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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
DREAMTHORP | 1 |
ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS | 10 |
OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING | 23 |
WILLIAM DUNBAR | 32 |
A LARK’S FLIGHT | 45 |
CHRISTMAS | 55 |
MEN OF LETTERS | 66 |
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF | 81 |
A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE | 90 |
GEOFFREY CHAUCER | 102 |
BOOKS AND GARDENS | 119 |
ON VAGABONDS | 129 |
It matters not to relate how or when I became a denizen of Dreamthorp; it will be sufficient to say that I am not a born native, but that I came to reside in it a good while ago now. The several towns and villages in which, in my time, I have pitched a tent did not please, for one obscure reason or another; this one was too large, t’other too small; but when, on a summer evening about the hour of eight, I first beheld Dreamthorp, with its westward-looking windows painted by sunset, its children playing in the single straggling street, the mothers knitting at the open doors, the fathers standing about in long white blouses, chatting or smoking; the great tower of the ruined castle rising high into the rosy air, with a whole troop of swallows—by distance made as small as gnats—skimming about its rents and fissures;—when I first beheld all this, I felt instinctively that my knapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that my tired feet might wander no more, that at last, on the planet, I had found a home. From that evening I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like now to make, is the very inconsiderable one, so far at least as distance is concerned, from the house in which I live to the graveyard beside the ruined castle. There, with the former inhabitants of the place, I trust to sleep quietly enough, and nature will draw over our heads her coverlet of green sod, and tenderly tuck us in, as a mother her sleeping ones, so that no sound from the world shall ever reach us, and no sorrow trouble us any more.
The village stands far inland; and the streams that trot through the soft green valleys all about have as little knowledge of the sea as the three-years’ child of the storms and passions of manhood. The surrounding country is smooth and green, full of undulations; and pleasant country roads strike through it in every direction, bound for distant towns and villages, yet in no hurry to reach them. On these roads the lark in summer is continually heard; nests are plentiful in the hedges and dry ditches; and on the grassy banks, and at the feet of the bowed dikes, the blue-eyed speedwell smiles its benison on the passing wayfarer. On these roads you may walk for a year and encounter nothing more remarkable than the country cart, troops of tawny children from the woods, laden with primroses, and at long intervals—for people in this district live to a ripe age—a black funeral creeping in from some remote hamlet; and to this last the people reverently doff their hats and stand aside. Death does not walk about here often, but when he does, he receives as much respect as the squire himself. Everything round one is unhurried, quiet, moss-grown, and orderly. Season follows in the track of season, and one year can hardly be distinguished from another. Time should be measured here by the silent dial, rather than by the ticking clock, or by the chimes of the
This place suits my whim, and I like it better year after year. As with everything else, since I began to love it I find it gradually growing beautiful. Dreamthorp—a castle, a chapel, a lake, a straggling strip of gray houses, with a blue film of smoke over all—lies embosomed in emerald. Summer, with its daisies, runs up to every cottage door. From the little height where I am now sitting, I see it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and the birds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear them not. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I make a frame of my fingers, and look at my picture. On the walls of the next Academy’s Exhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful!
My village is, I think, a special favourite of summer’s. Every window-sill in it she touches with colour and fragrance; everywhere she wakens the drowsy murmurs of the hives; every place she scents with apple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir beside the ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come and go, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face. Never was velvet on a monarch’s robe so gorgeous as the green mosses that be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on them and goes. The old road out towards the common, and the hoary dikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not been forgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has its mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by the loveliest gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stones lying on the ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy coverings. Some of these have not been disturbed for a century. Summer has adorned my village as gaily, and taken as much pleasure in the task, as the people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in the adornment of the May-pole against a summer festival. And, just think, not only Dreamthorp, but every English village she has made beautiful after one fashion or another—making vivid green the hill slope on which straggling white Welsh hamlets hang right opposite the sea; drowning in apple-blossom the red Sussex ones in the fat valley. And think, once more, every spear of grass in England she has touched with a livelier green; the crest of every bird she has burnished; every old wall between the four seas has received her mossy and licheny attentions; every nook in every forest she has sown with pale flowers, every marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold. And in the wonderful night the moon knows, she hangs—the planet on which so many millions of us fight, and sin, and agonise, and die—a sphere of glow-worm light.
Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is but fair that I should now introduce you to her lions. These are, for the most part, of a commonplace kind; and I am afraid that, if you wish to find romance in them, you must bring it with you. I might speak of the old church-tower, or of the church-yard beneath it, in which the village holds its dead, each resting-place marked by a simple stone, on which is inscribed the name and age of the sleeper, and a Scripture text beneath, in which live our hopes of immortality. But, on the whole, perhaps it will be better to begin with the canal, which wears on its olive-coloured face the big white water-lily already chronicled. Such a secluded place is Dreamthorp that the railway does not come near, and the canal is the only thing that connects it with the world. It stands high, and from it the undulating country may be seen stretching away into the gray of distance, with hills and woods, and stains of smoke which mark the sites of villages. Every now and then a horse comes staggering along the towing-path, trailing a sleepy barge filled with merchandise. A quiet, indolent life these bargemen lead in the summer days. One lies stretched at his length on the sun-heated plank; his comrade sits smoking in the little dog-hutch, which I suppose he calls a cabin. Silently they come and go; silently the wooden bridge lifts to let them through. The horse stops at the bridge-house for a drink, and there I like to talk a little with the men. They serve instead of a newspaper, and retail with great willingness the news they have picked up in their progress from town to town. I am told they sometimes marvel who the old gentleman is who accosts them from beneath a huge umbrella in the sun, and that they think him either very wise or very foolish. Not in the least unnatural! We are great friends, I believe—evidence of which they occasionally exhibit by requesting me to disburse a trifle for drink-money. This canal is a great haunt of mine of an evening. The water hardly invites one to bathe in it, and a delicate stomach might suspect the flavour of the eels caught therein; yet, to my thinking, it is not in the least destitute of beauty. A barge trailing up through it in the sunset is a pretty sight; and the heavenly crimsons and purples sleep quite lovingly upon its glossy ripples. Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I walk along I see it mirrored therein as clearly as in the waters of the Mediterranean itself.
The old castle and chapel already alluded to are, perhaps, to a stranger, the points of attraction in Dreamthorp. Back from the houses is the lake, on the green sloping banks of which, with broken windows and tombs, the ruins stand. As it is noon, and the weather is warm, let us go and sit on a turret. Here, on these very steps, as old ballads tell, a queen sat once, day after day, looking southward for the light of returning spears. I bethink me that
Love!—does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in poems and romances? Has not the circulating library become the sole home of the passion? Is love not become the exclusive property of novelists and playwrights, to be used by them only for professional purposes? Surely, if the men I see are lovers, or ever have been lovers, they would be nobler than they are. The knowledge that he is beloved should—must make a man tender, gentle, upright, pure. While yet a youngster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in love with a young lady several years my senior,—after the fashion of youngsters in jackets. Could
The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on which I am now sitting, and is evidently a building of much older date. It is a mere shell now. It is quite roofless, ivy covers it in part; the stone tracery of the great western window is yet intact, but the coloured glass is gone with the splendid vestments of the abbot, the fuming incense, the chanting choirs, and the patient, sad-eyed monks, who muttered Aves, shrived guilt, and illuminated missals. Time was when this place breathed actual benedictions, and was a home of active peace. At present it is visited only by the stranger, and delights but the antiquary. The village people have so little respect for it, that they do not even consider it haunted. There are several tombs in the interior
In summer I spend a good deal of time floating about the lake. The landing-place to which my boat is tethered is ruinous, like the chapel and palace, and my embarkation causes quite a stir in the sleepy little village. Small boys leave their games and mud-pies, and gather round in silence; they have seen me get off a hundred times, but their interest in the matter seems always new. Not unfrequently an idle cobbler, in red night-cap and leathern apron, leans on a broken stile, and honours my proceedings with his attention. I shoot off, and the human knot dissolves. The lake contains three islands, each with a solitary tree, and on these islands the swans breed. I feed the birds daily with bits of bread. See, one comes gliding towards me, with superbly arched neck, to receive its customary alms! How wildly beautiful its motions! How haughtily it begs! The green pasture lands run down to the edge of the water, and into it in the afternoons the red kine wade and stand knee-deep in their shadows, surrounded by troops of flies. Patiently the honest creatures abide the attacks of their tormentors. Now one swishes itself with its tail,—now its neighbour flaps a huge ear. I draw my oars alongside, and let my boat float at its own will. The soft blue heavenly abysses, the wandering streams of vapour, the long beaches of rippled clouds, are glassed and repeated in the lake. Dreamthorp is silent as a picture, the voices of the children are mute; and the smoke from the houses, the blue pillars all sloping in one angle, float upward as if in sleep. Grave and stern the old castle rises from its emerald banks, which long ago came down to the lake in terrace on terrace, gay with fruits and flowers, and with stone nymph and satyrs hid in every nook. Silent and empty enough to-day! A flock of daws suddenly bursts out from a turret, and round and round they wheel, as if in panic. Has some great scandal
