Title: Memories and Portraits
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
Language: English
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Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto and Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org



MEMORIES AND
PORTRAITS


                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

                            [Picture: Graphic]

                            FINE-PAPER EDITION

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                             CHATTO & WINDUS
                                   1912

                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                    At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

                                * * * * *

                                    TO
                                MY MOTHER
                                  IN THE
                   NAME OF PAST JOY AND PRESENT SORROW
                               _I DEDICATE_
                       THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

_S.S._ “_Ludgate Hill_”
      _within sight of Cape Race_



NOTE


This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read
through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.  A certain
thread of meaning binds them.  Memories of childhood and youth, portraits
of those who have gone before us in the battle—taken together, they build
up a face that “I have loved long since and lost awhile,” the face of
what was once myself.  This has come by accident; I had no design at
first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved
memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young
face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by
a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.

My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed.  Of their descendant, the
person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him
better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and
cannot divide interests.

Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in
_The Cornhill_, _Longman’s_, _Scribner_, _The English Illustrated_, _The
Magazine of Art_, _The Contemporary Review_; three are here in print for
the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as
a private circulation.

                                                                   R. L S.



CONTENTS

        I.  THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
       II.  SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
      III.  OLD MORALITY
       IV.  A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
        V.  AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
       VI.  PASTORAL
      VII.  THE MANSE
     VIII.  MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
       IX.  THOMAS STEVENSON
        X.  TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
       XI.  TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER
      XII.  THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
     XIII.  “A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED”
      XIV.  A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS’S
       XV.  A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
      XVI.  A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE

CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME


    “This is no my ain house;
    I ken by the biggin’ o’t.”

Two recent books {1} one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by
the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking
on the divisions of races and nations.  Such thoughts should arise with
particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom,
peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different
dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the
busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country
to the Moor of Rannoch.  It is not only when we cross the seas that we go
abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has
conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang.  Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still
cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech.  It was but the other day
that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on
St. Michael’s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman.  English
itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North
America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of
the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be
heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of
transition.  You may go all over the States, and—setting aside the actual
intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese—you
shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty
miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred
miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.  Book English has gone round the
world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and
every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality of speech,
vocal or verbal.  In like manner, local custom and prejudice, even local
religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth
century—_imperia in imperio_, foreign things at home.

In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours
is the character of the typical John Bull.  His is a domineering nature,
steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick
about the life of others.  In French colonies, and still more in the
Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between
the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten,
or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.
But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance.  He
figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the same disdainful
air that led him on to victory.  A passing enthusiasm for some foreign
art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his
intimates.  He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will
never condescend to study him with any patience.  Miss Bird, an authoress
with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to
be uneatable—a staggering pretension.  So, when the Prince of Wales’s
marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was
proposed to give them solid English fare—roast beef and plum pudding, and
no tomfoolery.  Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.  We will
not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, will we
suffer him to eat of it himself.  The same spirit inspired Miss Bird’s
American missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the
faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance of the religions
they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple.  Uncle Sam is
better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.  For Mr.
Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more.  He
wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.
He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in
America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming?  The name Yankee, of
which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a
term of reproach.  The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a
subject, are but a drop in the bucket.  And we find in his book a vast
virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view
partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,
at the largest, to a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere
not American, but merely Yankee.  I will go far beyond him in reprobating
the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their cousins from
beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness of our
newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find myself in
company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to him as to a
performing dog.  But in the case of Mr. Grant White example were better
than precept.  Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr.
White than Boston to the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no
better justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
ignorant of the foreigners at home.  John Bull is ignorant of the States;
he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he
is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door.  There is one
country, for instance—its frontier not so far from London, its people
closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English—of
which I will go bail he knows nothing.  His ignorance of the sister
kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by anecdote.  I
once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence—a
University man, as the phrase goes—a man, besides, who had taken his
degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in.  We were
deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other
things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had
recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were not
so in Scotland.  “I beg your pardon,” said he, “this is a matter of law.”
He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be informed.
The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly; every
child knew that.  At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I
was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an
examination in the very law in question.  Thereupon he looked me for a
moment full in the face and dropped the conversation.  This is a
monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
experience of Scots.

England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men’s faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly.  Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations.  A Scotchman may tramp
the better part of Europe and the United States, and never again receive
so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as
on his first excursion into England.  The change from a hilly to a level
country strikes him with delighted wonder.  Along the flat horizon there
arise the frequent venerable towers of churches.  He sees at the end of
airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails.  He may go where he
pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it
will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.  There are, indeed, few
merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a
fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement,
their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth
gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half
alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.  When the
Scotch child sees them first he falls immediately in love; and from that
time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams.  And so, in their
degree, with every feature of the life and landscape.  The warm,
habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of
the country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the
fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of
bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech—they are all new to
the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child’s story that
he tells himself at night.  The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the
feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed.  Rather it
keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes
to which you have been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish
to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.

One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman’s eye—the
domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all.  We
have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry.  Wood
has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are
sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are
steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and
permanent appearance.  English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter.  And to this the Scotchman
never becomes used.  His eye can never rest consciously on one of these
brick houses—rickles of brick, as he might call them—or on one of these
flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and
instantly travels back in fancy to his home.  “This is no my ain house; I
ken by the biggin’ o’t.”  And yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his
own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet,
and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he
cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.

But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
surprise and even pain us.  The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman.  A week or
two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping.  It seems
incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should
have been thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent, who hold
our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a
difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things with less
interest and conviction.  The first shock of English society is like a
cold plunge.  It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much,
and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction.  Yet
surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too
often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often
withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind
evaded as with terror.  A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of
his own experience.  He will not put you by with conversational counters
and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man’s chief end.  A Scotchman is vain, interested
in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and
experience in the best light.  The egoism of the Englishman is
self-contained.  He does not seek to proselytise.  He takes no interest
in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does
not care to justify his indifference.  Give him the wages of going on and
being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you
continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser
origin.  Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his
demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and
immodest.  That you should continually try to establish human and serious
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and
desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more
awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a
suitor and a poor relation.  Thus even the lowest class of the educated
English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth
begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up those
first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a
great extent, the rule of future conduct.  I have been to school in both
countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once
rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a
greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and
on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility.  The boy of
the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported
by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind and body,
more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a less romantic
sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in present
circumstances.  And certainly, for one thing, English boys are younger
for their age.  Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps
serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood—days of great
stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of
books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism,
the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other.  The typical
English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon,
leads perhaps to different results.  About the very cradle of the Scot
there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two divergent
systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first questions
of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, “What is your
name?” the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, “What is the
chief end of man?” and answering nobly, if obscurely, “To glorify God and
to enjoy Him for ever.”  I do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter
Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch
a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us,
from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together.  No
Englishman of Byron’s age, character, and history would have had patience
for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece; but the
daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days kept their influence to
the end.  We have spoken of the material conditions; nor need much more
be said of these: of the land lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind
always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of
high-lying, old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared
with the level streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic
quaintness of the architecture, among which English children begin to
grow up and come to themselves in life.  As the stage of the University
approaches, the contrast becomes more express.  The English lad goes to
Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a
semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors.  Nor is
this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of
privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of
his compatriots.  At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly
different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a
bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been
wandering fancy-free.  His college life has little of restraint, and
nothing of necessary gentility.  He will find no quiet clique of the
exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts.  All
classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches.  The raffish young gentleman
in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie
from the parish school.  They separate, at the session’s end, one to
smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of
the field beside his peasant family.  The first muster of a college class
in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment,
ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the
sound of their own rustic voices.  It was in these early days, I think,
that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these
uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality.
Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in
while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a
juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study
the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other.  Our
tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,
lamplit city.  At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the
college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer
of the winter sunset.  The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in
wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of
the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, _la trêve de
Dieu_.

Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his country’s
history gradually growing in the child’s mind from story and from
observation.  A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron
skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery
mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.  Breaths come to him in
song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs.  He glories
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of
the legend of his country’s history.  The heroes and kings of Scotland
have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish
history—Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five—were still either failures or
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce
combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a moral
than a material criterion for life.  Britain is altogether small, the
mere taproot of her extended empire: Scotland, again, which alone the
Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and
avowedly cold, sterile and unpopulous.  It is not so for nothing.  I once
seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of
sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own.
It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance,
that I had lacked penetration to divine.  But the error serves the
purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young
Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of number and
Spartan poverty of life.

So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained.  That Shorter
Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed
in the city of Westminster.  The division of races is more sharply marked
within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.
Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet
you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove to
have the headmark of a Scot.  A century and a half ago the Highlander
wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in
another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social
constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.
Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scotch.
Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot.  He would willingly raid into the
Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he
regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land.  When the Black Watch,
after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out
and kissed the earth at Port Patrick.  They had been in Ireland,
stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well
liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that
they kissed at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people
who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and
hanged them since the dawn of history.  Last, and perhaps most curious,
the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe.
They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English,
but the broad dialect of Scotland.  Now, what idea had they in their
minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their
ancestral enemies?  What was the sense in which they were Scotch and not
English, or Scotch and not Irish?  Can a bare name be thus influential on
the minds and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind them
to the nature of facts?  The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to
answer, NO; the far more galling business of Ireland clenches the
negative from nearer home.  Is it common education, common morals, a
common language or a common faith, that join men into nations?  There
were practically none of these in the case we are considering.

The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the
Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.
When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other’s necks in spirit; even
at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk.  But from his
compatriot in the south the Lowlander stands consciously apart.  He has
had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in
other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home
in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to
remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the mind.



CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES {15}


I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to the
profit and glory of my _Alma Mater_; and the fact is I seem to be in very
nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am willing
enough to write something, I know not what to write.  Only one point I
see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the University itself
and my own days under its shadow; of the things that are still the same
and of those that are already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass
naturally between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing
them to meet and grow confidential.

The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; more
swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the quadrangle; so
that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time
and the succession of men.  I looked for my name the other day in last
year’s case-book of the Speculative.  Naturally enough I looked for it
near the end; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I
began to think it had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it,
mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that
posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years.  This kind of dignity of temporal precession is likely,
with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome; but
I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more
emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a
praiser of things past.

For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it has
doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by gradual
stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it does; and
what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased to be a
student.  Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very best of
_Alma Mater_; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more strange),
had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and do not
die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have
befallen my successors of to-day.  Of the specific points of change, of
advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on
a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy.  The chief and far the
most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle,
unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the
whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good,
flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning
journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable
gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my
college life.  You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him; his
virtues, I make sure, are inconceivable to his successors, just as they
were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically
alone in the pleasure I had in his society.  Poor soul, I remember how
much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun)
seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and
dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went.  And it may
be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and
that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in
particular are things but of a moment.  So this student, whom I have in
my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by
his own fault; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of
much misconduct, kept on in his own way learning how to work; and at
last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly
shamed; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good
deal of its interest for myself.

But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no
means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if they
knew what they had lost, would regret also.  They have still Tait, to be
sure—long may they have him!—and they have still Tait’s class-room,
cupola and all; but think of what a different place it was when this
youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the benches,
and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior {17} was airing his
robust old age.  It is possible my successors may have never even heard
of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the last century.
He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke
with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire; his
reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with
post-chaises—a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire on the
Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather.  Thus he
was for me a mirror of things perished; it was only in his memory that I
could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward,
and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the
windward bars of the furnace; it was only thus that I could see my
grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from
Pittenweem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak
good-humouredly with those he met.  And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone
also; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow
him; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.

To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a
prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man
filled with the mathematics.  And doubtless these are set-offs.  But they
cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has retired, and that
Professor Kelland is dead.  No man’s education is complete or truly
liberal who knew not Kelland.  There were unutterable lessons in the mere
sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a
fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of
that very kindness.  I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class
time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in
out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the same
part as Lindsay—the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the
dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things.  But it
was a part that scarce became him; he somehow lacked the means: for all
his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old; and he had too much
of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invincible
innocence of mind, to play the veteran well.  The time to measure him
best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he
received his class at home.  What a pretty simplicity would he then show,
trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging
nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!
Truly he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed,
but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious, troubled
elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us.  A theorist has held
the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his spectacles;
that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed artificially, but
the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic.  And truly it must have been
thus with Kelland; for as I still fancy I behold him frisking actively
about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most
clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection.  I never knew
but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so kind a
spectacle; and that was Dr. Appleton.  But the light in his case was
tempered and passive; in Kelland’s it danced, and changed, and flashed
vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to goodwill.

I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.
Kelland’s class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of
merit, the only distinction of my University career.  But although I am
the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor’s own hand, I
cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class above a dozen
times.  Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once)
while in the very act of writing the document above referred to, that he
did not know my face.  Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting
upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a
great deal of trouble to put in exercise—perhaps as much as would have
taught me Greek—and sent me forth into the world and the profession of
letters with the merest shadow of an education.  But they say it is
always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its own
reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon this I should
plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more deliberate
care, and none ever had more certificates for less education.  One
consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say of
Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland; and as he is still
alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise you
very much that I have no intention of saying it.

Meanwhile, how many others have gone—Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who
besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch and
blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest parts of
the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their fathers in their
“resting-graves”!  And again, how many of these last have not found their
way there, all too early, through the stress of education!  That was one
thing, at least, from which my truantry protected me.  I am sorry indeed
that I have no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I were dead; nor
do I know the name of that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring
at the price of a brain fever.  There are many sordid tragedies in the
life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or both; but
nothing more moves a wise man’s pity than the case of the lad who is in
too much hurry to be learned.  And so, for the sake of a moral at the
end, I will call up one more figure, and have done.  A student, ambitious
of success by that hot, intemperate manner of study that now grows so
common, read night and day for an examination.  As he went on, the task
became more easy to him, sleep was more easily banished, his brain grew
hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller
and more orderly.  It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all
night in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of
success.  His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high up, and
the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over dwindling
suburbs to a country horizon.  At last my student drew up his blind, and
still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad.  Day was breaking, the
east was tinging with strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the
coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless terror seized upon his
mind.  He was sane, his senses were undisturbed; he saw clearly, and knew
what he was seeing, and knew that it was normal; but he could neither
bear to see it nor find the strength to look away, and fled in panic from
his chamber into the enclosure of the street.  In the cool air and
silence, and among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed.
Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject
fear of its return.

    “Gallo canente, spes redit,
    Aegris salus refunditur,
    Lapsis fides revertitur,”

as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office.  But to him that
good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic,
and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of.  He
dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; he sat down, he rose
up, he wandered; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the
sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the
distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear.  At the
appointed hour, he came to the door of the place of examination; but when
he was asked, he had forgotten his name.  Seeing him so disordered, they
had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted
him, still nameless, to the Hall.  Vain kindness, vain efforts.  He could
only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all, his
mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own
intolerable fear.  And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever.

People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent
reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of the
mind as fell on this young man, and made him cover his eyes from the
innocent morning.  We all have by our bedsides the box of the Merchant
Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a young man sacrifices
sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is playing with the lock.



CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY


I


There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on
the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it
beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the engine
and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long.  The aisles
are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of families, door beyond door,
like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison
turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves.  There, in the
hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy.  Pleasant incidents are woven
with my memory of the place.  I here made friends with a plain old
gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one
eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter
sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days
together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild heart
flying; and once—she possibly remembers—the wise Eugenia followed me to
that austere inclosure.  Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the
tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid.  But for the
most part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on
the names of the forgotten.  Name after name, and to each the
conventional attributions and the idle dates: a regiment of the unknown
that had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled with the illusions of
youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old
mortality.  In that whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom
my fancy had received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid
countenance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining
fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of
phantom appellations.  It was then possible to leave behind us something
more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying epitaphs; and the
thing left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call the
immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion.
Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath that “circular idea,” was
fainter than a dream; and when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and
beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged philosopher
melted like a raindrop in the sea.

And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David
Hume.  The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah’s
dove, come home to roost.  The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own
nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise.  The tumultuary and
gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see
himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own for one
among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street, and to
divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.  In the meantime he
will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet
whiff of chloroform—for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of
others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine
self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard.  The length of man’s
life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious
thought.  He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so
wholly.  He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still
idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.  The
parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth.  To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely
and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a
moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift.  Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of
that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least.  But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the
bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.
Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his
ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should
have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann.  Yet to Mr.
Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge.  The day
is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count _Moll Flanders_,
ay, or _The Country Wife_, more wholesome and more pious diet than these
guide-books to consistent egoism.

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.
And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I
began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was
weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors.  This was
dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness.  Not that I began to
see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and
modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally
from the prison windows of my affectation.  Once I remember to have
observed two working-women with a baby halting by a grave; there was
something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the
other with bowed face crouching by her side.  A wreath of immortelles
under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I
overheard their judgment on that wonder.  “Eh! what extravagance!”  To a
youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and pregnant
saying appeared merely base.

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
unremarkable.  One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red
evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral,
told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his
labours; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey; and
in a true Sexton’s Calendar, how the species varied with the season of
the year.  But this was the very poetry of the profession.  The others
whom I knew were somewhat dry.  A faint flavour of the gardener hung
about them, but sophisticated and dis-bloomed.  They had engagements to
keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with
man-kind’s clocks and hour-long measurement of time.  And thus there was
no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on
spade.  They were men wrapped up in their grim business; they liked well
to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide
the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and
dates.  It would be “in fifty-twa” that such a tomb was last opened for
“Miss Jemimy.”  It was thus they spoke of their past patients—familiarly
but not without respect, like old family servants.  Here is indeed a
servant, whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright
table, or run at the bell’s summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside
the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our
race.  To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch
savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he attributed
insensibility to the digger of the grave.  But perhaps it is on Hamlet
that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from
the Scotch.  The “goodman delver,” reckoning up his years of office,
might have at least suggested other thoughts.  It is a pride common among
sextons.  A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author
his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves; but the
grave-digger numbers his graves.  He would indeed be something different
from human if his solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a broad
mark upon his mind.  There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city
clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends
of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries,
falling like minute drops into eternity.  As they fall, he counts them;
and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul,
in the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to be
his pride and pleasure.  There are many common stories telling how he
piques himself on crowded cemeteries.  But I will rather tell of the old
grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister was
summoned.  He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the church-yard;
and through a bull’s-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay
dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recumbent stones.  Dr. Laurie
was, I think, a Moderate: ’tis certain, at least, that he took a very
Roman view of deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had
lived beyond man’s natural years, that his life had been easy and
reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his
care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and
follow the majority.  The grave-digger heard him out; then he raised
himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the
window to the scene of his life-long labours.  “Doctor,” he said, “I ha’e
laid three hunner and fower-score in that kirkyaird; an it had been His
wull,” indicating Heaven, “I would ha’e likit weel to ha’e made out the
fower hunner.”  But it was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had
now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to gird
and carry him.



II


I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground
of all youth’s suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave,
is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness.  It is himself that he
sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague
epitaph.  Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is
all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire
unshielded.  In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to
be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and
tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus,
is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.  But by-and-by his truant
interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers.
Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a
doom peculiar to himself, whether fate’s crowning injustice or his own
last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a power that
wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking
and giving, bereaving and yet storing up.

The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble
fallibility.  When we have fallen through storey after storey of our
vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we
begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us
and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others,
and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in
with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf
the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth.  So that
at the last, when such a pin falls out—when there vanishes in the least
breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for
our supply—when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces
of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those
clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory
and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our
life.



III


One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of us
labour to dissemble.  In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most
serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint thoughts.
Laughter attended on his coming.  He had the air of a great gentleman,
jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and
attentive.  Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop
to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies; we loved his
notice; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at
my father’s table, my acknowledged friend.  So he walked among us, both
hands full of gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most
influential life.

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking back,
I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow
of what he was to be.  For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity
and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend.  He
would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane; and by a
misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment.  I can still
see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets, _Là ci
darem la mano_ on his lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following
vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high
seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his
self-respect, miserably went down.

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore,
bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had
deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise.  But in his face there
was a light of knowledge that was new to it.  Of the wounds of his body
he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation;
of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence.  He returned to that
city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone,
seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still
grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still
joying in his friend’s successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier
music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which
he had disavowed and which had brought him low.  Lastly, when his bodily
evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without
complaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, urbane and
with the will to smile.

The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the
tale of a success.  In his youth he took thought for no one but himself;
when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of
none but others.  Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct
of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he
never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed
with a jest.  You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that
this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a
whole society had hissed and pointed fingers.  Often have we gone to him,
red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our
princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely counsel;
and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were
reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disembosomed: a man, by
his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of his gifts; his whole
city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer.
Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there, so gentle,
patient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so
swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him.  Even if
the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that
lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight.  He had gone to
ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who condescended; but once
ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.  Most men,
finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder
against God or destiny.  Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends
to share the bitterness of that repentance.  But he had held an inquest
and passed sentence: _mene_, _mene_; and condemned himself to smiling
silence.  He had given trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and
foregone the right to murmur.

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength;
but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had
betrayed him—“for our strength is weakness”—he began to blossom and bring
forth.  Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown
down before the great deliverer.  We

       “In the vast cathedral leave him;
    God accept him,
    Christ receive him!”



IV


If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the
irony are strangely fled.  They do not stand merely to the dead, these
foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the
difficult but not desperate life of man.  This ground is hallowed by the
heroes of defeat.

I see the indifferent pass before my friend’s last resting-place; pause,
with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk.  A
pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and
an ignorant wonder.  Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a
reproach; they honour him for silent lessons; they cherish his example;
and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the
dead.  For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of
humiliation;—of whom Bunyan wrote that, “Though Christian had the hard
hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in
former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and
have in this place found the words of life.”



CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE


I


All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the
pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end,
which was to learn to write.  I kept always two books in my pocket, one
to read, one to write in.  As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I
saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either
read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note
down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas.  Thus
I lived with words.  And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it
was written consciously for practice.  It was not so much that I wished
to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
would learn to write.  That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I
practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.
Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with
senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country
are but one continuous subject.  But I worked in other ways also; often
accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many
parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from
memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried
to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of
posturing and melancholy self-deception.  And yet this was not the most
efficient part of my training.  Good though it was, it only taught me (so
far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual
elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word:
things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature.  And
regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard
of achievement.  So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was
certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home.  Whenever I read a
book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said
or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down
at once and set myself to ape that quality.  I was unsuccessful, and I
knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always
unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in
rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.  I
have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to
Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire
and to Obermann.  I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called
_The Vanity of Morals_: it was to have had a second part, _The Vanity of
Knowledge_; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were
apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was
written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like, from its ashes)
no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the
manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a
laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne.  So with my other works:
_Cain_, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of _Sordello_: _Robin
Hood_, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields
of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in _Monmouth_, a tragedy, I reclined on the
bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed
many masters; in the first draft of _The King’s Pardon_, a tragedy, I was
on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of
the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance
to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein—for
it was not Congreve’s verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired
and sought to copy.  Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do
justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of
the _Book of Snobs_.  So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive
novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for
they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old
Dumas, but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by another
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the
other, originally known as _Semiramis_: _a Tragedy_, I have observed on
bookstalls under the _alias_ of _Prince Otto_.  But enough has been said
to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial
efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have
profited or not, that is the way.  It was so Keats learned, and there was
never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we
could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival
of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier
and fresher models.  Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the
way to be original!  It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so.
Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training
that shall clip the wings of your originality.  There can be none more
original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no
craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to
imitate the other.  Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters:
he was of all men the most imitative.  Shakespeare himself, the imperial,
proceeds directly from a school.  It is only from a school that we can
expect to have good writers; it is almost invariably from a school that
great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue.  Nor is there anything
here that should astonish the considerate.  Before he can tell what
cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are
possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he
should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after
years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding
for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within
the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines
beyond the student’s reach his inimitable model.  Let him try as he
please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true
saying that failure is the only highroad to success.  I must have had
some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own
performances.  I liked doing them indeed; but when they were done, I
could see they were rubbish.  In consequence, I very rarely showed them
even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I
must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain
with me, “Padding,” said one.  Another wrote: “I cannot understand why
you do lyrics so badly.”  No more could I!  Thrice I put myself in the
way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine.
These were returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained.  If they
had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case,
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been looked
at—well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning
and living.  Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the occasion
of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and
to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of the public.



II


The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted
among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant,
Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides.  By an
accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of
the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures,
looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly
dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire
cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of
famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.
Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance of
Senatus-consults, he can smoke.  The Senatus looks askance at these
privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole
society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the
world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of dead lions
than all the living dogs of the professorate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;
yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I
was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in particular, proud of
being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were
then conversing beside the corridor fire.  One of these has now his name
on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in
the law courts.  Of the death of the second, you have just been reading
what I had to say.  And the third also has escaped out of that battle of
life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely.  They were all
three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most
conspicuous.  Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a
reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one
of Balzac’s characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comédie Humaine_.
He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I
write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to
heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower than
earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_.  Report would have
it (I daresay, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he
particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its
truth from his own lips.  Thus, at least, he was up one day on a
pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a
boy, he was publicly disgraced.  The blow would have broken a less finely
tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his
considerable patrimony in the space of one winter.  For years thereafter
he lived I know not how; always well dressed, always in good hotels and
good society, always with empty pockets.  The charm of his manner may
have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are very
agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood; and to
explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon the
theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind,
“there was a suffering relative in the background.”  From this genteel
eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the
character of a generous editor.  It is in this part that I best remember
him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a
refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with an
engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great
appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of
burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation and, to a patient
listener, excellent effect.  After all these ups and downs, he seemed
still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to breathe of money;
seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end.  Yet he
was then upon the brink of his last overthrow.  He had set himself to
found the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young
gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to
garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals;
and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man’s name be often
enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will
pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone;
and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other
day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have
just done for me.  Our fathers, when they were upon some great
enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite
slave into the foundations of their palace.  It was with his own life
that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods.  He fought his paper
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early
and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-wigging
influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation.  In that slender
and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he
should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless ambition spoke
loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there was a
marriage in his view had he succeeded.  But he died, and his paper died
after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to
our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.
We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and thought it a poor
thing to come into the world at all and have no more behind one than
Macbean.  And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and
this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in
a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,
graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_
(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without
haggling, for some pence—this book may alone preserve a memory of James
Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were
all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and
made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and
hope.  We were to found a University magazine.  A pair of little, active
brothers—Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers
of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University
building—had been debauched to play the part of publishers.  We four were
to be conjunct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to
print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic—that flatterer of
credulity—the adventure must succeed and bring great profit.  Well, well:
it was a bright vision.  I went home that morning walking upon air.  To
have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to me the most
unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of consideration; it
reconciled me to myself and to my fellow-men; and as I steered round the
railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly.
Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim
fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were,
that nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able,
upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to
meet my share in the expense.  It was a comfortable thought to me that I
had a father.

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part of it,
for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed
obscurity, and died without a gasp.  The first number was edited by all
four of us with prodigious bustle; the second fell principally into the
hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a
solemn question who it was that edited the fourth.  It would perhaps be
still more difficult to say who read it.  Poor yellow sheet, that looked
so hopefully Livingtones’ window!  Poor, harmless paper, that might have
gone to print a _Shakespeare_ on, and was instead so clumsily defaced
with nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors?  I cannot pity myself, to
whom it was all pure gain.  It was no news to me, but only the wholesome
confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth,
and instantly sickened and subsided into night.  I had sent a copy to the
lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did
all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the
gift and my cherished contributions in silence.  I will not say that I
was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes
up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her
taste.  I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my share
of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed their hands
as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps,
these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful
illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the
time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to work I went again with
my penny version-books, having fallen back in one day from the printed
author to the manuscript student.



III


From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers.
The poor little piece is all tail-foremost.  I have done my best to
straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains
invertebrate and wordy.  No self-respecting magazine would print the
thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its
own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent and
some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of Memories
and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand alongside
of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd.  Not that John and Robert drew very
close together in their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy
brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow.
Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two; he had
grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases men with any
savage inheritance of blood; and he was a way-farer besides, and took my
gipsy fancy.  But however that may be, and however Robert’s profile may
be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man of a most
quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece
of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a maturer touch.
And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other country two
such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty
cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.



CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER


I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the
uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern hills there
may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone good fellowship;
but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life
who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew
Fairservice,—though without his vices.  He was a man whose very presence
could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern
flower-plots.  There was a dignity about his tall stooping form, and an
earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don
Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been
nourished in his youth on _Walker’s Lives_ and _The Hind let Loose_.

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this
as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the
infirmities of my description.  To me, who find it so difficult to tell
the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_.  It is
impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden
in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its
shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from
the north-west corner.  The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of
each other.  When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make
him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that
I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me
it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he
had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking horse.  Latterly he
was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the
parish register worth all the reasons in the world, “_I am old and well
stricken in years_,” he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold
enough to answer the argument.  Apart from this vantage that he kept over
all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a
gardener.  He shrank the very place he cultivated.  The dignity and
reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry
figure.  He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days.
He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.  He told of
places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were
meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad
shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was
condescension on his part to dress your humbler garden plots.  You were
thrown at once into an invidious position.  You felt that you were
profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will
consented to your vulgar rule.  Involuntarily you compared yourself with
the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen
Dionysius.  Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical,
for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your
garden, and, through the garden, to your diet.  He would trim a hedge,
throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile
section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in
supreme contempt for our opinion.  If you asked him to send you in one of
your own artichokes, “_That I wull_, _mem_,” he would say, “_with
pleasure_, _for it is mair blessed to give than to receive_.”  Ay, and
even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer
our commands to his own inclination, and he went away, stately and sad,
professing that “_our wull was his pleasure_,” but yet reminding us that
he would do it “_with feelin’s_,”—even then, I say, the triumphant master
felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that
he was taking a mean advantage of the other’s low estate, and that the
whole scene had been one of those “slights that patient merit of the
unworthy takes.”

