+almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English, or you can turn to a
+modern translation, such as this one of Johnes. A single page of Lord Berners
+is delightful; but it is a strain, I think, to read bulky volumes in an archaic
+style. Personally, I prefer the modern, and even with that you have shown some
+patience before you have reached the end of that big second tome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea of what he
+was doing&mdash;whether it ever flashed across his mind that the day might come
+when his book would be the one great authority, not only about the times in
+which he lived, but about the whole institution of chivalry? I fear that it is
+far more likely that his whole object was to gain some mundane advantage from
+the various barons and knights whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left
+it on record, for example, that when he visited the Court of England he took
+with him a handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless, if one could
+follow the good Canon one would find his journeys littered with similar copies
+which were probably expensive gifts to the recipient, for what return would a
+knightly soul make for a book which enshrined his own valour?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be admitted that
+the work could not have been done more thoroughly. There is something of
+Herodotus in the Canon&rsquo;s cheery, chatty, garrulous, take-it-or-leave-it
+manner. But he has the advantage of the old Greek in accuracy. Considering that
+he belonged to the same age which gravely accepted the travellers&rsquo; tales
+of Sir John Maundeville, it is, I think, remarkable how careful and accurate
+the chronicler is. Take, for example, his description of Scotland and the
+Scotch. Some would give the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that is another matter.
+Scotch descriptions are a subject over which a fourteenth-century Hainaulter
+might fairly be allowed a little scope for his imagination. Yet we can see that
+the account must on the whole have been very correct. The Galloway nags, the
+girdle-cakes, the bagpipes&mdash;every little detail rings true. Jean-le-Bel
+was actually present in a Border campaign, and from him Froissart got his
+material; but he has never attempted to embroider it, and its accuracy, where
+we can to some extent test it, must predispose us to accept his accounts where
+they are beyond our confirmation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the most interesting portion of old Froissart&rsquo;s work is that which
+deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time, their deeds, their
+habits, their methods of talking. It is true that he lived himself just a
+little after the true heyday of chivalry; but he was quite early enough to have
+met many of the men who had been looked upon as the flower of knighthood of the
+time. His book was read too, and commented on by these very men (as many of
+them as could read), and so we may take it that it was no fancy portrait, but a
+correct picture of these soldiers which is to be found in it. The accounts are
+always consistent. If you collate the remarks and speeches of the knights (as I
+have had occasion to do) you will find a remarkable uniformity running through
+them. We may believe then that this really does represent the kind of men who
+fought at Crecy and at Poictiers, in the age when both the French and the
+Scottish kings were prisoners in London, and England reached a pitch of
+military glory which has perhaps never been equalled in her history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had presented
+to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme romancer, you will
+find that Scott&rsquo;s mediaeval knights were usually muscular athletes in the
+prime of life: Bois-Guilbert, Front-de-Bœuf, Richard, Ivanhoe, Count
+Robert&mdash;they all were such. But occasionally the most famous of
+Froissart&rsquo;s knights were old, crippled and blinded. Chandos, the best
+lance of his day, must have been over seventy when he lost his life through
+being charged upon the side on which he had already lost an eye. He was well on
+to that age when he rode out from the English army and slew the Spanish
+champion, big Marten Ferrara, upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth and strength
+were very useful, no doubt, especially where heavy armour had to be carried,
+but once on the horse&rsquo;s back the gallant steed supplied the muscles. In
+an English hunting-field many a doddering old man, when he is once firmly
+seated in his familiar saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game.
+So it was among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could still
+carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms, and, above all,
+their cool and undaunted courage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the knight was
+often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little quarter in his wars,
+save when a ransom might be claimed. But with all his savagery, he was a
+light-hearted creature, like a formidable boy playing a dreadful game. He was
+true also to his own curious code, and, so far as his own class went, his
+feelings were genial and sympathetic, even in warfare. There was no personal
+feeling or bitterness as there might be now in a war between Frenchmen and
+Germans. On the contrary, the opponents were very softspoken and polite to each
+other. &ldquo;Is there any small vow of which I may relieve you?&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Would you desire to attempt some small deed of arms upon me?&rdquo; And
+in the midst of a fight they would stop for a breather, and converse amicably
+the while, with many compliments upon each other&rsquo;s prowess. When Seaton
+the Scotsman had exchanged as many blows as he wished with a company of French
+knights, he said, &ldquo;Thank you, gentlemen, thank you!&rdquo; and galloped
+away. An English knight made a vow, &ldquo;for his own advancement and the
+exaltation of his lady,&rdquo; that he would ride into the hostile city of
+Paris, and touch with his lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most
+characteristic of the times. As he galloped up, the French knights around the
+barrier, seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon him, and called out
+to him that he had carried himself well. As he returned, however, there stood
+an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe upon the side-walk, who struck him as he
+passed, and killed him. Here ends the chronicler; but I have not the least
+doubt that the butcher had a very evil time at the hands of the French knights,
+who would not stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an
+enemy, meet so plebeian an end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional than
+Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones out of that
+quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course Quentin Durward has
+come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The whole history of Louis XI. and
+his relations with Charles the Bold, the strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the
+plebeian courtiers, the barber and the hangman, the astrologers, the
+alternations of savage cruelty and of slavish superstition&mdash;it is all set
+forth here. One would imagine that such a monarch was unique, that such a
+mixture of strange qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and
+yet like causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Life of Ivan the Terrible,&rdquo; and you will find that more than a
+century later Russia produced a monarch even more diabolical, but working
+exactly on the same lines as Louis, even down to small details. The same
+cruelty, the same superstition, the same astrologers, the same low-born
+associates, the same residence outside the influence of the great
+cities&mdash;a parallel could hardly be more complete. If you have not supped
+too full of horrors when you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same
+author&rsquo;s account of Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of
+monarchs! Blood and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons.
+And there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which gives
+it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the Eighth, but our
+very worst would have been a wise and benevolent rule in Russia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder has as much
+between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It is Washington
+Irving&rsquo;s &ldquo;Conquest of Granada.&rdquo; I do not know where he got
+his material for this book&mdash;from Spanish Chronicles, I presume&mdash;but
+the wars between the Moors and the Christian knights must have been among the
+most chivalrous of exploits. I could not name a book which gets the beauty and
+the glamour of it better than this one, the lance-heads gleaming in the dark
+defiles, the red bale fires glowing on the crags, the stern devotion of the
+mail-clad Christians, the debonnaire and courtly courage of the dashing Moslem.
+Had Washington Irving written nothing else, that book alone should have forced
+the door of every library. I love all his books, for no man wrote fresher
+English with a purer style; but of them all it is still &ldquo;The Conquest of
+Granada&rdquo; to which I turn most often.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are two exotics
+side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are a brace of foreign
+novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has only two books. This
+green-and-gold volume contains both the works of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an
+excellent translation by Lady Wilde. The first is &ldquo;Sidonia the
+Sorceress,&rdquo; the second, &ldquo;The Amber Witch.&rdquo; I don&rsquo;t know
+where one may turn for a stranger view of the Middle Ages, the quaint details
+of simple life, with sudden intervals of grotesque savagery. The most weird and
+barbarous things are made human and comprehensible. There is one incident which
+haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers with the
+villagers as to what price they will give him for putting some young witch to
+the torture, running them up from a barrel of apples to a barrel and a half, on
+the grounds that he is now old and rheumatic, and that the stooping and
+straining is bad for his back. It should be done on a sloping hill, he
+explains, so that the &ldquo;dear little children&rdquo; may see it easily.
+Both &ldquo;Sidonia&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Amber Witch&rdquo; give such a
+picture of old Germany as I have never seen elsewhere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in whom I find
+a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who is, if I mistake not,
+young and with his career still before him. &ldquo;The Forerunner&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;The Death of the Gods&rdquo; are the only two books of his which I have
+been able to obtain, but the pictures of Renaissance Italy in the one, and of
+declining Rome in the other, are in my opinion among the masterpieces of
+fiction. I confess that as I read them I was pleased to find how open my mind
+was to new impressions, for one of the greatest mental dangers which comes upon
+a man as he grows older is that he should become so attached to old favourites
+that he has no room for the new-comer, and persuades himself that the days of
+great things are at an end because his own poor brain is getting ossified. You
+have but to open any critical paper to see how common is the disease, but a
+knowledge of literary history assures us that it has always been the same, and
+that if the young writer is discouraged by adverse comparisons it has been the
+common lot from the beginning. He has but one resource, which is to pay no heed
+to criticism, but to try to satisfy his own highest standard and leave the rest
+to time and the public. Here is a little bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see,
+beside my bookcase, which may in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to
+some younger brother&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;Critics kind&mdash;never mind!<br/>
+Critics flatter&mdash;no matter!<br/>
+Critics blame&mdash;all the same!<br/>
+Critics curse&mdash;none the worse!<br/>
+Do your best&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; the rest!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>XI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants, but
+surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been explored, when
+the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon has been scrapped, and
+the world has settled down into unbroken virtue and unutterable dulness, men
+will cast their thoughts back to our age, and will idealize our romance
+and&mdash;our courage, even as we do that of our distant forbears. &ldquo;It is
+wonderful what these people did with their rude implements and their limited
+appliances!&rdquo; That is what they will say when they read of our
+explorations, our voyages, and our wars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Cruise of the <i>Falcon</i>.&rdquo; Nature was guilty of the pun which
+put this soul into a body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if
+there is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen&mdash;solicitors, if
+I remember right&mdash;go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a long-shore
+youth, and they embark in a tiny boat in which they put to sea. Where do they
+turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they penetrate to Paraguay, return to the West
+Indies, sell their little boat there, and so home. What could the Elizabethan
+mariners have done more? There are no Spanish galleons now to vary the monotony
+of such a voyage, but had there been I am very certain our adventurers would
+have had their share of the doubloons. But surely it was the nobler when done
+out of the pure lust of adventure and in answer to the call of the sea, with no
+golden bait to draw them on. The old spirit still lives, disguise it as you
+will with top hats, frock coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they
+also will seem romantic when centuries have blurred them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still linger upon
+earth is that large copy of the &ldquo;Voyage of the <i>Discovery</i> in the
+Antarctic&rdquo; by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion with no
+attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or perhaps all the more)
+leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one reads it, and reflects on what
+one reads, one seems to get a clear view of just those qualities which make the
+best kind of Briton. Every nation produces brave men. Every nation has men of
+energy. But there is a certain type which mixes its bravery and its energy with
+a gentle modesty and a boyish good-humour, and it is just this type which is
+the highest. Here the whole expedition seem to have been imbued with the spirit
+of their commander. No flinching, no grumbling, every discomfort taken as a
+jest, no thought of self, each working only for the success of the enterprise.
+When you have read of such privations so endured and so chronicled, it makes
+one ashamed to show emotion over the small annoyances of daily life. Read of
+Scott&rsquo;s blinded, scurvy-struck party staggering on to their goal, and
+then complain, if you can, of the heat of a northern sun, or the dust of a
+country road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We are not
+ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was otherwise&mdash;when it was
+thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman should always be the Stoic, with
+his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of life. &ldquo;You
+look cold, sir,&rdquo; said an English sympathizer to a French <i>emigré</i>.
+The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo;
+said he, &ldquo;a gentleman is never cold.&rdquo; One&rsquo;s consideration for
+others as well as one&rsquo;s own self-respect should check the grumble. This
+self-suppression, and also the concealment of pain are two of the old
+<i>noblesse oblige</i> characteristics which are now little more than a
+tradition. Public opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop
+because his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are bruised
+should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity, but of contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans as well as
+ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is Greely&rsquo;s &ldquo;Arctic
+Service,&rdquo; and it is a worthy shelf-companion to Scott&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Account of the Voyage of the <i>Discovery</i>.&rdquo; There are
+incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of those
+twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one a day from cold
+and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our puny tragedies of romance.
+And the gallant starving leader giving lectures on abstract science in an
+attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from their
+sufferings&mdash;what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad to
+suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could do all
+these things for six months on end, and that some should live to tell the tale,
+is, indeed, a marvel. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation of the
+poor dying lieutenant: &ldquo;Well, this <i>is</i> wretched,&rdquo; he groaned,
+as he turned his face to the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there is none
+which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline.
+There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry at
+Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young
+recruits of the British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead.
+And this expedition of Greely&rsquo;s gave rise to another example which seems
+to me hardly less remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the book, that
+even when there were only about eight unfortunates still left, hardly able to
+move for weakness and hunger, the seven took the odd man out upon the ice, and
+shot him dead for breach of discipline. The whole grim proceeding was carried
+out with as much method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight
+of the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as I can
+remember, of stealing and eating the thong which bound two portions of the
+sledge together, something about as appetizing as a bootlace. It is only fair
+to the commander to say, however, that it was one of a series of petty thefts,
+and that the thong of a sledge might mean life or death to the whole party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas is always
+of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within the borders of that
+mysterious region, which can be both the most lovely and the most repellent
+upon earth, must always retain something of its glamour. Standing on the
+confines of known geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have
+taken from their gizzards pebbles which they have swallowed in some land whose
+shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that inexpressible air, of the
+great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water, of the cloudless sky shading away into
+a light green and then into a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy
+companionable birds, of the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the slug-like
+seals, startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice&mdash;all of
+it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more than some
+fantastic dream itself, so removed is it from the main stream of his life. And
+then to play a fish a hundred tons in weight, and worth two thousand
+pounds&mdash;but what in the world has all this to do with my bookcase?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me straight to
+the very next upon the shelf, Bullen&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cruise of the
+<i>Cachelot</i>,&rdquo; a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of
+the sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it in ships. This
+is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and very different from that
+Greenland ice groping in which I served a seven-months&rsquo; apprenticeship.
+Both, I fear, are things of the past&mdash;certainly the northern fishing is
+so, for why should men risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a
+pipe in the ground. It is the more fortunate then that it should have been
+handled by one of the most virile writers who has described a sailor&rsquo;s
+life. Bullen&rsquo;s English at its best rises to a great height. If I wished
+to show how high, I would take that next book down, &ldquo;Sea Idylls.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose? It is a
+simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a long calm in the
+tropics.
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue of the sea.
+No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror, the splendour of the sun, the
+sweet silvery glow of the moon, or the coruscating clusters of countless stars.
+Like the ashen-grey hue that bedims the countenance of the dying, a filmy
+greasy skin appeared to overspread the recent loveliness of the ocean surface.
+The sea was sick, stagnant, and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic
+vapour like a breath of decay, which clung clammily to the palate and dulled
+all the senses. Drawn by some strange force, from the unfathomable depths
+below, eerie shapes sought the surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar
+glare they had exchanged for their native gloom&mdash;uncouth creatures bedight
+with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them, fathom-long,
+medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering all over their transparent
+substance, wriggling worm-like forms of such elusive matter that the smallest
+exposure to the sun melted them, and they were not. Lower down, vast pale
+shadows creep sluggishly along, happily undistinguishable as yet, but adding a
+half-familiar flavour to the strange, faint smell that hung about us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics, or take the
+other one: &ldquo;Sunrise as seen from the Crow&rsquo;s-nest,&rdquo; and you
+must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive English in our
+time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a dozen volumes I should
+certainly give Bullen two places. The others? Well, it is so much a matter of
+individual taste. &ldquo;Tom Cringle&rsquo;s Log&rdquo; should have one for
+certain. I hope boys respond now as they once did to the sharks and the
+pirates, the planters, and all the rollicking high spirits of that splendid
+book. Then there is Dana&rsquo;s &ldquo;Two Years before the Mast.&rdquo; I
+should find room also for Stevenson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Wrecker&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;Ebb Tide.&rdquo; Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf for himself, but
+anyhow you could not miss out &ldquo;The Wreck of the <i>Grosvenor</i>.&rdquo;
+Marryat, of course, must be represented, and I should pick &ldquo;Midshipman
+Easy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Peter Simple&rdquo; as his samples. Then throw in one of
+Melville&rsquo;s Otaheite books&mdash;now far too completely
+forgotten&mdash;&ldquo;Typee&rdquo; or &ldquo;Omoo,&rdquo; and as a quite
+modern flavour Kipling&rsquo;s &ldquo;Captains Courageous&rdquo; and Jack
+London&rsquo;s &ldquo;Sea Wolf,&rdquo; with Conrad&rsquo;s &ldquo;Nigger of the
+Narcissus.&rdquo; Then you will have enough to turn your study into a cabin and
+bring the wash and surge to your ears, if written words can do it. Oh, how one
+longs for it sometimes when life grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood
+begins to stir! Surely it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in an
+island but had an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more must the salt
+drop tingle in the blood of an American when you reflect that in all that broad
+continent there is not one whose forefather did not cross 3000 miles of ocean.
+And yet there are in the Central States millions and millions of their
+descendants who have never seen the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that &ldquo;Omoo&rdquo; and &ldquo;Typee,&rdquo; the books in which
+the sailor Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too
+rapidly into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there is for some
+critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment to undertake rescue work
+among the lost books which would repay salvage! A small volume setting forth
+their names and their claims to attention would be interesting in itself, and
+more interesting in the material to which it would serve as an introduction. I
+am sure there are many good books, possibly there are some great ones, which
+have been swept away for a time in the rush. What chance, for example, has any
+book by an unknown author which is published at a moment of great national
+excitement, when some public crisis arrests the popular mind? Hundreds have
+been still-born in this fashion, and are there none which should have lived
+among them? Now, there is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth under
+thirty. It is Snaith&rsquo;s &ldquo;Broke of Covenden,&rdquo; and it scarce
+attained a second edition. I do not say that it is a Classic&mdash;I should not
+like to be positive that it is not&mdash;but I am perfectly sure that the man
+who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here is another
+novel&mdash;&ldquo;Eight Days,&rdquo; by Forrest. You can&rsquo;t buy it. You
+are lucky even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever written will
+bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book will do. Here&rsquo;s another
+which I will warrant you never heard of. It is Powell&rsquo;s &ldquo;Animal
+Episodes.&rdquo; No, it is not a collection of dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it is
+a series of very singularly told stories which deal with the animal side of the
+human, and which you will feel have an entirely new flavour if you have a
+discriminating palate. The book came out ten years ago, and is utterly unknown.
+If I can point to three in one small shelf, how many lost lights must be
+flitting in the outer darkness!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the romance of
+travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have two books of Scientific
+Exploration here which exhibit both these qualities as strongly as any I know.
+I could not choose two better books to put into a young man&rsquo;s hands if
+you wished to train him first in a gentle and noble firmness of mind, and
+secondly in a great love for and interest in all that pertains to Nature. The
+one is Darwin&rsquo;s &ldquo;Journal of the Voyage of the <i>Beagle</i>.&rdquo;
+Any discerning eye must have detected long before the &ldquo;Origin of
+Species&rdquo; appeared, simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a
+brain of the first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had
+arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too small and
+nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is occupied in the
+analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next
+deals with the evidence for the subsidence of a continent and the extinction of
+a myriad animals. And his sweep of knowledge was so great&mdash;botany,
+geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other. How a youth
+of Darwin&rsquo;s age&mdash;he was only twenty-three when in the year 1831 he
+started round the world on the surveying ship <i>Beagle</i>&mdash;could have
+acquired such a mass of information fills one with the same wonder, and is
+perhaps of the same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the
+touch of the master. Another quality which one would be less disposed to look
+for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger, which is veiled in such
+modesty that one reads between the lines in order to detect it. When he was in
+the Argentine, the country outside the Settlements was covered with roving
+bands of horse Indians, who gave no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the
+four hundred miles between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos
+refused to accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small things
+to him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The second book to which I alluded is Wallace&rsquo;s &ldquo;Malay
+Archipelago.&rdquo; There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men,
+the same courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the
+same catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion for the
+observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition understood and described
+in a letter to Darwin the cause of the Origin of Species at the very time when
+the latter was publishing a book founded upon twenty years&rsquo; labour to
+prove the same thesis. What must have been his feelings when he read that
+letter? And yet he had nothing to fear, for his book found no more enthusiastic
+admirer than the man who had in a sense anticipated it. Here also one sees that
+Science has its heroes no less than Religion. One of Wallace&rsquo;s missions
+in Papua was to examine the nature and species of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in
+the course of the years of his wanderings through those islands he made a
+complete investigation of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that
+the Papuans who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed cannibals.
+Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a young fellow read
+these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his mind and his spirit
+strengthened by the reading.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>XII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Here we are at the final seance. For the last time, my patient comrade, I ask
+you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green settee, to look up at the
+oaken shelves, and to bear with me as best you may while I preach about their
+contents. The last time! And yet, as I look along the lines of the volumes, I
+have not mentioned one out of ten of those to which I owe a debt of gratitude,
+nor one in a hundred of the thoughts which course through my brain as I look at
+them. As well perhaps, for the man who has said all that he has to say has
+invariably said too much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me be didactic for a moment! I assume this solemn&mdash;oh, call it not
+pedantic!&mdash;attitude because my eye catches the small but select corner
+which constitutes my library of Science. I wanted to say that if I were
+advising a young man who was beginning life, I should counsel him to devote one
+evening a week to scientific reading. Had he the perseverance to adhere to his
+resolution, and if he began it at twenty, he would certainly find himself with
+an unusually well-furnished mind at thirty, which would stand him in right good
+stead in whatever line of life he might walk. When I advise him to read
+science, I do not mean that he should choke himself with the dust of the
+pedants, and lose himself in the subdivisions of the Lepidoptera, or the
+classifications of the dicotyledonous plants. These dreary details are the
+prickly bushes in that enchanted garden, and you are foolish indeed if you
+begin your walks by butting your head into one. Keep very clear of them until
+you have explored the open beds and wandered down every easy path. For this
+reason avoid the text-books, which repel, and cultivate that popular science
+which attracts. You cannot hope to be a specialist upon all these varied
+subjects. Better far to have a broad idea of general results, and to understand
+their relations to each other. A very little reading will give a man such a
+knowledge of geology, for example, as will make every quarry and railway
+cutting an object of interest. A very little zoology will enable you to satisfy
+your curiosity as to what is the proper name and style of this buff-ermine moth
+which at the present instant is buzzing round the lamp. A very little botany
+will enable you to recognize every flower you are likely to meet in your walks
+abroad, and to give you a tiny thrill of interest when you chance upon one
+which is beyond your ken. A very little archaeology will tell you all about
+yonder British tumulus, or help you to fill in the outline of the broken Roman
+camp upon the downs. A very little astronomy will cause you to look more
+intently at the heavens, to pick out your brothers the planets, who move in
+your own circles, from the stranger stars, and to appreciate the order, beauty,
+and majesty of that material universe which is most surely the outward sign of
+the spiritual force behind it. How a man of science can be a materialist is as
+amazing to me as how a sectarian can limit the possibilities of the Creator.
+Show me a picture without an artist, show me a bust without a sculptor, show me
+music without a musician, and then you may begin to talk to me of a universe
+without a Universe-maker, call Him by what name you will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is Flammarion&rsquo;s &ldquo;L&rsquo;Atmosphere&rdquo;&mdash;a very
+gorgeous though weather-stained copy in faded scarlet and gold. The book has a
+small history, and I value it. A young Frenchman, dying of fever on the west
+coast of Africa, gave it to me as a professional fee. The sight of it takes me
+back to a little ship&rsquo;s bunk, and a sallow face with large, sad eyes
+looking out at me. Poor boy, I fear that he never saw his beloved Marseilles
+again!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a man&rsquo;s
+first interest, and giving a broad general view of the subject, than these of
+Samuel Laing. Who would have imagined that the wise savant and gentle dreamer
+of these volumes was also the energetic secretary of a railway company? Many
+men of the highest scientific eminence have begun in prosaic lines of life.