I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his “History of Civilization” in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and the other appurtenances of intellectual life, are not to be procured. I am acquainted with birds, and the building of nests—with wild-flowers, and the seasons in which they blow,—but with the big world far away, with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I am acquainted only through the Times, and the occasional magazine or review, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but by whom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten. The village has but few intellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured by the demand. Still there is something. Down in the village, and opposite the curiously-carved fountain, is a schoolroom which can accommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are our public meetings held. Musical entertainments have been given there by a single performer. In that schoolroom last winter an American biologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with this. Now and again some rare bird of an itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded periods the eloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence. His audience do not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and the doctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise as possible. Then, in connexion with the schoolroom, there is a public library, where books are exchanged once a month. This library is a kind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances. Each of these books has been in the wars; some are unquestionable antiques. The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages. The heroes and the heroines are of another age than ours. Sir Charles Grandison is standing with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones plops from the tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia. Moses comes home from market with his stock of shagreen spectacles. Lovers, warriors, and villains,—as dead to the present generation of readers as Cambyses,—are weeping, fighting, and intriguing. These books, tattered and torn
Besides the itinerant lecturer, and the permanent library, we have the Sunday sermon. These sum up the intellectual aids and furtherances of the whole place. We have a church and a chapel, and I attend both. The Dreamthorp people are Dissenters, for the most part; why, I never could understand; because dissent implies a certain intellectual effort. But Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely to remain. In an ungainly building, filled with hard gaunt pews, without an organ, without a touch of colour in the windows, with nothing to stir the imagination or the devotional sense, the simple people worship. On Sunday, they are put upon a diet of spiritual bread and water. Personally, I should desire more generous food. But the labouring people listen attentively, till once they fall asleep, and they wake up to receive the benediction with a feeling of having done their duty. They know they ought to go to chapel, and they go. I go likewise, from habit, although I have long ago lost the power of following a discourse. In my pew, and whilst the clergyman is going on, I think of the strangest things—of the tree at the window, of the congregation of the dead outside, of the wheat-fields and the corn-fields beyond and all around. And the odd thing is, that it is during sermon only that my mind flies off at a tangent and busies itself with things removed from the place and the circumstances. Whenever it is finished fancy returns from her wanderings, and I am alive to the objects around me. The clergyman knows my humour, and is good Christian enough to forgive me; and he smiles good-humouredly when I ask him to let me have the chapel keys, that I may enter, when in the mood, and preach a sermon to myself. To my mind, an empty chapel is impressive; a crowded one, comparatively a commonplace affair. Alone, I could choose my own text, and my silent discourse would not be without its practical applications.
An idle life I live in this place, as the world counts it; but then I have the satisfaction of differing from the world as to the meaning of idleness. A windmill twirling its arms all day is admirable only when there is corn to grind. Twirling its arms for the mere barren pleasure of twirling them, or for the sake of looking busy, does not deserve any rapturous paean of praise. I must be made happy after my own fashion, not after the fashion of other people. Here I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on the neck of my whim. Here I play with my own thoughts; here I ripen for the grave.
I have already described my environments and my mode of life, and out of both I contrive to extract a very tolerable amount of satisfaction. Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in the rain, is not my idea of comfort; no more is Dignity, walking forth richly clad, to whom every head uncovers, every knee grows supple. Bruin in winter-time fondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and love, feeding upon itself, dies of inanition. Take the candle of death in your hand, and walk through the stately galleries of the world, and their splendid furniture and array are as the tinsel armour and pasteboard goblets of a penny theatre; fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid. We argue fiercely about happiness. One insists that she is found in the cottage which the hawthorn shades. Another that she is a lady of fashion, and treads on cloth of gold. Wisdom, listening to both, shakes a white head, and considers that “a good deal may be said on both sides.”