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting sunflowers
and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in supreme aversion
whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild.  There was one exception
to this sweeping ban.  Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last
count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shrubbery was being
thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipulated his bill in order
to save every stately stem.  In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in
that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use
nowadays, his heart grew “_proud_” within him when he came on a
burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their
graceful trophies; and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so
many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections
from his heart.  Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all
that was bygone.  He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept
pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a
holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he
had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have
shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.

But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking
for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers
together.  They were but garnishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments
for ladies’ chimney-shelves.  It was towards his cauliflowers and peas
and cabbage that his heart grew warm.  His preference for the more useful
growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-pots, and
an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn.  He
would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling
reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.
Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself.  He had, indeed,
raised “_finer o’ them_;” but it seemed that no one else had been
favoured with a like success.  All other gardeners, in fact, were mere
foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with perfect
soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had wondered, and such
another could scarcely give credit to his eyes.  Nor was it with his
rivals only that he parted praise and blame.  If you remarked how well a
plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with
solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him.  If, on the
other hand, you called his attention to some back-going vegetable, he
would quote Scripture: “_Paul may plant and Apollos may water_;” all
blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or
untimely frosts.

There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his
favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive.  Their
sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had taken hold
of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot
say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some
recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood.  Nevertheless, he
was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal
dignity to mingle in any active office towards them.  But he could stand
by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest
that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the
cries of the distressed assistant.  In regard to bees, he was rather a
man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the
bees for text.  “_They are indeed wonderfu’ creatures_, _mem_,” he said
once.  “_They just mind me o’ what the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon—and
I think she said it wi’ a sigh_,—‘_The half of it hath not been told unto
me_.’”

As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read.  Like the old Covenanters,
of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred
quotations; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon
most deeply.  To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns,
are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding
themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the
very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational
series.  This was Robert’s position.  All day long he had dreamed of the
Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel
ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very
expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke without
some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the
merest trivialities of talk.  But the influence of the Bible did not stop
here.  There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and ready store of
reference.  He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love: he interposed
between man and wife: he threw himself between the angry, touching his
hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds
from everybody but himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between
official execution and wanton sport.  His mistress telling him one day to
put some ferns into his master’s particular corner, and adding, “Though,
indeed, Robert, he doesn’t deserve them, for he wouldn’t help me to
gather them,” “_Eh_, _mem_,” replies Robert, “_But I wouldnae say that_,
_for I think he’s just a most deservin’ gentleman_.”  Again, two of our
friends, who were on intimate terms, and accustomed to use language to
each other, somewhat without the bounds of the parliamentary, happened to
differ about the position of a seat in the garden.  The discussion, as
was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on
both sides.  Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a
day was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit—every
one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel
seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his conscience
would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that
the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost
tearful entreaty: “_Eh_, _but_, _gentlemen_, _I wad hae nae mair words
about it_!”  One thing was noticeable about Robert’s religion: it was
neither dogmatic nor sectarian.  He never expatiated (at least, in my
hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody
else.  I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and
Mahometans as considerably out of it; I don’t believe he had any sympathy
for Prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little
sore about Free-Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these
views, never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the
belief or practice of anybody.  Now all this is not generally
characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches militant with
a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one against the
other, and missionaries the one to the other.  Perhaps Robert’s
originally tender heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his
solitary and pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a
more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen
humanity; and the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his
spirit,

    “Annihilating all that’s made
    To a green thought in a green shade.”

But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of
his innocent and living piety.  I had meant to tell of his cottage, with
the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that he
had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically:  “_He was
real pleased wi’ it at first_, _but I think he’s got a kind o’ tired o’
it now_”—the son being then a man of about forty.  But I will let all
these pass.  “’Tis more significant: he’s dead.”  The earth, that he had
digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the
flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new
and nearer way.  A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to
honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour
of its kind.  “Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not
one of them falleth to the ground.”

Yes, he is dead.  But the kings did not rise in the place of death to
greet him “with taunting proverbs” as they rose to greet the haughty
Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant
of God.



CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL


To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light
upon the past.  As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton’s, the
image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central
features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only
deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places.  So may
some cadet of Royal Écossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard
about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the
Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides
upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of
peat-smoke.  And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men.
This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is
confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a
child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the lilied lowland
waters of that shire.  But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in
themselves—or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so—and their sound
and colour dwell for ever in the memory.  How often and willingly do I
not look again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or
Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden
burn that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie!  I think shame to
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if
I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting
Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leith
of the many and well-named mills—Bell’s Mills, and Canon Mills, and
Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its
smallness, that nameless trickle that springs in the green bosom of
Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and
threads the moss under the Shearer’s Knowe, and makes one pool there,
overhung by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of the
sea-beholding city in the plain.  From many points in the moss you may
see at one glance its whole course and that of all its tributaries; the
geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sitting
down, and not yet begin to be breathed; Shearer’s Knowe and Halkerside
are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as
names are squandered (it would seem to the in-expert, in superfluity)
upon these upland sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge
of the toy river; it would take it an appreciable time to fill your
morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the
moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain
_genius loci_, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores;
and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire
my pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.

John Todd, when I knew him, was already “the oldest herd on the
Pentlands,” and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,
sheep-collecting life.  He remembered the droving days, when the drove
roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged
thoroughfares.  He had himself often marched flocks into England,
sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a
rough business not without danger.  The drove roads lay apart from
habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea
fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the
one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule.  Crimes
were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of
which offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the
courts of justice.  John, in those days, was at least once attacked,—by
two men after his watch,—and at least once, betrayed by his habitual
anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic
prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more
heard of in that quarter.  When I knew him, his life had fallen in
quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and
the inroads of pedestrians from town.  But for a man of his propensity to
wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far up the
hill, he would wake the “toun” with the sound of his shoutings; and in
the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night.  This
wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the
Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which
men stood of John a touch of something legendary.  For my own part, he
was at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his
natural abhorrence.  It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing
him only by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me
“c’way oot amang the sheep.”  The quietest recesses of the hill harboured
this ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing
dragoons.  Little by little we dropped into civilities; his hail at sight
of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met
but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with
the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the
ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone
in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to “give me
a cry” over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and
for me to overtake and bear him company.

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in
ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied,
friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish.  He
laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw,
hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock.  His face was
permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like
a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent
anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed
with perpetual vigilance.  He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I
ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise
to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new
acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking
a little before me, “beard on shoulder,” the plaid hanging loosely about
him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by
that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade.
I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking Scotch and
talking English seem incomparable acts.  He touched on nothing at least,
but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he
spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a
colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.  The clans of sheep
with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly
killings and purchases, each must be proportionally thinned and
strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the weather,
the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the
exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present so humanly, and
with so much old experience and living gusto, that weariness was
excluded.  And in the midst he would suddenly straighten his bowed back,
the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his
voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the
use of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the
hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and raised
faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and spread
themselves upon the indicated circuit.  It used to fill me with wonder
how they could follow and retain so long a story.  But John denied these
creatures all intelligence; they were the constant butt of his passion
and contempt; it was just possible to work with the like of them, he
said,—not more than possible.  And then he would expand upon the subject
of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one really good dog
that he had himself possessed.  He had been offered forty pounds for it;
but a good collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a
“herd;” he did the herd’s work for him.  “As for the like of them!” he
would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his assistants.

Once—I translate John’s Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born
_Britannis in montibus_, indeed, but alas! _inerudito sæculo_—once, in
the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on
the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost.  This was a reproach
to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their
misfortune.  Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had
found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for
restitution.  But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights.
“How were they marked?” he asked; and since John had bought right and
left from many sellers and had no notion of the marks—“Very well,” said
the farmer, “then it’s only right that I should keep them.”—“Well,” said
John, “it’s a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, will
ye let me have them?”  The farmer was honest as well as hard, and besides
I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had all the sheep upon
his farm into one large park, and turned John’s dog into their midst.
That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he knew that John and he
had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost them about
Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord knows how, unless by
listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and without
pause or blunder singled out, first one and then another, the two waifs.
It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused.  And the
shepherd and his dog—what do I say? the true shepherd and his man—set off
together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and “smiled to ither” all the
way home, with the two recovered ones before them.  So far, so good; but
intelligence may be abused.  The dog, as he is by little man’s inferior
in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and John had another
collie tale of quite a different complexion.  At the foot of the moss
behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) there is a scrog of low
wood and a pool with a dam for washing sheep.  John was one day lying
under a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a collie on the far
hillside skulking down through the deepest of the heather with obtrusive
stealth.  He knew the dog; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner
from quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him
masterfully steering flocks to market.  But what did the practitioner so
far from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the
pool?—for it was towards the pool that he was heading.  John lay the
closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth upon the
margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in
and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, and then (but now openly
and with tail in air) strike homeward over the hills.  That same night
word was sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken up from
where he lay, all innocence, before the fire, was had out to a dykeside
and promptly shot; for alas! he was that foulest of criminals under
trust, a sheep-eater; and it was from the maculation of sheep’s blood
that he had come so far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk
Yetton.

A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in
which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it
ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or
written.  The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that
writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who
reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have
never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors
rejoicing in past deeds.  Thus novels begin to touch not the fine
_dilettanti_ but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak
of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and
begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth;
and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields
the shepherd’s crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance
into a near neighbourhood with epic.  These aged things have on them the
dew of man’s morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the
semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the
race.  A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a
thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once
the fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse
us to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past.  There is a
certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be
known to set before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at
first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant
afternoon, to munch his berries—his wife, that accomplished lady,
squatting by his side: his name I never heard, but he is often described
as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for recognition.  Each has his own
tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all
our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our
civilised nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to
that which would have moved our common ancestor, all must obediently
thrill.

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had one
for an ascendant who has largely moulded me.  But yet I think I owe my
taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of John
Todd.  He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all
things live.  It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep
upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy
aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I
never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on
the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there
like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black
dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly
harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain’s
eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of
bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker.  It is thus that I
still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not
far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking
hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile,
standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch
of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.



CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE


I have named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty
Water of Leith.  Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the
choice of a point of view is easy to me.  It should be at a certain
water-door, embowered in shrubbery.  The river is there dammed back for
the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and
darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold;
and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill
just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black
heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other
mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface.  Or so it was when I
was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been
busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on
many and impossible conditions.  I must choose, as well as the point of
view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be
exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb
to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as
low as Styx.  And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may
be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds;—and the year
of grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old
manse and its inhabitants unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces
by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church and the terrace
of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall
“spunkies” might be seen to dance at least by children; flower-plots
lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a
pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with
an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water everywhere, and the
sound of mills—the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain; the
birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods
pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the
midst of this, the manse.  I see it, by the standard of my childish
stature, as a great and roomy house.  In truth, it was not so large as I
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is
difficult to suppose that it was healthful.  Yet a large family of
stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came to man
and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the
earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with
outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of
the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East.  The dullest
could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign
places: a well-beloved house—its image fondly dwelt on by many
travellers.

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men.  I read him,
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a man
of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the display of
what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a lover of his life and
innocent habits to the end.  We children admired him: partly for his
beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned
for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn
light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers,
in the pulpit.  But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy,
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of
terror.  When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or letters
to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a library of
bloodless books—or so they seemed in those days, although I have some of
them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read them; and these
lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations.  But
the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured
and dear to young eyes.  I cannot depict (for I have no such passions
now) the greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to
say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at
the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward
me with an Indian picture.

    “Thy foot He’ll not let slide, nor will
       He slumber that thee keeps,”

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to set
in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task in
recitation that really merited reward.  And I must suppose the old man
thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for
he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and
gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we
were clerk and parson.  I was struck by this reception into so tender a
surprise that I forgot my disappointment.  And indeed the hope was one of
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon
reality.  Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip
himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of his absent
sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon me.  He
had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had
fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod in the last century; and
his ways were still Spartan for the young.  The last word I heard upon
his lips was in this Spartan key.  He had over-walked in the teeth of an
east wind, and was now near the end of his many days.  He sat by the
dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a
somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old
Scotch medicine, Dr. Gregory’s powder.  Now that remedy, as the work of a
near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the
imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate.  The old gentleman had
taken it with a wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with perfect
simplicity, like a child’s, munching a “barley-sugar kiss.”  But when my
aunt, having the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me share in
the sweets, he interfered at once.  I had had no Gregory; then I should
have no barley-sugar kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation.  And
just then the phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door—for such was
our unlordly fashion—I was taken for the last time from the presence of
my grandfather.

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister.  I must
suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I,
though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them.
He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it
in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the
quest.  He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have
been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded
I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so.  He made
embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kind of work I never
made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of
knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.
He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract.  He had
chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may possibly
inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence.  Try
as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor; and all
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my
blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and
centre of my being.  In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love
of mills—or had I an ancestor a miller?—and a kindness for the
neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry—or had
I an ancestor a sexton?  But what of the garden where he played
himself?—for that, too, was a scene of my education.  Some part of me
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green
avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still
a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed,
perhaps, by Dr. Adam.  The house where I spent my youth was not yet
thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its
site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener’s.  All this I
had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me.  I
have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our
first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of
Burns’s Dr. Smith—“Smith opens out his cauld harangues.”  I have
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at
first hand.

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this _homunculus_ or
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr.
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other _homunculos_ or
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors.  These were of a lower
order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly.  But as I went to
college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking
down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron;—we may have had a
rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I know
not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion, we
may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flower-garden and seen
a certain weaver plying his shuttle.  And these were all kinsmen of mine
upon the other side; and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half
of my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we
went by to college.  Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the
young student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated.  It would
not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil
man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a
lighthouse-engineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, in the
fulness of time, should wed; and some portion of that student himself
should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and
it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our _homunculos_ and be reminded of our antenatal
lives.  Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.  Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at
Peckham?  It was not always so.  And though to-day I am only a man of
letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St.
Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and
shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the ’15; I was in a West
India merchant’s office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie’s, and
managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt’s; I was with my
engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the
_Pirate_ and the _Lord of the Isles_; I was with him, too, on the Bell
Rock, in the fog, when the _Smeaton_ had drifted from her moorings, and
the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he
must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible words;
and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a “thrawe,” and his
workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved
reading in his Bible—or affecting to read—till one after another slunk
back with confusion of countenance to their engineer.  Yes, parts of me
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.  And
away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be
traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants:
Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable)
system of descent by females, fleërs from before the legions of Agricola,
marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldæan plateaus; and,
furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see peering through the
disparted branches?  What sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher of
nuts, concludes my pedigree?  Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with
me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in
his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an
aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,
like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts
awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be
distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the
old divine.



CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET


Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manœuvre, or murder to be done, on the
playground of their youth.  But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using.  After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind’s eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired.  _Glück und Unglück
wird Gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each.  So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid.  I used one
but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once
waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on
both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an
island.  Two of my puppets lay there a summer’s day, hearkening to the
shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the gray old
garrison upon the neighbouring hill.  And this was, I think, done
rightly: the place was rightly peopled—and now belongs not to me but to
my puppets—for a time at least.  In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow
faint; the original memory swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more
lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in
nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and
wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be
pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it
into art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me.
I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and later on, threw upon
its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its
tumbled boulders, the hero of another.  The ink is not yet faded; the
sound of the sentences is still in my mind’s ear; and I am under a spell
to write of that island again.