+Herbert Spencer was a railway engineer. Wallace was a land surveyor. But that a
+man with so pronounced a scientific brain as Laing should continue all his life
+to devote his time to dull routine work, remaining in harness until extreme old
+age, with his soul still open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring new
+concretions of knowledge, is indeed a remarkable fact. Read those books, and
+you will be a fuller man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is an excellent device to talk about what you have recently read. Rather
+hard upon your audience, you may say; but without wishing to be personal, I
+dare bet it is more interesting than your usual small talk. It must, of course,
+be done with some tact and discretion. It is the mention of Laing&rsquo;s works
+which awoke the train of thought which led to these remarks. I had met some one
+at a <i>table d&rsquo;hôte</i> or elsewhere who made some remark about the
+prehistoric remains in the valley of the Somme. I knew all about those, and
+showed him that I did. I then threw out some allusion to the rock temples of
+Yucatan, which he instantly picked up and enlarged upon. He spoke of ancient
+Peruvian civilization, and I kept well abreast of him. I cited the Titicaca
+image, and he knew all about that. He spoke of Quaternary man, and I was with
+him all the time. Each was more and more amazed at the fulness and the accuracy
+of the information of the other, until like a flash the explanation crossed my
+mind. &ldquo;You are reading Samuel Laing&rsquo;s &lsquo;Human
+Origins&rsquo;!&rdquo; I cried. So he was, and so by a coincidence was I. We
+were pouring water over each other, but it was all new-drawn from the spring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a big two-volumed book at the end of my science shelf which would,
+even now, have its right to be called scientific disputed by some of the
+pedants. It is Myers&rsquo; &ldquo;Human Personality.&rdquo; My own opinion,
+for what it is worth, is that it will be recognized a century hence as a great
+root book, one from which a whole new branch of science will have sprung. Where
+between four covers will you find greater evidence of patience, of industry, of
+thought, of discrimination, of that sweep of mind which can gather up a
+thousand separate facts and bind them all in the meshes of a single consistent
+system? Darwin has not been a more ardent collector in zoology than Myers in
+the dim regions of psychic research, and his whole hypothesis, so new that a
+new nomenclature and terminology had to be invented to express it, telepathy,
+the subliminal, and the rest of it, will always be a monument of acute
+reasoning, expressed in fine prose and founded upon ascertained fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mere suspicion of scientific thought or scientific methods has a great
+charm in any branch of literature, however far it may be removed from actual
+research. Poe&rsquo;s tales, for example, owe much to this effect, though in
+his case it was a pure illusion. Jules Verne also produces a charmingly
+credible effect for the most incredible things by an adept use of a
+considerable amount of real knowledge of nature. But most gracefully of all
+does it shine in the lighter form of essay, where playful thoughts draw their
+analogies and illustrations from actual fact, each showing up the other, and
+the combination presenting a peculiar piquancy to the reader.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where could I get better illustration of what I mean than in those three little
+volumes which make up Wendell Holmes&rsquo; immortal series, &ldquo;The
+Autocrat,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Poet,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Professor at the
+Breakfast Table&rdquo;? Here the subtle, dainty, delicate thought is
+continually reinforced by the allusion or the analogy which shows the wide,
+accurate knowledge behind it. What work it is! how wise, how witty, how
+large-hearted and tolerant! Could one choose one&rsquo;s philosopher in the
+Elysian fields, as once in Athens, I would surely join the smiling group who
+listened to the human, kindly words of the Sage of Boston. I suppose it is just
+that continual leaven of science, especially of medical science, which has from
+my early student days given those books so strong an attraction for me. Never
+have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen. It was one of the
+ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his face, but by the irony of Fate I
+arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath upon his newly-turned
+grave. Read his books again, and see if you are not especially struck by the
+up-to-dateness of them. Like Tennyson&rsquo;s &ldquo;In Memoriam,&rdquo; it
+seems to me to be work which sprang into full flower fifty years before its
+time. One can hardly open a page haphazard without lighting upon some passage
+which illustrates the breadth of view, the felicity of phrase, and the singular
+power of playful but most suggestive analogy. Here, for example, is a
+paragraph&mdash;no better than a dozen others&mdash;which combines all the rare
+qualities:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental
+machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust upon
+them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind
+does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man
+from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in
+consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances. I confess that I
+think better of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their
+wits and enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought
+to go mad if he really holds such and such opinions…. Anything that is brutal,
+cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind, and
+perhaps for entire races&mdash;anything that assumes the necessity for the
+extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated&mdash;no matter by
+what name you call it&mdash;no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon
+believes it&mdash;if received, ought to produce insanity in every
+well-regulated mind.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There&rsquo;s a fine bit of breezy polemics for the dreary fifties&mdash;a fine
+bit of moral courage too for the University professor who ventured to say it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I put him above Lamb as an essayist, because there is a flavour of actual
+knowledge and of practical acquaintance with the problems and affairs of life,
+which is lacking in the elfin Londoner. I do not say that the latter is not the
+rarer quality. There are my &ldquo;Essays of Elia,&rdquo; and they are
+well-thumbed as you see, so it is not because I love Lamb less that I love this
+other more. Both are exquisite, but Wendell Holmes is for ever touching some
+note which awakens an answering vibration within my own mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The essay must always be a somewhat repellent form of literature, unless it be
+handled with the lightest and deftest touch. It is too reminiscent of the
+school themes of our boyhood&mdash;to put a heading and then to show what you
+can get under it. Even Stevenson, for whom I have the most profound admiration,
+finds it difficult to carry the reader through a series of such papers, adorned
+with his original thought and quaint turn of phrase. Yet his &ldquo;Men and
+Books&rdquo; and &ldquo;Virginibus Puerisque&rdquo; are high examples of what
+may be done in spite of the inherent unavoidable difficulty of the task.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his style! Ah, if Stevenson had only realized how beautiful and nervous was
+his own natural God-given style, he would never have been at pains to acquire
+another! It is sad to read the much-lauded anecdote of his imitating this
+author and that, picking up and dropping, in search of the best. The best is
+always the most natural. When Stevenson becomes a conscious stylist, applauded
+by so many critics, he seems to me like a man who, having most natural curls,
+will still conceal them under a wig. The moment he is precious he loses his
+grip. But when he will abide by his own sterling Lowland Saxon, with the direct
+word and the short, cutting sentence, I know not where in recent years we may
+find his mate. In this strong, plain setting the occasional happy word shines
+like a cut jewel. A really good stylist is like Beau Brummell&rsquo;s
+description of a well-dressed man&mdash;so dressed that no one would ever
+observe him. The moment you begin to remark a man&rsquo;s style the odds are
+that there is something the matter with it. It is a clouding of the
+crystal&mdash;a diversion of the reader&rsquo;s mind from the matter to the
+manner, from the author&rsquo;s subject to the author himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, I have not the Edinburgh edition. If you think of a presentation&mdash;but
+I should be the last to suggest it. Perhaps on the whole I would prefer to have
+him in scattered books, rather than in a complete set. The half is more than
+the whole of most authors, and not the least of him. I am sure that his friends
+who reverenced his memory had good warrant and express instructions to publish
+this complete edition&mdash;very possibly it was arranged before his lamented
+end. Yet, speaking generally, I would say that an author was best served by
+being very carefully pruned before being exposed to the winds of time. Let
+every weak twig, every immature shoot be shorn away, and nothing but strong,
+sturdy, well-seasoned branches left. So shall the whole tree stand strong for
+years to come. How false an impression of the true Stevenson would our critical
+grandchild acquire if he chanced to pick down any one of half a dozen of these
+volumes! As we watched his hand stray down the rank, how we would pray that it
+might alight upon the ones we love, on the &ldquo;New Arabian Nights&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Ebb-tide,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Wrecker,&rdquo; &ldquo;Kidnapped,&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;Treasure Island.&rdquo; These can surely never lose their charm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What noble books of their class are those last, &ldquo;Kidnapped&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;Treasure Island&rdquo;! both, as you see, shining forth upon my lower
+shelf. &ldquo;Treasure Island&rdquo; is the better story, while I could imagine
+that &ldquo;Kidnapped&rdquo; might have the more permanent value as being an
+excellent and graphic sketch of the state of the Highlands after the last
+Jacobite insurrection. Each contains one novel and admirable character, Alan
+Breck in the one, and Long John in the other. Surely John Silver, with his face
+the size of a ham, and his little gleaming eyes like crumbs of glass in the
+centre of it, is the king of all seafaring desperadoes. Observe how the strong
+effect is produced in his case: seldom by direct assertion on the part of the
+story-teller, but usually by comparison, innuendo, or indirect reference. The
+objectionable Billy Bones is haunted by the dread of &ldquo;a seafaring man
+with one leg.&rdquo; Captain Flint, we are told, was a brave man; &ldquo;he was
+afraid of none, not he, only Silver&mdash;Silver was that genteel.&rdquo; Or,
+again, where John himself says, &ldquo;there was some that was feared of Pew,
+and some that was feared of Flint; but Flint his own self was feared of me.
+Feared he was, and proud. They was the roughest crew afloat was Flint&rsquo;s.
+The devil himself would have been feared to go to sea with them. Well, now, I
+will tell you. I&rsquo;m not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy I
+keep company; but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasn&rsquo;t the word for
+Flint&rsquo;s old buccaneers.&rdquo; So, by a touch here and a hint there,
+there grows upon us the individuality of the smooth-tongued, ruthless,
+masterful, one-legged devil. He is to us not a creation of fiction, but an
+organic living reality with whom we have come in contact; such is the effect of
+the fine suggestive strokes with which he is drawn. And the buccaneers
+themselves, how simple and yet how effective are the little touches which
+indicate their ways of thinking and of acting. &ldquo;I want to go in that
+cabin, I do; I want their pickles and wine and that.&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, if you
+had sailed along o&rsquo; Bill you wouldn&rsquo;t have stood there to be spoke
+twice&mdash;not you. That was never Bill&rsquo;s way, not the way of sich as
+sailed with him.&rdquo; Scott&rsquo;s buccaneers in &ldquo;The Pirate&rdquo;
+are admirable, but they lack something human which we find here. It will be
+long before John Silver loses his place in sea fiction, &ldquo;and you may lay
+to that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson was deeply influenced by Meredith, and even in these books the
+influence of the master is apparent. There is the apt use of an occasional
+archaic or unusual word, the short, strong descriptions, the striking
+metaphors, the somewhat staccato fashion of speech. Yet, in spite of this
+flavour, they have quite individuality enough to constitute a school of their
+own. Their faults, or rather perhaps their limitations, lie never in the
+execution, but entirely in the original conception. They picture only one side
+of life, and that a strange and exceptional one. There is no female interest.
+We feel that it is an apotheosis of the boy-story&mdash;the penny number of our
+youth <i>in excelsis</i>. But it is all so good, so fresh, so picturesque,
+that, however limited its scope, it still retains a definite and well-assured
+place in literature. There is no reason why &ldquo;Treasure Island&rdquo;
+should not be to the rising generation of the twenty-first century what
+&ldquo;Robinson Crusoe&rdquo; has been to that of the nineteenth. The balance
+of probability is all in that direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the rougher, more
+stirring side of life, with the objective rather than the subjective, marks the
+reaction against the abuse of love in fiction. This one phase of life in its
+orthodox aspect, and ending in the conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed
+and worn to a shadow, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency
+sometimes to swing to the other extreme, and to give it less than its fair
+share in the affairs of men. In British fiction nine books out of ten have held
+up love and marriage as the be-all and end-all of life. Yet we know, in actual
+practice, that this may not be so. In the career of the average man his
+marriage is an incident, and a momentous incident; but it is only one of
+several. He is swayed by many strong emotions&mdash;his business, his
+ambitions, his friendships, his struggles with the recurrent dangers and
+difficulties which tax a man&rsquo;s wisdom and his courage. Love will often
+play a subordinate part in his life. How many go through the world without ever
+loving at all? It jars upon us then to have it continually held up as the
+predominating, all-important fact in life; and there is a not unnatural
+tendency among a certain school, of which Stevenson is certainly the leader, to
+avoid altogether a source of interest which has been so misused and overdone.
+If all love-making were like that between Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough,
+then indeed we could not have too much of it; but to be made attractive once
+more, the passion must be handled by some great master who has courage to break
+down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for his inspiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The use of novel and piquant forms of speech is one of the most obvious of
+Stevenson&rsquo;s devices. No man handles his adjectives with greater judgment
+and nicer discrimination. There is hardly a page of his work where we do not
+come across words and expressions which strike us with a pleasant sense of
+novelty, and yet express the meaning with admirable conciseness. &ldquo;His
+eyes came coasting round to me.&rdquo; It is dangerous to begin quoting, as the
+examples are interminable, and each suggests another. Now and then he misses
+his mark, but it is very seldom. As an example, an &ldquo;eye-shot&rdquo; does
+not commend itself as a substitute for &ldquo;a glance,&rdquo; and &ldquo;to
+tee-hee&rdquo; for &ldquo;to giggle&rdquo; grates somewhat upon the ear, though
+the authority of Chaucer might be cited for the expressions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next in order is his extraordinary faculty for the use of pithy similes, which
+arrest the attention and stimulate the imagination. &ldquo;His voice sounded
+hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock.&rdquo; &ldquo;I saw her sway, like
+something stricken by the wind.&rdquo; &ldquo;His laugh rang false, like a
+cracked bell.&rdquo; &ldquo;His voice shook like a taut rope.&rdquo; &ldquo;My
+mind flying like a weaver&rsquo;s shuttle.&rdquo; &ldquo;His blows resounded on
+the grave as thick as sobs.&rdquo; &ldquo;The private guilty considerations I
+would continually observe to peep forth in the man&rsquo;s talk like rabbits
+from a hill.&rdquo; Nothing could be more effective than these direct and
+homely comparisons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all, however, the main characteristic of Stevenson is his curious
+instinct for saying in the briefest space just those few words which stamp the
+impression upon the reader&rsquo;s mind. He will make you see a thing more
+clearly than you would probably have done had your eyes actually rested upon
+it. Here are a few of these word-pictures, taken haphazard from among hundreds
+of equal merit&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+&ldquo;Not far off Macconochie was standing with his tongue out of his mouth,
+and his hand upon his chin, like a dull fellow thinking hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Stewart ran after us for more than a mile, and I could not help laughing
+as I looked back at last and saw him on a hill, holding his hand to his side,
+and nearly burst with running.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ballantrae turned to me with a face all wrinkled up, and his teeth all
+showing in his mouth…. He said no word, but his whole appearance was a kind of
+dreadful question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at him, if you doubt; look at him, grinning and gulping, a detected
+thief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He looked me all over with a warlike eye, and I could see the challenge
+on his lips.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p class="p2">
+What could be more vivid than the effect produced by such sentences as these?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is much more that might be said as to Stevenson&rsquo;s peculiar and
+original methods in fiction. As a minor point, it might be remarked that he is
+the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain. It is true that Mr.
+Wilkie Collins has described one gentleman who had not only been deprived of
+all his limbs, but was further afflicted by the insupportable name of
+Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson, however, has used the effect so often, and with
+such telling results, that he may be said to have made it his own. To say
+nothing of Hyde, who was the very impersonation of deformity, there is the
+horrid blind Pew, Black Dog with two fingers missing, Long John with his one
+leg, and the sinister catechist who is blind but shoots by ear, and smites
+about him with his staff. In &ldquo;The Black Arrow,&rdquo; too, there is
+another dreadful creature who comes tapping along with a stick. Often as he has
+used the device, he handles it so artistically that it never fails to produce
+its effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is Stevenson a classic? Well, it is a large word that. You mean by a classic a
+piece of work which passes into the permanent literature of the country. As a
+rule, you only know your classics when they are in their graves. Who guessed it
+of Poe, and who of Borrow? The Roman Catholics only canonize their saints a
+century after their death. So with our classics. The choice lies with our
+grandchildren. But I can hardly think that healthy boys will ever let
+Stevenson&rsquo;s books of adventure die, nor do I think that such a short tale
+as &ldquo;The Pavilion on the Links&rdquo; nor so magnificent a parable as
+&ldquo;Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde&rdquo; will ever cease to be esteemed. How well
+I remember the eagerness, the delight with which I read those early tales in
+&ldquo;Cornhill&rdquo; away back in the late seventies and early eighties. They
+were unsigned, after the old unfair fashion, but no man with any sense of prose
+could fail to know that they were all by the same author. Only years afterwards
+did I learn who that author was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have Stevenson&rsquo;s collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet.
+Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful sallies of
+a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic, for it is in my judgment
+by all odds the best narrative ballad of the last century&mdash;that is if I am
+right in supposing that &ldquo;The Ancient Mariner&rdquo; appeared at the very
+end of the eighteenth. I would put Coleridge&rsquo;s tour de force of grim
+fancy first, but I know none other to compare in glamour and phrase and easy
+power with &ldquo;Ticonderoga.&rdquo; Then there is his immortal epitaph. The
+two pieces alone give him a niche of his own in our poetical literature, just
+as his character gives him a niche of his own in our affections. No, I never
+met him. But among my most prized possessions are several letters which I
+received from Samoa. From that distant tower he kept a surprisingly close watch
+upon what was doing among the bookmen, and it was his hand which was among the
+first held out to the striver, for he had quick appreciation and keen
+sympathies which met another man&rsquo;s work half-way, and wove into it a
+beauty from his own mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, my very patient friend, the time has come for us to part, and I hope
+my little sermons have not bored you over-much. If I have put you on the track
+of anything which you did not know before, then verify it and pass it on. If I
+have not, there is no harm done, save that my breath and your time have been
+wasted. There may be a score of mistakes in what I have said&mdash;is it not
+the privilege of the conversationalist to misquote? My judgments may differ
+very far from yours, and my likings may be your abhorrence; but the mere
+thinking and talking of books is in itself good, be the upshot what it may. For
+the time the magic door is still shut. You are still in the land of faerie.
+But, alas, though you shut that door, you cannot seal it. Still come the ring
+of bell, the call of telephone, the summons back to the sordid world of work
+and men and daily strife. Well, that&rsquo;s the real life after all&mdash;this
+only the imitation. And yet, now that the portal is wide open and we stride out
+together, do we not face our fate with a braver heart for all the rest and
+quiet and comradeship that we found behind the Magic Door?
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Through the Magic Door, by Arthur Conan Doyle
+#32 in our series by Arthur Conan Doyle
+
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+Title: Through the Magic Door
+
+Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5317]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 30, 2002]
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by Anders Thulin.
+Adapted for Project Gutenberg by Andrew Sly.
+
+
+
+
+
+THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR
+
+BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room
+which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off
+with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the
+soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the
+magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can
+follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is
+sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting
+in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man.
+And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go
+together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about
+a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense
+of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron
+of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the
+concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have
+faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable
+dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.
+
+It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the
+miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were
+suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that
+he would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How
+eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him--the very best of
+him--at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves
+to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man
+may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can
+summon the world's greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be
+thoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here
+are the masters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can
+signal to any one of the world's great story-tellers, and out comes
+the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such
+good company that one may come to think too little of the living.
+It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should
+never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed
+by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are
+surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings
+to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man's
+wisdom and strength in the living of our own strenuous days.
+
+Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green
+settee, where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of
+volumes. Smoking is not forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of
+them? Well, I ask nothing better, for there is no volume there which
+is not a dear, personal friend, and what can a man talk of more
+pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but these are
+my own favourites--the ones I care to re-read and to have near my
+elbow. There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow
+memories to me.
+
+Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a
+possession dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the
+bottom? Every one of those represents a lunch. They were bought in
+my student days, when times were not too affluent. Threepence was
+my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and glass of beer; but,
+as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the most
+fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a
+large tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books,
+with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be
+purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I
+approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful
+body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of
+six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an
+entrancing five minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes
+of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found
+something which made it all worth while. If you will look over these
+titles, you will see that I did not do so very badly. Four volumes
+of Gordon's "Tacitus" (life is too short to read originals, so
+long as there are good translations), Sir William Temple's Essays,
+Addison's works, Swift's "Tale of a Tub," Clarendon's "History,"
+"Gil Blas," Buckingham's Poems, Churchill's Poems, "Life of
+Bacon"--not so bad for the old threepenny tub.
+
+They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness
+of the rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering.
+Once they adorned the shelves of some noble library, and even among
+the odd almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces of their
+former greatness, like the faded silk dress of the reduced
+gentlewoman, a present pathos but a glory of the past.
+
+Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and
+free libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the
+thing that comes to him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill
+which Carlyle felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of
+Gibbon's "History" under his arm, his mind just starving for want
+of food, to devour them at the rate of one a day? A book should be
+your very own before you can really get the taste of it, and unless
+you have worked for it, you will never have the true inward pride
+of possession.
+
+If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I
+have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder
+stained copy of Macaulay's "Essays." It seems entwined into my whole
+life as I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it
+has been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part
+of my humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch
+harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see
+the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick
+the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound
+volume could ever take its place for me.
+
+What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach
+the study either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli,
+Hallam, Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive,
+Hastings, Chatham--what nuclei for thought! With a good grip of each
+how pleasant and easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
+vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they
+all throw a glamour round the subject and should make the least
+studious of readers desire to go further. If Macaulay's hand cannot
+lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
+all hope of ever finding them.
+
+When I was a senior schoolboy this book--not this very volume, for
+it had an even more tattered predecessor--opened up a new world to
+me. History had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and
+the drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a land of
+colour and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path. In
+that great style of his I loved even the faults--indeed, now that
+I come to think of it, it was the faults which I loved best. No
+sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis
+too flowery. It pleased me to read that "a universal shout of
+laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the
+days of the crusades were past," and I was delighted to learn that
+"Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses,
+and Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady
+Jerningham's vase." Those were the kind of sentences which used to
+fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger
+in the musician's ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as he
+grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with
+admiration and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great
+subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail--just a bold sweep
+of the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. As he leads you
+down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which
+branch away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
+literary and historical education night be effected by working
+through every book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be
+curious, however, to know the exact age of the youth when he came
+to the end of his studies.
+
+I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that
+it would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power
+of drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift
+of reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look
+at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his
+atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter
+space--
+
+  "As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table
+  on which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for
+  Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever
+  on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke,
+  and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of
+  Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping
+  his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear.
+  In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
+  to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought
+  up--the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the
+  scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings,
+  the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the
+  nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth
+  moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling;
+  we hear it puffing, and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the
+  'What then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see
+  your way through the question, sir!'"
+
+It is etched into your memory for ever.
+
+I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
+first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
+to Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under
+the shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he had
+loved so well. It was the one great object of interest which London
+held for me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe
+him. It is not merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh
+interests, but it is the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad,
+liberal outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of prejudice.
+My judgment now confirms all that I felt for him then.
+
+My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the
+right of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that
+work--the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth
+century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of
+Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact
+and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of
+commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder
+and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could
+have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself
+to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact
+that a Londoner in the country, or a countryman in London, felt
+equally out of place in those days of difficult travel, would seem
+to hardly require stating, and to afford no opportunity of leaving
+a strong impression upon the reader's mind. See what Macaulay makes
+of it, though it is no more than a hundred other paragraphs which
+discuss a hundred various points--
+
+  "A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he
+  had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand,
+  when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared
+  in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the
+  resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait,
+  his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled
+  into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the
+  waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the
+  operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into
+  the kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
+  thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his
+  horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of
+  the Lord Mayor's Show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's
+  tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the
+  most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted
+  women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
+  themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he
+  asked his way to St. James', his informants sent him to Mile
+  End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be
+  a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of
+  second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would
+  not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he
+  became a mark for the insolent derision of fops, and the grave
+  waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned
+  to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and
+  the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for
+  the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There
+  he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself
+  except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near
+  the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the
+  Lord Lieutenant."
+
+On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at
+the very head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another
+volume. The History as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach
+the same level as the shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it
+is a brilliant piece of special pleading from a fervid Whig, and
+that there must be more to be said for the other side than is there
+set forth. Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his own
+political and religious limitations. The best are those which get
+right away into the broad fields of literature and philosophy.
+Johnson, Walpole, Madame D'Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian
+ones, Clive and Warren Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick
+the Great, too, must surely stand in the first rank. Only one would
+I wish to eliminate. It is the diabolically clever criticism upon
+Montgomery. One would have wished to think that Macaulay's heart was
+too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter an attack. Bad
+work will sink of its own weight. It is not necessary to souse the
+author as well. One would think more highly of the man if he had not
+done that savage bit of work.
+
+I don't know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott,
+whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of
+their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence,
+and woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity
+in the minds and characters of the two men. You don't see it, you
+say? Well, just think of Scott's "Border Ballads," and then of
+Macaulay's "Lays." The machines must be alike, when the products are
+so similar. Each was the only man who could possibly have written
+the poems of the other. What swing and dash in both of them! What
+a love of all that is and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so
+strong. But there are minds on which strength and simplicity are
+thrown away. They think that unless a thing is obscure it must be
+superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which is turbid,
+and the deep which is clear. Do you remember the fatuous criticism
+of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious "Lays," where he calls out "is
+this poetry?" after quoting--
+
+   "And how can man die better
+      Than facing fearful odds
+    For the ashes of his fathers
+      And the Temples of his Gods?"
+
+In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was
+really showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The
+baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended him.
+But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving
+the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals
+to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
+sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines
+are, I think, taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and
+have just the dramatic quality and sense which a ballad poet must
+have. That opinion of Arnold's shook my faith in his judgment, and
+yet I would forgive a good deal to the man who wrote--
+
+   "One more charge and then be dumb,
+      When the forts of Folly fall,
+    May the victors when they come
+      Find my body near the wall."
+
+Not a bad verse that for one's life aspiration.
+
+This is one of the things which human society has not yet
+understood--the value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does
+we shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate places, and
+our progress through the streets will be brightened and ennobled
+by one continual series of beautiful mental impulses and images,
+reflected into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our
+eyes. To think that we should walk with empty, listless minds while
+all this splendid material is running to waste. I do not mean mere
+Scriptural texts, for they do not bear the same meaning to all,
+though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work
+while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I
+mean those beautiful thoughts--who can say that they are uninspired
+thoughts?--which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a
+hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious
+jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and
+ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a horse-trough across
+the road from my house, a plain stone trough, and no man could pass
+it with any feelings save vague discontent at its ugliness. But
+suppose that on its front slab you print the verse of Coleridge--
+
+   "He prayeth best who loveth best
+      All things, both great and small
+    For the dear Lord who fashioned him
+      He knows and loveth all."
+
+I fear I may misquote, for I have not "The Ancient Mariner" at my
+elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?
+We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There
+are few men who have not some chosen quotations printed on their
+study mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. Carlyle's
+transcription of "Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all Eternity to rest
+in!" is a pretty good spur to a weary man. But what we need is a
+more general application of the same thing for public and not for
+private use, until people understand that a graven thought is as
+beautiful an ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye
+right deep down into the soul.
+
+However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay's glorious lays,
+save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you
+can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to
+learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it
+stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off
+almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was
+like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not
+compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So
+the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf
+which waits for reference. But I want you now to move your eye a
+little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green volumes.
+That is my edition of Scott. But surely I must give you a little
+breathing space before I venture upon them.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
+books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
+You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.
+You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull
+days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to
+fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait
+so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which
+marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see,
+like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for
+literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities,
+but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your
+mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually
+the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with
+your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at
+last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for
+all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green
+line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were
+the first books I ever owned--long, long before I could appreciate
+or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they
+were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the
+dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the
+story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different
+edition from the others. The first copy was left in the grass by the
+side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually picked up
+three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I think I
+may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
+it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
+replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
+breaking fresh ground.
+
+I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
+literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
+thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
+found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
+the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
+of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
+challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar.
+It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
+allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
+frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great
+masters to make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay
+it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who described the prosaic man, who
+enters a drawing-room with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned
+bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose on any play of
+fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives
+a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
+prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack--well, it was so, and that's an end
+of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an
+editor to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author;
+and he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers'
+conviction with him.
+
+But this is a digression from "Ivanhoe." What a book it is! The
+second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every
+successive reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott's
+soldiers are always as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak;
+but here, while the soldiers are at their very best, the romantic
+figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of the story from the
+usual commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he was a
+manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.
+
+He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he
+had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for
+a dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat--in the long
+stretch, for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the
+end of the Friar Tuck incident--that we realize the height of
+continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I don't
+think in the whole range of our literature we have a finer
+sustained flight than that.
+
+There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
+Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
+the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
+admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
+relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
+introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
+matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order
+are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how
+to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or
+sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
+might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin
+telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
+characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
+great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
+lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
+past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse
+phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when
+the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim
+Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or
+a bed of heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also:
+"The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there!
+But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few
+stern words, which haunt your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon
+Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
+what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the
+actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn
+day when they fought under the "Red Dragon of Wessex" on the low
+ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they roared, as the Norman chivalry
+broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic--the very genius of the
+race was in the cry.