There is a wise saying to the effect that “a man can eat no more than he can hold.” Every man gets about the same satisfaction out of life. Mr. Suddlechops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alexander at the head of his legions. The business of the one is to depopulate kingdoms, the business of the other to reap beards seven days old; but their relative positions do not affect the question. The one works with razors and soap-lather the other with battle-cries and well-greaved Greeks. The one of a Saturday night counts up his shabby gains and grumbles; the other on his Saturday night sits down and weeps for other worlds to conquer. The pence to Mr. Suddlechops are as important as are the worlds to Alexander. Every condition of life has its peculiar advantages, and wisdom points these out and is contented with them. The varlet who sang—
“A king cannot swagger
Or get drunk like a beggar,
Nor be half so happy as I”—
had the soul of a philosopher in him. The harshness of the parlour is revenged at night in the servants’ hall. The coarse rich man rates his domestic, but there is a thought in the domestic’s brain, docile and respectful as he looks, which makes the matter equal, which would madden the rich man if he knew it—make him wince as with a shrewdest twinge of hereditary gout. For insult and degradation are not without their peculiar solaces. You may spit upon Shylock’s gaberdine, but the day comes when he demands his pound of flesh; every blow, every insult, not without a certain satisfaction, he adds to the account running up against you in the day-book and ledger of his hate—which at the proper time he will ask you to discharge. Every way we look we see even-handed nature administering her laws of compensation. Grandeur has a heavy tax to pay. The usurper rolls along like a god, surrounded by his guards. He dazzles the crowd—all very fine; but look beneath his splendid trappings and you see a shirt of mail, and beneath that a heart cowering in terror of an air-drawn dagger. Whom did the memory of Austerlitz most keenly sting? The beaten emperor? or the mighty Napoleon, dying like an untended watch-fire on St. Helena?
Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise and sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeper dissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal than quiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than I would the great London ones. I like the pictures I see, and think them better painted, too, than those which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy; and the village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the scandals that convulse the clubs. It is wonderful how the whole world reflects itself in the simple village life. The people around me are full of their own affairs and interests; were they of imperial magnitude, they could not be excited more strongly. Farmer Worthy is anxious about the next market; the likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggs hardly allows him to sleep o’ nights. The village doctor—happily we have only one—skirrs hither and thither in his gig, as if man could neither die nor be born without his assistance. He is continually standing on the confines of existence, welcoming the new-comer, bidding farewell to the goer-away. And the robustious fellow who sits at the head of the table when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion on Wednesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung metal, and wields the village in the taproom, as my Lord Palmerston wields the nation in the House. His listeners think him a wiser personage than the Premier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion himself. I find everything here that other men find in the big world. London is but a magnified Dreamthorp.
And just as the Rev. Mr. White took note of the ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the spider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in “As You Like It,” had the makings of a charming essayist.
The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he extracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world’s six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world’s amanuensis. The proverbial
The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world which surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism is not unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home. If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, his titled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, his men-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed if he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man speaks of death—tells you that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the most insatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines in churchyards like a “demon-mole”—no one is specially offended, and that this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him. Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive, that exalts trifles and takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in matters of equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runs counter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which rises no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind—it crosses no man’s path, it disturbs no man’s amour propre. You may offend a man if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he. You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. The king, in his crown and coronation robes,
The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he comments upon material already existing. It is essential for him that books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some extent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusions and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and understand. And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giants came first: Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and, as yet, they are our best. In point of style, these essays are different from anything that could now be produced. Not only is the thinking different—the manner of
Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, and likeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon was constitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom presses the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too familiar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial. When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden “which is indeed prince-like.” To read over his table of contents, is like reading over a roll of peers’ names. We have, taking them as they stand, essays treating Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel,—a book plainly to lie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurture the noblest natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on. Montaigne was different from all this. His table of contents reads, in comparison, like a medley, or
Montaigne is avowedly an egotist; and by those who are inclined to make this a matter of reproach, it should be remembered that the value of egotism depends entirely on the egotist. If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race. If Shakspeare had left personal revelations, how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense left them—if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelations altogether—the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun at once in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne an egotist does not go a great way to decipher him. No writer takes the reader so much into his confidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty of confidence. He tells us everything about himself, we think; and when all is told, it is astonishing how little we really know. The esplanades of Montaigne’s palace are thoroughfares, men from every European country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building there is a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himself wears the key. We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his daughter’s governess, of his cook, of his page, “who was never found guilty of telling the truth,” of his library, the Gascon harvest outside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favourite speculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us. His daughter’s governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are never introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrate and set off the subject on which he happens to be writing.
Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately essayists,—Montaigne the greatest of the garrulous and communicative. The one gives you his thoughts on Death, Travel, Government, and the like, and lets you make the best of them; the other gives you his on the same subjects, but he wraps them up in personal gossip and reminiscence. With the last it is never Death or Travel alone: it is always Death one-fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths; or Travel one-fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths. He pours his thought into the water of gossip, and gives you to drink. He gilds his pill always, and he always gilds it with himself. The general characteristics of his Essays have been indicated, and it is worth while inquiring what they teach, what positive good they have done, and why for three centuries they have charmed, and still continue to charm.