I


The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the
Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which you may see the
isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the other, where you shall be
able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the breakers running white on many
sunken rocks.  I first saw it, or first remembered seeing it, framed in
the round bull’s-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its
shores like the waters of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early
morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks.  There stood upon
it, in these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached
by a pier of wreckwood.  It must have been very early, for it was then
summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; but even
at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me
over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by
the pier.  The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship’s
boats; rowed deep into Fiddler’s Hole, sounding as we went; and having
taken stock of all possible accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet
as the scene of operations.  For it was no accident that had brought the
lighthouse steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid.  Fifteen miles away
to seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers,
the outpost of the Torran reefs.  Here was a tower to be built, and a
star lighted, for the conduct of seamen.  But as the rock was small, and
hard of access, and far from land, the work would be one of years; and my
father was now looking for a shore station, where the stones might be
quarried and dressed, the men live, and the tender, with some degree of
safety, lie at anchor.

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam Bough and
I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a
beautiful, clear, northern summer eve.  And behold! there was now a pier
of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling-cranes, a street
of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for
the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together
experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside
where granite was quarried.  In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings.
All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and
even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in
the dark settlement and could light the pipe of any midnight muser.  It
was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of
the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet.  All about the green
compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday’s best, walking with
those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking
small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of
the gulls.  And it was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they
were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the
congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; and to
hear the singing of the psalms, “the chapters,” the inevitable Spurgeon’s
sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse prayer.

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed
to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the
very early morning; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More,
the tender would steam out of the bay.  Over fifteen sea-miles of the
great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trailing at her tail a
brace of wallowing stone-lighters.  The open ocean widened upon either
board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon,
before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the
rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack
on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their
arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea.  An ugly
reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and
pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer
without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval
nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and
alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug.
No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself,
that here ran like a mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for
ever, and ever and again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on
the rock itself.  Times were different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew,
and the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and
Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their
iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the sprays.  Fear sat
with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in
anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its
pillars quivered and sprang under the blow.  It was then that the foreman
builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of
undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human
minstrelsy amid the music of the storm.  But it was in sunshine only that
I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer
afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an
enchanted sea; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo,
riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose
on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly.  The lighthouse
settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the top of the first
brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face of
things unchanged by any of man’s doings.  Here was no living presence,
save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, gray, rain-beaten ram
that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the
haunting and the piping of the gulls.  It was older than man; it was
found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba’s
priests.  The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the
boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the
iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden
springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the
isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
with scarce a difference.  I steeped myself in open air and in past ages.

    “Delightful would it be to me to be in _Uchd Ailiun_
       On the pinnacle of a rock,
    That I might often see
       The face of the ocean;
    That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
       Source of happiness;
    That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
       Upon the rocks:
    At times at work without compulsion—
       This would be delightful;
    At times plucking dulse from the rocks
       At times at fishing.”

So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred
years before.  And so might I have sung of Earraid.

And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday.  In that year cannon were roaring
for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit in my isle (I
call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the
loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men’s wounds, and
the weariness of their marching.  And I would think too of that other war
which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man: the unsparing
war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy years,
dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the
poor rewards.  It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as with
trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and
beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a
childish bather on the beach.

There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much
together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and
spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the roost.  But the most
part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures;
wondering together what should there befall us; hearing with surprise the
sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth.  As far, and as
hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now
to look backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath
submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our necks
under the yoke of destiny.  I met my old companion but the other day; I
cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon my part, I was
wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and sedentary
in the world; and how much we had gained, and how much we had lost, to
attain to that composure; and which had been upon the whole our best
estate: when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some experience,
or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.



CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON—CIVIL ENGINEER


The death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general
reader.  His service to mankind took on forms of which the public knows
little and understands less.  He came seldom to London, and then only as
a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced provincial; putting
up for years at the same hotel where his father had gone before him;
faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same
theatre, chosen simply for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out.
He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more beloved in
Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever he
went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, humorous
vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up friends and
admirers.  But to the general public and the world of London, except
about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained unknown.  All the
time, his lights were in every part of the world, guiding the mariner;
his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and
the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was a world centre for
that branch of applied science; in Germany, he had been called “the
Nestor of lighthouse illumination”; even in France, where his claims were
long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition,
recognised and medalled.  And to show by one instance the inverted nature
of his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world, a
friend of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main, and was
asked by a Peruvian if he “knew Mr. Stevenson the author, because his
works were much esteemed in Peru?”  My friend supposed the reference was
to the writer of tales; but the Peruvian had never heard of _Dr. Jekyll_;
what he had in his eye, what was esteemed in Peru, where the volumes of
the engineer.

Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818, the grandson of
Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of
Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David
Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the
engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or
conjointly, that office.  The Bell Rock, his father’s great triumph, was
finished before he was born; but he served under his brother Alan in the
building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and,
in conjunction with his brother David, he added two—the Chickens and Dhu
Heartach—to that small number of man’s extreme outposts in the ocean.  Of
shore lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer than
twenty-seven; of beacons, {84} about twenty-five.  Many harbours were
successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster of
my father’s life, was a failure; the sea proved too strong for man’s
arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale
hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in that
bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-o’-Groat’s.  In the
improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of
practice over both England and Scotland, nor had any British engineer
anything approaching their experience.

It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my
father’s scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these proceeded
from, and acted back upon, his daily business.  Thus it was as a harbour
engineer that he became interested in the propagation and reduction of
waves; a difficult subject in regard to which he has left behind him much
suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results.  Storms were his
sworn adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that he
approached that of meteorology at large.  Many who knew him not
otherwise, knew—perhaps have in their gardens—his louvre-boarded screen
for instruments.  But the great achievement of his life was, of course,
in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination.  Fresnel had done much;
Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle that still
seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and brought to a
comparable perfection the revolving light, a not unnatural jealousy and
much painful controversy rose in France.  It had its hour; and, as I have
told already, even in France it has blown by.  Had it not, it would have
mattered the less, since all through his life my father continued to
justify his claim by fresh advances.  New apparatus for lights in new
situations was continually being designed with the same unwearied search
after perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and though the
holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant
contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much later
condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications.  The number
and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the name of
one of mankind’s benefactors.  In all parts of the world a safer landfall
awaits the mariner.  Two things must be said: and, first, that Thomas
Stevenson was no mathematician.  Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of
optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration led him to just
conclusions; but to calculate the necessary formulæ for the instruments
he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help
of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend,
_emeritus_ Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his later friend,
Professor P. G. Tait.  It is a curious enough circumstance, and a great
encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have succeeded
in one of the most abstract and arduous walks of applied science.  The
second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and only
particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and importance of
his inventions: holding as the Stevensons did a Government appointment
they regarded their original work as something due already to the nation,
and none of them has ever taken out a patent.  It is another cause of the
comparative obscurity of the name: for a patent not only brings in money,
it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father’s instruments enter
anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed anonymously over
in a hundred reports, where the least considerable patent would stand out
and tell its author’s story.

But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what we
now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion.  He was a man of a
somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was
wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound
essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the
most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately
attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of
temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.
Yet he was a wise adviser; many men, and these not inconsiderable, took
counsel with him habitually.  “I sat at his feet,” writes one of these,
“when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set in thought and
the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no man could add to the
worth of the conclusion.”  He had excellent taste, though whimsical and
partial; collected old furniture and delighted specially in sunflowers
long before the days of Mr. Wilde; took a lasting pleasure in prints and
pictures; was a devout admirer of Thomson of Duddingston at a time when
few shared the taste; and though he read little, was constant to his
favourite books.  He had never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught
himself after he had left school, where he was a mere consistent idler:
happily, I say, for Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief
authors.  The first he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly,
keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys.
Another old theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands.  When
he was indisposed, he had two books, _Guy Mannering_ and _The Parent’s
Assistant_, of which he never wearied.  He was a strong Conservative, or,
as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; except in so far as his views
were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women.  He was
actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a
divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same
sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,
founded and largely supported by himself.  This was but one of the many
channels of his public generosity; his private was equally unstrained.
The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense
of his own) and to which he bore a clansman’s loyalty, profited often by
his time and money; and though, from a morbid sense of his own
unworthiness, he would never consent to be an office-bearer, his advice
was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees.  What he
perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence
of Christianity; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson
Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, too, were
his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death.  He had
never accepted the conditions of man’s life or his own character; and his
inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy.  Cases of
conscience were sometimes grievous to him, and that delicate employment
of a scientific witness cost him many qualms.  But he found respite from
these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong study of natural
science, in the society of those he loved, and in his daily walks, which
now would carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and
now keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another,
and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed.  His talk,
compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and
clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a perpetual delight
to all who knew him before the clouds began to settle on his mind.  His
use of language was both just and picturesque; and when at the beginning
of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange
and painful to hear him reject one word after another as inadequate, and
at length desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather
than finish it without propriety.  It was perhaps another Celtic trait
that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to
passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in
words and gestures.  Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and
broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races.  For all
these emotional extremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of his
character, he had upon the whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate
in his death, which at the last came to him unaware.



CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS


    Sir, we had a good talk.—JOHNSON.

    As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
    silence.—FRANKLIN.

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of
time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international
congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public
errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by
day, a little nearer to the right.  No measure comes before Parliament
but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no
book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.
Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good
talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom
and effect.  There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing
experience and according conclusions.  Talk is fluid, tentative,
continually “in further search and progress”; while written words remain
fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and
preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.  Last and
chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a
fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a
spade.  Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit.  It
cannot, even if it would, become merely æsthetic or merely classical like
literature.  A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in
laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the
open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of
school.  And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and
ourselves.  In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his
chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of
two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures.  It costs
nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds
and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost
any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
fall whether in love or enmity.  It is still by force of body, or power
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.  Men and
women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists;
the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body;
and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation.  All sluggish and
pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and
every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by
some element of competition.  Now, the relation that has the least root
in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends.  Talk
is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.  It is in talk
alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable
counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and the
sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking.  Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the
quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood.  Not
that the talker has any of the hunter’s pride, though he has all and more
than all his ardour.  The genuine artist follows the stream of
conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying
where he fails to “kill.”  He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is
rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing
prospects of the truth that are the best of education.  There is nothing
in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow
it beyond the promptings of desire.  Indeed, there are few subjects; and
so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be
reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other
people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.  Wherever
talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines.  The
theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts and
justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and opinions, and
brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of
his adversary.  All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the
laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other.  It is
from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare
to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other’s eyes to such
a vast proportion.  For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the
limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,
musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to be.
So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace
of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of the
world’s dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos.  And when
the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and
admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height
of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.  I remember,
in the _entr’acte_ of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the
sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and
as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there
and evaporate _The Flying Dutchman_ (for it was that I had been hearing)
with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride; and the
noises of the city, voices, bells and marching feet, fell together in my
ears like a symphonious orchestra.  In the same way, the excitement of a
good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot
within you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming
around you with the colours of the sunset.

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
rather than dig mines into geological strata.  Masses of experience,
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in
hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental
elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is
fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive.  Such argument as is
proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing.  Talk should
proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository.  It should
keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of
men, at the level where history, fiction and experience intersect and
illuminate each other.  I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; but
conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, instead of
words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed in the
live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to corroborate the story
in the face.  Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to
speak of generalities—the bad, the good, the miser, and all the
characters of Theophrastus—and call up other men, by anecdote or
instance, in their very trick and feature; or trading on a common
knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of
life.  Communication is no longer by words, but by the instancing of
whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of history,
in bulk.  That which is understood excels that which is spoken in
quantity and quality alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change
hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort
the most obscure and intricate thoughts.  Strangers who have a large
common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the
grapple of genuine converse.  If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo
and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave
generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that
embrace the widest range of facts.  A few pleasures bear discussion for
their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically
human; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees.  A
technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art
or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such
rare and happy persons as both know and love their business.  No human
being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes
me suspect we hear too much of it in literature.  The weather is regarded
as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics.  And yet the
weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in
language, and far more human both in import and suggestion than the
stable features of the landscape.  Sailors and shepherds, and the people
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
excitingly presented in literature.  But the tendency of all living talk
draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity.  Talk is a
creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last
resort is still in a discussion on morals.  That is the heroic form of
gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions; but still gossip,
because it turns on personalities.  You can keep no men long, nor
Scotchmen at all, off moral or theological discussion.  These are to all
the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody’s technicalities;
the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which they
express their judgments.  I knew three young men who walked together
daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet
scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects—theology and love.
And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would have
granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions.

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking.  That is not the profit.  The profit is in the
exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on
any subject, we review our state and history in life.  From time to time,
however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an
exploration.  A point arises; the question takes a problematical, a
baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively
presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this they strive
with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first
utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a
shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold
they are agreed.  Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat’s
cradle having been wound and unwound out of words.  But the sense of
joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting.  And in the life
of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far
apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth;
and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.

There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to
fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable
man.  It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain
proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable
adversaries.  They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen
questing after elements of truth.  Neither must they be boys to be
instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on
equal terms.  We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for
without that, eager talk becomes a torture.  But we do not wish to reach
it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure
lies.

The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel’d
Jack.  I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely the
possible ingredients of converse.  In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man
necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it: Jack is that
madman.  I know not which is more remarkable; the insane lucidity of his
conclusions the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of
method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated,
mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god.  He doubles like the
serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, transmigrates
bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and
with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty
before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror.  It is my common
practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence
of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration,
as at length shall spur him up in its defence.  In a moment he
transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck
philosophy justifies the act in question.  I can fancy nothing to compare
with the _vim_ of these impersonations, the strange scale of language,
flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell—

    “As fast as a musician scatters sounds
    Out of an instrument”

the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant
particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos,
each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder
of their combination.  A talker of a different calibre, though belonging
to the same school, is Burly.  Burly is a man of a great presence; he
commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of
character than most men.  It has been said of him that his presence could
be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been
said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction.
There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly’s manner of talk which
suits well enough with this impression.  He will roar you down, he will
bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony;
and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and
receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol’d, and the welkin rung
for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring
torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a
glow of mutual admiration.  The outcry only serves to make your final
union the more unexpected and precious.  Throughout there has been
perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not
always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions.  You
have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with
Spring-Heel’d Jack; who may at any moment turn his powers of
transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and
then furiously fall on you for holding it.  These, at least, are my two
favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers.  This argues
that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we
love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot,
in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full
measure of the dust and exertion of battle.  Both these men can be beat
from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard
adventure, worth attempting.  With both you can pass days in an enchanted
country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own; live a
life apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real existence; and
come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a dream,
to find the east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old
battered city still around you.  Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the
far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic
prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a
light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at
the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the same humour and
artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts
of talk and thunderclaps of contradiction.

