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<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 />
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<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR ***</div>
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<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’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—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.
</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—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’ 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.
</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’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.
</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’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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—
</p>
<p>
“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!’”
</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’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—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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“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?”
</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’s
shook my faith in his judgment, and yet I would forgive a good deal to the man
who wrote—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“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.”
</p>
<p class="noindent">
Not a bad verse that for one’s life aspiration.
</p>
<p>
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—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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—well, it <i>was</i> 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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—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.
</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’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”?
</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 “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.
</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’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?
</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 “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 <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’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’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
“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.
</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—“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.
</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—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—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.
</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—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.
</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’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">
“Great Genius is to madness close allied,<br/>
And thin partitions do those rooms divide.”
</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, “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.
</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’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.
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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 “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.
</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’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?—
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>must</i> be paid in current
coin.” 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
“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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</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’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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap04"></a>IV.</h2>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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—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’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—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.
</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—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—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.
</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’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—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.
</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.
“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.
</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’s evil, in spite of the Royal touch. Gibbon gives us
a concise but lurid account of his own boyhood.
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</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’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.
</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’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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</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’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!
</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’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—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?
</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—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.
</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’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.
</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—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.
</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 “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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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!”
</p>
<p class="p2">
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.
</p>
<p>
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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</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—but there are possibilities for barbarism,
and none in this wide world for effeminacy.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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 “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?
</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 “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.
</p>
<p>
Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</p>
<p class="p2">
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?—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</p>
<p class="p2">
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.
</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—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—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!
</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’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.
</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—“<i>quorum pars parva fui!</i>” 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.
</p>
<p>
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 <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. “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.
</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 “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 <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—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.
</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 “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.
</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
“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.
</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’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’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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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’s story called “Le Horla”? 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, “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.
</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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</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’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 “The Cloister
and the Hearth,” the next volume on the left.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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 ’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.
</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 “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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</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—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’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.
</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’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—<i>puris omnia pura</i>—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.
</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—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—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
<i>he</i> 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.
</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’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.
</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 “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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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’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.
</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’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’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?
</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
“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.
</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’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.”
</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
“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.
</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’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 <i>arrière pensée</i> that the words would apply as strongly to himself.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
<div class="chapter">
<h2><a name="chap08"></a>VIII.</h2>
<p>
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.
</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 “<i>Ex libris</i> 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.
</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. “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. “<i>Ob fas est aquam hostis venere</i>,”
etc. “Tut, tut, it’s not allowed. But here are some of the enemy in
a barn? What about that?” “<i>Ob fas est hostem
incendio</i>,” 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.
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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 <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’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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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’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.
</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 “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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</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’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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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!’”
</p>
<p class="p2">
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.
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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>
“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?’”
</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—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 “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.
</p>
<p>
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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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’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. “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!
</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’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 “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.
</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—“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!
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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. “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. “<i>Je fais mon devoir et suis indifférent pour le
reste</i>,” 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’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?—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</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’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.
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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.
</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’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’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.
</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—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“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.”
</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’s knife. When he said—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“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.”
</p>
<p class="noindent">
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.
</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 “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!
</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—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’
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—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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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.
</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. “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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</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 “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.
</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. “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—
</p>
<p class="poem">
“Critics kind—never mind!<br/>
Critics flatter—no matter!<br/>
Critics blame—all the same!<br/>
Critics curse—none the worse!<br/>
Do your best— —— the rest!”
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight’s
“Cruise of the <i>Falcon</i>.” 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.
</p>
<p>
Another book which shows the romance and the heroism which still linger upon
earth is that large copy of the “Voyage of the <i>Discovery</i> 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.
</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—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 <i>emigré</i>.
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
<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’s “Arctic
Service,” and it is a worthy shelf-companion to Scott’s
“Account of the Voyage of the <i>Discovery</i>.” 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 <i>is</i> wretched,” 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’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—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?
</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’s “Cruise of the
<i>Cachelot</i>,” 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.”
</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">
“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.”
</p>
<p class="p2">
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 <i>Grosvenor</i>.”
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</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’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 <i>Beagle</i>.”
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 <i>Beagle</i>—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’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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’s works
which awoke the train of thought which led to these remarks. I had met some one
at a <i>table d’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. “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.
</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’ “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.
</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’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’ 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:—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</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 “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.
</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—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.
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.”
</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—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 “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.
</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—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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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’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—
</p>
<p class="p2">
“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>
“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>
“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>
“Look at him, if you doubt; look at him, grinning and gulping, a detected
thief.
</p>
<p>
“He looked me all over with a warlike eye, and I could see the challenge
on his lips.”
</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’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.
</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’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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</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—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?
</p>
</div><!--end chapter-->
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