+
+Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they
+are damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
+Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as
+a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson's famous message from
+the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship's company. The
+officers were impressed. The men were not. "Duty!" they muttered.
+"We've always done it. Why not?" Anything in the least highfalutin'
+would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the under
+statement which delights them. German troops can march to battle
+singing Luther's hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
+by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets need not
+trouble to imitate--or at least need not imagine that if they do
+so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
+working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: "Here's another lump of
+sugar for the Bird." I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain
+of "A little bit off the top." The martial poet aforesaid, unless
+he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a
+good deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The
+Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I remember reading of
+some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to
+finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest
+with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous chant
+it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found
+that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was "Ivan
+is in the garden picking cabbages." The fact is, I suppose, that a
+mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
+warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.
+
+Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
+with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
+the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
+only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched
+to their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp,
+tramp," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a
+playful humour running through them. Only one exception do I know,
+and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an
+outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I
+mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with
+the choral opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
+coming of the Lord." If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the
+effect must have been terrific.
+
+A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts
+at the other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
+a dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I
+was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical,
+no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
+abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
+ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
+natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
+appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
+were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps, that the world
+has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
+Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
+could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
+Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
+Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
+have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
+portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of
+the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister
+of Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in "Quentin
+Durward"?
+
+In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men
+who during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also
+the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from
+the sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much
+romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling
+cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular
+veteran, with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as
+Dugald Dalgetty from the German wars. But then no man ever does
+realize the true interest of the age in which he happens to live.
+All sense of proportion is lost, and the little thing hard-by
+obscures the great thing at a distance. It is easy in the dark to
+confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the Old
+Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St. Sebastians,
+while Columbus was discovering America before their very faces.
+
+I have said that I think "Ivanhoe" the best of Scott's novels. I
+suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the
+second best? It speaks well for their general average that there is
+hardly one among them which might not find some admirers who would
+vote it to a place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels
+which deal with Scottish life and character have a quality of
+raciness which gives them a place apart. There is a rich humour of
+the soil in such books as "Old Mortality," "The Antiquary," and "Rob
+Roy," which puts them in a different class from the others. His old
+Scottish women are, next to his soldiers, the best series of types
+that he has drawn. At the same time it must be admitted that merit
+which is associated with dialect has such limitations that it can
+never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to all
+the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin Durward," on account of
+its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
+importance of the events and people described, would have my vote
+for the second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape
+novels which have formed so numerous an addition to the light
+literature of the last century. The pictures of Charles the Bold and
+of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I can see those
+two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the herald, and
+clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
+clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.
+
+The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
+superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and
+is the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
+rival. It is not often that historical characters work out in their
+actual physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the
+High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles
+which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
+ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It
+is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas,
+when, for example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man
+with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read
+beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally,
+however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have
+before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which
+represents Queen Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark
+the big head, fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face,
+made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful
+features--the mouth with a suggestion of wild boars' tusks behind
+it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the whole man and his
+life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder if Scott had
+ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family seat?
+
+Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which
+the critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the
+last from his tired pen. I mean "Count Robert of Paris." I am
+convinced that if it had been the first, instead of the last, of
+the series it would have attracted as much attention as "Waverley."
+I can understand the state of mind of the expert, who cried out in
+mingled admiration and despair: "I have studied the conditions of
+Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who
+makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw
+with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but
+to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with
+such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think,
+a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself
+before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the
+first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading
+aloud her father's exploits, or of such majesty as the account of
+the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
+the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
+front rank of the novels.
+
+I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse
+of the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was
+ever anything in the world's history like it? It had what historical
+incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from
+the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.
+Those leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice.
+Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous
+and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy
+the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is
+not worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve
+anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical
+facts?
+
+But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
+romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life
+in "The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England
+in "Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above
+all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a
+coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car,
+and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter
+Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and
+for humanity.
+
+For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the
+same shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law
+and his admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly
+impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to
+tell the absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a
+man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world
+was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
+Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen
+eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would
+have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us
+feel that they were men and brothers. They need not go the length
+of the lady who began a biography of her deceased husband with the
+words--"D--- was a dirty man," but the books certainly would be
+more readable, and the subjects more lovable too, if we had greater
+light and shade in the picture.
+
+But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would
+have admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking
+country, and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of
+toddy occasionally of an evening which would have laid his feeble
+successors under the table. His last years, at least, poor fellow,
+were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while
+the others passed the decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
+gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of honour, translating
+itself not into empty phrases, but into years of labour and denial!
+You remember how he became sleeping partner in a printing house,
+and so involved himself in its failure. There was a legal, but very
+little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him
+had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled
+him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took the
+whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
+spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort
+to save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly
+a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the
+creditors--a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
+life thrown in.
+
+And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
+has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
+recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single
+year. I remember reading in some book of reminiscences--on second
+thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged
+in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
+all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the
+opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer could
+see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to
+the pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still
+the hand was moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the
+rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.
+
+A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction
+is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books--good ones,
+too--at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards
+remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read
+to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently
+the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were
+in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
+faculty--imagination in its supreme form--was absolutely unimpaired.
+It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives
+some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work
+must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way
+from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon
+the paper. The creative thought--the germ thought from which a
+larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.
+He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
+originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
+functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
+that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of
+the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the
+least sense of personal effort.
+
+And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail
+physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's
+materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these
+spiritual uses? It is an old tag that
+
+   "Great Genius is to madness close allied,
+    And thin partitions do those rooms divide."
+
+But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
+seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the
+body.
+
+Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns,
+Shelley, Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band,
+yet Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed away, "burned out,"
+as his brother terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died
+by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a
+sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost
+a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards.
+Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age
+of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late
+years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled
+with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the
+really shocking case of the young Americans, for example. What a
+band of promising young writers have in a few years been swept away!
+There was the author of that admirable book, "David Harum"; there
+was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I think, the seeds of
+greatness more than almost any living writer. His "Pit" seemed to me
+one of the finest American novels. He also died a premature death.
+Then there was Stephen Crane--a man who had also done most brilliant
+work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman. Is
+there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers
+could show such losses as that? In the meantime, out of our own men
+Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many
+another.
+
+Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had
+rounded off their career were really premature in their end.
+Thackeray, for example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52;
+Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his
+61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was
+over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career
+than most of his brethren.
+
+He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is
+as much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
+example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
+believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who
+were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous
+disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his
+signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special
+scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more,
+were its victims. As to the tradition, first mentioned long after
+his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout,
+it is absurd on the face of it, since no such fever is known to
+science. But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
+likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.
+
+One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
+volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account
+of his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
+secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
+the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
+the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met
+him day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the
+whole of Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his
+pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told
+her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A
+psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the
+numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep
+their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of
+his novels.
+
+It's a sad book, Lockhart's "Life." It leaves gloom in the mind.
+The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
+overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
+intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
+literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is
+the memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but
+faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper.
+He sampled every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his
+success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the
+sons of men I don't think there are many greater than he who lies
+under the great slab at Dryburgh.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and
+Lockhart's "Life" which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the
+four big grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print
+edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I emphasize the large print,
+for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English
+Classics which come now into the market. With subjects which are in
+the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you
+on your way. The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your
+temper. Better pay a little more and have a book that is made for
+use.
+
+That book interests me--fascinates me--and yet I wish I could join
+heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully
+has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to "clear
+one's mind of cant" upon the subject, for when you have been
+accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of
+Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one's
+eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one's own account at the
+man's actual words, deeds, and limitations. If you try it you are
+left with the oddest mixture of impressions. How could one express
+it save that this is John Bull taken to literature--the exaggerated
+John Bull of the caricaturists--with every quality, good or evil,
+at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the
+explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of
+sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness,
+the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle,
+and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who
+was the great grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.
+
+If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
+huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
+the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
+should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
+delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a
+safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met,
+Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth
+year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent
+and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation
+with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was
+bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made
+unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between
+ordinary father and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken
+relation between them.
+
+It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but
+it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the
+language. He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was
+a clear and vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his
+great model. Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once
+permitted a fault of taste in this whole enormous book where he must
+have had to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They
+say that he was a fool and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so
+with a pen in his hand. Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson,
+where he ventured some little squeak of remonstrance, before the
+roaring "No, sir!" came to silence him, there are few in which his
+views were not, as experience proved, the wiser. On the question
+of slavery he was in the wrong. But I could quote from memory at
+least a dozen cases, including such vital subjects as the American
+Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and so on,
+where Boswell's views were those which survived.
+
+But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those
+little things that you want to know. How often you read the life of
+a man and are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It
+is not so here. The man lives again. There is a short description
+of Johnson's person--it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the
+Hebrides, the very next book upon the shelf, which is typical of
+his vivid portraiture. May I take it down, and read you a paragraph
+of it?--
+
+  "His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the
+  gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance
+  was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat
+  disfigured by the scars of King's evil. He was now in his
+  sixty-fourth year and was become a little dull of hearing. His
+  sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind
+  govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that his
+  perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
+  sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like
+  the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed
+  by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that
+  distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of
+  plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same
+  colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted
+  stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
+  wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets
+  which might almost have held the two volumes of his folio
+  dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large English oak
+  stick."
+
+You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
+that it is not Mr. Boswell's fault--and it is but one of a dozen
+equally vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just
+these pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts
+and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and
+his tricks with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate
+the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than
+his writings could have done.
+
+For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
+to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely--that stilted romance. "The Lives of
+the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of
+ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary,
+a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable
+to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to
+the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political
+and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it
+must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant
+place in English literature, and that we must turn to his humble,
+much-ridiculed biographer for the real explanation.
+
+And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
+distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this
+is a sign of a narrow finality--impossible to the man of sympathy
+and of imagination, who sees the other side of every question and
+understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must
+be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at
+the results. Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the race,
+stand convicted of so many incredible blunders? It recalls the
+remark of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned
+could be stamped upon the whole human race the result would be
+to propagate the most absurd errors. He was asked what became of
+swallows in the winter. Rolling and wheezing, the oracle answered:
+"Swallows," said he, "certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
+them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all
+in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a
+river." Boswell gravely dockets the information. However, if I
+remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne
+had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson's
+misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would
+have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
+would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said,
+"never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit
+two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country
+Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad
+ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's
+"Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything
+good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was
+a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be
+honest men.
+
+And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I
+suppose even in those days they were reactionary. "A poor man has no
+honour." "Charles the Second was a good King." "Governments should
+turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side."
+"Judges in India should be encouraged to trade." "No country is the
+richer on account of trade." (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the
+company when this proposition was laid down!) "A landed proprietor
+should turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished." "It is
+not good for a labourer to have his wages raised." "When the balance
+of trade is against a country, the margin must be paid in current
+coin." Those were a few of his convictions.
+
+And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion.
+In our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider
+those of Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so
+very much left. He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested
+Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was "an odious wench").
+He loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire
+and fury at everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay's
+posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in life
+Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly
+everything that Johnson abominated.
+
+It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
+principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
+interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record.
+In his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by
+which the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the
+unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable
+contingency, but when George III., either through policy or charity,
+offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting
+it. One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his
+convictions represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts
+in this instance seem against it.
+
+He was a great talker--but his talk was more properly a monologue.
+It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from
+his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man
+who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most
+vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views,
+or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common
+ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he
+could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his
+pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."
+In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of gentle
+argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say "Ouf!"
+when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that the
+older men of Johnson's circle must have given a sigh of relief when
+at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
+without the danger of a scene where "Why, no, sir!" was very likely
+to ripen into "Let us have no more on't!" Certainly one would like
+to get behind Boswell's account, and to hear a chat between such
+men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and
+atmosphere of the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was
+not there, as compared to one when he was.
+
+No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not
+make due allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and
+early middle age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was
+fifty-three when the pension was given him, and up to then his
+existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first
+necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed. He had
+seen his comrades of letters die of actual privation. From childhood
+he had known no happiness. The half blind gawky youth, with dirty
+linen and twitching limbs, had always, whether in the streets of
+Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the coffee-houses of
+London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement. With a proud
+and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some
+bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a man's
+spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
+roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
+caused Boswell's father to christen him "Ursa Major." If his nature
+was in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had
+gone to the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result
+of a dreadful experience.
+
+And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He
+had read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not
+merely in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read,
+but with every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he
+could quote it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its
+enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect.
+With the mind so crammed with other people's goods, how can you have
+room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I
+think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other
+exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing
+upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when
+did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light
+upon those enigmas with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the
+past, he had space for nothing else. Modern developments of every
+sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France
+a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever
+known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once
+responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible
+around him. We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him
+over his brewery and supplied him with statistics as to his output
+of beer. It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the
+drums to drown Louis' voice at the scaffold. The association shows
+how near the unconscious sage was to the edge of that precipice and
+how little his learning availed him in discerning it.
+
+He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would
+think, could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In
+either case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent
+sense of piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top.
+His brain, working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There
+is no more wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of
+Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the
+Scotch judges. That an outsider with no special training should at
+short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and
+reason, is, I think, as remarkable a tour de force as literature can
+show.
+
+Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must
+count for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small
+purse. The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge
+in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings.
+There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams,
+and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing--a trying
+group amid which to spend one's days. His guinea was always ready
+for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might
+not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous
+sentences bore the hall-mark of their maker. It is the rough,
+kindly man, the man who bore the poor street-walker home upon his
+shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least forgive, the dogmatic
+pedantic Doctor of the Club.
+
+There is always to me something of interest in the view which a
+great man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of
+how far the philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw
+death afar, and met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson's mind
+flinched from that dread opponent. His letters and his talk during
+his latter years are one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for
+physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived.
+There were no limits to his courage. It was spiritual diffidence,
+coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other
+world, which a more humane and liberal theology has done something
+to soften. How strange to see him cling so desperately to that crazy
+body, with its gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus' dance, and its six
+gallons of dropsy! What could be the attraction of an existence
+where eight hours of every day were spent groaning in a chair, and
+sixteen wheezing in a bed? "I would give one of these legs," said
+he, "for another year of life." None the less, when the hour did
+at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more simple
+dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent him how
+you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting
+some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight
+into human learning or character, which should leave you a better
+and a wiser man.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons--two editions, if you please,
+for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could
+not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the
+History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in
+any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You
+are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and
+keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a
+note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now
+and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what
+follows. There are no thrills in it. You won't be kept out of your
+bed at night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day,
+but you will feel a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and
+when it is done you will have gained something which you can never
+lose--something solid, something definite, something that will make
+you broader and deeper than before.
+
+Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed
+only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should
+choose. For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for
+thought is contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand
+years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its
+standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our
+more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he
+lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our
+literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A
+paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe
+the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You
+are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side
+upholding and instructing you. Beneath you are warring nations, the
+clash of races, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflict of
+creeds. Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama
+flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the true
+meaning of the scene into your ear.
+
+It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description
+of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
+throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass
+down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of
+greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal
+lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it
+took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a
+religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of
+Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood. The new
+creed had only added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the
+many which already existed, and the wars of angry nations were mild
+compared to those of excited sectaries.
+
+Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the
+waste places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly
+through the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally
+cleansing and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A
+storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it
+may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off, and
+Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is
+that it was not the conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it
+was the terrified fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle,
+blundered over everything which barred their way. It was a wild,
+dramatic time--the time of the formation of the modern races of
+Europe. The nations came whirling in out of the north and east like
+dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was blended with its
+neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul
+got his steadying from the Franks, the steady Saxon got his touch of
+refinement from the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life
+from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt Greek made way for
+the manly and earnest Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a
+great hand blending the seeds. And so one can now, save only that
+emigration has taken the place of war. It does not, for example,
+take much prophetic power to say that something very great is being
+built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic
+basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian being
+added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
+thereby evolved.
+
+But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
+Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its
+centre some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is
+the whole strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the
+south, submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to
+India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing
+right over the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
+Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced European fortress
+of the Moslem. Such is the tremendous narrative covering half the
+world's known history, which can all be acquired and made part of
+yourself by the aid of that humble atlas, pencil, and note-book
+already recommended.
+
+When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me
+there has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in
+the first entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has
+something of the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a
+great man. You remember how the Russians made their debut--came
+down the great rivers and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred
+canoes, from which they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys.
+Singular that a thousand years have passed and that the ambition
+of the Russians is still to carry out the task at which their
+skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the Turks again; you may recall the
+characteristic ferocity with which they opened their career. A
+handful of them were on some mission to the Emperor. The town was
+besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and the Asiatics
+obtained leave to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk galloped
+out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside
+him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man's
+comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
+adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived
+at the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the
+ambition of the other for so many centuries.
+
+And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are
+those that disappear. There is something there which appeals most
+powerfully to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those
+Vandals who conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe,
+blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country.
+Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness
+which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of least
+resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to
+west. South-west was the course of the Vandals--a course which must
+have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the
+thousands of miles which they traversed there were many fair
+resting-places, if that were only their quest.
+
+They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
+more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the
+old Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much
+as the English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some
+hundreds of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those
+flickers which showed that there was still some fire among the
+ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The
+Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they
+carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated
+by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
+brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid
+race with light eyes and hair. Is it possible that here we have some
+trace of the vanished Germans?
+
+It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland.
+That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic
+questions in history--the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my
+eyes to see across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point
+(or near it) where the old "Eyrbyggia" must have stood. That was the
+Scandinavian city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to
+be a considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a
+bishop. That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming
+out to his see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a
+climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait
+between Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been
+able to say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were
+at the time, be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced
+race in Europe. They may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux,
+the despised Skroeling--or they may have amalgamated with them--or
+conceivably they might have held their own. Very little is known yet
+of that portion of the coast. It would be strange if some Nansen or
+Peary were to stumble upon the remains of the old colony, and find
+possibly in that antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of some
+bygone civilization.
+
+But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been
+which first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty
+years, carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author
+so little known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish
+chronicle so crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into
+their appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application,
+great perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all
+this, but the coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in
+the heart of his own creation the individuality of the man himself
+becomes as insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the
+little creature that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon's work
+for one who cares anything for Gibbon.
+
+And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are
+greater than their work. Their work only represents one facet of
+their character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable,
+and uniting to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so
+with Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to
+have grown at the expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life
+one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics.
+His excellent judgment was never clouded by the haze of human
+emotion--or, at least, it was such an emotion as was well under
+the control of his will. Could anything be more laudable--or less
+lovable? He abandons his girl at the order of his father, and sums
+it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father
+dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of
+a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French
+Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because
+his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just
+as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
+was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all
+the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon--often without even
+mentioning his name--and one cannot read the great historian's life
+without understanding why.
+
+I should think that few men have been born with the material for
+self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than
+Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have,
+an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry,
+a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
+enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
+critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked
+upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but
+his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
+susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days.
+Turn him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is
+upon his contentions. "Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth
+chapters it is not necessary to dwell," says the biographer,
+"because at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams of
+denying the substantial truth of any of the more important
+allegations of Gibbon. Christians may complain of the suppression
+of some circumstances which might influence the general result, and
+they must remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case.
+But they no longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to
+show that persecution was less severe than had been once believed,
+and they have slowly learned that they can afford to concede the
+validity of all the secondary causes assigned by Gibbon and even of
+others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the historian has
+again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary causes
+which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity
+leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of
+Christianity practically untouched." This is all very well, but in
+that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
+upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
+for.
+
+Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was
+a curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth,
+was ulcerated and tortured by the king's evil, in spite of the Royal
+touch. Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own
+boyhood.
+
+  "I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by
+  opposite tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit,
+  by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the
+  bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness. Every
+  practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors
+  were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons.
+  There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
+  my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets,
+  issues, and caustics."
+
+Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that
+day seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
+ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far
+the hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had
+anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection
+between struma and learning; but one has only to compare this
+account of Gibbon with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred face
+and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that these, the two most solid
+English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same
+gruesome inheritance.
+
+I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character
+of subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame,
+his huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform,
+he must have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so
+round a peg in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different
+type, held a commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a
+soldier in spite of himself. War had broken out, the regiment was
+mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was
+kept under arms until the conclusion of hostilities. For three years
+he was divorced from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he
+resent it. The South Hampshire Militia never saw the enemy, which is
+perhaps as well for them. Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but
+after three years under canvas it is probable that his men had more
+cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his men. His
+hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt.
+In his lament, one of the items is that his colonel's example
+encouraged the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking,
+which gave him the gout. "The loss of so many busy and idle hours
+were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure," says he; "and my
+temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic officers, who
+were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners
+of gentlemen." The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
+mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must
+certainly have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he
+found consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering.
+It made him an Englishman once more, it improved his health, it
+changed the current of his thoughts. It was even useful to him as
+an historian. In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says,
+"The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a
+clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of
+the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of
+the Roman Empire."
+
+If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote
+no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from
+the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and
+soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most
+difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact,
+discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend.
+Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical
+Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and
+self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever
+been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been
+good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of
+all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national
+genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a
+British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the
+race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our neighbours
+we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress
+its publication.
+
+There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke's)
+of Pepys' Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in
+our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When
+Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought
+which came into his head he would have been very much surprised
+had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our
+literature. Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some
+obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant
+for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature
+as Boswell's book among biographies or Gibbon's among histories.
+
+As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce
+a good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy,
+and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own
+emotions--especially on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the
+heart, for example, which are such an index to a man's character,
+and so profoundly modify his life--what space do they fill in any
+man's autobiography? Perhaps in Gibbon's case the omission matters
+little, for, save in the instance of his well-controlled passion
+for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an organ which
+gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author
+tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the
+more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become.
+Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand
+self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not respectable
+they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.
+
+The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
+making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been
+a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess
+it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what
+he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences--all the more
+interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is
+of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious,
+blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud,
+trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed
+always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man,
+the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil
+servant, an eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable
+musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated 3000 volumes--a large
+private library in those days--and had the public spirit to leave
+them all to his University. You can forgive old Pepys a good deal of
+his philandering when you remember that he was the only official of
+the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst days of the
+Plague. He may have been--indeed, he assuredly was--a coward, but
+the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
+is the most truly brave of mankind.
+
+But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys
+is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of
+writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of
+his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other
+man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for
+about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes
+of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
+that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as
+easily as he did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour
+to compile these books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to
+leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all
+the countless sons of men? In such a case he would assuredly have
+left directions in somebody's care with a reference to it in the
+deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In that way
+he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
+name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had
+not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar
+the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
+Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not his object. What could it
+have been? The only alternative is reference and self-information.
+You will observe in his character a curious vein of method and
+order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
+wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions. It is
+conceivable that this systematic recording of his deeds--even of his
+misdeeds--was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness
+of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to
+advance another one.
+
+One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical
+a nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one
+seems to have had command of some instrument, many of several.
+Part-singing was common. There is not much of Charles the Second's
+days which we need envy, but there, at least, they seem to have
+had the advantage of us. It was real music, too--music of dignity
+and tenderness--with words which were worthy of such treatment.
+This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval
+pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have
+read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange thing this for
+a land which in the whole of last century has produced no single
+master of the first rank!
+
+What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
+life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
+climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
+England, alas, the sound of a poor man's voice raised in song means
+only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know
+that the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout
+forth if they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs
+were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I
+believe, that our orchestral associations are now the best in
+Europe. So, at least, the German papers said on the occasion of the
+recent visit of a north of England choir. But one cannot read Pepys
+without knowing that the general musical habit is much less
+cultivated now than of old.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow--from one pole
+of the human character to the other--and yet they are in contact on
+the shelf of my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I
+think, about the land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out
+into the ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things, and
+has held them there in isolation until they have woven themselves
+into the texture of the Cornish race. What is this strange strain
+which lurks down yonder and every now and then throws up a great
+man with singular un-English ways and features for all the world to
+marvel at? It is not Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further
+and deeper lie the springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving
+men of Tyre, with noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations,
+who have in far-off days forgotten their blue Mediterranean and
+settled on the granite shores of the Northern Sea?
+
+Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry
+Irving? How strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know
+that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing
+imagination of the Brontes--so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm
+of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a
+Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow,
+with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced,
+white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable
+face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in
+literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is
+something strange, and weird, and great, lurking down yonder in the
+great peninsula which juts into the western sea. Borrow may, if he
+so pleases, call himself an East Anglian--"an English Englishman,"
+as he loved to term it--but is it a coincidence that the one East
+Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one who showed these strange
+qualities? The birth was accidental. The qualities throw back to the
+twilight of the world.
+
+There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so
+voluminous that I feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be
+well read in their works. Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them
+altogether. There is Balzac, for example, with his hundred odd
+volumes. I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest
+pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an
+author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal years.
+Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all.
+Dumas, too! I stand on the edge of him, and look at that huge crop,
+and content myself with a sample here and there. But no one could
+raise this objection to Borrow. A month's reading--even for a
+leisurely reader--will master all that he has written. There are
+"Lavengro," "The Bible in Spain," "Romany Rye," and, finally, if you
+wish to go further, "Wild Wales." Only four books--not much to
+found a great reputation upon--but, then, there are no other four
+books quite like them in the language.
+
+He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined
+to be sulky, as wayward as a man could be. So far his catalogue of
+qualities does not seem to pick him as a winner. But he had one
+great and rare gift. He preserved through all his days a sense of
+the great wonder and mystery of life--the child sense which is so
+quickly dulled. Not only did he retain it himself, but he was
+word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he
+writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which
+his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was
+all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to
+the light. If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman
+there was something arresting in the words he said, something
+singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house one felt,
+after reading his account, that one would wish to know more of
+that man. If he approached a town he saw and made you see--not a
+collection of commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but something
+very strange and wonderful, the winding river, the noble bridge,
+the old castle, the shadows of the dead. Every human being, every
+object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol and reminder
+of the past. He looked through a man at that which the man
+represented. Was his name Welsh? Then in an instant the individual
+is forgotten and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient
+Britons, intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower,
+mountain raiders and a thousand fascinating things. Or is it a
+Danish name? He leaves the individual in all his modern commonplace
+while he flies off to huge skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may
+remark that I have examined the said skulls with some care, and they
+seemed to me to be rather below the human average), to Vikings,
+Berserkers, Varangians, Harald Haardraada, and the innate wickedness
+of the Pope. To Borrow all roads lead to Rome.