Cockshot {100} is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has
been meat and drink to me for many a long evening.  His manner is dry,
brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.  The point
about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit.  You can propound
nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-made, or will have one
instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in
your presence.  “Let me see,” he will say.  “Give me a moment.  I
_should_ have some theory for that.”  A blither spectacle than the vigour
with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy.  He is
possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and
bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and
lively effort.  He has, in theorising, a compass, an art; what I would
call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see
the fun of the thing.  You are not bound, and no more is he, to place
your faith in these brand-new opinions.  But some of them are right
enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock shy—as
when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an
hour’s diversion ere it sinks.  Whichever they are, serious opinions or
humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable
wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a
man.  He knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the
sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like
a thorough “glutton,” and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his
adversary.  Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.
Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim.  His talk is like the
driest of all imaginable dry champagnes.  Sleight of hand and inimitable
quickness are the qualities by which he lives.  Athelred, on the other
hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow
nature thinking aloud.  He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine
in conversation.  You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory
jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the
end.  And there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in
the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the
result, the works as well as the dial of the clock.  Withal he has his
hours of inspiration.  Apt words come to him as if by accident, and,
coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the
more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.  There
are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of
the language; you would think he must have worn the words next his skin
and slept with them.  Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things
that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of
thought.  I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he has been
wielding the broad-axe; and between us, on this unequal division, many a
specious fallacy has fallen.  I have known him to battle the same
question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk,
constantly applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave
intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an
unfair advantage of the facts.  Jack at a given moment, when arising, as
it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom
he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while
Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits
over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still
faithfully contending with his doubts.

Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion studied
in the “dry light” of prose.  Indirectly and as if against his will the
same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk of
Opalstein.  His various and exotic knowledge, complete although unready
sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative flow of language, fit him out
to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with
me—_proxime accessit_, I should say.  He sings the praises of the earth
and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight,
serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his
tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes.
But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the
barking of the Sphinx.  Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his
Horatian humours.  His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world
for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double
orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in
the distance.  He is not truly reconciled either with life or with
himself; and this instant war in his members sometimes divides the man’s
attention.  He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender
himself in conversation.  He brings into the talk other thoughts than
those which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on
something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite forget
himself.  Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an occasional
unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one day giving too
much, and the next, when they are wary out of season, giving perhaps too
little.  Purcel is in another class from any I have mentioned.  He is no
debater, but appears in conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct
characters, one of which I admire and fear, and the other love.  In the
first, he is radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly
hilltop, and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours.
He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of
interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished
that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the sensitive are
silenced.  True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder,
vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold
so steady an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason
out of a score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he
unbends into a strain of graceful gossip, singing like the fireside
kettle.  In these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the
true Queen Anne.  I know another person who attains, in his moments, to
the insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve
wrote; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric,
for there is none, alas! to give him answer.

One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the
sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of
common friends.  To have their proper weight they should appear in a
biography, and with the portrait of the speaker.  Good talk is dramatic;
it is like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent
himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk
where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you
were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the
greatest loss in significance and perspicuity.  It is for this reason
that talk depends so wholly on our company.  We should like to introduce
Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk
with Cordelia seems even painful.  Most of us, by the Protean quality of
man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes
out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren
of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our
being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have
it, and to be grateful for forever.



CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS {105}


II


In the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and there
was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely luminous
and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the evening shared
by ruminating friends.  There is something, aside from personal
preference, to be alleged in support of this omission.  Those who are no
chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a ground
in reason for their choice.  They get little rest indeed; but restfulness
is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert, and
it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil.  On the other hand,
they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and others; they have in
a high degree the fencer’s pleasure in dexterity displayed and proved;
what they get they get upon life’s terms, paying for it as they go; and
once the talk is launched, they are assured of honest dealing from an
adversary eager like themselves.  The aboriginal man within us, the
cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and
berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old
primæval days upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life
from the comfortable fictions of the civilised.  And if it be delightful
to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother,
the conscientious gentleman I feel never quite sure of your urbane and
smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man’s vanities in silence, suffer
him to encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and send him forth again,
not merely contemned for the moment, but radically more contemptible than
when he entered.  But if I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my
opposite, bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure to have its ears
rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate.  He will not spare me
when we differ; he will not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face.

For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered society,
the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the admired
remark, the flutter of affectionate approval.  They demand more
atmosphere and exercise; “a gale upon their spirits,” as our pious
ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an
uproarious Valhalla.  And I suspect that the choice, given their
character and faults, is one to be defended.  The purely wise are
silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around
them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat in the
wrong, they digest the reproof like a thrashing, and make better
intellectual blood.  They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a
glance reminds them of the great eternal law.  But it is not so with all.
Others in conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than
increase of knowledge or clarity of thought.  The drama, not the
philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity.  Even
when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may
call human scenery along the road they follow.  They dwell in the heart
of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what
delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides,
their interest riveted on people, living, loving, talking, tangible
people.  To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very
pale and ghostly.  By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance,
floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow,
he is brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed
to him.  His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively conscious
of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear
nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness of
things and take himself in earnest for a god.  Talk might be to such an
one the very way of moral ruin; the school where he might learn to be at
once intolerable and ridiculous.

This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose.  And for
persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak with
their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that must be
proved, but in station.  If they cannot find a friend to bully them for
their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some one so far
below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy may be
particularly exercised.

The best teachers are the aged.  To the old our mouths are always partly
closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen.  They sit above
our heads, on life’s raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and
pity.  A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in
their manner—which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a
good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle
class—serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add
a distinction to gray hairs.  But their superiority is founded more
deeply than by outward marks or gestures.  They are before us in the
march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have
battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held
their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and
harbour.  It may be we have been struck with one of fortune’s darts; we
can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed.  Yet long before we
were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or
woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies us upon our inattention,
sitting composed in the holy evening of man’s life, in the clear shining
after rain.  We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse,
like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under
the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of
contented elders, look forward and take patience.  Fear shrinks before
them “like a thing reproved,” not the flitting and ineffectual fear of
death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and
revenges of life.  Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in
the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred
faces are more eloquent and tell another story.  Where they have gone, we
will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken,
we also, God helping us, will make a shift to bear.

Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their minds
are stored with antidotes, wisdom’s simples, plain considerations
overlooked by youth.  They have matter to communicate, be they never so
stupid.  Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;
classic in virtue of the speaker’s detachment, studded, like a book of
travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt.  In virtue, I
have said, of the speaker’s detachment,—and this is why, of two old men,
the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible
authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests
and remain still young.  Thus I have known two young men great friends;
each swore by the other’s father; the father of each swore by the other
lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were perpetually by the ears.
This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy.

The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent
and the garrulous anecdotic.  The last is perhaps what we look for; it is
perhaps the more instructive.  An old gentleman, well on in years, sits
handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning
experience with reverted eye; and chirping and smiling, communicates the
accidents and reads the lesson of his long career.  Opinions are
strengthened, indeed, but they are also weeded out in the course of
years.  What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran
in his hermitage, what still ministers to his content, what still
quickens his old honest heart—these are “the real long-lived things” that
Whitman tells us to prefer.  Where youth agrees with age, not where they
differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to
beat in tune with his gray-bearded teacher’s that a lesson may be
learned.  I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he is now
gathered to his stock—Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and author of
an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished.  Whether he was
originally big or little is more than I can guess.  When I knew him he
was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a
stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him
hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not
for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin—and for
that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the
traditions of his life.  You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by
Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in
the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness,
and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities.  You could
not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shakespeare and
Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together; but the
parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he
was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits.
His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it.
On his last voyage as Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at
sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling
the while with a proper vanity in his achievement.  He had a habit of
eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a
little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival
from some former stage of bodily portliness.  Of yore, when he was a
great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with
these minute guns his allocutions to the bench.  His humour was perfectly
equable, set beyond the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel
might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when
I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor’s _Life
of Christ_ and greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality
of manner.  His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a decade.
He had begun life, under his mother’s influence, as an admirer of Junius,
but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke.  He
cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English;
never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign
tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be
shamed: the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.
Scott was too new for him; he had known the author—known him, too, for a
Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a
trouble.  He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was
proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of Shakespearian
revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edinburgh
Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare’s fairy pieces with great
scenic display.  A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the last
years of his life by a conversation with two young lads, revivalists
“H’m,” he would say—“new to me.  I have had—h’m—no such experience.”  It
struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest,
that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing,
should hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own
weapons that he had fought the battle of life with,—“and—h’m—not
understand.”  In this wise and graceful attitude he did justice to
himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and recognised
their limits without anger or alarm.  His last recorded remark, on the
last night of his life, was after he had been arguing against Calvinism
with his minister and was interrupted by an intolerable pang.  “After
all,” he said, “of all the ’isms, I know none so bad as rheumatism.”  My
own last sight of him was some time before, when we dined together at an
inn; he had been on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part
of his existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever
soiled his lips with slang—a thing he loathed.  We were both Roberts; and
as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle: “We are
just what you would call two bob.”  He offered me port, I remember, as
the proper milk of youth; spoke of “twenty-shilling notes”; and
throughout the meal was full of old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like
an ancient boy on a holiday.  But what I recall chiefly was his
confession that he had never read _Othello_ to an end.  Shakespeare was
his continual study.  He loved nothing better than to display his
knowledge and memory by adducing parallel passages from Shakespeare,
passages where the same word was employed, or the same idea differently
treated.  But _Othello_ had beaten him.  “That noble gentleman and that
noble lady—h’m—too painful for me.”  The same night the hoardings were
covered with posters, “Burlesque of _Othello_,” and the contrast blazed
up in my mind like a bonfire.  An unforgettable look it gave me into that
kind man’s soul.  His acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious
education.  All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room
beside his gouty footstool.  He was a piece of good advice; he was
himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk.  Nor
could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy,
fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a life so honest
and composed; a soul like an ancient violin, so subdued to harmony,
responding to a touch in music—as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter
chatting at the eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and
gentle.

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather hearers
than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical
attention.  To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we
must go to old ladies.  Women are better hearers than men, to begin with;
they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile
vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even
from the oldest man in the way of biting comment.  Biting comment is the
chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business.  The old
lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after
years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.
If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity
of age.  But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened
to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, and from time to time
chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe.  It
requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal
these stunning corrections among the coxcombs of the young.  The pill is
disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment—if you had
not pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a personal affair—a
hyphen, _a trait d’union_, between you and your censor; age’s
philandering, for her pleasure and your good.  Incontestably the young
man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick
with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile.  The
correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed,
and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye.  If a man were made of
gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.  But when the word
is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any good-humour at all may
pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his
soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a
dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking
readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.

There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened,
who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of
genial cruelty.  Still there are some—and I doubt if there be any man who
can return the compliment.  The class of man represented by Vernon
Whitford in _The Egoist_ says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it
stockishly.  Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and
instructive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a
man of honour; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he
remorsefully considers “its astonishing dryness.”  He is the best of men,
but the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.
Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the falseness of
their position in life.  They can retire into the fortified camp of the
proprieties.  They can touch a subject and suppress it.  The most adroit
employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they
wear gloves when they shake hands.  But a man has the full responsibility
of his freedom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without
rudeness, must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom
left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less
dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of Vernon
Whitford.

But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not sit
throned on infirmities like the old; they are suitors as well as
sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to
follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into
something unworthy of the name.  The desire to please, to shine with a
certain softness of lustre and to draw a fascinating picture of oneself,
banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is
humorous.  As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to
flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the
commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the
commercing of eyes.  But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided,
and a man and woman converse equally and honestly, something in their
nature or their education falsifies the strain.  An instinct prompts them
to agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ.  Should they
neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, they find
themselves in different hemispheres.  About any point of business or
conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a woman will speak and
listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with
candour and logical honesty.  But if the subject of debate be something
in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally,
then may the male debater instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason,
adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him
nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it)
she will repeat at the end.  Hence, at the very junctures when a talk
between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear
fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution.  The point of
difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman,
under a shower of irrelevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the
discreet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward to
the nearest point of safety.  And this sort of prestidigitation, juggling
the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced with safety
in an altered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room
queens.

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice
and for our sins.  The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them
from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;
their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance;
their managing arts—the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured
barbarians—are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.
It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine
relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared.  In the garden, on the
road or the hillside, or _tête-à-tête_ and apart from interruptions,
occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and nowhere
more often than in married life.  Marriage is one long conversation,
chequered by disputes.  The disputes are valueless; they but ingrain the
difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her
colours to the mast.  But in the intervals, almost unconsciously and with
no desire to shine, the whole material of life is turned over and over,
ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt
their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without
sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.



CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS


The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great
extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man.  This animal,
in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares
the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant.  But the
potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character
of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him
in a byword.  Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have
exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below
exaggerations.  And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent
has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond
of dogs “but in their proper place”; who say “poo’ fellow, poo’ fellow,”
and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist
or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire “the creature’s
instinct”; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the
theory of animal machines.  The “dog’s instinct” and the “automaton-dog,”
in this age of psychology and science, sound like strange anachronisms.
An automaton he certainly is; a machine working independently of his
control, the heart, like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and the
consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view
out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton
in one corner of which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like
man.  Instinct again he certainly possesses.  Inherited aptitudes are
his, inherited frailties.  Some things he at once views and understands,
as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he came “trailing
clouds of glory.”  But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is
limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and about the far
larger part of life both the dog and his master must conduct their steps
by deduction and observation.

The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before the
different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and that the
other cannot.  The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the
development of his intellect.  It hinders him from many speculations, for
words are the beginning of meta-physic.  At the same blow it saves him
from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name
for virtue than his conduct justifies.  The faults of the dog are many.
He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant
of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy,
and radically devoid of truth.  The day of an intelligent small dog is
passed in the manufacture and the laborious communication of falsehood;
he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting
paw; and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is
other than appears.  But he has some apology to offer for the vice.  Many
of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary
meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a
new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest
an old one to a different purpose; and this necessity frequently
recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols.
Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human
nicety, the distinction between formal and essential truth.  Of his
punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even
vain; but when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a
hair upon his body but confesses guilt.  To a dog of gentlemanly feeling
theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.  The canine, like the human,
gentleman demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne’s “_je ne sais quoi de
généreux_.”  He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or
bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to
shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under physical
correction, a share of pride.  But to be caught lying, if he understands
it, instantly uncurls his fleece.

Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has
been credited with modesty.  It is amazing how the use of language blunts
the faculties of man—that because vain glory finds no vent in words,
creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross
and obvious.  If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with
speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had
friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his
whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year’s time he
would have gone far to weary out our love.  I was about to compare him to
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their
own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready.  Hans Christian
Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top
to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street
for shadows of offence—here was the talking dog.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his
satellite position as the friend of man.  The cat, an animal of franker
appetites, preserves his independence.  But the dog, with one eye ever on
the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into
the renunciation of his nature.  Once he ceased hunting and became man’s
plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed.  Thenceforth he was a gentleman of
leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew
more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.  The number of
things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.  Enjoying
better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more
theatrical than average man.  His whole life, if he be a dog of any
pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit
of admiration.  Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the
little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural.  Let but a
few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature
buried in convention.  He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest
processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an
elaborate and mysterious etiquette.  Instinct, says the fool, has
awakened.  But it is not so.  Some dogs—some, at the very least—if they
be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at
length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game
explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their
devotion to its rules.  I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would
radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and
mysterious etiquette.  It is their bond of sympathy that both are the
children of convention.