+
+But, my word, what English the fellow could write! What an
+organ-roll he could get into his sentences! How nervous and vital
+and vivid it all is!
+
+There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an
+ear for the music of prose. Take the chapter in "Lavengro" of how
+the screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped
+in the Dingle. The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle
+of Bunyan and Defoe. And, observe the art of it, under all the
+simplicity--notice, for example, the curious weird effect produced
+by the studied repetition of the word "dingle" coming ever round and
+round like the master-note in a chime. Or take the passage about
+Britain towards the end of "The Bible in Spain." I hate quoting from
+these masterpieces, if only for the very selfish reason that my poor
+setting cannot afford to show up brilliants. None the less, cost
+what it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of impassioned
+prose--
+
+  "O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink
+  beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous
+  clouds are now gathering rapidly around thee, still, still
+  may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee
+  a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown
+  than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be
+  a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled the Old
+  Queen of the waters! May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst
+  blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one
+  nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it
+  please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a
+  slow decay; becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for
+  those self-same foes who now, though they envy and abhor thee,
+  still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and
+  respect thee.... Remove from thee the false prophets, who
+  have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall
+  with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions
+  of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the
+  hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad.
+  Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall
+  thy end be a majestic and an enviable one; or God shall
+  perpetuate thy reign upon the waters, thou Old Queen!"
+
+Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. It's too long for
+quotation--but read it, read every word of it. Where in the language
+can you find a stronger, more condensed and more restrained
+narrative? I have seen with my own eyes many a noble fight, more
+than one international battle, where the best of two great countries
+have been pitted against each other--yet the second-hand impression
+of Borrow's description leaves a more vivid remembrance upon my mind
+than any of them. This is the real witchcraft of letters.
+
+He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in
+other than literary circles--circles which would have been amazed to
+learn that he was a writer of books. With his natural advantages,
+his six foot three of height and his staglike agility, he could
+hardly fail to be formidable. But he was a scientific sparrer as
+well, though he had, I have been told, a curious sprawling fashion
+of his own. And how his heart was in it--how he loved the fighting
+men! You remember his thumb-nail sketches of his heroes. If you
+don't I must quote one, and if you do you will be glad to read
+it again--
+
+  "There's Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best
+  man in England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure,
+  and face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher,
+  the younger, not the mighty one, who is gone to his place,
+  but the Teucer Belcher, the most scientific pugilist that
+  ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to be I won't say
+  what. He appears to walk before me now, as he did that
+  evening, with his white hat, white great coat, thin genteel
+  figure, springy step, and keen determined eye. Crosses him,
+  what a contrast! Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word
+  for nobody, and a hard blow for anybody. Hard! One blow
+  given with the proper play of his athletic arm will unsense
+  a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands
+  behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized,
+  and who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the
+  light-weights, so-called--Randall! The terrible Randall,
+  who has Irish blood in his veins; not the better for that,
+  nor the worse; and not far from him is his last antagonist,
+  Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself
+  as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was
+  a near thing. But how shall I name them all? They were
+  there by dozens, and all tremendous in their way. There
+  was Bulldog Hudson, and fearless Scroggins, who beat the
+  conqueror of Sam the Jew. There was Black Richmond--no,
+  he was not there, but I knew him well; he was the most
+  dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was
+  Purcell, who could never conquer until all seemed over with
+  him. There was--what! shall I name thee last? Ay, why not?
+  I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family
+  still above the sod, where mayst thou long continue--true
+  piece of English stuff--Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee, Tom
+  of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be
+  called, Spring or Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman
+  of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at
+  Flodden, where England's yeomen triumphed over Scotland's
+  King, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee, last of English
+  bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast
+  achieved--true English victories, unbought by yellow gold."
+
+Those are words from the heart. Long may it be before we lose the
+fighting blood which has come to us from of old! In a world of peace
+we shall at last be able to root it from our natures. In a world
+which is armed to the teeth it is the last and only guarantee of our
+future. Neither our numbers, nor our wealth, nor the waters which
+guard us can hold us safe if once the old iron passes from our
+spirit. Barbarous, perhaps--but there are possibilities for
+barbarism, and none in this wide world for effeminacy.
+
+Borrow's views of literature and of literary men were curious.
+Publisher and brother author, he hated them with a fine
+comprehensive hatred. In all his books I cannot recall a word of
+commendation to any living writer, nor has he posthumous praise for
+those of the generation immediately preceding. Southey, indeed, he
+commends with what most would regard as exaggerated warmth, but for
+the rest he who lived when Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all
+in their glorious prime, looks fixedly past them at some obscure
+Dane or forgotten Welshman. The reason was, I expect, that his
+proud soul was bitterly wounded by his own early failures and slow
+recognition. He knew himself to be a chief in the clan, and when the
+clan heeded him not he withdrew in haughty disdain. Look at his
+proud, sensitive face and you hold the key to his life.
+
+Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which
+gave me pleasure. A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called
+"Rodney Stone" to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon
+a bed of mortal sickness. The dying gladiator listened with intent
+interest but keen, professional criticism to the combats of the
+novel. The reader had got to the point where the young amateur
+fights the brutal Berks. Berks is winded, but holds his adversary
+off with a stiff left arm. The amateur's second in the story, an old
+prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal with the
+situation. "That's right. By --- he's got him!" yelled the stricken
+man in the bed. Who cares for critics after that?
+
+You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown
+volumes which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow.
+They are the three volumes of "Pugilistica," given me years ago by
+my old friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for
+half an hour without striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang
+of those days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and
+its fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing
+a word or two in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate
+encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become
+dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. You have to tum to
+Hazlitt's account of the encounter between the Gasman and the
+Bristol Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is a
+hardened reader who does not wince even in print before that
+frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and left him in "red
+ruin" from eyebrow to jaw. But even if there be no Hazlitt present
+to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination which is not
+fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly
+upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these
+little-read pages. They were picturesque creatures, men of great
+force of character and will, who reached the limits of human bravery
+and endurance. There is Jackson on the cover, gold upon brown,
+"gentleman Jackson," Jackson of the balustrade calf and the noble
+head, who wrote his name with an 88-pound weight dangling from his
+little finger.
+
+Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well--
+
+  "I can see him now as I saw him in '84 walking down Holborn
+  Hill, towards Smithfield. He had on a scarlet coat worked
+  in gold at the buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace,
+  a small white stock, no collar (they were not then invented),
+  a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches
+  and long silk strings, striped white silk stockings, pumps
+  and paste buckles; his waistcoat was pale blue satin,
+  sprigged with white. It was impossible to look on his fine
+  ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything
+  too small), his large but not too large hips, his balustrade
+  calf and beautifully turned but not over delicate ankle,
+  his firm foot and peculiarly small hand, without thinking
+  that nature had sent him on earth as a model. On he went
+  at a good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all
+  men and the admiration of all women."
+
+Now, that is a discriminating portrait--a portrait which really
+helps you to see that which the writer sets out to describe. After
+reading it one can understand why even in reminiscent sporting
+descriptions of those old days, amid all the Tonis and Bills
+and Jacks, it is always Mr. John Jackson. He was the friend and
+instructor of Byron and of half the bloods in town. Jackson it was
+who, in the heat of combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair,
+and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a
+close-cropped race. Inside you see the square face of old Broughton,
+the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose
+humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian
+Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had a chronicler,
+the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would
+take some beating. How about this passage?--
+
+  "He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows
+  truly in the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself,
+  to stop a blow, and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided
+  by his body, producing but fly-flap blows. No! Broughton steps
+  boldly and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow;
+  receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general
+  summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body seconding
+  his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the
+  pile-driving force upon his man."
+
+One would like a little more from the gallant Captain. Poor
+Broughton! He fought once too often. "Why, damn you, you're beat!"
+cried the Royal Duke. "Not beat, your highness, but I can't see my
+man!" cried the blinded old hero. Alas, there is the tragedy of the
+ring as it is of life! The wave of youth surges ever upwards, and
+the wave that went before is swept sobbing on to the shingle. "Youth
+will be served," said the terse old pugs. But what so sad as the
+downfall of the old champion! Wise Tom Spring--Tom of Bedford, as
+Borrow calls him--had the wit to leave the ring unconquered in
+the prime of his fame. Cribb also stood out as a champion. But
+Broughton, Slack, Belcher, and the rest--their end was one common
+tragedy.
+
+The latter days of the fighting men were often curious and
+unexpected, though as a rule they were short-lived, for the
+alternation of the excess of their normal existence and the
+asceticism of their training undermined their constitution. Their
+popularity among both men and women was their undoing, and the
+king of the ring went down at last before that deadliest of
+light-weights, the microbe of tubercle, or some equally fatal and
+perhaps less reputable bacillus. The crockiest of spectators had a
+better chance of life than the magnificent young athlete whom he
+had come to admire. Jem Belcher died at 30, Hooper at 31, Pearce,
+the Game Chicken, at 32, Turner at 35, Hudson at 38, Randall, the
+Nonpareil, at 34. Occasionally, when they did reach mature age,
+their lives took the strangest turns. Gully, as is well known,
+became a wealthy man, and Member for Pontefract in the Reform
+Parliament. Humphries developed into a successful coal merchant.
+Jack Martin became a convinced teetotaller and vegetarian. Jem Ward,
+the Black Diamond, developed considerable powers as an artist.
+Cribb, Spring, Langan, and many others, were successful publicans.
+Strangest of all, perhaps, was Broughton, who spent his old age
+haunting every sale of old pictures and bric-a-brac. One who saw
+him has recorded his impression of the silent old gentleman, clad in
+old-fashioned garb, with his catalogue in his hand--Broughton, once
+the terror of England, and now the harmless and gentle collector.
+
+Many of them, as was but natural, died violent deaths, some by
+accident and a few by their own hands. No man of the first class
+ever died in the ring. The nearest approach to it was the singular
+and mournful fate which befell Simon Byrne, the brave Irishman,
+who had the misfortune to cause the death of his antagonist, Angus
+Mackay, and afterwards met his own end at the hands of Deaf Burke.
+Neither Byrne nor Mackay could, however, be said to be boxers of the
+very first rank. It certainly would appear, if we may argue from the
+prize-ring, that the human machine becomes more delicate and is more
+sensitive to jar or shock. In the early days a fatal end to a fight
+was exceedingly rare. Gradually such tragedies became rather more
+common, until now even with the gloves they have shocked us by their
+frequency, and we feel that the rude play of our forefathers is
+indeed too rough for a more highly organized generation. Still, it
+may help us to clear our minds of cant if we remember that within
+two or three years the hunting-field and the steeple-chase claim
+more victims than the prize-ring has done in two centuries.
+
+Many of these men had served their country well with that strength
+and courage which brought them fame. Cribb was, if I mistake not, in
+the Royal Navy. So was the terrible dwarf Scroggins, all chest and
+shoulders, whose springing hits for many a year carried all before
+them until the canny Welshman, Ned Turner, stopped his career, only
+to be stopped in turn by the brilliant Irishman, Jack Randall. Shaw,
+who stood high among the heavy-weights, was cut to pieces by the
+French Cuirassiers in the first charge at Waterloo. The brutal Berks
+died greatly in the breach of Badajos. The lives of these men stood
+for something, and that was just the one supreme thing which the
+times called for--an unflinching endurance which could bear up
+against a world in arms. Look at Jem Belcher--beautiful, heroic
+Jem, a manlier Byron--but there, this is not an essay on the old
+prize-ring, and one man's lore is another man's bore. Let us pass
+those three low-down, unjustifiable, fascinating volumes, and on to
+nobler topics beyond!
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+Which are the great short stories of the English language? Not a
+bad basis for a debate! This I am sure of: that there are far fewer
+supremely good short stories than there are supremely good long
+books. It takes more exquisite skill to carve the cameo than the
+statue. But the strangest thing is that the two excellences seem
+to be separate and even antagonistic. Skill in the one by no means
+ensures skill in the other. The great masters of our literature,
+Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, have left no single
+short story of outstanding merit behind them, with the possible
+exception of Wandering Willie's Tale in "Red Gauntlet." On the other
+hand, men who have been very great in the short story, Stevenson,
+Poe, and Bret Harte, have written no great book. The champion
+sprinter is seldom a five-miler as well.
+
+Well, now, if you had to choose your team whom would you put in? You
+have not really a large choice. What are the points by which you
+judge them? You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of
+interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the
+master of all. I may remark by the way that it is the sight of his
+green cover, the next in order upon my favourite shelf, which has
+started this train of thought. Poe is, to my mind, the supreme
+original short story writer of all time. His brain was like a
+seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which
+have sprung nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of
+what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to
+repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him
+must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection
+of crime--"quorum pars parva fui!" Each may find some little
+development of his own, but his main art must trace back to those
+admirable stories of Monsieur Dupin, so wonderful in their masterful
+force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point. After all,
+mental acuteness is the one quality which can be ascribed to the
+ideal detective, and when that has once been admirably done,
+succeeding writers must necessarily be content for all time to
+follow in the same main track. But not only is Poe the originator
+of the detective story; all treasure-hunting, cryptogram-solving
+yarns trace back to his "Gold Bug," just as all pseudo-scientific
+Verne-and-Wells stories have their prototypes in the "Voyage to
+the Moon," and the "Case of Monsieur Valdemar." If every man who
+receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to
+pay tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as
+big as that of Cheops.
+
+And yet I could only give him two places in my team. One would be
+for the "Gold Bug," the other for the "Murder in the Rue Morgue." I
+do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not
+admit _perfect_ excellence to any other of his stories. These two
+have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others,
+the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of
+the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and
+Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one
+of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of
+a longer flight. He was always like one of his own gold-miners who
+struck a rich pocket, but found no continuous reef. The pocket was,
+alas, a very limited one, but the gold was of the best. "The Luck of
+Roaring Camp" and "Tennessee's Partner" are both, I think, worthy
+of a place among my immortals. They are, it is true, so tinged with
+Dickens as to be almost parodies of the master, but they have a
+symmetry and satisfying completeness as short stories to which
+Dickens himself never attained. The man who can read those two
+stories without a gulp in the throat is not a man I envy.
+
+And Stevenson? Surely he shall have two places also, for where
+is a finer sense of what the short story can do? He wrote, in
+my judgment, two masterpieces in his life, and each of them is
+essentially a short story, though the one happened to be published
+as a volume. The one is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which, whether
+you take it as a vivid narrative or as a wonderfully deep and true
+allegory, is a supremely fine bit of work. The other story of my
+choice would be "The Pavilion on the Links"--the very model of
+dramatic narrative. That story stamped itself so clearly on my brain
+when I read it in Cornhill that when I came across it again many
+years afterwards in volume form, I was able instantly to recognize
+two small modifications of the text--each very much for the
+worse--from the original form. They were small things, but they
+seemed somehow like a chip on a perfect statue. Surely it is only a
+very fine work, of art which could leave so definite an impression
+as that. Of course, there are a dozen other of his stories which
+would put the average writer's best work to shame, all with the
+strange Stevenson glamour upon them, of which I may discourse later,
+but only to those two would I be disposed to admit that complete
+excellence which would pass them into such a team as this.
+
+And who else? If it be not an impertinence to mention a
+contemporary, I should certainly have a brace from Rudyard Kipling.
+His power, his compression, his dramatic sense, his way of glowing
+suddenly into a vivid flame, all mark him as a great master. But
+which are we to choose from that long and varied collection, many of
+which have claims to the highest? Speaking from memory, I should say
+that the stories of his which have impressed me most are "The Drums
+of the Fore and Aft," "The Man who Would be King," "The Man who
+Was," and "The Brushwood Boy." Perhaps, on the whole, it is the
+first two which I should choose to add to my list of masterpieces.
+
+They are stories which invite criticism and yet defy it. The great
+batsman at cricket is the man who can play an unorthodox game, take
+every liberty which is denied to inferior players, and yet succeed
+brilliantly in the face of his disregard of law. So it is here. I
+should think the model of these stories is the most dangerous that
+any young writer could follow. There is digression, that most deadly
+fault in the short narrative; there is incoherence, there is want
+of proportion which makes the story stand still for pages and bound
+forward in a few sentences. But genius overrides all that, just as
+the great cricketer hooks the off ball and glides the straight one
+to leg. There is a dash, an exuberance, a full-blooded, confident
+mastery which carries everything before it. Yes, no team of
+immortals would be complete which did not contain at least two
+representatives of Kipling.
+
+And now whom? Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest
+degree to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed
+to crave stronger fare than he gave me. It was too subtle, too
+elusive, for effect. Indeed, I have been more affected by some of
+the short work of his son Julian, though I can quite understand the
+high artistic claims which the senior writer has, and the delicate
+charm of his style. There is Bulwer Lytton as a claimant. His
+"Haunted and the Haunters" is the very best ghost story that I know.
+As such I should include it in my list. There was a story, too, in
+one of the old Blackwoods--"Metempsychosis" it was called, which
+left so deep an impression upon my mind that I should be inclined,
+though it is many years since I read it, to number it with the best.
+Another story which has the characteristics of great work is Grant
+Allen's "John Creedy." So good a story upon so philosophic a basis
+deserves a place among the best. There is some first-class work
+to be picked also from the contemporary work of Wells and of
+Quiller-Couch which reaches a high standard. One little sketch--"Old
+Oeson" in "Noughts and Crosses"--is, in my opinion, as good as
+anything of the kind which I have ever read.
+
+And all this didactic talk comes from looking at that old green
+cover of Poe. I am sure that if I had to name the few books which
+have really influenced my own life I should have to put this one
+second only to Macaulay's Essays. I read it young when my mind was
+plastic. It stimulated my imagination and set before me a supreme
+example of dignity and force in the methods of telling a story.
+It is not altogether a healthy influence, perhaps. It turns the
+thoughts too forcibly to the morbid and the strange.
+
+He was a saturnine creature, devoid of humour and geniality, with
+a love for the grotesque and the terrible. The reader must himself
+furnish the counteracting qualities or Poe may become a dangerous
+comrade. We know along what perilous tracks and into what deadly
+quagmires his strange mind led him, down to that grey October Sunday
+morning when he was picked up, a dying man, on the side-walk at
+Baltimore, at an age which should have seen him at the very prime
+of his strength and his manhood.
+
+I have said that I look upon Poe as the world's supreme short story
+writer. His nearest rival, I should say, was Maupassant. The great
+Norman never rose to the extreme force and originality of the
+American, but he had a natural inherited power, an inborn instinct
+towards the right way of making his effects, which mark him as a
+great master. He produced stories because it was in him to do so, as
+naturally and as perfectly as an apple tree produces apples. What a
+fine, sensitive, artistic touch it is! How easily and delicately the
+points are made! How clear and nervous is his style, and how free
+from that redundancy which disfigures so much of our English work!
+He pares it down to the quick all the time.
+
+I cannot write the name of Maupassant without recalling what was
+either a spiritual interposition or an extraordinary coincidence in
+my own life. I had been travelling in Switzerland and had visited,
+among other places, that Gemmi Pass, where a huge cliff separates
+a French from a German canton. On the summit of this cliff was a
+small inn, where we broke our journey. It was explained to us that,
+although the inn was inhabited all the year round, still for about
+three months in winter it was utterly isolated, because it could at
+any time only be approached by winding paths on the mountain side,
+and when these became obliterated by snow it was impossible either
+to come up or to descend. They could see the lights in the valley
+beneath them, but were as lonely as if they lived in the moon. So
+curious a situation naturally appealed to one's imagination, and I
+speedily began to build up a short story in my own mind, depending
+upon a group of strong antagonistic characters being penned up in
+this inn, loathing each other and yet utterly unable to get away
+from each other's society, every day bringing them nearer to
+tragedy. For a week or so, as I travelled, I was turning over
+the idea.
+
+At the end of that time I returned through France. Having nothing to
+read I happened to buy a volume of Maupassant's Tales which I had
+never seen before. The first story was called "L'Auberge" (The
+Inn)--and as I ran my eye down the printed page I was amazed to see
+the two words, "Kandersteg" and "Gemmi Pass." I settled down and
+read it with ever-growing amazement. The scene was laid in the inn I
+had visited. The plot depended on the isolation of a group of people
+through the snowfall. Everything that I imagined was there, save
+that Maupassant had brought in a savage hound.
+
+Of course, the genesis of the thing is clear enough. He had chanced
+to visit the inn, and had been impressed as I had been by the same
+train of thought. All that is quite intelligible. But what is
+perfectly marvellous is that in that short journey I should have
+chanced to buy the one book in all the world which would prevent
+me from making a public fool of myself, for who would ever have
+believed that my work was not an imitation? I do not think that
+the hypothesis of coincidence can cover the facts. It is one of
+several incidents in my life which have convinced me of spiritual
+interposition--of the promptings of some beneficent force outside
+ourselves, which tries to help us where it can. The old Catholic
+doctrine of the Guardian Angel is not only a beautiful one, but
+has in it, I believe, a real basis of truth.
+
+Or is it that our subliminal ego, to use the jargon of the new
+psychology, or our astral, in the terms of the new theology, can
+learn and convey to the mind that which our own known senses are
+unable to apprehend? But that is too long a side track for us to
+turn down it.
+
+When Maupassant chose he could run Poe close in that domain of the
+strange and weird which the American had made so entirely his own.
+Have you read Maupassant's story called "Le Horla"? That is as good
+a bit of diablerie as you could wish for. And the Frenchman has,
+of course, far the broader range. He has a keen sense of humour,
+breaking out beyond all decorum in some of his stories, but giving
+a pleasant sub-flavour to all of them. And yet, when all is said,
+who can doubt that the austere and dreadful American is far the
+greater and more original mind of the two?
+
+Talking of weird American stories, have you ever read any of the
+works of Ambrose Bierce? I have one of his works there, "In the
+Midst of Life." This man had a flavour quite his own, and was a
+great artist in his way. It is not cheering reading, but it leaves
+its mark upon you, and that is the proof of good work.
+
+I have often wondered where Poe got his style. There is a sombre
+majesty about his best work, as if it were carved from polished jet,
+which is peculiarly his own. I dare say if I took down that volume
+I could light anywhere upon a paragraph which would show you what I
+mean. This is the kind of thing--
+
+  "Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi--in the
+  iron-bound melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say,
+  are glorious histories of the heaven and of the earth, and
+  of the mighty sea--and of the genius that overruled the sea,
+  and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There were much lore,
+  too, in the sayings which were said by the Sybils, and holy,
+  holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves which trembled
+  round Dodona, but as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon
+  told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I
+  hold to be the most wonderful of all." Or this sentence:
+  "And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror,
+  and stand trembling and aghast, for the tones in the voice
+  of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of
+  a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from
+  syllable to syllable, fell duskily upon our ears in the
+  well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed
+  friends."
+
+Is there not a sense of austere dignity? No man invents a style. It
+always derives back from some influence, or, as is more usual, it is
+a compromise between several influences. I cannot trace Poe's. And
+yet if Hazlitt and De Quincey had set forth to tell weird stories
+they might have developed something of the kind.
+
+Now, by your leave, we will pass on to my noble edition of "The
+Cloister and the Hearth," the next volume on the left.
+
+I notice, in glancing over my rambling remarks, that I classed
+"Ivanhoe" as the second historical novel of the century. I dare
+say there are many who would give "Esmond" the first place, and I
+can quite understand their position, although it is not my own.
+I recognize the beauty of the style, the consistency of the
+character-drawing, the absolutely perfect Queen Anne atmosphere.
+There was never an historical novel written by a man who knew his
+period so thoroughly. But, great as these virtues are, they are not
+the essential in a novel. The essential in a novel is interest,
+though Addison unkindly remarked that the real essential was that
+the pastrycooks should never run short of paper. Now "Esmond" is,
+in my opinion, exceedingly interesting during the campaigns in the
+Lowlands, and when our Machiavelian hero, the Duke, comes in, and
+also whenever Lord Mohun shows his ill-omened face; but there are
+long stretches of the story which are heavy reading. A pre-eminently
+good novel must always advance and never mark time. "Ivanhoe" never
+halts for an instant, and that just makes its superiority as a novel
+over "Esmond," though as a piece of literature I think the latter is
+the more perfect.
+
+No, if I had three votes, I should plump them all for "The Cloister
+and the Hearth," as being our greatest historical novel, and,
+indeed, as being our greatest novel of any sort. I think I may claim
+to have read most of the more famous foreign novels of last century,
+and (speaking only for myself and within the limits of my reading)
+I have been more impressed by that book of Reade's and by Tolstoi's
+"Peace and War" than by any others. They seem to me to stand at the
+very top of the century's fiction. There is a certain resemblance
+in the two--the sense of space, the number of figures, the way in
+which characters drop in and drop out. The Englishman is the more
+romantic. The Russian is the more real and earnest. But they are
+both great.
+
+Think of what Reade does in that one book. He takes the reader by
+the hand, and he leads him away into the Middle Ages, and not a
+conventional study-built Middle Age, but a period quivering with
+life, full of folk who are as human and real as a 'bus-load in
+Oxford Street. He takes him through Holland, he shows him the
+painters, the dykes, the life. He leads him down the long line of
+the Rhine, the spinal marrow of Mediaeval Europe. He shows him
+the dawn of printing, the beginnings of freedom, the life of the
+great mercantile cities of South Germany, the state of Italy, the
+artist-life of Rome, the monastic institutions on the eve of the
+Reformation. And all this between the covers of one book, so
+naturally introduced, too, and told with such vividness and spirit.
+Apart from the huge scope of it, the mere study of Gerard's own
+nature, his rise, his fall, his regeneration, the whole pitiable
+tragedy at the end, make the book a great one. It contains, I think,
+a blending of knowledge with imagination, which makes it stand alone
+in our literature. Let any one read the "Autobiography of Benvenuto
+Cellini," and then Charles Reade's picture of Mediaeval Roman life,
+if he wishes to appreciate the way in which Reade has collected his
+rough ore and has then smelted it all down in his fiery imagination.
+It is a good thing to have the industry to collect facts. It is a
+greater and a rarer one to have the tact to know how to use them
+when you have got them. To be exact without pedantry, and thorough
+without being dull, that should be the ideal of the writer of
+historical romance.
+
+Reade is one of the most perplexing figures in our literature. Never
+was there a man so hard to place. At his best he is the best we
+have. At his worst he is below the level of Surreyside melodrama.