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to
some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally
precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing.  And the
converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog,
moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed.  To follow for
ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive
a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every
act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest
cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody
that charming ease.  For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman,
careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog.  The
large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so
majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic
means to wholly represent the part.  And it is more pathetic and perhaps
more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and
imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney.  For the ideal of the dog
is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing
Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their
singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually
prevents the appearance of the democratic notion.  Or we might more
exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a
school—ushers, monitors, and big and little boys—qualified by one
circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.  In each, we should
observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points
of honour.  In each the larger animal keeps a contemptuous good humour;
in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain of
practical immunity; in each we shall find a double life producing double
characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair
amount of practical timidity.  I have known dogs, and I have known school
heroes that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if
we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school
playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping.

Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised.  Incessant massacre of
female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted
their relations.  Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a
romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at
war with impossible conditions.  Man has much to answer for; and the part
he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin’s in the eyes of
Touchstone.  But his intervention has at least created an imperial
situation for the rare surviving ladies.  In that society they reign
without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine
wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was
somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story.  He is a little, very
alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble
for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes.  To the human observer, he is
decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems abhorrent.
A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he was
born with a nice sense of gallantry to women.  He took at their hands the
most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have
seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner;
and yet he would scorn to make reprisals.  Nay more, when a human lady
upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been so
cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and
fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail.  This is the tale of a soul’s
tragedy.  After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one
hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he would
then have written _Troilus and Cressida_ to brand the offending sex; but
being only a little dog, he began to bite them.  The surprise of the
ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he
had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide;
for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he
proceeded to attack the aged also.  The fact is worth remark, showing, as
it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with
both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens all.  “But
while the lamp holds on to burn,” says the paraphrase, “the greatest
sinner may return.”  I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual
penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he accepted
uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope
the period of _Sturm und Drang_ is closed.

All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists.  The duty to the female
dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and
study them out, like Jesuit confessors.  I knew another little Skye,
somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of
amiability and solid wisdom.  His family going abroad for a winter, he
was received for that period by an uncle in the same city.  The winter
over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very
proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting
duties of loyalty and gratitude.  His old friends were not to be
neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new.  This was how
he solved the problem.  Every morning, as soon as the door was opened,
off posted Coolin to his uncle’s, visited the children in the nursery,
saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and
his bit of fish.  Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part,
sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of his
day—his morning’s walk with my father.  And, perhaps from this cause, he
gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned
entirely to his ancient habits.  But the same decision served him in
another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not
long after.  He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him
with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore
her as he adored my father—although (born snob) he was critically
conscious of her position as “only a servant”—he still cherished for her
a special gratitude.  Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away
to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same
situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of
a faithful nurse.  The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a
pound of tea at Christmas.  No longer content to pay a flying visit, it
was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend.  And so,
day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason
which I could never understand and cannot approve) he was kept locked up
to break him of the graceful habit.  Here, it is not the similarity, it
is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees
of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits.  Anything
further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even
stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of
spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the
voice of reason.

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people.  But
the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.
Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive
respectability.  He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a
praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.
And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own
blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater
gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father.  It was no sinecure to be
Coolin’s idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of
levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of
virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees.
It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think
we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the
criterion.  Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were
several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to—the phrase
is technical—to “rake the backets” in a troop.  A friend of mine, the
master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left
one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the
result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess.
And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs,
their social ambitions and their social hierarchies.  At least, in their
dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the
difference of station.  And that in the most snobbish manner; for the
poor man’s dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps all
his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his master.  And
again, for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to which the
master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform.  How often
has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed;
and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be
thus wounded in the seat of piety!

I knew one disrespectable dog.  He was far liker a cat; cared little or
nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and
was entirely devoted to the art of poaching.  A house would not hold him,
and to live in a town was what he refused.  He led, I believe, a life of
troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a
trap.  But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral
type; like the hairy human infant.  The true dog of the nineteenth
century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in
love with respectability.  A street-dog was once adopted by a lady.
While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud,
charging into butchers’ stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common
rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid aside these
inconsistent pleasures.  He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and
conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions.  Yet the canine
upper class was never brought to recognise the upstart, and from that
hour, except for human countenance, he was alone.  Friendless, shorn of
his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of
happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but
to support it solemnly.  Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog?
We praise his human brother.  And thus to conquer vicious habits is as
rare with dogs as with men.  With the more part, for all their
scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them
remain invincible throughout; and they live all their years, glorying in
their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects.  Thus the sage
Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole
goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs,
{128} whose soul’s shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted
above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered
the temptation.  The eighth is his favourite commandment.  There is
something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties
of the best.  Still more painful is the bearing of those “stammering
professors” in the house of sickness and under the terror of death.  It
is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects
together, or confounds, the uneasiness of sickness and the consciousness
of guilt.  To the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the
conscience; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard
to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel.

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double
etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the
showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of
home virtues for the tyrant man.  But the female dog, that mass of
carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough
posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her
master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning
point.  The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it
would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read
the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different
degrees.  Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the
flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures.  To push their favour
in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their
lives; and their joys may lie outside.  I am in despair at our persistent
ignorance.  I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of
reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the
wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our
weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one
stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry
by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my
regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable
to man.  Is man the friend, or is he the patron only?  Have they indeed
forgotten nature’s voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership
when they touch noses with the tinker’s mongrel, the brief reward and
pleasure of their artificial lives?  Doubtless, when man shares with his
dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the
shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it
fills the soul.  But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the
object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze,
giving and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority
of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes of
their ambition.



CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED


These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt’s Juvenile Drama.
That national monument, after having changed its name to Park’s, to
Webb’s, to Redington’s, and last of all to Pollock’s, has now become, for
the most part, a memory.  Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are still
afoot, the rest clean vanished.  It may be the Museum numbers a full set;
and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may boast their
great collections; but to the plain private person they are become, like
Raphaels, unattainable.  I have, at different times, possessed _Aladdin_,
_The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak Chest_, _The Wood Dæmon_,
_Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_, _Der Freischütz_, _The
Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_, _The Waterman_, _Richard
I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and
_Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of Jamaica_; and I have assisted
others in the illumination of _Maid of the Inn_ and _The Battle of
Waterloo_.  In this roll-call of stirring names you read the evidences of
a happy childhood; and though not half of them are still to be procured
of any living stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all
survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer’s shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the city
of my childhood with the sea.  When, upon any Saturday, we made a party
to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those days I
loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself had been
enough to hallow it.  But there was more than that.  In the Leith Walk
window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in working
order, with a “forest set,” a “combat,” and a few “robbers carousing” in
the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays
themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another.  Long
and often have I lingered there with empty pockets.  One figure, we shall
say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in
hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell the name:
was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress?  O, how I
would long to see the rest! how—if the name by chance were hidden—I would
wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal legend justified his
attitude and strange apparel!  And then to go within, to announce
yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to
undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating
villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships,
frowning fortresses and prison vaults—it was a giddy joy.  That shop,
which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that
bore the name of boy.  They could not pass it by, nor, having entered,
leave it.  It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding
Salem, had a double task.  They kept us at the stick’s end, frowned us
down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we were trusted with
another, and, increditable as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our
entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or with empty hand.  Old
Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation, once swept the
treasures from before me, with the cry: “I do not believe, child, that
you are an intending purchaser at all!”  These were the dragons of the
garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of
Jamaica himself.  Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance
into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of
story-books.  I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in
dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of
adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity.  The _crux_
of Buridan’s donkey was as nothing to the uncertainty of the boy as he
handled and lingered and doated on these bundles of delight; there was a
physical pleasure in the sight and touch of them which he would jealously
prolong; and when at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the
impatient shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the
boy was forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into
light in the blue winter’s even, and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or
some kindred drama clutched against his side—on what gay feet he ran, and
how he laughed aloud in exultation!  I can hear that laughter still.  Out
of all the years of my life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare
with these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the
_Arabian Entertainments_ in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the
prints.  I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember,
when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in
behind me.  I grew blind with terror.  But instead of ordering the book
away, he said he envied me.  Ah, well he might!

The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little.  The fable, as
set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and
characters: what fable would not?  Such passages as: “Scene 6. The
Hermitage.  Night set scene.  Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of
stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting
direction”—such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to be
called good reading.  Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much
appeal to me.  I forget the very outline of the plots.  Of _The Blind
Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince and once, I
think, abducted, I know nothing.  And _The Old Oak Chest_, what was it
all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of
banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in
the third act (was it in the third?)—they are all fallen in a deliquium,
swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.

I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite forget
that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to “twopence
coloured.”  With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it—crimson lake!—the
horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)—with crimson lake and
Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks
especially, Titian could not equal.  The latter colour with gamboge, a
hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of such a
savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it.  Nor can I recall
without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I dipped my
brush.  Yes, there was pleasure in the painting.  But when all was
painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled.  You might, indeed,
set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was simply
sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, and the
long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance.  Two days after the
purchase the honey had been sucked.  Parents used to complain; they
thought I wearied of my play.  It was not so: no more than a person can
be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and
dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.

Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that
enticing double file of names, where poetry, for the true child of Skelt,
reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen.  Much as I have
travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or
abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and are
still but names.  _The Floating Beacon_—why was that denied me? or _The
Wreck Ashore_?  _Sixteen-String Jack_ whom I did not even guess to be a
highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is one
sequence of three from that enchanted calender that I still at times
recall, like a loved verse of poetry: _Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_, _Echo
of Westminster Bridge_.  Names, bare names, are surely more to children
than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.

The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm
of his productions.  It may be different with the rose, but the
attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into
the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt’s nest.  And now we have
reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs.  Indeed, this name of Skelt
appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design
these qualities.  Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art.  It is even
to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature.  The
stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred
staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking
of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama: a peculiar
fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of
voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity.  I will not insist upon the
art of Skelt’s purveyors.  These wonderful characters that once so
thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard
favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the
villain’s scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes
themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a
prentice hand.  So much of fault we find; but on the other side the
impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of
gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and
buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!

The scenery of Skeltdom—or, shall we say, the kingdom of Transpontus?—had
a prevailing character.  Whether it set forth Poland as in _The Blind
Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy with _The Old
Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus.  A botanist could tell it by the
plants.  The hollyhock was all pervasive, running wild in deserts; the
dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing these were
poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_—brave growths.  The
caves were all embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all
betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke.  Skelt, to be sure, had yet
another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the
new quarter of Hyères, say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d’Or, you
may behold these blessed visions realised.  But on these I will not
dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the occidental scenery that Skelt
was all himself.  It had a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of
indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was
charming.  How the roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how
the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds
themselves up-roll, as stiff as bolsters!  Here is the cottage interior,
the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of
onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn
(this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob
Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock;
and there again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, which was so
dull to colour.  England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses,
windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames—England, when at last I came
to visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for
the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the
horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt.  If, at the ripe
age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load
it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal,
radiating pure romance—still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the
original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the
bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of
Jonathan Wild, pl. I.  “This is mastering me,” as Whitman cries, upon
some lesser provocation.  What am I? what are life, art, letters, the
world, but what my Skelt has made them?  He stamped himself upon my
immaturity.  The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;
but soon it was all coloured with romance.  If I go to the theatre to see
a good old melodrama, ’tis but Skelt a little faded.  If I visit a bold
scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly a
castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree—that set piece—I seem to
miss it in the foreground.  Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,
swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very
spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I
was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der
Freischütz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;
acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent
theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took
from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure.  Reader—and
yourself?

A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest readiness
to issue other thirty-three.  If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes
of children, speed to Pollock’s, or to Clarke’s of Garrick Street.  In
Pollock’s list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations:
_Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish the belief that
when these shall see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember
this apologist.  But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a
dream.  I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street—E. W., I think,
the postal district—close below the fool’s-cap of St. Paul’s, and yet
within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey bridge.  There in a dim
shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find
myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt himself, the aboriginal all
dusty from the tomb.  I buy, with what a choking heart—I buy them all,
all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the
packets are dust.



CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS’S


The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we
admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and various
reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends.  One or two of Scott’s
novels, Shakespeare, Molière, Montaigne, _The Egoist_, and the _Vicomte
de Bragelonne_, form the inner circle of my intimates.  Behind these
comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ in the
front rank, _The Bible in Spain_ not far behind.  There are besides a
certain number that look at me with reproach as I pass them by on my
shelves: books that I once thumbed and studied: houses which were once
like home to me, but where I now rarely visit.  I am on these sad terms
(and blush to confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt.
Last of all, there is the class of book that has its hour of
brilliancy—glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance
until the fit return.  Chief of those who thus smile and frown on me by
turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but

    “Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,”

must have stood in the first company with the six names of my continual
literary intimates.  To these six, incongruous as they seem, I have long
been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day of death.  I have never
read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not like to be long without reading
some of him, and my delight in what I do read never lessens.  Of
Shakespeare I have read all but _Richard III._, _Henry VI._, _Titus
Andronicus_, and _All’s Well that Ends Well_; and these, having already
made all suitable endeavour, I now know that I shall never read—to make
up for which unfaithfulness I could read much of the rest for ever.  Of
Molière—surely the next greatest name of Christendom—I could tell a very
similar story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are
too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on.  How
often I have read _Guy Mannering_, _Rob Roy_, or _Redgauntlet_, I have no
means of guessing, having begun young.  But it is either four or five
times that I have read _The Egoist_, and either five or six that I have
read the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_.

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent so
much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the last.
And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but the
coldness of the world.  My acquaintance with the _Vicomte_ began,
somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage
of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice.  The
name of d’Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend,
for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge’s.  My first
perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time
out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes.  I
understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is
of the execution of d’Eyméric and Lyodot—a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de
Grêve, and forget d’Artagnan’s visits to the two financiers.  My next
reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands.  I
would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd;
a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry
upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the _Vicomte_
for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire.  And yet I
know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter
of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk;
or why I call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends.
I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and
the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight
brighten the white hills.  Thence I would turn again to that crowded and
sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself, my cares,
and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre,
thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech.  I
carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it
unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was
with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no
part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and
not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as
d’Artagnan.

Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my
favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it my
fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously than
ever.  Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in these
six volumes.  Perhaps I think that d’Artagnan delights to have me read of
him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and
Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his
best graces, as to an old patron of the show.  Perhaps, if I am not
careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV. about the
battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the _Vicomte_ one of the
first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works.  At least, I avow
myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the _Vicomte_
with that of _Monte Cristo_, or its own elder brother, the _Trois
Mousquetaires_, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.