+But his best have weak pieces, and his worst have good. There is
+always silk among his cotton, and cotton among his silk. But, for
+all his flaws, the man who, in addition to the great book, of which
+I have already spoken, wrote "It is Never Too Late to Mend," "Hard
+Cash," "Foul Play," and "Griffith Gaunt," must always stand in the
+very first rank of our novelists.
+
+There is a quality of heart about his work which I recognize nowhere
+else. He so absolutely loves his own heroes and heroines, while he
+so cordially detests his own villains, that he sweeps your emotions
+along with his own. No one has ever spoken warmly enough of the
+humanity and the lovability of his women. It is a rare gift--very
+rare for a man--this power of drawing a human and delightful girl.
+If there is a better one in nineteenth-century fiction than Julia
+Dodd I have never had the pleasure of meeting her. A man who could
+draw a character so delicate and so delightful, and yet could write
+such an episode as that of the Robber Inn in "The Cloister and the
+Hearth," adventurous romance in its highest form, has such a range
+of power as is granted to few men. My hat is always ready to come
+off to Charles Reade.
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+It is good to have the magic door shut behind us. On the other
+side of that door are the world and its troubles, hopes and fears,
+headaches and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments; but within,
+as you lie back on the green settee, and face the long lines of your
+silent soothing comrades, there is only peace of spirit and rest
+of mind in the company of the great dead. Learn to love, learn to
+admire them; learn to know what their comradeship means; for until
+you have done so the greatest solace and anodyne God has given to
+man have not yet shed their blessing upon you. Here behind this
+magic door is the rest house, where you may forget the past, enjoy
+the present, and prepare for the future.
+
+You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar
+with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon,
+the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all
+the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one
+wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each
+other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would
+have thought that noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed
+the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter for the
+younger man to use towards the elder. The fact is that Borrow had
+one dangerous virus in him--a poison which distorts the whole
+vision--for he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue
+outside his own interpretation of the great riddle. Downright
+heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the chaunting Druid,
+appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the man of his
+own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of ritual, or
+in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil to the
+bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person. Scott
+therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once
+hateful in his eyes. In any case he was a disappointed man, the big
+Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was
+good of any brother author. Only in the bards of Wales and in the
+Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though
+it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of
+informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse. But we
+must not be unkind behind the magic door--and yet to be charitable
+to the uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.
+
+So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped
+for six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as
+you see there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to
+my heart, and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and
+to my memory. Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old
+friends, and tell you why I love them, and all that they have meant
+to me in the past. If you picked any book from that line you would
+be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small, no doubt,
+and yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself.
+Hereditary impulses, personal experiences, books--those are the
+three forces which go to the making of man. These are the books.
+
+This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the
+eighteenth century, or those of them whom I regard as essential.
+After all, putting aside single books, such as Sterne's "Tristram
+Shandy," Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and Miss Burney's
+"Evelina," there are only three authors who count, and they in turn
+wrote only three books each, of first-rate importance, so that by
+the mastery of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad
+view of this most important and distinctive branch of English
+literature. The three men are, of course, Fielding, Richardson, and
+Smollett. The books are: Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," "Pamela,"
+and "Sir Charles Grandison"; Fielding's "Tom Jones", "Joseph
+Andrews," and "Amelia"; Smollett's "Peregrine Pickle," "Humphrey
+Clinker," and "Roderick Random." There we have the real work of
+the three great contemporaries who illuminated the middle of
+the eighteenth century--only nine volumes in all. Let us walk
+round these nine volumes, therefore, and see whether we cannot
+discriminate and throw a little light, after this interval of a
+hundred and fifty years, upon their comparative aims, and how far
+they have justified them by the permanent value of their work. A fat
+little bookseller in the City, a rakehell wit of noble blood, and
+a rugged Scotch surgeon from the navy--those are the three strange
+immortals who now challenge a comparison--the three men who dominate
+the fiction of their century, and to whom we owe it that the life
+and the types of that century are familiar to us, their fifth
+generation.
+
+It is not a subject to be dogmatic upon, for I can imagine that
+these three writers would appeal quite differently to every
+temperament, and that whichever one might desire to champion one
+could find arguments to sustain one's choice. Yet I cannot think
+that any large section of the critical public could maintain that
+Smollett was on the same level as the other two. Ethically he is
+gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour
+which is more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his
+rivals. I can remember in callow boyhood--puris omnia pura--reading
+"Peregrine Pickle," and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in
+the Fashion of the Ancients. I read it again in my manhood with the
+same effect, though with a greater appreciation of its inherent
+bestiality. That merit, a gross primitive merit, he has in a high
+degree, but in no other respect can he challenge comparison with
+either Fielding or Richardson. His view of life is far more limited,
+his characters less varied, his incidents less distinctive, and his
+thoughts less deep. Assuredly I, for one, should award him the third
+place in the trio.
+
+But how about Richardson and Fielding? There is indeed a competition
+of giants. Let us take the points of each in turn, and then compare
+them with each other.
+
+There is one characteristic, the rarest and subtlest of all, which
+each of them had in a supreme degree. Each could draw the most
+delightful women--the most perfect women, I think, in the whole
+range of our literature. If the eighteenth-century women were like
+that, then the eighteenth-century men got a great deal more than
+they ever deserved. They had such a charming little dignity of their
+own, such good sense, and yet such dear, pretty, dainty ways, so
+human and so charming, that even now they become our ideals. One
+cannot come to know them without a double emotion, one of respectful
+devotion towards themselves, and the other of abhorrence for the
+herd of swine who surrounded them. Pamela, Harriet Byron, Clarissa,
+Amelia, and Sophia Western were all equally delightful, and it was
+not the negative charm of the innocent and colourless woman, the
+amiable doll of the nineteenth century, but it was a beauty of
+nature depending upon an alert mind, clear and strong principles,
+true womanly feelings, and complete feminine charm. In this respect
+our rival authors may claim a tie, for I could not give a preference
+to one set of these perfect creatures over another. The plump little
+printer and the worn-out man-about-town had each a supreme woman in
+his mind.
+
+But their men! Alas, what a drop is there! To say that we are all
+capable of doing what Tom Jones did--as I have seen stated--is the
+worst form of inverted cant, the cant which makes us out worse than
+we are. It is a libel on mankind to say that a man who truly loves
+a woman is usually false to her, and, above all, a libel that he
+should be false in the vile fashion which aroused good Tom Newcome's
+indignation. Tom Jones was no more fit to touch the hem of Sophia's
+dress than Captain Booth was to be the mate of Amelia. Never once
+has Fielding drawn a gentleman, save perhaps Squire Alworthy. A
+lusty, brawling, good-hearted, material creature was the best that
+he could fashion. Where, in his heroes, is there one touch of
+distinction, of spirituality, of nobility? Here I think that the
+plebeian printer has done very much better than the aristocrat.
+Sir Charles Grandison is a very noble type--spoiled a little by
+over-coddling on the part of his creator, perhaps, but a very
+high-souled and exquisite gentleman all the same. Had _he_ married
+Sophia or Amelia I should not have forbidden the banns. Even the
+persevering Mr. B--- and the too amorous Lovelace were, in spite of
+their aberrations, men of gentle nature, and had possibilities of
+greatness and tenderness within them. Yes, I cannot doubt that
+Richardson drew the higher type of man--and that in Grandison he
+has done what has seldom or never been bettered.
+
+Richardson was also the subtler and deeper writer, in my opinion. He
+concerns himself with fine consistent character-drawing, and with a
+very searching analysis of the human heart, which is done so easily,
+and in such simple English, that the depth and truth of it only
+come upon reflection. He condescends to none of those scuffles and
+buffetings and pantomime rallies which enliven, but cheapen, many
+of Fielding's pages. The latter has, it may be granted, a broader
+view of life. He had personal acquaintance of circles far above, and
+also far below, any which the douce citizen, who was his rival, had
+ever been able or willing to explore. His pictures of low London
+life, the prison scenes in "Amelia," the thieves' kitchens in
+"Jonathan Wild," the sponging houses and the slums, are as vivid
+and as complete as those of his friend Hogarth--the most British
+of artists, even as Fielding was the most British of writers. But
+the greatest and most permanent facts of life are to be found in
+the smallest circles. Two men and a woman may furnish either the
+tragedian or the comedian with the most satisfying theme. And so,
+although his range was limited, Richardson knew very clearly and
+very thoroughly just that knowledge which was essential for his
+purpose. Pamela, the perfect woman of humble life, Clarissa, the
+perfect lady, Grandison the ideal gentleman--these were the three
+figures on which he lavished his most loving art. And now, after
+one hundred and fifty years, I do not know where we may find more
+satisfying types.
+
+He was prolix, it may be admitted, but who could bear to have him
+cut? He loved to sit down and tell you just all about it. His use of
+letters for his narratives made this gossipy style more easy. First
+_he_ writes and he tells all that passed. You have his letter. _She_
+at the same time writes to her friend, and also states her views.
+This also you see. The friends in each case reply, and you have the
+advantage of their comments and advice. You really do know all about
+it before you finish. It may be a little wearisome at first, if you
+have been accustomed to a more hustling style with fireworks in
+every chapter. But gradually it creates an atmosphere in which you
+live, and you come to know these people, with their characters and
+their troubles, as you know no others of the dream-folk of fiction.
+Three times as long as an ordinary book, no doubt, but why grudge
+the time? What is the hurry? Surely it is better to read one
+masterpiece than three books which will leave no permanent
+impression on the mind.
+
+It was all attuned to the sedate life of that, the last of the quiet
+centuries. In the lonely country-house, with few letters and fewer
+papers, do you suppose that the readers ever complained of the
+length of a book, or could have too much of the happy Pamela or of
+the unhappy Clarissa? It is only under extraordinary circumstances
+that one can now get into that receptive frame of mind which was
+normal then. Such an occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells
+how in some Indian hill station, where books were rare, he let loose
+a copy of "Clarissa." The effect was what might have been expected.
+Richardson in a suitable environment went through the community
+like a mild fever. They lived him, and dreamed him, until the whole
+episode passed into literary history, never to be forgotten by those
+who experienced it. It is tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style
+is so correct and yet so simple that there is no page which a
+scholar may not applaud nor a servant-maid understand.
+
+Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told
+in letters. Scott reverted to it in "Guy Mannering," and there are
+other conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the
+expense of a strain upon the reader's good-nature and credulity. One
+feels that these constant details, these long conversations, could
+not possibly have been recorded in such a fashion. The indignant and
+dishevelled heroine could not sit down and record her escape with
+such cool minuteness of description. Richardson does it as well as
+it could be done, but it remains intrinsically faulty. Fielding,
+using the third person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival,
+and gave a freedom and personal authority to the novel which it had
+never before enjoyed. There at least he is the master.
+
+And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson,
+though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so. First of
+all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme
+credit of having been the first. Surely the originator should have
+a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should
+also improve and amplify. It is Richardson and not Fielding who is
+the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without
+romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling
+stories may be made from everyday life, told in everyday language.
+This was his great new departure. So entirely was Fielding his
+imitator, or rather perhaps his parodist, that with supreme audacity
+(some would say brazen impudence) he used poor Richardson's own
+characters, taken from "Pamela," in his own first novel, "Joseph
+Andrews," and used them too for the unkind purpose of ridiculing
+them. As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if Thackeray wrote
+a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to show what
+faulty characters these were. It is no wonder that even the gentle
+little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a somewhat
+unscrupulous man.
+
+And then there is the vexed question of morals. Surely in talking
+of this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain
+class of critics. The inference appears to be that there is some
+subtle connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of
+the lewd, or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of
+the true artist. It is not difficult to handle or depict. On the
+contrary, it is so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its
+forms, that the temptation to employ it is ever present. It is the
+easiest and cheapest of all methods of creating a spurious effect.
+The difficulty does not lie in doing it. The difficulty lies in
+avoiding it. But one tries to avoid it because on the face of it
+there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a gentleman,
+or that he should write for a woman's eyes that which he would be
+justly knocked down for having said in a woman's ears. But "you
+must draw the world as it is." Why must you? Surely it is just in
+selection and restraint that the artist is shown. It is true that in
+a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself
+had fewer restrictions then. We are of our own age, and must live
+up to it.
+
+But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded? By no means.
+Our decency need not weaken into prudery. It all lies in the spirit
+in which it is done. No one who wished to lecture on these various
+spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals,
+Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. It is possible to draw vice with
+some freedom for the purpose of condemning it. Such a writer is a
+moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson. Again, it
+is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation,
+but simply as a fact which is there. Such a writer is a realist, and
+such was Fielding. Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order
+to extract amusement from it. Such a man is a coarse humorist, and
+such was Smollett. Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to
+show sympathy with it. Such a man is a wicked man, and there were
+many among the writers of the Restoration. But of all reasons that
+exist for treating this side of life, Richardson's were the best,
+and nowhere do we find it more deftly done.
+
+Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble
+about Fielding as a man. He was a better hero than any that he drew.
+Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the
+most dangerous and lawless of European capitals. Hogarth's pictures
+give some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs,
+the high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves'
+kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is
+thrust. This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and
+poor Hercules was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a
+sick-room than for such a task. It cost him his life, for he died at
+47, worn out with his own exertions. It might well have cost him his
+life in more dramatic fashion, for he had become a marked man to
+the criminal classes, and he headed his own search-parties when, on
+the information of some bribed rascal, a new den of villainy was
+exposed. But he carried his point. In little more than a year the
+thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to what it has
+ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals. Has
+any man ever left a finer monument behind him?
+
+If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the
+novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock
+cynicism, but in his "Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon." He knew
+that his health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were
+numbered. Those are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he
+has no longer a motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate
+presence of the most tremendous of all realities. Yet, sitting in
+the shadow of death, Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and
+constancy of mind, which show how splendid a nature had been
+shrouded by his earlier frailties.
+
+Just one word upon another eighteenth-century novel before I finish
+this somewhat didactic chat. You will admit that I have never prosed
+so much before, but the period and the subject seem to encourage
+it. I skip Sterne, for I have no great sympathy with his finicky
+methods. And I skip Miss Burney's novels, as being feminine
+reflections of the great masters who had just preceded her. But
+Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" surely deserves one paragraph to
+itself. There is a book which is tinged throughout, as was all
+Goldsmith's work, with a beautiful nature. No one who had not a fine
+heart could have written it, just as no one without a fine heart
+could have written "The Deserted Village." How strange it is to
+think of old Johnson patronizing or snubbing the shrinking Irishman,
+when both in poetry, in fiction, and in the drama the latter has
+proved himself far the greater man. But here is an object-lesson of
+how the facts of life may be treated without offence. Nothing is
+shirked. It is all faced and duly recorded. Yet if I wished to set
+before the sensitive mind of a young girl a book which would prepare
+her for life without in any way contaminating her delicacy of
+feeling, there is no book which I should choose so readily as "The
+Vicar of Wakefield."
+
+So much for the eighteenth-century novelists. They have a shelf of
+their own in the case, and a corner of their own in my brain. For
+years you may never think of them, and then suddenly some stray word
+or train of thought leads straight to them, and you look at them
+and love them, and rejoice that you know them. But let us pass to
+something which may interest you more.
+
+If statistics could be taken in the various free libraries of the
+kingdom to prove the comparative popularity of different novelists
+with the public, I think that it is quite certain that Mr. George
+Meredith would come out very low indeed. If, on the other hand,
+a number of authors were convened to determine which of their
+fellow-craftsmen they considered the greatest and the most
+stimulating to their own minds, I am equally confident that Mr.
+Meredith would have a vast preponderance of votes. Indeed, his only
+conceivable rival would be Mr. Hardy. It becomes an interesting
+study, therefore, why there should be such a divergence of opinion
+as to his merits, and what the qualities are which have repelled
+so many readers, and yet have attracted those whose opinion must
+be allowed to have a special weight.
+
+The most obvious reason is his complete unconventionality. The
+public read to be amused. The novelist reads to have new light
+thrown upon his art. To read Meredith is not a mere amusement; it is
+an intellectual exercise, a kind of mental dumb-bell with which you
+develop your thinking powers. Your mind is in a state of tension the
+whole time that you are reading him.
+
+If you will follow my nose as the sportsman follows that of his
+pointer, you will observe that these remarks are excited by the
+presence of my beloved "Richard Feverel," which lurks in yonder
+corner. What a great book it is, how wise and how witty! Others of
+the master's novels may be more characteristic or more profound, but
+for my own part it is the one which I would always present to the
+new-comer who had not yet come under the influence. I think that I
+should put it third after "Vanity Fair" and "The Cloister and the
+Hearth" if I had to name the three novels which I admire most in the
+Victorian era. The book was published, I believe, in 1859, and it is
+almost incredible, and says little for the discrimination of critics
+or public, that it was nearly twenty years before a second edition
+was needed.
+
+But there are never effects without causes, however inadequate
+the cause may be. What was it that stood in the way of the book's
+success? Undoubtedly it was the style. And yet it is subdued and
+tempered here with little of the luxuriance and exuberance which
+it attained in the later works. But it was an innovation, and it
+stalled off both the public and the critics. They regarded it, no
+doubt, as an affectation, as Carlyle's had been considered twenty
+years before, forgetting that in the case of an original genius
+style is an organic thing, part of the man as much as the colour of
+his eyes. It is not, to quote Carlyle, a shirt to be taken on and
+off at pleasure, but a skin, eternally fixed. And this strange,
+powerful style, how is it to be described? Best, perhaps, in his
+own strong words, when he spoke of Carlyle with perhaps the arriere
+pensee that the words would apply as strongly to himself.
+
+"His favourite author," says he, "was one writing on heroes in a
+style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation, so
+loose and rough it seemed. A wind-in-the-orchard style that tumbled
+down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster,
+sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke,
+like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a
+hand to street slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like
+slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole
+book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and joints."
+
+What a wonderful description and example of style! And how vivid
+is the impression left by such expressions as "all the pages in a
+breeze." As a comment on Carlyle, and as a sample of Meredith, the
+passage is equally perfect.
+
+Well, "Richard Feverel" has come into its own at last. I confess to
+having a strong belief in the critical discernment of the public. I
+do not think good work is often overlooked. Literature, like water,
+finds its true level. Opinion is slow to form, but it sets true at
+last. I am sure that if the critics were to unite to praise a bad
+book or to damn a good one they could (and continually do) have
+a five-year influence, but it would in no wise affect the final
+result. Sheridan said that if all the fleas in his bed had been
+unanimous, they could have pushed him out of it. I do not think
+that any unanimity of critics has ever pushed a good book out of
+literature.
+
+Among the minor excellences of "Richard Feverel"--excuse the
+prolixity of an enthusiast--are the scattered aphorisms which are
+worthy of a place among our British proverbs. What could be more
+exquisite than this, "Who rises from prayer a better man his prayer
+is answered"; or this, "Expediency is man's wisdom. Doing right is
+God's"; or, "All great thoughts come from the heart"? Good are the
+words "The coward amongst us is he who sneers at the failings of
+humanity," and a healthy optimism rings in the phrase "There is for
+the mind but one grasp of happiness; from that uppermost pinnacle
+of wisdom whence we see that this world is well designed." In more
+playful mood is "Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by
+man." Let us hurry away abruptly, for he who starts quotation from
+"Richard Feverel" is lost.
+
+He has, as you see, a goodly line of his brothers beside him. There
+are the Italian ones, "Sandra Belloni," and "Vittoria"; there is
+"Rhoda Fleming," which carried Stevenson off his critical feet;
+"Beauchamp's Career," too, dealing with obsolete politics. No great
+writer should spend himself upon a temporary theme. It is like the
+beauty who is painted in some passing fashion of gown. She tends
+to become obsolete along with her frame. Here also is the dainty
+"Diana," the egoist with immortal Willoughby Pattern, eternal type
+of masculine selfishness, and "Harry Richmond," the first chapters
+of which are, in my opinion, among the finest pieces of narrative
+prose in the language. That great mind would have worked in any form
+which his age had favoured. He is a novelist by accident. As an
+Elizabethan he would have been a great dramatist; under Queen Anne
+a great essayist. But whatever medium he worked in, he must equally
+have thrown the image of a great brain and a great soul.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+We have left our eighteenth-century novelists--Fielding, Richardson,
+and Smollett--safely behind us, with all their solidity and their
+audacity, their sincerity, and their coarseness of fibre. They have
+brought us, as you perceive, to the end of the shelf. What, not
+wearied? Ready for yet another? Let us run down this next row, then,
+and I will tell you a few things which may be of interest, though
+they will be dull enough if you have not been born with that love of
+books in your heart which is among the choicest gifts of the gods.
+If that is wanting, then one might as well play music to the deaf,
+or walk round the Academy with the colour-blind, as appeal to the
+book-sense of an unfortunate who has it not.
+
+There is this old brown volume in the corner. How it got there I
+cannot imagine, for it is one of those which I bought for threepence
+out of the remnant box in Edinburgh, and its weather-beaten comrades
+are up yonder in the back gallery, while this one has elbowed its
+way among the quality in the stalls. But it is worth a word or two.
+Take it out and handle it! See how swarthy it is, how squat, with
+how bullet-proof a cover of scaling leather. Now open the fly-leaf
+"Ex libris Guilielmi Whyte. 1672" in faded yellow ink. I wonder who
+William Whyte may have been, and what he did upon earth in the reign
+of the merry monarch. A pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I
+should judge, by that hard, angular writing. The date of issue is
+1642, so it was printed just about the time when the Pilgrim Fathers
+were settling down into their new American home, and the first
+Charles's head was still firm upon his shoulders, though a little
+puzzled, no doubt, at what was going on around it. The book is in
+Latin--though Cicero might not have admitted it--and it treats of
+the laws of warfare.
+
+I picture some pedantic Dugald Dalgetty bearing it about under his
+buff coat, or down in his holster, and turning up the reference for
+every fresh emergency which occurred. "Hullo! here's a well!" says
+he. "I wonder if I may poison it?" Out comes the book, and he runs a
+dirty forefinger down the index. "Ob fas est aquam hostis venere,"
+etc. "Tut, tut, it's not allowed. But here are some of the enemy in
+a barn? What about that?" "Ob fas est hostem incendio," etc. "Yes;
+he says we may. Quick, Ambrose, up with the straw and the tinder
+box." Warfare was no child's play about the time when Tilly sacked
+Magdeburg, and Cromwell turned his hand from the mash tub to the
+sword. It might not be much better now in a long campaign, when men
+were hardened and embittered. Many of these laws are unrepealed, and
+it is less than a century since highly disciplined British troops
+claimed their dreadful rights at Badajos and Rodrigo. Recent
+European wars have been so short that discipline and humanity have
+not had time to go to pieces, but a long war would show that man is
+ever the same, and that civilization is the thinnest of veneers.
+
+Now you see that whole row of books which takes you at one sweep
+nearly across the shelf? I am rather proud of those, for they are
+my collection of Napoleonic military memoirs. There is a story told
+of an illiterate millionaire who gave a wholesale dealer an order
+for a copy of all books in any language treating of any aspect of
+Napoleon's career. He thought it would fill a case in his library.
+He was somewhat taken aback, however, when in a few weeks he
+received a message from the dealer that he had got 40,000 volumes,
+and awaited instructions as to whether he should send them on as
+an instalment, or wait for a complete set. The figures may not be
+exact, but at least they bring home the impossibility of exhausting
+the subject, and the danger of losing one's self for years in a huge
+labyrinth of reading, which may end by leaving no very definite
+impression upon your mind. But one might, perhaps, take a corner of
+it, as I have done here in the military memoirs, and there one might
+hope to get some finality.
+
+Here is Marbot at this end--the first of all soldier books in the
+world. This is the complete three-volume French edition, with red
+and gold cover, smart and debonnaire like its author. Here he is
+in one frontispiece with his pleasant, round, boyish face, as a
+Captain of his beloved Chasseurs. And here in the other is the
+grizzled old bull-dog as a full general, looking as full of fight as
+ever. It was a real blow to me when some one began to throw doubts
+upon the authenticity of Marbot's memoirs. Homer may be dissolved
+into a crowd of skin-clad bards. Even Shakespeare may be jostled
+in his throne of honour by plausible Baconians; but the human, the
+gallant, the inimitable Marbot! His book is that which gives us the
+best picture by far of the Napoleonic soldiers, and to me they are
+even more interesting than their great leader, though his must ever
+be the most singular figure in history. But those soldiers, with
+their huge shakoes, their hairy knapsacks, and their hearts of
+steel--what men they were! And what a latent power there must be
+in this French nation which could go on pouring out the blood of
+its sons for twenty-three years with hardly a pause!
+
+It took all that time to work off the hot ferment which the
+Revolution had left in men's veins. And they were not exhausted, for
+the very last fight which the French fought was the finest of all.
+Proud as we are of our infantry at Waterloo, it was really with the
+French cavalry that the greenest laurels of that great epic rested.
+They got the better of our own cavalry, they took our guns again
+and again, they swept a large portion of our allies from the field,
+and finally they rode off unbroken, and as full of fight as ever.
+Read Gronow's "Memoirs," that chatty little yellow volume yonder
+which brings all that age back to us more vividly than any more
+pretentious work, and you will find the chivalrous admiration which
+our officers expressed at the fine performance of the French
+horsemen.
+
+It must be admitted that, looking back upon history, we have not
+always been good allies, nor yet generous co-partners in the
+battlefield. The first is the fault of our politics, where one party
+rejoices to break what the other has bound. The makers of the Treaty
+are staunch enough, as the Tories were under Pitt and Castlereagh,
+or the Whigs at the time of Queen Anne, but sooner or later the
+others must come in. At the end of the Marlborough wars we suddenly
+vamped up a peace and, left our allies in the lurch, on account
+of a change in domestic politics. We did the same with Frederick
+the Great, and would have done it in the Napoleonic days if Fox
+could have controlled the country. And as to our partners of the
+battlefield, how little we have ever said that is hearty as to the
+splendid staunchness of the Prussians at Waterloo. You have to read
+the Frenchman, Houssaye, to get a central view and to understand
+the part they played. Think of old Blucher, seventy years old, and
+ridden over by a regiment of charging cavalry the day before, yet
+swearing that he would come to Wellington if he had to be strapped
+to his horse. He nobly redeemed his promise.
+
+The loss of the Prussians at Waterloo was not far short of our own.