To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero in the
pages of _Vingt Ans Après_, perhaps the name may act as a deterrent.  A
man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to follow, for six
volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and withal so dreary a
cavalier as Bragelonne.  But the fear is idle.  I may be said to have
passed the best years of my life in these six volumes, and my
acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a bow; and when he, who has
so long pretended to be alive, is at last suffered to pretend to be dead,
I am sometimes reminded of a saying in an earlier volume: “_Enfin_, _dit
Miss Stewart_,”—and it was of Bragelonne she spoke—“_enfin il a fait
quelquechose_: _c’est_, _ma foi_! _bien heureux_.”  I am reminded of it,
as I say; and the next moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear
d’Artagnan bursts into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my
flippancy.

Or perhaps it is La Vallière that the reader of _Vingt Ans Après_ is
inclined to flee.  Well, he is right there too, though not so right.
Louise is no success.  Her creator has spared no pains; she is
well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings out true;
sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our sympathies.  But
I have never envied the King his triumph.  And so far from pitying
Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no worse (not for lack of
malice, but imagination) than to be wedded to that lady.  Madame enchants
me; I can forgive that royal minx her most serious offences; I can thrill
and soften with the King on that memorable occasion when he goes to
upbraid and remains to flirt; and when it comes to the “_Allons_,
_aimez-moi donc_,” it is my heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.
Not so with Louise.  Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an
author tells us of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for
nought; that we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her
mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall
from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before us,
self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping
market-woman.  Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often
start the trick of “getting ugly;” and no disease is more difficult to
cure.  I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author in
particular, with whose works I am very well acquainted, though I cannot
read them, and who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting beside
his ailing puppets and (like a magician) wearying his art to restore them
to youth and beauty.  There are others who ride too high for these
misfortunes.  Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind?  Arden itself was
not more lovely.  Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose
Jocelyn, Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names,
the daughters of George Meredith.  Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and
I am at her knees.  Ah! these are the creators of desirable women.  They
would never have fallen in the mud with Dumas and poor La Vallière.  It
is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the first,
could have plucked at the moustache of d’Artagnan.

Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the threshold.  In
so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs and kitchen offices
where no one would delight to linger; but it was at least unhappy that
the vestibule should be so badly lighted; and until, in the seventeenth
chapter, d’Artagnan sets off to seek his friends, I must confess, the
book goes heavily enough.  But, from thenceforward, what a feast is
spread!  Monk kidnapped; d’Artagnan enriched; Mazarin’s death; the ever
delectable adventure of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d’Artagnan,
with its epilogue (vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d’Artagnan regains the
moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St.
Aignan’s story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes, and
Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the bastille; the
night talk in the forest of Sénart; Belle Isle again, with the death of
Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d’Artagnan the untamable,
under the lash of the young King.  What other novel has such epic variety
and nobility of incident? often, if you will, impossible; often of the
order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in human nature.  For if you
come to that, what novel has more human nature? not studied with the
microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural eye?
What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging,
admirable literary skill?  Good souls, I suppose, must sometimes read it
in the blackguard travesty of a translation.  But there is no style so
untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a
village tale; pat like a general’s despatch; with every fault, yet never
tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.  And, once more, to make an
end of commendations, what novel is inspired with a more unstrained or a
more wholesome morality?

Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of d’Artagnan
only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, I have to add
morality.  There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the
world is wide, and so are morals.  Out of two people who have dipped into
Sir Richard Burton’s _Thousand and One Nights_, one shall have been
offended by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless,
perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the
rascality and cruelty of all the characters.  Of two readers, again, one
shall have been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by that
of the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_.  And the point is that neither need be
wrong.  We shall always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot
get the sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a
thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some hint of
the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in the other,
there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity.  I would
scarce send to the _Vicomte_ a reader who was in quest of what we may
call puritan morality.  The ventripotent mulatto, the great eater,
worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man of
the great heart and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet
clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial
portrait; but with whatever art that may be touched, and whatever
indulgence, it will not be the portrait of a precisian.  Dumas was
certainly not thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the
mouth of d’Artagnan’s old servant this excellent profession: “_Monsieur_,
_j’étais une de ces bonnes pâtes d’hommes que Dieu a fait pour s’animer
pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes toutes choses qui
accompagnent leur séjour sur la terre_.”  He was thinking, as I say, of
Planchet, to whom the words are aptly fitted; but they were fitted also
to Planchet’s creator; and perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for
observe what follows: “_D’Artagnan s’assit alors près de la fenêtre_,
_et_, _cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru solide_, _il y
rêva_.”  In a man who finds all things good, you will scarce expect much
zeal for negative virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him;
abstinence, however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge
entirely mean and partly impious.  So with Dumas.  Chastity is not near
his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of frugality which
is the armour of the artist.  Now, in the _Vicomte_, he had much to do
with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert.  Historic justice should be all
upon the side of Colbert, of official honesty, and fiscal competence.
And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his knowledge; once
it is but flashed upon us and received with the laughter of Fouquet
himself, in the jesting controversy in the gardens of Saint Mandé; once
it is touched on by Aramis in the forest of Sénart; in the end, it is set
before us clearly in one dignified speech of the triumphant Colbert.  But
in Fouquet, the waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the
swift transactor of much business, “_l’homme de bruit_, _l’homme de
plaisir_, _l’homme qui n’est que parceque les autres sont_,” Dumas saw
something of himself and drew the figure the more tenderly.  It is to me
even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet’s honour; not seeing, you
might think, that unflawed honour is impossible to spendthrifts; but
rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life, seeing it too well, and
clinging the more to what was left.  Honour can survive a wound; it can
live and thrive without a member.  The man rebounds from his disgrace; he
begins fresh foundations on the ruins of the old; and when his sword is
broken, he will do valiantly with his dagger.  So it is with Fouquet in
the book; so it was with Dumas on the battlefield of life.

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man; but
perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called morality in the
writer.  And it is elsewhere, it is in the character of d’Artagnan, that
we must look for that spirit of morality, which is one of the chief
merits of the book, makes one of the main joys of its perusal, and sets
it high above more popular rivals.  Athos, with the coming of years, has
declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed;
but d’Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and upright,
that he takes the heart by storm.  There is nothing of the copy-book
about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, natural
civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor—no Wesley
or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all refinement whether for good
or evil; but the whole man rings true like a good sovereign.  Readers who
have approached the _Vicomte_, not across country, but by the legitimate,
five-volumed avenue of the _Mousquetaires_ and _Vingt Ans Après_, will
not have forgotten d’Artagnan’s ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable
trick upon Milady.  What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how
agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the son of
the man whom he had personated!  Here, and throughout, if I am to choose
virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the virtues of
d’Artagnan.  I do not say there is no character as well drawn in
Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly.  There are
many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions—eyes of the dead
and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most private hours,
and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and judges.  And
among these, even if you should think me childish, I must count my
d’Artagnan—not d’Artagnan of the memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to
prefer—a preference, I take the freedom of saying, in which he stands
alone; not the d’Artagnan of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and
paper; not Nature’s, but Dumas’s.  And this is the particular crown and
triumph of the artist—not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not
simply to convince, but to enchant.

There is yet another point in the _Vicomte_ which I find incomparable.  I
can recall no other work of the imagination in which the end of life is
represented with so nice a tact.  I was asked the other day if Dumas made
me laugh or cry.  Well in this my late fifth reading of the _Vicomte_, I
did laugh once at the small Coquelin de Volière business, and was perhaps
a thought surprised at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled
continually.  But for tears, I do not know.  If you put a pistol to my
throat, I must own the tale trips upon a very airy foot—within a
measurable distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to
be discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may even
seem inadequate from first to last.  Not so to me; I cannot count that a
poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I love; and, above
all, in this last volume, I find a singular charm of spirit.  It breathes
a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always brave, never hysterical.  Upon the
crowded, noisy life of this long tale, evening gradually falls; and the
lights are extinguished, and the heroes pass away one by one.  One by one
they go, and not a regret embitters their departure; the young succeed
them in their places, Louis Quatorze is swelling larger and shining
broader, another generation and another France dawn on the horizon; but
for us and these old men whom we have loved so long, the inevitable end
draws near and is welcome.  To read this well is to anticipate
experience.  Ah, if only when these hours of the long shadows fall for us
in reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them with a mind as
quiet!

But my paper is running out; the siege guns are firing on the Dutch
frontier; and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade
fallen on the field of glory.  _Adieu_—rather _au revoir_!  Yet a sixth
time, dearest d’Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse together
for Belle Isle.



CHAPTER XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE


In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
continuous thought.  The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood.  Eloquence
and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush
aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for
truffles.  For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn
where, “towards the close of the year 17--,” several gentlemen in
three-cocked hats were playing bowls.  A friend of mine preferred the
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling
fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure,
was a pirate.  This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved
to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales
that I affected.  Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a
Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish.  I can still
hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and
the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John
Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words “post-chaise,” the “great North
road,” “ostler,” and “nag” still sound in my ears like poetry.  One and
all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in
childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some
quality of the brute incident.  That quality was not mere bloodshed or
wonder.  Although each of these was welcome in its place, the charm for
the sake of which we read depended on something different from either.
My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still remember four
different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen
and lasting pleasure.  One I discovered long afterwards to be the
admirable opening of _What will he Do with It_: it was no wonder I was
pleased with that.  The other three still remain unidentified.  One is a
little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people
groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a
sickroom.  In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool,
dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of
the dancers as they moved.  This was the most sentimental impression I
think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the
sentimental.  In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with
his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and
witnessed the horrors of a wreck. {153}  Different as they are, all these
early favourites have a common note—they have all a touch of the
romantic.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.  The
pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts—the active and the passive.
Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are
lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not
how into the future.  Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely
pleased by our surroundings.  It would be hard to say which of these
modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the
more constant.  Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think
they put it high.  There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is
not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human
will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the
interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he
manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the
conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical
intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the
diplomacy of life.  With such material as this it is impossible to build
a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a
standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience.  But it is
possible to build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the
most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and
places.  The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.
One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long
rambles in the dew.  The effect of night, of any flowing water, of
lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up
in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures.  Something, we
feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.
And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain
attendance on the genius of the place and moment.  It is thus that tracts
of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly
torture and delight me.  Something must have happened in such places, and
perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried
in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as
vainly, to fit them with the proper story.  Some places speak distinctly.
Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to
be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.  Other spots
again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, “miching
mallecho.”  The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden
and silent, eddying river—though it is known already as the place where
Keats wrote some of his _Endymion_ and Nelson parted from his Emma—still
seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend.  Within these ivied
walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders,
waiting for its hour.  The old Hawes Inn at the Queen’s Ferry makes a
similar call upon my fancy.  There it stands, apart from the town, beside
the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine—in front, the
ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor;
behind, the old garden with the trees.  Americans seek it already for the
sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the
_Antiquary_.  But you need not tell me—that is not all; there is some
story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of
that inn more fully.  So it is with names and faces; so it is with
incidents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like
the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless author
leaves untold.  How many of these romances have we not seen determine at
their birth; how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their
eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have
we not drawn near, with express intimations—“here my destiny awaits
me”—and we have but dined there and passed on!  I have lived both at the
Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of
some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had
me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round
of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark.  The
man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put
off from the Queen’s Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty
night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green
shutters of the inn at Burford. {155}

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count.  The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit
and striking incident.  The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,
himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;
and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once
enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer
shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common
men.  His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their
true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey
the ideal laws of the day-dream.  The right kind of thing should fall out
in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and
not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the
circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.  The
threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in
the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each
other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration.
Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend,
and each has been printed on the mind’s eye for ever.  Other things we
may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may
forget the author’s comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true;
but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a
story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we
so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can
efface or weaken the impression.  This, then, is the plastic part of
literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or
attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye.  This is
the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once
accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in
its own right, the quality of epics.  Compared with this, all other
purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in
result.  It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to
describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on
the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend.  It
is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the
complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to
give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet.  The first is
literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art.

English people of the present day {157} are apt, I know not why, to look
somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of
teaspoons and the accents of the curate.  It is thought clever to write a
novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one.  Reduced
even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the
art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of
monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of _Sandy’s Mull_,
preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded.  Some people
work, in this manner, with even a strong touch.  Mr. Trollope’s
inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection.  But
even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.
Mr. Crawley’s collision with the Bishop’s wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in
the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived,
fitly embodying a crisis.  Or again look at Thackeray.  If Rawdon
Crawley’s blow were not delivered, _Vanity Fair_ would cease to be a work
of art.  That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge
of energy from Rawdon’s fist is the reward and consolation of the reader.
The end of _Esmond_ is a yet wider excursion from the author’s customary
fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the great and wily English
borrower has here borrowed from the great, unblushing French thief; as
usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword
rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, martial note.  But
perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the necessity for marking
incident than to compare the living fame of _Robinson Crusoe_ with the
discredit of _Clarissa Harlowe_.  _Clarissa_ is a book of a far more
startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage
and unflagging art.  It contains wit, character, passion, plot,
conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with
unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid
and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we
now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself.  And yet a
little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style
nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of
humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from
edition to edition, ever young, while _Clarissa_ lies upon the shelves
unread.  A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old
and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of _Robinson_
read aloud in a farm kitchen.  Up to that moment he had sat content,
huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another man.  There were
day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and
bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure.  Down he sat
that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the
book.  It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was
in English.  Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, and
with entire delight, read _Robinson_.  It is like the story of a
love-chase.  If he had heard a letter from _Clarissa_, would he have been
fired with the same chivalrous ardour?  I wonder.  Yet _Clarissa_ has
every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted—pictorial or
picture-making romance.  While _Robinson_ depends, for the most part and
with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of
circumstance.

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by a
common and organic law.  Situation is animated with passion, passion
clothed upon with situation.  Neither exists for itself, but each inheres
indissolubly with the other.  This is high art; and not only the highest
art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the
greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure.  Such
are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight.  But as
from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are
ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or
subordinated to romance.  There is one book, for example, more generally
loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights
in age—I mean the _Arabian Nights_—where you shall look in vain for moral
or for intellectual interest.  No human face or voice greets us among
that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.
Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and
is found enough.  Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these
Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances.
The early part of _Monte Cristo_, down to the finding of the treasure, is
a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared these
moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread
and Dantès little more than a name.  The sequel is one long-drawn error,
gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as for these early chapters, I do
not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same
unmingled atmosphere of romance.  It is very thin and light to be sure,
as on a high mountain; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion.
I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting
forth on a second or third voyage into _Monte Cristo_.  Here are stories
which powerfully affect the reader, which can be reperused at any age,
and where the characters are no more than puppets.  The bony fist of the
showman visibly propels them; their springs are an open secret; their
faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly
partake of their adventures.  And the point may be illustrated still
further.  The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure
drama; more than that, it is the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in
the English tongue.  Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand,
is pure romance; it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to
any other boy or maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change.
And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these
passages.  Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital
in its order: in the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall
utter its genuine voice; in the second, according circumstances, like
instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident,
such as we love to prefigure for ourselves; and in the end, in spite of
the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either.  The one
may ask more genius—I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells
as clearly in the memory.