+You would not know it, to read our historians. And then the abuse
+of our Belgian allies has been overdone. Some of them fought
+splendidly, and one brigade of infantry had a share in the critical
+instant when the battle was turned. This also you would not learn
+from British sources. Look at our Portuguese allies also! They
+trained into magnificent troops, and one of Wellington's earnest
+desires was to have ten thousand of them for his Waterloo campaign.
+It was a Portuguese who first topped the rampart of Badajos. They
+have never had their due credit, nor have the Spaniards either, for,
+though often defeated, it was their unconquerable pertinacity which
+played a great part in the struggle. No; I do not think that we are
+very amiable partners, but I suppose that all national history may
+be open to a similar charge.
+
+It must be confessed that Marbot's details are occasionally a little
+hard to believe. Never in the pages of Lever has there been such a
+series of hairbreadth escapes and dare-devil exploits. Surely he
+stretched it a little sometimes. You may remember his adventure at
+Eylau--I think it was Eylau--how a cannon-ball, striking the top of
+his helmet, paralyzed him by the concussion of his spine; and how,
+on a Russian officer running forward to cut him down, his horse bit
+the man's face nearly off. This was the famous charger which savaged
+everything until Marbot, having bought it for next to nothing, cured
+it by thrusting a boiling leg of mutton into its mouth when it tried
+to bite him. It certainly does need a robust faith to get over these
+incidents. And yet, when one reflects upon the hundreds of battles
+and skirmishes which a Napoleonic officer must have endured--how
+they must have been the uninterrupted routine of his life from the
+first dark hair upon his lip to the first grey one upon his head,
+it is presumptuous to say what may or may not have been possible in
+such unparalleled careers. At any rate, be it fact or fiction--fact
+it is, in my opinion, with some artistic touching up of the high
+lights--there are few books which I could not spare from my shelves
+better than the memoirs of the gallant Marbot.
+
+I dwell upon this particular book because it is the best; but take
+the whole line, and there is not one which is not full of interest.
+Marbot gives you the point of view of the officer. So does De
+Segur and De Fezensac and Colonel Gonville, each in some different
+branch of the service. But some are from the pens of the men in the
+ranks, and they are even more graphic than the others. Here, for
+example, are the papers of good old Cogniet, who was a grenadier of
+the Guard, and could neither read nor write until after the great
+wars were over. A tougher soldier never went into battle. Here is
+Sergeant Bourgogne, also with his dreadful account of that nightmare
+campaign in Russia, and the gallant Chevillet, trumpeter of
+Chasseurs, with his matter-of-fact account of all that he saw, where
+the daily "combat" is sandwiched in betwixt the real business of the
+day, which was foraging for his frugal breakfast and supper. There
+is no better writing, and no easier reading, than the records of
+these men of action.
+
+A Briton cannot help asking himself, as he realizes what men these
+were, what would have happened if 150,000 Cogniets and Bourgognes,
+with Marbots to lead them, and the great captain of all time in the
+prime of his vigour at their head, had made their landing in Kent?
+For months it was touch-and-go. A single naval slip which left
+the Channel clear would have been followed by an embarkation
+from Boulogne, which had been brought by constant practice to so
+incredibly fine a point that the last horse was aboard within two
+hours of the start. Any evening might have seen the whole host
+upon the Pevensey Flats. What then? We know what Humbert did with
+a handful of men in Ireland, and the story is not reassuring.
+Conquest, of course, is unthinkable. The world in arms could not do
+that. But Napoleon never thought of the conquest of Britain. He has
+expressly disclaimed it. What he did contemplate was a gigantic raid
+in which he would do so much damage that for years to come England
+would be occupied at home in picking up the pieces, instead of
+having energy to spend abroad in thwarting his Continental plans.
+
+Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Sheerness in flames, with London either
+levelled to the ground or ransomed at his own figure--that was a
+more feasible programme. Then, with the united fleets of conquered
+Europe at his back, enormous armies and an inexhaustible treasury,
+swollen with the ransom of Britain, he could turn to that conquest
+of America which would win back the old colonies of France and leave
+him master of the world. If the worst happened and he had met his
+Waterloo upon the South Downs, he would have done again what he
+did in Egypt and once more in Russia: hurried back to France in a
+swift vessel, and still had force enough to hold his own upon the
+Continent. It would, no doubt, have been a big stake to lay upon
+the table--150,000 of his best--but he could play again if he lost;
+while, if he won, he cleared the board. A fine game--if little
+Nelson had not stopped it, and with one blow fixed the edge of salt
+water as the limit of Napoleon's power.
+
+There's the cast of a medal on the top of that cabinet which will
+bring it all close home to you. It is taken from the die of the
+medal which Napoleon had arranged to issue on the day that he
+reached London. It serves, at any rate, to show that his great
+muster was not a bluff, but that he really did mean serious
+business. On one side is his head. On the other France is engaged
+in strangling and throwing to earth a curious fish-tailed creature,
+which stands for perfidious Albion. "Frappe a Londres" is
+printed on one part of it, and "La Descente dans Angleterre" upon
+another. Struck to commemorate a conquest, it remains now as a
+souvenir of a fiasco. But it was a close call.
+
+By the way, talking of Napoleon's flight from Egypt, did you ever
+see a curious little book called, if I remember right, "Intercepted
+Letters"? No; I have no copy upon this shelf, but a friend is more
+fortunate. It shows the almost incredible hatred which existed
+at the end of the eighteenth century between the two nations,
+descending even to the most petty personal annoyance. On this
+occasion the British Government intercepted a mail-bag of letters
+coming from French officers in Egypt to their friends at home,
+and they either published them, or at least allowed them to be
+published, in the hope, no doubt, of causing domestic complications.
+Was ever a more despicable action? But who knows what other injuries
+had been inflicted to draw forth such a retaliation? I have myself
+seen a burned and mutilated British mail lying where De Wet had left
+it; but suppose the refinement of his vengeance had gone so far as
+to publish it, what a thunder-bolt it might have been!
+
+As to the French officers, I have read their letters, though even
+after a century one had a feeling of guilt when one did so. But, on
+the whole, they are a credit to the writers, and give the impression
+of a noble and chivalrous set of men. Whether they were all
+addressed to the right people is another matter, and therein lay the
+poisoned sting of this most un-British affair. As to the monstrous
+things which were done upon the other side, remember the arrest of
+all the poor British tourists and commercials who chanced to be in
+France when the war was renewed in 1803. They had run over in all
+trust and confidence for a little outing and change of air. They
+certainly got it, for Napoleon's steel grip fell upon them, and they
+rejoined their families in 1814. He must have had a heart of adamant
+and a will of iron. Look at his conduct over the naval prisoners.
+The natural proceeding would have been to exchange them. For some
+reason he did not think it good policy to do so. All representations
+from the British Government were set aside, save in the case of the
+higher officers. Hence the miseries of the hulks and the dreadful
+prison barracks in England. Hence also the unhappy idlers of Verdun.
+What splendid loyalty there must have been in those humble Frenchmen
+which never allowed them for one instant to turn bitterly upon the
+author of all their great misfortunes. It is all brought vividly
+home by the description of their prisons given by Borrow in
+"Lavengro." This is the passage--
+
+  "What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with
+  their blank, blind walls, without windows or grating, and
+  their slanting roofs, out of which, through orifices where
+  the tiles had been removed, would be protruded dozens of
+  grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide
+  expanse of country unfolded from their airy height. Ah!
+  there was much misery in those casernes; and from those
+  roofs, doubtless, many a wistful look was turned in the
+  direction of lovely France. Much had the poor inmates to
+  endure, and much to complain of, to the disgrace of England
+  be it said--of England, in general so kind and bountiful.
+  Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I have seen
+  the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy
+  entertainment even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless
+  and captive; and such, alas! was the fare in those casernes.
+  And then, those visits, or rather ruthless inroads, called
+  in the slang of the place 'straw-plait hunts,' when in
+  pursuit of a contraband article, which the prisoners,
+  in order to procure themselves a few of the necessaries
+  and comforts of existence, were in the habit of making,
+  red-coated battalions were marched into the prisons, who,
+  with the bayonet's point, carried havoc and ruin into every
+  poor convenience which ingenious wretchedness had been
+  endeavouring to raise around it; and then the triumphant
+  exit with the miserable booty, and worst of all, the accursed
+  bonfire, on the barrack parade of the plait contraband,
+  beneath the view of glaring eyeballs from those lofty roofs,
+  amid the hurrahs of the troops frequently drowned in the
+  curses poured down from above like a tempest-shower, or in
+  the terrific war-whoop of 'Vive l'Empereur!'"
+
+There is a little vignette of Napoleon's men in captivity. Here is
+another which is worth preserving of the bearing of his veterans
+when wounded on the field of battle. It is from Mercer's
+recollections of the Battle of Waterloo. Mercer had spent the day
+firing case into the French cavalry at ranges from fifty to two
+hundred yards, losing two-thirds of his own battery in the process.
+In the evening he had a look at some of his own grim handiwork.
+
+  "I had satisfied my curiosity at Hougoumont, and was retracing
+  my steps up the hill when my attention was called to a group
+  of wounded Frenchmen by the calm, dignified, and soldier-like
+  oration addressed by one of them to the rest. I cannot, like
+  Livy, compose a fine harangue for my hero, and, of course, I
+  could not retain the precise words, but the import of them was
+  to exhort them to bear their sufferings with fortitude; not
+  to repine, like women or children, at what every soldier
+  should have made up his mind to suffer as the fortune of
+  war, but above all, to remember that they were surrounded by
+  Englishmen, before whom they ought to be doubly careful not
+  to disgrace themselves by displaying such an unsoldier-like
+  want of fortitude.
+
+  "The speaker was sitting on the ground with his lance stuck
+  upright beside him--an old veteran with thick bushy, grizzly
+  beard, countenance like a lion--a lancer of the old guard,
+  and no doubt had fought in many a field. One hand was
+  flourished in the air as he spoke, the other, severed at the
+  wrist, lay on the earth beside him; one ball (case-shot,
+  probably) had entered his body, another had broken his leg.
+  His suffering, after a night of exposure so mangled, must
+  have been great; yet he betrayed it not. His bearing was
+  that of a Roman, or perhaps an Indian warrior, and I could
+  fancy him concluding appropriately his speech in the words
+  of the Mexican king, 'And I too; am I on a bed of roses?'"
+
+What a load of moral responsibility upon one man! But his mind was
+insensible to moral responsibility. Surely if it had not been it
+must have been crushed beneath it. Now, if you want to understand
+the character of Napoleon--but surely I must take a fresh start
+before I launch on so portentous a subject as that.
+
+But before I leave the military men let me, for the credit of my own
+country, after that infamous incident of the letters, indicate these
+six well-thumbed volumes of "Napier's History." This is the story of
+the great Peninsular War, by one who fought through it himself, and
+in no history has a more chivalrous and manly account been given of
+one's enemy. Indeed, Napier seems to me to push it too far, for his
+admiration appears to extend not only to the gallant soldiers who
+opposed him, but to the character and to the ultimate aims of their
+leader. He was, in fact, a political follower of Charles James Fox,
+and his heart seems to have been with the enemy even at the moment
+when he led his men most desperately against them. In the verdict
+of history the action of those men who, in their honest zeal for
+freedom, inflamed somewhat by political strife, turned against their
+own country, when it was in truth the Champion of Freedom, and
+approved of a military despot of the most uncompromising kind, seems
+wildly foolish.
+
+But if Napier's politics may seem strange, his soldiering was
+splendid, and his prose among the very best that I know. There
+are passages in that work--the one which describes the breach of
+Badajos, that of the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera, and that
+of the French advance at Fuentes d'Onoro--which once read haunt the
+mind for ever. The book is a worthy monument of a great national
+epic. Alas! for the pregnant sentence with which it closes, "So
+ended the great war, and with it all memory of the services of the
+veterans." Was there ever a British war of which the same might not
+have been written?
+
+The quotation which I have given from Mercer's book turns my
+thoughts in the direction of the British military reminiscences of
+that period, less numerous, less varied, and less central than the
+French, but full of character and interest all the same. I have
+found that if I am turned loose in a large library, after hesitating
+over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier
+memoirs which I take down. Man is never so interesting as when he is
+thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is
+at stake upon the event. But of all types of soldier the best is
+the man who is keen upon his work, and yet has general culture
+which enables him to see that work in its due perspective, and to
+sympathize with the gentler aspirations of mankind. Such a man is
+Mercer, an ice-cool fighter, with a sense of discipline and decorum
+which prevented him from moving when a bombshell was fizzing between
+his feet, and yet a man of thoughtful and philosophic temperament,
+with a weakness for solitary musings, for children, and for flowers.
+He has written for all time the classic account of a great battle,
+seen from the point of view of a battery commander. Many others of
+Wellington's soldiers wrote their personal reminiscences. You can
+get them, as I have them there, in the pleasant abridgement of
+"Wellington's Men" (admirably edited by Dr. Fitchett)--Anton the
+Highlander, Harris the rifleman, and Kincaid of the same corps. It
+is a most singular fate which has made an Australian nonconformist
+clergyman the most sympathetic and eloquent reconstructor of those
+old heroes, but it is a noble example of that unity of the British
+race, which in fifty scattered lands still mourns or rejoices over
+the same historic record.
+
+And just one word, before I close down this over-long and too
+discursive chatter, on the subject of yonder twin red volumes which
+flank the shelf. They are Maxwell's "History of Wellington," and I
+do not think you will find a better or more readable one. The reader
+must ever feel towards the great soldier what his own immediate
+followers felt, respect rather than affection. One's failure to
+attain a more affectionate emotion is alleviated by the knowledge
+that it was the last thing which he invited or desired. "Don't be a
+damned fool, sir!" was his exhortation to the good citizen who had
+paid him a compliment. It was a curious, callous nature, brusque
+and limited. The hardest huntsman learns to love his hounds, but he
+showed no affection and a good deal of contempt for the men who had
+been his instruments. "They are the scum of the earth," said he.
+"All English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink. That
+is the plain fact--they have all enlisted for drink." His general
+orders were full of undeserved reproaches at a time when the most
+lavish praise could hardly have met the real deserts of his army.
+When the wars were done he saw little, save in his official
+capacity, of his old comrades-in-arms. And yet, from major-general
+to drummer-boy, he was the man whom they would all have elected to
+serve under, had the work to be done once more. As one of them said,
+"The sight of his long nose was worth ten thousand men on a field of
+battle." They were themselves a leathery breed, and cared little for
+the gentler amenities so long as the French were well drubbed.
+
+His mind, which was comprehensive and alert in warfare, was
+singularly limited in civil affairs. As a statesman he was so
+constant an example of devotion to duty, self-sacrifice, and high
+disinterested character, that the country was the better for his
+presence. But he fiercely opposed Catholic Emancipation, the Reform
+Bill, and everything upon which our modern life is founded. He could
+never be brought to see that a pyramid should stand on its base and
+not on its apex, and that the larger the pyramid, the broader should
+be the base. Even in military affairs he was averse from every
+change, and I know of no improvements which came from his initiative
+during all those years when his authority was supreme. The floggings
+which broke a man's spirit and self-respect, the leathern stock
+which hampered his movements, all the old traditional regime
+found a champion in him. On the other hand, he strongly opposed the
+introduction of the percussion cap as opposed to the flint and steel
+in the musket. Neither in war nor in politics did he rightly judge
+the future.
+
+And yet in reading his letters and dispatches, one is surprised
+sometimes at the incisive thought and its vigorous expression. There
+is a passage in which he describes the way in which his soldiers
+would occasionally desert into some town which he was besieging.
+"They knew," he writes, "that they must be taken, for when we lay
+our bloody hands upon a place we are sure to take it, sooner or
+later; but they liked being dry and under cover, and then that
+extraordinary caprice which always pervades the English character!
+Our deserters are very badly treated by the enemy; those who
+deserted in France were treated as the lowest of mortals, slaves and
+scavengers. Nothing but English caprice can account for it; just
+what makes our noblemen associate with stage-coach drivers, and
+become stage-coach drivers themselves." After reading that passage,
+how often does the phrase "the extraordinary caprice which always
+pervades the English character" come back as one observes some fresh
+manifestation of it!
+
+But let not my last note upon the great duke be a carping one.
+Rather let my final sentence be one which will remind you of his
+frugal and abstemious life, his carpetless floor and little camp
+bed, his precise courtesy which left no humblest letter unanswered,
+his courage which never flinched, his tenacity which never faltered,
+his sense of duty which made his life one long unselfish effort
+on behalf of what seemed to him to be the highest interest of the
+State. Go down and stand by the huge granite sarcophagus in the dim
+light of the crypt of St. Paul's, and in the hush of that austere
+spot, cast back your mind to the days when little England alone
+stood firm against the greatest soldier and the greatest army that
+the world has ever known. Then you feel what this dead man stood
+for, and you pray that we may still find such another amongst us
+when the clouds gather once again.
+
+You see that the literature of Waterloo is well represented in my
+small military library. Of all books dealing with the personal
+view of the matter, I think that "Siborne's Letters," which is a
+collection of the narratives of surviving officers made by Siborne
+in the year 1827, is the most interesting. Gronow's account is
+also very vivid and interesting. Of the strategical narratives,
+Houssaye's book is my favourite. Taken from the French point of
+view, it gets the actions of the allies in truer perspective than
+any English or German account can do; but there is a fascination
+about that great combat which makes every narrative that bears upon
+it of enthralling interest.
+
+Wellington used to say that too much was made of it, and that one
+would imagine that the British Army had never fought a battle
+before. It was a characteristic speech, but it must be admitted that
+the British Army never had, as a matter of fact, for many centuries
+fought a battle which was finally decisive of a great European war.
+There lies the perennial interest of the incident, that it was the
+last act of that long-drawn drama, and that to the very fall of the
+curtain no man could tell how the play would end--"the nearest run
+thing that ever you saw"--that was the victor's description. It is
+a singular thing that during those twenty-five years of incessant
+fighting the material and methods of warfare made so little
+progress. So far as I know, there was no great change in either
+between 1789 and 1805. The breech-loader, heavy artillery, the
+ironclad, all great advances in the art of war, have been invented
+in time of peace. There are some improvements so obvious, and at
+the same time so valuable, that it is extraordinary that they were
+not adopted. Signalling, for example, whether by heliograph or by
+flag-waving, would have made an immense difference in the Napoleonic
+campaigns. The principle of the semaphore was well known, and
+Belgium, with its numerous windmills, would seem to be furnished
+with natural semaphores. Yet in the four days during which the
+campaign of Waterloo was fought, the whole scheme of military
+operations on both sides was again and again imperilled, and finally
+in the case of the French brought to utter ruin by lack of that
+intelligence which could so easily have been conveyed. June 18th was
+at intervals a sunshiny day--a four-inch glass mirror would have
+put Napoleon in communication with Gruchy, and the whole history
+of Europe might have been altered. Wellington himself suffered
+dreadfully from defective information which might have been easily
+supplied. The unexpected presence of the French army was first
+discovered at four in the morning of June 15. It was of enormous
+importance to get the news rapidly to Wellington at Brussels that he
+might instantly concentrate his scattered forces on the best line
+of resistance--yet, through the folly of sending only a single
+messenger, this vital information did not reach him until three in
+the afternoon, the distance being thirty miles. Again, when Blucher
+was defeated at Ligny on the 16th, it was of enormous importance
+that Wellington should know at once the line of his retreat so as
+to prevent the French from driving a wedge between them. The single
+Prussian officer who was despatched with this information was
+wounded, and never reached his destination, and it was only next
+day that Wellington learned the Prussian plans. On what tiny things
+does History depend!
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+The contemplation of my fine little regiment of French military
+memoirs had brought me to the question of Napoleon himself, and you
+see that I have a very fair line dealing with him also. There is
+Scott's life, which is not entirely a success. His ink was too
+precious to be shed in such a venture. But here are the three
+volumes of the physician Bourrienne--that Bourrienne who knew him so
+well. Does any one ever know a man so well as his doctor? They are
+quite excellent and admirably translated. Meneval also--the patient
+Meneval--who wrote for untold hours to dictation at ordinary talking
+speed, and yet was expected to be legible and to make no mistakes.
+At least his master could not fairly criticize his legibility, for
+is it not on record that when Napoleon's holograph account of an
+engagement was laid before the President of the Senate, the worthy
+man thought that it was a drawn plan of the battle? Meneval survived
+his master and has left an excellent and intimate account of him.
+There is Constant's account, also written from that point of view in
+which it is proverbial that no man is a hero. But of all the vivid
+terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who
+never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him. I
+mean Taine's account of him, in the first volume of "Les Origines de
+la France Contemporaine." You can never forget it when once you have
+read it. He produces his effect in a wonderful, and to me a novel,
+way. He does not, for example, say in mere crude words that Napoleon
+had a more than mediaeval Italian cunning. He presents a succession
+of documents--gives a series of contemporary instances to prove
+it. Then, having got that fixed in your head by blow after blow,
+he passes on to another phase of his character, his coldhearted
+amorousness, his power of work, his spoiled child wilfulness, or
+some other quality, and piles up his illustrations of that. Instead,
+for example, of saying that the Emperor had a marvellous memory for
+detail, we have the account of the head of Artillery laying the list
+of all the guns in France before his master, who looked over it and
+remarked, "Yes, but you have omitted two in a fort near Dieppe." So
+the man is gradually etched in with indelible ink. It is a wonderful
+figure of which you are conscious in the end, the figure of an
+archangel, but surely of an archangel of darkness.
+
+We will, after Taine's method, take one fact and let it speak for
+itself. Napoleon left a legacy in a codicil to his will to a man
+who tried to assassinate Wellington. There is the mediaeval Italian
+again! He was no more a Corsican than the Englishman born in India
+is a Hindoo. Read the lives of the Borgias, the Sforzas, the
+Medicis, and of all the lustful, cruel, broad-minded, art-loving,
+talented despots of the little Italian States, including Genoa,
+from which the Buonapartes migrated. There at once you get the
+real descent of the man, with all the stigmata clear upon him--the
+outward calm, the inward passion, the layer of snow above the
+volcano, everything which characterized the old despots of his
+native land, the pupils of Machiavelli, but all raised to the
+dimensions of genius. You can whitewash him as you may, but you
+will never get a layer thick enough to cover the stain of that
+cold-blooded deliberate endorsement of his noble adversary's
+assassination.
+
+Another book which gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the
+man is this one--the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat. She was in daily
+contact with him at the Court, and she studied him with those quick
+critical eyes of a clever woman, the most unerring things in life
+when they are not blinded by love. If you have read those pages, you
+feel that you know him as if you had yourself seen and talked with
+him. His singular mixture of the small and the great, his huge sweep
+of imagination, his very limited knowledge, his intense egotism, his
+impatience of obstacles, his boorishness, his gross impertinence to
+women, his diabolical playing upon the weak side of every one with
+whom he came in contact--they make up among them one of the most
+striking of historical portraits.
+
+Most of my books deal with the days of his greatness, but here, you
+see, is a three-volume account of those weary years at St. Helena.
+Who can help pitying the mewed eagle? And yet if you play the great
+game you must pay a stake. This was the same man who had a royal
+duke shot in a ditch because he was a danger to his throne. Was
+not he himself a danger to every throne in Europe? Why so harsh a
+retreat as St. Helena, you say? Remember that he had been put in a
+milder one before, that he had broken away from it, and that the
+lives of fifty thousand men had paid for the mistaken leniency.
+All this is forgotten now, and the pathetic picture of the modern
+Prometheus chained to his rock and devoured by the vultures of his
+own bitter thoughts, is the one impression which the world has
+retained. It is always so much easier to follow the emotions than
+the reason, especially where a cheap magnanimity and second-hand
+generosity are involved. But reason must still insist that Europe's
+treatment of Napoleon was not vindictive, and that Hudson Lowe was
+a man who tried to live up to the trust which had been committed to
+him by his country.
+
+It was certainly not a post from which any one would hope for
+credit. If he were slack and easy-going all would be well. But there
+would be the chance of a second flight with its consequences. If he
+were strict and assiduous he would be assuredly represented as a
+petty tyrant. "I am glad when you are on outpost," said Lowe's
+general in some campaign, "for then I am sure of a sound rest." He
+was on outpost at St. Helena, and because he was true to his duties
+Europe (France included) had a sound rest. But he purchased it at
+the price of his own reputation. The greatest schemer in the world,
+having nothing else on which to vent his energies, turned them all
+to the task of vilifying his guardian. It was natural enough that he
+who had never known control should not brook it now. It is natural
+also that sentimentalists who have not thought of the details should
+take the Emperor's point of view. What is deplorable, however, is
+that our own people should be misled by one-sided accounts, and that
+they should throw to the wolves a man who was serving his country in
+a post of anxiety and danger, with such responsibility upon him as
+few could ever have endured. Let them remember Montholon's remark:
+"An angel from heaven would not have satisfied us." Let them recall
+also that Lowe with ample material never once troubled to state his
+own case. "Je fais mon devoir et suis indifferent pour le reste,"
+said he, in his interview with the Emperor. They were no idle words.
+
+Apart from this particular epoch, French literature, which is so
+rich in all its branches, is richest of all in its memoirs. Whenever
+there was anything of interest going forward there was always some
+kindly gossip who knew all about it, and was ready to set it down
+for the benefit of posterity. Our own history has not nearly enough
+of these charming sidelights. Look at our sailors in the Napoleonic
+wars, for example. They played an epoch-making part. For nearly
+twenty years Freedom was a Refugee upon the seas. Had our navy been
+swept away, then all Europe would have been one organized despotism.
+At times everybody was against us, fighting against their own direct
+interests under the pressure of that terrible hand. We fought on the
+waters with the French, with the Spaniards, with the Danes, with the
+Russians, with the Turks, even with our American kinsmen. Middies
+grew into post-captains, and admirals into dotards during that
+prolonged struggle. And what have we in literature to show for it
+all? Marryat's novels, many of which are founded upon personal
+experience, Nelson's and Collingwood's letters, Lord Cochrane's
+biography--that is about all. I wish we had more of Collingwood,
+for he wielded a fine pen. Do you remember the sonorous opening of
+his Trafalgar message to his captains?--
+
+  "The ever to be lamented death of Lord Viscount Nelson, Duke
+  of Bronte, the Commander-in-Chief, who fell in the action of
+  the 21st, in the arms of Victory, covered with glory, whose
+  memory will be ever dear to the British Navy and the British
+  Nation; whose zeal for the honour of his king and for the
+  interests of his country will be ever held up as a shining
+  example for a British seaman--leaves to me a duty to return
+  thanks, etc., etc."