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things.  It reaches into
the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most
pedestrian realism.  _Robinson Crusoe_ is as realistic as it is romantic;
both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers.  Nor does
romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents.  To deal
with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to
conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the
disgrace.  The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon’s villa is a
very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from
beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of
adventure.  It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember
rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith.  Nor is the fact surprising.
Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is “a joy for
ever” to the man who reads of them.  They are the things that should be
found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood.  I found a glimmer of
the same interest the other day in a new book, _The Sailor’s Sweetheart_,
by Mr. Clark Russell.  The whole business of the brig _Morning Star_ is
very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the books and
the money satisfy the reader’s mind like things to eat.  We are dealing
here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove.
But even treasure trove can be made dull.  There are few people who have
not groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the
_Swiss Family Robinson_, that dreary family.  They found article after
article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a
whole consignment; but no informing taste had presided over the
selection, there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these riches
left the fancy cold.  The box of goods in Verne’s _Mysterious Island_ is
another case in point: there was no gusto and no glamour about that; it
might have come from a shop.  But the two hundred and seventy-eight
Australian sovereigns on board the _Morning Star_ fell upon me like a
surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of secondary stories, besides
the one in hand, radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from
a striking particular in life; and I was made for the moment as happy as
a reader has the right to be.

To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in
mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art.  No art produces
illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and
while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely
clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to
take an active part in fancy with the characters.  This last is the
triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at
being the hero, the scene is a good scene.  Now in character-studies the
pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at
incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,
suffering or virtue.  But the characters are still themselves, they are
not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand
away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place
as a spectator.  I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with
Eugène de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with
them.  It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve.
Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some
situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the
story with enticing and appropriate details.  Then we forget the
characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in
our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do
we say we have been reading a romance.  It is not only pleasurable things
that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are
willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it
seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated.  It
is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which
every incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the
reader’s thoughts.  Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the
child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life;
and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with
all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to
recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction
is called romance.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics.  _The Lady of the
Lake_ has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness
and desirability of the tale.  It is just such a story as a man would
make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just
such scenes as it is laid in.  Hence it is that a charm dwells
undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the
mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside,
the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green
possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, _The Lady of the Lake_,
or that direct, romantic opening—one of the most spirited and poetical in
literature—“The stag at eve had drunk his fill.”  The same strength and
the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels.  In that ill-written,
ragged book, _The Pirate_, the figure of Cleveland—cast up by the sea on
the resounding foreland of Dunrossness—moving, with the blood on his
hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple
islanders—singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress—is
conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention.  The words of
his song, “Through groves of palm,” sung in such a scene and by such a
lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the
tale is built.  In _Guy Mannering_, again, every incident is delightful
to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan
is a model instance of romantic method.

“‘I remember the tune well,’ he says, ‘though I cannot guess what should
at present so strongly recall it to my memory.”  He took his flageolet
from his pocket and played a simple melody.  Apparently the tune awoke
the corresponding associations of a damsel.  She immediately took up the
song—

    “‘Are these the links of Forth, she said;
       Or are they the crooks of Dee,
    Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
       That I so fain would see?’

“‘By heaven!’ said Bertram, ‘it is the very ballad.’”

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made.  First, as an instance of
modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the
old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission.  Miss Braddon’s idea
of a story, like Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden leg, were something
strange to have expounded.  As a matter of personal experience, Meg’s
appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the
scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie’s recognition of Harry, are the
four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is
laid aside.  The second point is still more curious.  The reader will
observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me.  Well, here is
how it runs in the original: “a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring
about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle
with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.”  A man who gave in such copy
would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper.  Scott has forgotten
to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”; he has forgotten
to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face
with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all
this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence.  It is not
merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong
light upon the subject of this paper.  For here we have a man of the
finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the
romantic junctures of his story; and we find him utterly careless,
almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and
not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama.  In
character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate,
strong and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of
his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers.  At times his
characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true
heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily forward
with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words.  The man who
could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot,
as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic,
but splendid tragic gifts.  How comes it, then, that he could so often
fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle?

It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of
his surprising merits.  As his books are play to the reader, so were they
play to him.  He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly
patience to describe it.  He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and
beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the
manful sense, an artist at all.  He pleased himself, and so he pleases
us.  Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and
vigils and distresses never man knew less.  A great romantic—an idle
child.



CHAPTER XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE {168a}


We have recently {168b} enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in
some detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter
Besant and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very different calibre:
Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of
finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and
humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate
artist, Mr. Besant the impersonation of good nature.  That such doctors
should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they
seem to agree fills me, I confess, with wonder.  For they are both
content to talk about the “art of fiction”; and Mr. Besant, waxing
exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called “art of fiction” to
the “art of poetry.”  By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the
art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of
prose.  For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call
by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present,
at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present
in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic.  Fiction
is the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters
largely into all the arts but architecture.  Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias,
Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that
either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any
degree into the scope of Mr. Besant’s interesting lecture or Mr. James’s
charming essay.  The art of fiction, then, regarded as a definition, is
both too ample and too scanty.  Let me suggest another; let me suggest
that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither more nor
less than the art of narrative.

But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of “the modern English novel,”
the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most
pleasing novel on that roll, _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, the
desire is natural enough.  I can conceive, then, that he would hasten to
propose two additions, and read thus: the art of _fictitious_ narrative
_in prose_.

Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be
denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded
lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature;
but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to
build our definitions on some more fundamental ground then binding.  Why,
then, are we to add “in prose”?  _The Odyssey_ appears to me the best of
romances; _The Lady of the Lake_ to stand high in the second order; and
Chaucer’s tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of
the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie.  Whether a
narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long
period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles
of the art of narrative must be equally observed.  The choice of a noble
and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same
way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured verse; for both
imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of dialogue, and a more
picked and stately strain of words.  If you are to refuse _Don Juan_, it
is hard to see why you should include _Zanoni_ or (to bracket works of
very different value) _The Scarlet Letter_; and by what discrimination
are you to open your doors to _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ and close them on
_The Faery Queen_?  To bring things closer home, I will here propound to
Mr. Besant a conundrum.  A narrative called _Paradise Lost_ was written
in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then?  It was next
translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then?
Lastly, the French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George
Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an English novel; and, in the
name of clearness, what was it then?

But, once more, why should we add “fictitious”?  The reason why is
obvious.  The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want
for weight.  The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is
applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or
of an imaginary series.  Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ (a work of cunning
and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manœuvres as
(let us say) _Tom Jones_: the clear conception of certain characters of
man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great
number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation
of a certain key in dialogue.  In which these things are done with the
more art—in which with the greater air of nature—readers will differently
judge.  Boswell’s is, indeed, a very special case, and almost a generic;
but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of
life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas, are
presented—in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay—that the
novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and
adroitly handled.  He will find besides that he, who is free—who has the
right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
precious still, of wholesale omission—is frequently defeated, and, with
all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and
passion.  Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the
sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth
will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours
of the novelist, but for those of the historian.  No art—to use the
daring phrase of Mr. James—can successfully “compete with life”; and the
art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_.  Life
goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various
and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the
mind—the seat of wonder, to the touch—so thrillingly delicate, and to the
belly—so imperious when starved.  It combines and employs in its
manifestation the method and material, not of one art only, but of all
the arts, Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life’s
majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and
colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of
moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which
it teems.  To “compete with life,” whose sun we cannot look upon, whose
passions and diseases waste and slay us—to compete with the flavour of
wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of
death and separation—here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven;
here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a
pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of
superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun.  No
art is true in this sense: none can “compete with life”: not even
history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of
their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of a city
or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and justly commend the
author’s talent, if our pulse be quickened.  And mark, for a last
differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case,
purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at
their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in
the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.

What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the
source of its power?  The whole secret is that no art does “compete with
life.”  Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut
his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality.  The arts, like
arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, coloured
and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary
abstraction.  Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in
nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand
upon its mouth.  So with the arts.  Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine
and flake-white, gives up truth of colour, as it had already given up
relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme
of harmonious tints.  Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the
mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues
instead an independent and creative aim.  So far as it imitates at all,
it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the
emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them.
The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who
told their stories round the savage camp-fire.  Our art is occupied, and
bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making
them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in
marshalling all of them towards a common end.  For the welter of
impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it
substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most
feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of
the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like
the graduated tints in a good picture.  From all its chapters, from all
its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes and
re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every
incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in
unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way,
the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller
without it.  Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;
a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,
flowing and emasculate.  Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,
like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.  A proposition of
geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a
fair and luminous parallel for a work of art.  Both are reasonable, both
untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to
life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of
leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed
and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is
legion; and with each new subject—for here again I must differ by the
whole width of heaven from Mr. James—the true artist will vary his method
and change the point of attack.  That which was in one case an
excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one
book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.  First each novel, and
then each class of novels, exists by and for itself.  I will take, for
instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel
of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical
tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which appeals to our
intellectual appreciation of man’s foibles and mingled and inconstant
motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff
as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral
judgment.

And first for the novel of adventure.  Mr. James refers, with singular
generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden treasure;
but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words.  In this book
he misses what he calls the “immense luxury” of being able to quarrel
with his author.  The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment,
to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin
to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid
aside.  Still more remarkable is Mr. James’s reason.  He cannot criticise
the author, as he goes, “because,” says he, comparing it with another
work, “_I have been a child_, _but I have never been on a quest for
buried treasure_.”  Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has
never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he
has never been a child.  There never was a child (unless Master James)
but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a
bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and
prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the
lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty.  Elsewhere
in his essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too
narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the
“faintest hints of life” are converted into revelations; and it will be
found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes
with more gusto and effect of those things which he has only wished to
do, than of those which he has done.  Desire is a wonderful telescope,
and Pisgah the best observatory.  Now, while it is true that neither Mr.
James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly
sense, gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently
desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful
day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning
and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently
treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of
the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and
circumstantiation of this boyish dream.  Character to the boy is a sealed
book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers and a liberal
complement of pistols.  The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and
because he was himself more or less grown up, admitted character, within
certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits.  Had the
same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to
very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the
characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities—the
warlike and formidable.  So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal
in the combat, they have served their end.  Danger is the matter with
which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly
trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the
sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear.  To add more traits, to
be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while
we are running the fox of material interest, is not to enrich but to
stultify your tale.  The stupid reader will only be offended, and the
clever reader lose the scent.

The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it
requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of
_Gil Blas_, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure.  It turns on
the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied
in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not
march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown.  As
they enter, so they may go out; they must be consistent, but they need
not grow.  Here Mr. James will recognise the note of much of his own
work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying it
at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just
artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform
the attitudes he loves to study, and change his sitters from the
humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more
emotional moments.  In his recent _Author of Beltraffio_, so just in
conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed
employed; but observe that it is not displayed.  Even in the heroine the
working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true
tragedy, the _scène-à-faire_ passes unseen behind the panels of a locked
door.  The delectable invention of the young visitor is introduced,
consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his method,
might avoid the scene of passion.  I trust no reader will suppose me
guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece.  I mean merely that it
belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very
differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked
class, of which I now proceed to speak.

I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it
enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English
misconception.  It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of
incident.  It consists of passion, which gives the actor his opportunity;
and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece
proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a higher
pitch of interest and emotion.  A good serious play must therefore be
founded on one of the passionate _cruces_ of life, where duty and
inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I
call, for that reason, the dramatic novel.  I will instance a few worthy
specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith’s _Rhoda Fleming_,
that wonderful and painful book, long out of print, {178} and hunted for
at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy’s _Pair of Blue Eyes_; and two of
Charles Reade’s, _Griffith Gaunt_ and the _Double Marriage_, originally
called _White Lies_, and founded (by an accident quaintly favourable to
my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas.  In
this kind of novel the closed door of _The Author of Beltraffio_ must be
broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last word;
passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the
protagonist and the _deus ex machinâ_ in one.  The characters may come
anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they
leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by
passion.  It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to
depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and change in the
furnace of emotion.  But there is no obligation of the sort; nice
portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept mere abstract
types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved.  A novel of this class
may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great,
because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the
impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second class
it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue has thus been
narrowed and the whole force of the writer’s mind directed to passion
alone.  Cleverness again, which has its fair field in the novel of
character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre.  A
far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of
a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity.  All should be plain,
all straightforward to the end.  Hence it is that, in _Rhoda Fleming_,
Mrs. Lovell raises such resentment in the reader; her motives are too
flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her
surroundings.  Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after
having begun the _Duchesse de Langeais_ in terms of strong if somewhat
swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero’s clock.
Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of character; they are
out of place in the high society of the passions; when the passions are
introduced in art at their full height, we look to see them, not baffled
and impotently striving, as in life, but towering above circumstance and
acting substitutes for fate.

And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene.  To
much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would,
somewhat impatiently, acquiesce.  It may be true; but it is not what he
desired to say or to hear said.  He spoke of the finished picture and its
worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light.  He
uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with
the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student.  But the point,
I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful
advice to the young writer.  And the young writer will not so much be
helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as
by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms.  The best that we
can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character or
passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an
illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it
a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as
sometimes in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of
the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the
argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men
talk in parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may
be called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative nor
any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that
is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of
the problem involved.  Let him not regret if this shortens his book; it
will be better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to lengthen but to
bury.  Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps
unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen.  Let him not care
particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material
detail of the day’s manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the
environment.  These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent,
and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better
depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance.  In this age of
the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, the great
books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and before
Balzac.  And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that
his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude;
but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by
its significant simplicity.  For although, in great men, working upon
great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet
underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that simplification
was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence.



II


Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the
lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none
ever couched a lance with narrower convictions.  His own work and those
of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave,
the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there
is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead; he thinks a
form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange
forgetfulness of the history of the race!  Meanwhile, by a glance at his
own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of
this illusion would be dispelled.  For while he holds all the poor little
orthodoxies of the day—no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday
or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are
exclusive—the living quality of much that he has done is of a contrary, I
had almost said of a heretical, complexion.  A man, as I read him, of an
originally strong romantic bent—a certain glow of romance still resides
in many of his books, and lends them their distinction.  As by accident
he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as often as
not, that his reader rejoices—justly, as I contend.  For in all this
excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central human
thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I mean himself?
A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances of life, a
cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and aspirations than
those he loves to draw.  And why should he suppress himself and do such
reverence to the Lemuel Barkers?  The obvious is not of necessity the
normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the
contemporary shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer,
only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking
to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of
society instead of the romance of man.

                                * * * * *

                   Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
                            Edinburgh & London



Footnotes:


{1}  1881.

{15} Written for the “Book” of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair.

{17}  Professor Tait’s laboratory assistant.

{84}  In Dr. Murray’s admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw
_sub voce_ Beacon.  In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be
defined as “a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted.”

{100}  The late Fleeming Jenkin.

{105}  This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in _The
Spectator_.

{128}  Waiter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which
last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago.  Glory was his aim
and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now lies
among the treasures of the nation.

{153}  Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of
Charles Kingsley.

{155}  Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat with
my own hands in _Kidnapped_.  Some day, perhaps, I may try a rattle at
the shutters.

{157}  1882.

{168a}  This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, is
reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.

{168b}  1884

{178}  Now no longer so, thank Heaven!





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