+
+It was a worthy sentence to carry such a message, written too in a
+raging tempest, with sinking vessels all around him. But in the main
+it is a poor crop from such a soil. No doubt our sailors were too
+busy to do much writing, but none the less one wonders that among
+so many thousands there were not some to understand what a treasure
+their experiences would be to their descendants. I can call to mind
+the old three-deckers which used to rot in Portsmouth Harbour, and
+I have often thought, could they tell their tales, what a missing
+chapter in our literature they could supply.
+
+It is not only in Napoleonic memoirs that the French are so
+fortunate. The almost equally interesting age of Louis XIV. produced
+an even more wonderful series. If you go deeply into the subject
+you are amazed by their number, and you feel as if every one at the
+Court of the Roi Soleil had done what he (or she) could to give
+away their neighbours. Just to take the more obvious, there are St.
+Simon's Memoirs--those in themselves give us a more comprehensive
+and intimate view of the age than anything I know of which treats
+of the times of Queen Victoria. Then there is St. Evremond, who is
+nearly as complete. Do you want the view of a woman of quality?
+There are the letters of Madame de Sevigne (eight volumes of
+them), perhaps the most wonderful series of letters that any woman
+has ever penned. Do you want the confessions of a rake of the
+period? Here are the too salacious memoirs of the mischievous Duc
+de Roquelaure, not reading for the nursery certainly, not even for
+the boudoir, but a strange and very intimate picture of the times.
+All these books fit into each other, for the characters of the one
+reappear in the others. You come to know them quite familiarly
+before you have finished, their loves and their hates, their duels,
+their intrigues, and their ultimate fortunes. If you do not care
+to go so deeply into it you have only to put Julia Pardoe's
+four-volumed "Court of Louis XIV." upon your shelf, and you will
+find a very admirable condensation--or a distillation rather, for
+most of the salt is left behind. There is another book too--that
+big one on the bottom shelf--which holds it all between its brown
+and gold covers. An extravagance that--for it cost me some
+sovereigns--but it is something to have the portraits of all that
+wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the devout Maintenon, of the frail
+Montespan, of Bossuet, Fenelon, Moliere, Racine, Pascal, Conde,
+Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age. If you want to
+make yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of "The Court and
+Times of Louis XIV.," you will never think that your money has
+been wasted.
+
+Well, I have bored you unduly, my patient friend, with my love of
+memoirs, Napoleonic and otherwise, which give a touch of human
+interest to the arid records of history. Not that history should
+be arid. It ought to be the most interesting subject upon earth,
+the story of ourselves, of our forefathers, of the human race, the
+events which made us what we are, and wherein, if Weismann's views
+hold the field, some microscopic fraction of this very body which
+for the instant we chance to inhabit may have borne a part. But
+unfortunately the power of accumulating knowledge and that of
+imparting it are two very different things, and the uninspired
+historian becomes merely the dignified compiler of an enlarged
+almanac. Worst of all, when a man does come along with fancy and
+imagination, who can breathe the breath of life into the dry bones,
+it is the fashion for the dryasdusts to belabour him, as one who
+has wandered away from the orthodox path and must necessarily be
+inaccurate. So Froude was attacked. So also Macaulay in his day. But
+both will be read when the pedants are forgotten. If I were asked
+my very ideal of how history should be written, I think I should
+point to those two rows on yonder shelf, the one M'Carthy's "History
+of Our Own Times," the other Lecky's "History of England in the
+Eighteenth Century." Curious that each should have been written by
+an Irishman, and that though of opposite politics and living in an
+age when Irish affairs have caused such bitterness, both should be
+conspicuous not merely for all literary graces, but for that broad
+toleration which sees every side of a question, and handles every
+problem from the point of view of the philosophic observer and never
+of the sectarian partisan.
+
+By the way, talking of history, have you read Parkman's works? He
+was, I think, among the very greatest of the historians, and yet
+one seldom hears his name. A New England man by birth, and writing
+principally of the early history of the American Settlements and of
+French Canada, it is perhaps excusable that he should have no great
+vogue in England, but even among Americans I have found many who
+have not read him. There are four of his volumes in green and gold
+down yonder, "The Jesuits in Canada," and "Frontenac," but there
+are others, all of them well worth reading, "Pioneers of France,"
+"Montcalm and Wolfe," "Discovery of the Great West," etc. Some day
+I hope to have a complete set.
+
+Taking only that one book, "The Jesuits in Canada," it is worth a
+reputation in itself. And how noble a tribute is this which a man
+of Puritan blood pays to that wonderful Order! He shows how in the
+heyday of their enthusiasm these brave soldiers of the Cross invaded
+Canada as they did China and every other place where danger was to
+be faced, and a horrible death to be found. I don't care what faith
+a man may profess, or whether he be a Christian at all, but he
+cannot read these true records without feeling that the very highest
+that man has ever evolved in sanctity and devotion was to be found
+among these marvellous men. They were indeed the pioneers of
+civilization, for apart from doctrines they brought among the
+savages the highest European culture, and in their own deportment an
+object-lesson of how chastely, austerely, and nobly men could live.
+France has sent myriads of brave men on to her battlefields, but in
+all her long record of glory I do not think that she can point to
+any courage so steadfast and so absolutely heroic as that of the
+men of the Iroquois Mission.
+
+How nobly they lived makes the body of the book, how serenely they
+died forms the end to it. It is a tale which cannot even now be read
+without a shudder--a nightmare of horrors. Fanaticism may brace a
+man to hurl himself into oblivion, as the Mahdi's hordes did before
+Khartoum, but one feels that it is at least a higher development of
+such emotion, where men slowly and in cold blood endure so thankless
+a life, and welcome so dreadful an end. Every faith can equally
+boast its martyrs--a painful thought, since it shows how many
+thousands must have given their blood for error--but in testifying
+to their faith these brave men have testified to something more
+important still, to the subjugation of the body and to the absolute
+supremacy of the dominating spirit.
+
+The story of Father Jogue is but one of many, and yet it is worth
+recounting, as showing the spirit of the men. He also was on the
+Iroquois Mission, and was so tortured and mutilated by his sweet
+parishioners that the very dogs used to howl at his distorted
+figure. He made his way back to France, not for any reason of
+personal rest or recuperation, but because he needed a special
+dispensation to say Mass. The Catholic Church has a regulation
+that a priest shall not be deformed, so that the savages with
+their knives had wrought better than they knew. He received his
+dispensation and was sent for by Louis XIV., who asked him what he
+could do for him. No doubt the assembled courtiers expected to hear
+him ask for the next vacant Bishopric. What he did actually ask for,
+as the highest favour, was to be sent back to the Iroquois Mission,
+where the savages signalized his arrival by burning him alive.
+
+Parkman is worth reading, if it were only for his account of the
+Indians. Perhaps the very strangest thing about them, and the most
+unaccountable, is their small numbers. The Iroquois were one of the
+most formidable of tribes. They were of the Five Nations, whose
+scalping-parties wandered over an expanse of thousands of square
+miles. Yet there is good reason to doubt whether the whole five
+nations could have put as many thousand warriors in the field. It
+was the same with all the other tribes of Northern Americans, both
+in the east, the north, and the west. Their numbers were always
+insignificant. And yet they had that huge country to themselves,
+the best of climates, and plenty of food. Why was it that they did
+not people it thickly? It may be taken as a striking example of the
+purpose and design which run through the affairs of men, that at the
+very moment when the old world was ready to overflow the new world
+was empty to receive it. Had North America been peopled as China
+is peopled, the Europeans might have founded some settlements, but
+could never have taken possession of the continent. Buffon has made
+the striking remark that the creative power appeared to have never
+had great vigour in America. He alluded to the abundance of the
+flora and fauna as compared with that of other great divisions of
+the earth's surface. Whether the numbers of the Indians are an
+illustration of the same fact, or whether there is some special
+cause, is beyond my very modest scientific attainments. When one
+reflects upon the countless herds of bison which used to cover the
+Western plains, or marks in the present day the race statistics
+of the French Canadians at one end of the continent, and of the
+Southern negro at the other, it seems absurd to suppose that there
+is any geographical reason against Nature being as prolific here
+as elsewhere. However, these be deeper waters, and with your leave
+we will get back into my usual six-inch wading-depth once more.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+I don't know how those two little books got in there. They are
+Henley's "Song of the Sword" and "Book of Verses." They ought to be
+over yonder in the rather limited Poetry Section. Perhaps it is that
+I like his work so, whether it be prose or verse, and so have put
+them ready to my hand. He was a remarkable man, a man who was very
+much greater than his work, great as some of his work was. I have
+seldom known a personality more magnetic and stimulating. You left
+his presence, as a battery leaves a generating station, charged up
+and full. He made you feel what a lot of work there was to be done,
+and how glorious it was to be able to do it, and how needful to get
+started upon it that very hour. With the frame and the vitality of
+a giant he was cruelly bereft of all outlet for his strength, and
+so distilled it off in hot words, in warm sympathy, in strong
+prejudices, in all manner of human and stimulating emotions. Much
+of the time and energy which might have built an imperishable name
+for himself was spent in encouraging others; but it was not waste,
+for he left his broad thumb-mark upon all that passed beneath it.
+A dozen second-hand Henleys are fortifying our literature to-day.
+
+Alas that we have so little of his very best! for that very best
+was the finest of our time. Few poets ever wrote sixteen consecutive
+lines more noble and more strong than those which begin with the
+well-known quatrain--
+
+   "Out of the night that covers me,
+      Black as the pit from Pole to Pole,
+    I thank whatever Gods there be
+      For my unconquerable soul."
+
+It is grand literature, and it is grand pluck too; for it came from
+a man who, through no fault of his own, had been pruned, and pruned
+again, like an ill-grown shrub, by the surgeon's knife. When he
+said--
+
+   "In the fell clutch of Circumstance
+      I have not winced nor cried aloud,
+    Beneath the bludgeonings of Chance
+      My head is bloody but unbowed."
+
+It was not what Lady Byron called "the mimic woe" of the poet, but
+it was rather the grand defiance of the Indian warrior at the stake,
+whose proud soul can hold in hand his quivering body.
+
+There were two quite distinct veins of poetry in Henley, each the
+very extreme from the other. The one was heroic, gigantic, running
+to large sweeping images and thundering words. Such are the "Song of
+the Sword" and much more that he has written, like the wild singing
+of some Northern scald. The other, and to my mind both the more
+characteristic and the finer side of his work, is delicate, precise,
+finely etched, with extraordinarily vivid little pictures drawn
+in carefully phrased and balanced English. Such are the "Hospital
+Verses," while the "London Voluntaries" stand midway between the two
+styles. What! you have not read the "Hospital Verses!" Then get the
+"Book of Verses" and read them without delay. You will surely find
+something there which, for good or ill, is unique. You can name--or
+at least I can name--nothing to compare it with. Goldsmith and
+Crabbe have written of indoor themes; but their monotonous, if
+majestic metre, wearies the modern reader. But this is so varied,
+so flexible, so dramatic. It stands by itself. Confound the weekly
+journals and all the other lightning conductors which caused such a
+man to pass away, and to leave a total output of about five booklets
+behind him!
+
+However, all this is an absolute digression, for the books had no
+business in this shelf at all. This corner is meant for chronicles
+of various sorts. Here are three in a line, which carry you over a
+splendid stretch of French (which usually means European) history,
+each, as luck would have it, beginning just about the time when the
+other leaves off. The first is Froissart, the second de Monstrelet,
+and the third de Comines. When you have read the three you have the
+best contemporary account first hand of considerably more than a
+century--a fair slice out of the total written record of the human
+race.
+
+Froissart is always splendid. If you desire to avoid the mediaeval
+French, which only a specialist can read with pleasure, you can get
+Lord Berners' almost equally mediaeval, but very charming English,
+or you can turn to a modern translation, such as this one of Johnes.
+A single page of Lord Berners is delightful; but it is a strain,
+I think, to read bulky volumes in an archaic style. Personally, I
+prefer the modern, and even with that you have shown some patience
+before you have reached the end of that big second tome.
+
+I wonder whether, at the time, the old Hainault Canon had any idea
+of what he was doing--whether it ever flashed across his mind that
+the day might come when his book would be the one great authority,
+not only about the times in which he lived, but about the whole
+institution of chivalry? I fear that it is far more likely that his
+whole object was to gain some mundane advantage from the various
+barons and knights whose names and deeds be recounts. He has left it
+on record, for example, that when he visited the Court of England he
+took with him a handsomely-bound copy of his work; and, doubtless,
+if one could follow the good Canon one would find his journeys
+littered with similar copies which were probably expensive gifts to
+the recipient, for what return would a knightly soul make for a book
+which enshrined his own valour?
+
+But without looking too curiously into his motives, it must be
+admitted that the work could not have been done more thoroughly.
+There is something of Herodotus in the Canon's cheery, chatty,
+garrulous, take-it-or-leave-it manner. But he has the advantage
+of the old Greek in accuracy. Considering that he belonged to the
+same age which gravely accepted the travellers' tales of Sir John
+Maundeville, it is, I think, remarkable how careful and accurate
+the chronicler is. Take, for example, his description of Scotland
+and the Scotch. Some would give the credit to Jean-le-Bel, but that
+is another matter. Scotch descriptions are a subject over which a
+fourteenth-century Hainaulter might fairly be allowed a little scope
+for his imagination. Yet we can see that the account must on the
+whole have been very correct. The Galloway nags, the girdle-cakes,
+the bagpipes--every little detail rings true. Jean-le-Bel was
+actually present in a Border campaign, and from him Froissart got
+his material; but he has never attempted to embroider it, and its
+accuracy, where we can to some extent test it, must predispose us
+to accept his accounts where they are beyond our confirmation.
+
+But the most interesting portion of old Froissart's work is that
+which deals with the knights and the knight-errants of his time,
+their deeds, their habits, their methods of talking. It is true that
+he lived himself just a little after the true heyday of chivalry;
+but he was quite early enough to have met many of the men who had
+been looked upon as the flower of knighthood of the time. His book
+was read too, and commented on by these very men (as many of them as
+could read), and so we may take it that it was no fancy portrait,
+but a correct picture of these soldiers which is to be found in it.
+The accounts are always consistent. If you collate the remarks and
+speeches of the knights (as I have had occasion to do) you will find
+a remarkable uniformity running through them. We may believe then
+that this really does represent the kind of men who fought at Crecy
+and at Poictiers, in the age when both the French and the Scottish
+kings were prisoners in London, and England reached a pitch of
+military glory which has perhaps never been equalled in her history.
+
+In one respect these knights differ from anything which we have had
+presented to us in our historical romances. To turn to the supreme
+romancer, you will find that Scott's mediaeval knights were
+usually muscular athletes in the prime of life: Bois-Guilbert,
+Front-de-Boeuf, Richard, Ivanhoe, Count Robert--they all were
+such. But occasionally the most famous of Froissart's knights were
+old, crippled and blinded. Chandos, the best lance of his day, must
+have been over seventy when he lost his life through being charged
+upon the side on which he had already lost an eye. He was well on to
+that age when he rode out from the English army and slew the Spanish
+champion, big Marten Ferrara, upon the morning of Navaretta. Youth
+and strength were very useful, no doubt, especially where heavy
+armour had to be carried, but once on the horse's back the gallant
+steed supplied the muscles. In an English hunting-field many a
+doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated in his familiar
+saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game. So it was
+among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could still
+carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms, and,
+above all, their cool and undaunted courage.
+
+Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the
+knight was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian. There was little
+quarter in his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed. But with
+all his savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable
+boy playing a dreadful game. He was true also to his own curious
+code, and, so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial
+and sympathetic, even in warfare. There was no personal feeling or
+bitterness as there might be now in a war between Frenchmen and
+Germans. On the contrary, the opponents were very softspoken and
+polite to each other. "Is there any small vow of which I may relieve
+you?" "Would you desire to attempt some small deed of arms upon me?"
+And in the midst of a fight they would stop for a breather, and
+converse amicably the while, with many compliments upon each other's
+prowess. When Seaton the Scotsman had exchanged as many blows as
+he wished with a company of French knights, he said, "Thank you,
+gentlemen, thank you!" and galloped away. An English knight made a
+vow, "for his own advancement and the exaltation of his lady," that
+he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and touch with his
+lance the inner barrier. The whole story is most characteristic of
+the times. As he galloped up, the French knights around the barrier,
+seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon him, and called
+out to him that he had carried himself well. As he returned,
+however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe upon the
+side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him. Here ends
+the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher had
+a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not
+stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy,
+meet so plebeian an end.
+
+De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional
+than Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones
+out of that quarry for the use of his own little building. Of course
+Quentin Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines. The
+whole history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold,
+the strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the
+barber and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage
+cruelty and of slavish superstition--it is all set forth here. One
+would imagine that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of
+strange qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and
+yet like causes will always produce like results. Read Walewski's
+"Life of Ivan the Terrible," and you will find that more than a
+century later Russia produced a monarch even more diabolical,
+but working exactly on the same lines as Louis, even down to
+small details. The same cruelty, the same superstition, the same
+astrologers, the same low-born associates, the same residence
+outside the influence of the great cities--a parallel could hardly
+be more complete. If you have not supped too full of horrors when
+you have finished Ivan, then pass on to the same author's account of
+Peter the Great. What a land! What a succession of monarchs! Blood
+and snow and iron! Both Ivan and Peter killed their own sons. And
+there is a hideous mockery of religion running through it all which
+gives it a grotesque horror of its own. We have had our Henry the
+Eighth, but our very worst would have been a wise and benevolent
+rule in Russia.
+
+Talking of romance and of chivalry, that tattered book down yonder
+has as much between its disreputable covers as most that I know. It
+is Washington Irving's "Conquest of Granada." I do not know where
+he got his material for this book--from Spanish Chronicles, I
+presume--but the wars between the Moors and the Christian knights
+must have been among the most chivalrous of exploits. I could not
+name a book which gets the beauty and the glamour of it better than
+this one, the lance-heads gleaming in the dark defiles, the red bale
+fires glowing on the crags, the stern devotion of the mail-clad
+Christians, the debonnaire and courtly courage of the dashing
+Moslem. Had Washington Irving written nothing else, that book alone
+should have forced the door of every library. I love all his books,
+for no man wrote fresher English with a purer style; but of them all
+it is still "The Conquest of Granada" to which I turn most often.
+
+To hark back for a moment to history as seen in romances, here are
+two exotics side by side, which have a flavour that is new. They are
+a brace of foreign novelists, each of whom, so far as I know, has
+only two books. This green-and-gold volume contains both the works
+of the Pomeranian Meinhold in an excellent translation by Lady
+Wilde. The first is "Sidonia the Sorceress," the second, "The Amber
+Witch." I don't know where one may turn for a stranger view of
+the Middle Ages, the quaint details of simple life, with sudden
+intervals of grotesque savagery. The most weird and barbarous things
+are made human and comprehensible. There is one incident which
+haunts one after one has read it, where the executioner chaffers
+with the villagers as to what price they will give him for putting
+some young witch to the torture, running them up from a barrel of
+apples to a barrel and a half, on the grounds that he is now old and
+rheumatic, and that the stooping and straining is bad for his back.
+It should be done on a sloping hill, he explains, so that the "dear
+little children" may see it easily. Both "Sidonia" and "The Amber
+Witch" give such a picture of old Germany as I have never seen
+elsewhere.
+
+But Meinhold belongs to a bygone generation. This other author, in
+whom I find a new note, and one of great power, is Merejkowski, who
+is, if I mistake not, young and with his career still before him.
+"The Forerunner" and "The Death of the Gods" are the only two
+books of his which I have been able to obtain, but the pictures of
+Renaissance Italy in the one, and of declining Rome in the other,
+are in my opinion among the masterpieces of fiction. I confess that
+as I read them I was pleased to find how open my mind was to new
+impressions, for one of the greatest mental dangers which comes upon
+a man as he grows older is that he should become so attached to old
+favourites that he has no room for the new-comer, and persuades
+himself that the days of great things are at an end because his own
+poor brain is getting ossified. You have but to open any critical
+paper to see how common is the disease, but a knowledge of literary
+history assures us that it has always been the same, and that if the
+young writer is discouraged by adverse comparisons it has been the
+common lot from the beginning. He has but one resource, which is
+to pay no heed to criticism, but to try to satisfy his own highest
+standard and leave the rest to time and the public. Here is a little
+bit of doggerel, pinned, as you see, beside my bookcase, which may
+in a ruffled hour bring peace and guidance to some younger brother--
+
+   "Critics kind--never mind!
+    Critics flatter--no matter!
+    Critics blame--all the same!
+    Critics curse--none the worse!
+    Do your best-- ---- the rest!"
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+I have been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants,
+but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been
+explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon
+has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken
+virtue and unutterable dulness, men will cast their thoughts back to
+our age, and will idealize our romance and--our courage, even as we
+do that of our distant forbears. "It is wonderful what these people
+did with their rude implements and their limited appliances!" That
+is what they will say when they read of our explorations, our
+voyages, and our wars.
+
+Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight's "Cruise
+of the Falcon." Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul
+into a body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there
+is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen--solicitors,
+if I remember right--go down to Southampton Quay. They pick up a
+long-shore youth, and they embark in a tiny boat in which they put
+to sea. Where do they turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they
+penetrate to Paraquay, return to the West Indies, sell their little
+boat there, and so home. What could the Elizabethan mariners have
+done more? There are no Spanish galleons now to vary the monotony of
+such a voyage, but had there been I am very certain our adventurers
+would have had their share of the doubloons. But surely it was the
+nobler when done out of the pure lust of adventure and in answer to
+the call of the sea, with no golden bait to draw them on. The old
+spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with top hats, frock
+coats, and all prosaic settings. Perhaps even they also will seem
+romantic when centuries have blurred them.
+
+Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still
+linger upon earth is that large copy of the "Voyage of the Discovery
+in the Antarctic" by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion
+with no attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or
+perhaps all the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one
+reads it, and reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear
+view of just those qualities which make the best kind of Briton.
+Every nation produces brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But
+there is a certain type which mixes its bravery and its energy with
+a gentle modesty and a boyish good-humour, and it is just this
+type which is the highest. Here the whole expedition seem to have
+been imbued with the spirit of their commander. No flinching, no
+grumbling, every discomfort taken as a jest, no thought of self,
+each working only for the success of the enterprise. When you have
+read of such privations so endured and so chronicled, it makes one
+ashamed to show emotion over the small annoyances of daily life.
+Read of Scott's blinded, scurvy-struck party staggering on to their
+goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat of a northern sun,
+or the dust of a country road.
+
+That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too
+much. We are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was
+otherwise--when it was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman
+should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected
+by the small troubles of life. "You look cold, sir," said an English
+sympathizer to a French emigre. The fallen noble drew himself up
+in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold."
+One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect
+should check the grumble. This self-suppression, and also
+the concealment of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige
+characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public
+opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop because
+his shin is hacked, or wring his hand because his knuckles are
+bruised should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity,
+but of contempt.
+
+The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans
+as well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is
+Greely's "Arctic Service," and it is a worthy shelf-companion
+to Scott's "Account of the Voyage of the Discovery." There are
+incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of
+those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff, and dying one
+a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs all our
+puny tragedies of romance. And the gallant starving leader giving
+lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of
+the dying men away from their sufferings--what a picture! It is bad
+to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live
+in the dark; but that men could do all these things for six months
+on end, and that some should live to tell the tale, is, indeed, a
+marvel. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation of the poor
+dying lieutenant: "Well, this _is_ wretched," he groaned, as he
+turned his face to the wall.
+
+The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there
+is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer
+ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals,
+not even the lava-baked sentry at Pompeii, which gives a more
+sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the
+British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And
+this expedition of Greely's gave rise to another example which seems
+to me hardly less remarkable. You may remember, if you have read the
+book, that even when there were only about eight unfortunates still
+left, hardly able to move for weakness and hunger, the seven took
+the odd man out upon the ice, and shot him dead for breach of
+discipline. The whole grim proceeding was carried out with as much
+method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight of
+the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as
+I can remember, of stealing and eating the thong which bound two
+portions of the sledge together, something about as appetizing as a
+bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to say, however, that it
+was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the thong of a sledge
+might mean life or death to the whole party.
+
+Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas
+is always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within
+the borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most
+lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain
+something of its glamour. Standing on the confines of known
+geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have taken
+from their gizzards pebbles which they have swallowed in some
+land whose shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that
+inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water,
+of the cloudless sky shading away into a light green and then into
+a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy companionable birds, of
+the huge, greasy-backed water animals, of the slug-like seals,
+startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice--all of
+it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more
+than some fantastic dream itself, go removed is it from the main
+stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in
+weight, and worth two thousand pounds--but what in the world has
+all this to do with my bookcase?
+
+Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me
+straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen's "Cruise of the
+Cachelot," a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of
+the sea, marred only by the brutality of those who go down to it
+in ships. This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and
+very different from that Greenland ice groping in which I served
+a seven-months' apprenticeship. Both, I fear, are things of the
+past--certainly the northern fishing is so, for why should men
+risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a pipe in the
+ground. It is the more fortunate then that it should have been
+handled by one of the most virile writers who has described a
+sailor's life. Bullen's English at its best rises to a great height.
+If I wished to show how high, I would take that next book down,
+"Sea Idylls."
+
+How is this, for example, if you have an ear for the music of prose?
+It is a simple paragraph out of the magnificent description of a
+long calm in the tropics.
+
+  "A change, unusual as unwholesome, came over the bright blue
+  of the sea. No longer did it reflect, as in a limpid mirror,
+  the splendour of the sun, the sweet silvery glow of the
+  moon, or the coruscating clusters of countless stars. Like
+  the ashen-grey hue that bedims the countenance of the dying,
+  a filmy greasy skin appeared to overspread the recent
+  loveliness of the ocean surface. The sea was sick, stagnant,
+  and foul, from its turbid waters arose a miasmatic vapour
+  like a breath of decay, which clung clammily to the palate
+  and dulled all the senses. Drawn by some strange force,
+  from the unfathomable depths below, eerie shapes sought the
+  surface, blinking glassily at the unfamiliar glare they had
+  exchanged for their native gloom--uncouth creatures bedight
+  with tasselled fringes like weed-growths waving around them,
+  fathom-long, medusae with coloured spots like eyes clustering
+  all over their transparent substance, wriggling worm-like
+  forms of such elusive matter that the smallest exposure to
+  the sun melted them, and they were not. Lower down, vast pale
+  shadows creep sluggishly along, happily undistinguishable
+  as yet, but adding a half-familiar flavour to the strange,
+  faint smell that hung about us."
+
+Take the whole of that essay which describes a calm in the Tropics,
+or take the other one "Sunrise as seen from the Crow's-nest," and
+you must admit that there have been few finer pieces of descriptive
+English in our time. If I had to choose a sea library of only a
+dozen volumes I should certainly give Bullen two places. The others?
+Well, it is so much a matter of individual taste. "Tom Cringle's
+Log" should have one for certain. I hope boys respond now as they
+once did to the sharks and the pirates, the planters, and all the
+rollicking high spirits of that splendid book. Then there is Dana's
+"Two Years before the Mast." I should find room also for Stevenson's
+"Wrecker" and "Ebb Tide." Clark Russell deserves a whole shelf
+for himself, but anyhow you could not miss out "The Wreck of the
+Grosvenor." Marryat, of course, must be represented, and I should
+pick "Midshipman Easy" and "Peter Simple" as his samples. Then
+throw in one of Melville's Otaheite books--now far too completely
+forgotten--"Typee" or "Omoo," and as a quite modern flavour
+Kipling's "Captains Courageous" and Jack London's "Sea Wolf," with
+Conrad's "Nigger of the Narcissus." Then you will have enough to
+turn your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your
+cars, if written words can do it. Oh, how one longs for it sometimes
+when life grows too artificial, and the old Viking blood begins to
+stir! Surely it must linger in all of us, for no man who dwells in
+an island but had an ancestor in longship or in coracle. Still more
+must the salt drop tingle in the blood of an American when you
+reflect that in all that broad continent there is not one whose
+forefather did not cross 3000 miles of ocean. And yet there are in
+the Central States millions and millions of their descendants who
+have never seen the sea.
+
+I have said that "Omoo" and "Typee," the books in which the sailor
+Melville describes his life among the Otaheitans, have sunk too
+rapidly into obscurity. What a charming and interesting task there
+is for some critic of catholic tastes and sympathetic judgment
+to undertake rescue work among the lost books which would repay
+salvage! A small volume setting forth their names and their claims
+to attention would be interesting in itself, and more interesting
+in the material to which it would serve as an introduction. I am
+sure there are many good books, possibly there are some great ones,
+which have been swept away for a time in the rush. What chance, for
+example, has any book by an unknown author which is published at a
+moment of great national excitement, when some public crisis arrests
+the popular mind? Hundreds have been still-born in this fashion,
+and are there none which should have lived among them? Now, there
+is a book, a modern one, and written by a youth under thirty. It
+is Snaith's "Broke of Covenden," and it scarce attained a second
+edition. I do not say that it is a Classic--I should not like to
+be positive that it is not--but I am perfectly sure that the man
+who wrote it has the possibility of a Classic within him. Here
+is another novel--"Eight Days," by Forrest. You can't buy it. You
+are lucky even if you can find it in a library. Yet nothing ever
+written will bring the Indian Mutiny home to you as this book
+will do. Here's another which I will warrant you never heard of.
+It is Powell's "Animal Episodes." No, it is not a collection of
+dog-and-cat anecdotes, but it is a series of very singularly told
+stories which deal with the animal side of the human, and which you
+will feel have an entirely new flavour if you have a discriminating
+palate. The book came out ten years ago, and is utterly unknown.
+If I can point to three in one small shelf, how many lost lights
+must be flitting in the outer darkness!
+
+Let me hark back for a moment to the subject with which I began, the
+romance of travel and the frequent heroism of modern life. I have
+two books of Scientific Exploration here which exhibit both these
+qualities as strongly as any I know. I could not choose two better
+books to put into a young man's hands if you wished to train him
+first in a gentle and noble firmness of mind, and secondly in a
+great love for and interest in all that pertains to Nature. The one
+is Darwin's "Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle." Any discerning
+eye must have detected long before the "Origin of Species" appeared,
+simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a brain of the
+first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had
+arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too
+small and nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is
+occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute
+spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of
+a continent and the extinction of a myriad animals. And his sweep of
+knowledge was so great--botany, geology, zoology, each lending its
+corroborative aid to the other. How a youth of Darwin's age--he was
+only twenty-three when in the year 1831 he started round the world
+on the surveying ship Beagle--could have acquired such a mass of
+information fills one with the same wonder, and is perhaps of the
+same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the touch
+of the master. Another quality which one would be less disposed
+to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger, which is
+veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in order
+to detect it. When he was in the Argentina, the country outside the
+Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who gave
+no quarter to any whites. Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles
+between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused
+to accompany him. Personal danger and a hideous death were small
+things to him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.
+
+The second book to which I alluded is Wallace's "Malay Archipelago."
+There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same
+courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the
+same catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion
+for the observation of Nature. Wallace by a flash of intuition
+understood and described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the
+Origin of Species at the very time when the latter was publishing
+a book founded upon twenty years' labour to prove the same thesis.
+What must have been his feelings when he read that letter? And yet
+he had nothing to fear, for his book found no more enthusiastic
+admirer than the man who had in a sense anticipated it. Here also
+one sees that Science has its heroes no less than Religion. One of
+Wallace's missions in Papua was to examine the nature and species
+of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of the years of his
+wanderings through those islands he made a complete investigation
+of the whole fauna. A footnote somewhere explains that the Papuans
+who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed cannibals.
+Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours! Let a young
+fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his
+mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+Here we are at the final seance. For the last time, my patient
+comrade, I ask you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green
+settee, to look up at the oaken shelves, and to bear with me as best
+you may while I preach about their contents. The last time! And yet,
+as I look along the lines of the volumes, I have not mentioned one
+out of ten of those to which I owe a debt of gratitude, nor one in
+a hundred of the thoughts which course through my brain as I look
+at them. As well perhaps, for the man who has said all that he has
+to say has invariably said too much.
+
+Let me be didactic for a moment! I assume this solemn--oh, call it
+not pedantic!--attitude because my eye catches the small but select
+corner which constitutes my library of Science. I wanted to say that
+if I were advising a young man who was beginning life, I should
+counsel him to devote one evening a week to scientific reading. Had
+he the perseverance to adhere to his resolution, and if he began
+it at twenty, he would certainly find himself with an unusually
+well-furnished mind at thirty, which would stand him in right good
+stead in whatever line of life he might walk. When I advise him to
+read science, I do not mean that he should choke himself with the
+dust of the pedants, and lose himself in the subdivisions of the
+Lepidoptera, or the classifications of the dicotyledonous plants.
+These dreary details are the prickly bushes in that enchanted
+garden, and you are foolish indeed if you begin your walks by
+butting your head into one. Keep very clear of them until you have
+explored the open beds and wandered down every easy path. For this
+reason avoid the text-books, which repel, and cultivate that popular
+science which attracts. You cannot hope to be a specialist upon all
+these varied subjects. Better far to have a broad idea of general
+results, and to understand their relations to each other. A very
+little reading will give a man such a knowledge of geology, for
+example, as will make every quarry and railway cutting an object
+of interest. A very little zoology will enable you to satisfy
+your curiosity as to what is the proper name and style of this
+buff-ermine moth which at the present instant is buzzing round the
+lamp. A very little botany will enable you to recognize every flower
+you are likely to meet in your walks abroad, and to give you a tiny
+thrill of interest when you chance upon one which is beyond your
+ken. A very little archaeology will tell you all about yonder
+British tumulus, or help you to fill in the outline of the broken
+Roman camp upon the downs. A very little astronomy will cause you
+to look more intently at the heavens, to pick out your brothers the
+planets, who move in your own circles, from the stranger stars,
+and to appreciate the order, beauty, and majesty of that material
+universe which is most surely the outward sign of the spiritual
+force behind it. How a man of science can be a materialist is as
+amazing to me as how a sectarian can limit the possibilities of the
+Creator. Show me a picture without an artist, show me a bust without
+a sculptor, show me music without a musician, and then you may begin
+to talk to me of a universe without a Universe-maker, call Him by
+what name you will.
+
+Here is Flammarion's "L'Atmosphere"--a very gorgeous though
+weather-stained copy in faded scarlet and gold. The book has a small
+history, and I value it. A young Frenchman, dying of fever on the
+west coast of Africa, gave it to me as a professional fee. The sight
+of it takes me back to a little ship's bunk, and a sallow face with
+large, sad eyes looking out at me. Poor boy, I fear that he never
+saw his beloved Marseilles again!
+
+Talking of popular science, I know no better books for exciting a
+man's first interest, and giving a broad general view of the
+subject, than these of Samuel Laing. Who would have imagined that
+the wise savant and gentle dreamer of these volumes was also the
+energetic secretary of a railway company? Many men of the highest
+scientific eminence have begun in prosaic lines of life. Herbert
+Spencer was a railway engineer. Wallace was a land surveyor. But
+that a man with so pronounced a scientific brain as Laing should
+continue all his life to devote his time to dull routine work,
+remaining in harness until extreme old age, with his soul still
+open to every fresh idea and his brain acquiring new concretions
+of knowledge, is indeed a remarkable fact. Read those books, and
+you will be a fuller man.
+
+It is an excellent device to talk about what you have recently read.
+Rather hard upon your audience, you may say; but without wishing to
+be personal, I dare bet it is more interesting than your usual small
+talk. It must, of course, be done with some tact and discretion. It
+is the mention of Laing's works which awoke the train of thought
+which led to these remarks. I had met some one at a table d'hote
+or elsewhere who made some remark about the prehistoric remains in
+the valley of the Somme. I knew all about those, and showed him
+that I did. I then threw out some allusion to the rock temples of
+Yucatan, which he instantly picked up and enlarged upon. He spoke
+of ancient Peruvian civilization, and I kept well abreast of him.
+I cited the Titicaca image, and he knew all about that. He spoke of
+Quaternary man, and I was with him all the time. Each was more and
+more amazed at the fulness and the accuracy of the information of
+the other, until like a flash the explanation crossed my mind. "You
+are reading Samuel Laing's 'Human Origins'!" I cried. So he was, and
+so by a coincidence was I. We were pouring water over each other,
+but it was all new-drawn from the spring.
+
+There is a big two-volumed book at the end of my science shelf which
+would, even now, have its right to be called scientific disputed
+by some of the pedants. It is Myers' "Human Personality." My own
+opinion, for what it is worth, is that it will be recognized a
+century hence as a great root book, one from which a whole new
+branch of science will have sprung. Where between four covers will
+you find greater evidence of patience, of industry, of thought,
+of discrimination, of that sweep of mind which can gather up a
+thousand separate facts and bind them all in the meshes of a single
+consistent system? Darwin has not been a more ardent collector in
+zoology than Myers in the dim regions of psychic research, and his
+whole hypothesis, so new that a new nomenclature and terminology
+had to be invented to express it, telepathy, the subliminal, and
+the rest of it, will always be a monument of acute reasoning,
+expressed in fine prose and founded upon ascertained fact.
+
+The mere suspicion of scientific thought or scientific methods has
+a great charm in any branch of literature, however far it may be
+removed from actual research. Poe's tales, for example, owe much to
+this effect, though in his case it was a pure illusion. Jules Verne
+also produces a charmingly credible effect for the most incredible
+things by an adept use of a considerable amount of real knowledge
+of nature. But most gracefully of all does it shine in the lighter
+form of essay, where playful thoughts draw their analogies and
+illustrations from actual fact, each showing up the other, and the
+combination presenting a peculiar piquancy to the reader.
+
+Where could I get better illustration of what I mean than in those
+three little volumes which make up Wendell Holmes' immortal series,
+"The Autocrat," "The Poet," and "The Professor at the Breakfast
+Table"? Here the subtle, dainty, delicate thought is continually
+reinforced by the allusion or the analogy which shows the wide,
+accurate knowledge behind it. What work it is! how wise, how witty,
+how large-hearted and tolerant! Could one choose one's philosopher
+in the Elysian fields, as once in Athens, I would surely join the
+smiling group who listened to the human, kindly words of the Sage
+of Boston. I suppose it is just that continual leaven of science,
+especially of medical science, which has from my early student days
+given those books so strong an attraction for me. Never have I
+so known and loved a man whom I had never seen. It was one of the
+ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his face, but by the irony of
+Fate I arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath upon
+his newly-turned grave. Read his books again, and see if you are not
+especially struck by the up-to-dateness of them. Like Tennyson's "In
+Memoriam," it seems to me to be work which sprang into full flower
+fifty years before its time. One can hardly open a page haphazard
+without lighting upon some passage which illustrates the breadth of
+view, the felicity of phrase, and the singular power of playful but
+most suggestive analogy. Here, for example, is a paragraph--no
+better than a dozen others--which combines all the rare qualities:--
+
+  "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
+  Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and
+  levers, if anything is thrust upon them suddenly which tends
+  to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not
+  accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves
+  a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane
+  hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called
+  religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better
+  of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep
+  their wits and enjoy life very well, outside of the asylums.
+  Any decent person ought to go mad if he really holds such
+  and such opinions.... Anything that is brutal, cruel,
+  heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind,
+  and perhaps for entire races--anything that assumes the
+  necessity for the extermination of instincts which were
+  given to be regulated--no matter by what name you call
+  it--no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon
+  believes it--if received, ought to produce insanity in
+  every well-regulated mind."
+
+There's a fine bit of breezy polemics for the dreary fifties--a fine
+bit of moral courage too for the University professor who ventured
+to say it.
+
+I put him above Lamb as an essayist, because there is a flavour of
+actual knowledge and of practical acquaintance with the problems and
+affairs of life, which is lacking in the elfin Londoner. I do not
+say that the latter is not the rarer quality. There are my "Essays
+of Elia," and they are well-thumbed as you see, so it is not because
+I love Lamb less that I love this other more. Both are exquisite,
+but Wendell Holmes is for ever touching some note which awakens an
+answering vibration within my own mind.
+
+The essay must always be a somewhat repellent form of literature,
+unless it be handled with the lightest and deftest touch. It is too
+reminiscent of the school themes of our boyhood--to put a heading
+and then to show what you can get under it. Even Stevenson, for whom
+I have the most profound admiration, finds it difficult to carry the
+reader through a series of such papers, adorned with his original
+thought and quaint turn of phrase. Yet his "Men and Books" and
+"Virginibus Puerisque" are high examples of what may be done in
+spite of the inherent unavoidable difficulty of the task.
+
+But his style! Ah, if Stevenson had only realized how beautiful and
+nervous was his own natural God-given style, he would never have
+been at pains to acquire another! It is sad to read the much-lauded
+anecdote of his imitating this author and that, picking up and
+dropping, in search of the best. The best is always the most
+natural. When Stevenson becomes a conscious stylist, applauded by
+so many critics, he seems to me like a man who, having most natural
+curls, will still conceal them under a wig. The moment he is
+precious he loses his grip. But when he will abide by his own
+sterling Lowland Saxon, with the direct word and the short, cutting
+sentence, I know not where in recent years we may find his mate. In
+this strong, plain setting the occasional happy word shines like a
+cut jewel. A really good stylist is like Beau Brummell's description
+of a well-dressed man--so dressed that no one would ever observe
+him. The moment you begin to remark a man's style the odds are that
+there is something the matter with it. It is a clouding of the
+crystal--a diversion of the reader's mind from the matter to the
+manner, from the author's subject to the author himself.
+
+No, I have not the Edinburgh edition. If you think of a
+presentation--but I should be the last to suggest it. Perhaps on the
+whole I would prefer to have him in scattered books, rather than in
+a complete set. The half is more than the whole of most authors, and
+not the least of him. I am sure that his friends who reverenced his
+memory had good warrant and express instructions to publish this
+complete edition--very possibly it was arranged before his lamented
+end. Yet, speaking generally, I would say that an author was best
+served by being very carefully pruned before being exposed to the
+winds of time. Let every weak twig, every immature shoot be shorn
+away, and nothing but strong, sturdy, well-seasoned branches left.
+So shall the whole tree stand strong for years to come. How false
+an impression of the true Stevenson would our critical grandchild
+acquire if he chanced to pick down any one of half a dozen of these
+volumes! As we watched his hand stray down the rank, how we would
+pray that it might alight upon the ones we love, on the "New Arabian
+Nights" "The Ebb-tide," "The Wrecker," "Kidnapped," or "Treasure
+Island." These can surely never lose their charm.
+
+What noble books of their class are those last, "Kidnapped" and
+"Treasure Island"! both, as you see, shining forth upon my lower
+shelf. "Treasure Island" is the better story, while I could imagine
+that "Kidnapped" might have the more permanent value as being an
+excellent and graphic sketch of the state of the Highlands after the
+last Jacobite insurrection. Each contains one novel and admirable
+character, Alan Breck in the one, and Long John in the other.
+Surely John Silver, with his face the size of a ham, and his little
+gleaming eyes like crumbs of glass in the centre of it, is the king
+of all seafaring desperadoes. Observe how the strong effect is
+produced in his case: seldom by direct assertion on the part of
+the story-teller, but usually by comparison, innuendo, or indirect
+reference. The objectionable Billy Bones is haunted by the dread of
+"a seafaring man with one leg." Captain Flint, we are told, was a
+brave man; "he was afraid of none, not he, only Silver--Silver was
+that genteel." Or, again, where John himself says, "there was some
+that was feared of Pew, and some that was feared of Flint; but Flint
+his own self was feared of me. Feared he was, and proud. They was
+the roughest crew afloat was Flint's. The devil himself would have
+been feared to go to sea with them. Well, now, I will tell you. I'm
+not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy I keep company;
+but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasn't the word for Flint's old
+buccaneers." So, by a touch here and a hint there, there grows upon
+us the individuality of the smooth-tongued, ruthless, masterful,
+one-legged devil. He is to us not a creation of fiction, but an
+organic living reality with whom we have come in contact; such is
+the effect of the fine suggestive strokes with which he is drawn.
+And the buccaneers themselves, how simple and yet how effective are
+the little touches which indicate their ways of thinking and of
+acting. "I want to go in that cabin, I do; I want their pickles and
+wine and that." "Now, if you had sailed along o' Bill you wouldn't
+have stood there to be spoke twice--not you. That was never Bill's
+way, not the way of sich as sailed with him." Scott's buccaneers in
+"The Pirate" are admirable, but they lack something human which we
+find here. It will be long before John Silver loses his place in
+sea fiction, "and you may lay to that."
+
+Stevenson was deeply influenced by Meredith, and even in these books
+the influence of the master is apparent. There is the apt use of an
+occasional archaic or unusual word, the short, strong descriptions,
+the striking metaphors, the somewhat staccato fashion of speech.
+Yet, in spite of this flavour, they have quite individuality enough
+to constitute a school of their own. Their faults, or rather perhaps
+their limitations, lie never in the execution, but entirely in the
+original conception. They picture only one side of life, and that a
+strange and exceptional one. There is no female interest. We feel
+that it is an apotheosis of the boy-story--the penny number of our
+youth in excelsis. But it is all so good, so fresh, so picturesque,
+that, however limited its scope, it still retains a definite and
+well-assured place in literature. There is no reason why "Treasure
+Island" should not be to the rising generation of the twenty-first
+century what "Robinson Crusoe" has been to that of the nineteenth.
+The balance of probability is all in that direction.
+
+The modern masculine novel, dealing almost exclusively with the
+rougher, more stirring side of life, with the objective rather than
+the subjective, marks the reaction against the abuse of love in
+fiction. This one phase of life in its orthodox aspect, and ending
+in the conventional marriage, has been so hackneyed and worn to a
+shadow, that it is not to be wondered at that there is a tendency
+sometimes to swing to the other extreme, and to give it less than
+its fair share in the affairs of men. In British fiction nine books
+out of ten have held up love and marriage as the be-all and end-all
+of life. Yet we know, in actual practice, that this may not be so.
+In the career of the average man his marriage is an incident, and a
+momentous incident; but it is only one of several. He is swayed by
+many strong emotions--his business, his ambitions, his friendships,
+his struggles with the recurrent dangers and difficulties which tax
+a man's wisdom and his courage. Love will often play a subordinate
+part in his life. How many go through the world without ever loving
+at all? It jars upon us then to have it continually held up as
+the predominating, all-important fact in life; and there is a not
+unnatural tendency among a certain school, of which Stevenson is
+certainly the leader, to avoid altogether a source of interest which
+has been so misused and overdone. If all love-making were like that
+between Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough, then indeed we could
+not have too much of it; but to be made attractive once more, the
+passion must be handled by some great master who has courage to
+break down conventionalities and to go straight to actual life for
+his inspiration.
+
+The use of novel and piquant forms of speech is one of the most
+obvious of Stevenson's devices. No man handles his adjectives with
+greater judgment and nicer discrimination. There is hardly a page
+of his work where we do not come across words and expressions which
+strike us with a pleasant sense of novelty, and yet express the
+meaning with admirable conciseness. "His eyes came coasting round
+to me." It is dangerous to begin quoting, as the examples are
+interminable, and each suggests another. Now and then he misses his
+mark, but it is very seldom. As an example, an "eye-shot" does not
+commend itself as a substitute for "a glance," and "to tee-hee" for
+"to giggle" grates somewhat upon the ear, though the authority of
+Chaucer might be cited for the expressions.
+
+Next in order is his extraordinary faculty for the use of pithy
+similes, which arrest the attention and stimulate the imagination.
+"His voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock." "I saw
+her sway, like something stricken by the wind." "His laugh rang
+false, like a cracked bell." "His voice shook like a taut rope." "My
+mind flying like a weaver's shuttle." "His blows resounded on the
+grave as thick as sobs." "The private guilty considerations I would
+continually observe to peep forth in the man's talk like rabbits
+from a hill." Nothing could be more effective than these direct and
+homely comparisons.
+
+After all, however, the main characteristic of Stevenson is his
+curious instinct for saying in the briefest space just those few
+words which stamp the impression upon the reader's mind. He will
+make you see a thing more clearly than you would probably have done
+had your eyes actually rested upon it. Here are a few of these
+word-pictures, taken haphazard from among hundreds of equal merit--
+
+  "Not far off Macconochie was standing with his tongue out of
+  his mouth, and his hand upon his chin, like a dull fellow
+  thinking hard.
+
+  "Stewart ran after us for more than a mile, and I could not
+  help laughing as I looked back at last and saw him on a hill,
+  holding his hand to his side, and nearly burst with running.
+
+  "Ballantrae turned to me with a face all wrinkled up, and his
+  teeth all showing in his mouth.... He said no word, but his
+  whole appearance was a kind of dreadful question.
+
+  "Look at him, if you doubt; look at him, grinning and gulping,
+  a detected thief.
+
+  "He looked me all over with a warlike eye, and I could see the
+  challenge on his lips."
+
+What could be more vivid than the effect produced by such sentences
+as these?
+
+There is much more that might be said as to Stevenson's peculiar and
+original methods in fiction. As a minor point, it might be remarked
+that he is the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain.
+It is true that Mr. Wilkie Collins has described one gentleman
+who had not only been deprived of all his limbs, but was further
+afflicted by the insupportable name of Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson,
+however, has used the effect so often, and with such telling
+results, that he may be said to have made it his own. To say nothing
+of Hyde, who was the very impersonation of deformity, there is the
+horrid blind Pew, Black Dog with two fingers missing, Long John with
+his one leg, and the sinister catechist who is blind but shoots by
+ear, and smites about him with his staff. In "The Black Arrow," too,
+there is another dreadful creature who comes tapping along with a
+stick. Often as he has used the device, he handles it so artistically
+that it never fails to produce its effect.
+
+Is Stevenson a classic? Well, it is a large word that. You mean by a
+classic a piece of work which passes into the permanent literature
+of the country. As a rule, you only know your classics when they are
+in their graves. Who guessed it of Poe, and who of Borrow? The Roman
+Catholics only canonize their saints a century after their death.
+So with our classics. The choice lies with our grandchildren. But I
+can hardly think that healthy boys will ever let Stevenson's books
+of adventure die, nor do I think that such a short tale as "The
+Pavilion on the Links" nor so magnificent a parable as "Dr. Jekyll
+and Mr. Hyde" will ever cease to be esteemed. How well I remember
+the eagerness, the delight with which I read those early tales in
+"Cornhill" away back in the late seventies and early eighties. They
+were unsigned, after the old unfair fashion, but no man with any
+sense of prose could fail to know that they were all by the same
+author. Only years afterwards did I learn who that author was.
+
+I have Stevenson's collected poems over yonder in the small cabinet.
+Would that he had given us more! Most of them are the merest playful
+sallies of a freakish mind. But one should, indeed, be a classic,
+for it is in my judgment by all odds the best narrative ballad of
+the last century--that is if I am right in supposing that "The
+Ancient Mariner" appeared at the very end of the eighteenth. I
+would put Coleridge's tour de force of grim fancy first, but I know
+none other to compare in glamour and phrase and easy power with
+"Ticonderoga." Then there is his immortal epitaph. The two pieces
+alone give him a niche of his own in our poetical literature, just
+as his character gives him a niche of his own in our affections. No,
+I never met him. But among my most prized possessions are several
+letters which I received from Samoa. From that distant tower he kept
+a surprisingly close watch upon what was doing among the bookmen,
+and it was his hand which was among the first held out to the
+striver, for he had quick appreciation and keen sympathies which
+met another man's work half-way, and wove into it a beauty from his
+own mind.
+
+And now, my very patient friend, the time has come for us to part,
+and I hope my little sermons have not bored you over-much. If I have
+put you on the track of anything which you did not know before, then
+verify it and pass it on. If I have not, there is no harm done, save
+that my breath and your time have been wasted. There may be a score
+of mistakes in what I have said--is it not the privilege of the
+conversationalist to misquote? My judgments may differ very far from
+yours, and my likings may be your abhorrence; but the mere thinking
+and talking of books is in itself good, be the upshot what it may.
+For the time the magic door is still shut. You are still in the land
+of faerie. But, alas, though you shut that door, you cannot seal it.
+Still come the ring of bell, the call of telephone, the summons back
+to the sordid world of work and men and daily strife. Well, that's
+the real life after all--this only the imitation. And yet, now that
+the portal is wide open and we stride out together, do we not face
+our fate with a braver heart for all the rest and quiet and
+comradeship that we found behind the Magic Door?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Through the Magic Door, by Arthur Conan Doyle
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***
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