The Essays contain a philosophy of life, which is not specially high, yet which is certain to find acceptance more or less with men who have passed out beyond the glow of youth, and who have made trial of the actual world. The essence of his philosophy is a kind of cynical common-sense. He will risk nothing in life; he will keep to the beaten track; he will not let passion blind or enslave him; he will gather round him what good he can, and will therewith endeavour to be content. He will be, as far as possible, self-sustained; he will not risk his happiness in the hands of man, or of woman either. He is shy of friendship, he fears love, for he knows that both are dangerous. He knows that life is full of bitters, and he holds it wisdom that a man should console himself, as far as possible, with its sweets, the principal of which are peace, travel, leisure, and the writing of essays. He values obtainable Gascon bread and cheese more than the unobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon the foolishest thing in the world. He will remain where he is. He will not deny that a new world may exist beyond the sunset, but he knows that to reach the new world there is a troublesome Atlantic to cross; and he is not in the least certain that, putting aside the chance of being drowned on the way, he will be one whit happier in the new world than he is in the old. For his part he will embark with no Columbus. He feels that life is but a sad thing at best; but as he has little hope of making it better, he accepts it, and will not make it worse by murmuring. When the chain galls him, he can at least revenge himself by making jests on it. He will temper the despotism of nature by epigrams. He has read Aesop’s fable, and is the last man in the world to relinquish the shabbiest substance to grasp at the finest shadow.
Of nothing under the sun was Montaigne quite certain, except that every man—whatever his station—might travel farther and fare worse; and that the playing with his own thoughts, in the shape of essay-writing, was the most harmless of amusements. His practical acquiescence in things does not promise much fruit, save to himself; yet in virtue of it he became one of the forces of the world—a very visible agent in bringing about the Europe which surrounds us today. He lived in the midst of the French religious wars. The rulers of his country were execrable Christians, but most orthodox Catholics. The burning of heretics was a public amusement, and the court ladies sat out the play. On the queen-mother and on her miserable son lay all the blood of the St. Bartholomew. The country was torn asunder; everywhere was battle, murder, pillage, and such woeful partings as Mr. Millais has represented in his incomparable picture. To the solitary humourous essayist this state of things was hateful. He was a good Catholic in his easy way; he attended divine service regularly; he crossed himself when he yawned. He conformed in practice to every rule of the Church; but if orthodox in these matters, he was daring in speculation. There was nothing he was not bold enough to question. He waged war after his peculiar fashion with every form of superstition. He worked under the foundations of priestcraft. But while serving the Reformed cause, he had no sympathy with Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, but keep their peculiar notions to themselves, France would rest! That a man should go to the stake for an opinion, was as incomprehensible to him as that a priest or king should send him there for an opinion. He thought the persecuted and the persecutors fools about equally matched. He was easy-tempered and humane—in the hunting-field he could not bear the cry of a dying hare with composure—martyr-burning had consequently no attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, his melancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man’s life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself. Man is here, he said, with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, with an unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured of nothing but that he was born, and that he must die; why, then, in Heaven’s name should he burn his fellow for a difference of opinion in the matter of surplices, or as to the proper fashion of conducting devotion? Out of his scepticism and his merciful disposition grew, in that fiercely intolerant age, the idea of toleration, of which he was the apostle. Widely read, charming every one by his wit and wisdom, his influence spread from mind to mind, and assisted in bringing about the change which has taken place in European thought. His ideas, perhaps, did not spring from the highest sources. He was no ascetic, he loved pleasure, he was tolerant of everything except cruelty; but on that account we
Montaigne’s hold on his readers arises from many causes. There is his frank and curious self-delineation; that interests, because it is the revelation of a very peculiar nature. Then there is the positive value of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour. Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never a separate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental and moral qualities in a man’s possession, and which bears the same relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up the orb of the sun. And style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature. In literature, the charm of style is indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life. In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word. “But Shadwell never deviates into sense,” for instance. Young Roscius, in his provincial barn, will repeat you the great soliloquy of Hamlet, and although every word may be given with tolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace as himself; the great actor speaks it, and you “read Shakspeare as by a flash of lightning.” And it is in Montaigne’s style, in the strange freaks and turnings of his thought, his constant surprises, his curious alternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, familiar form of address, and the grace with which everything is done, that his charm lies, and which makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as the first.
And on style depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new. Love is an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in the downcast eyes and blushes of young maidens. And so, although he fluttered in Eden, Cupid is young to-day. If Montaigne had lived in Dreamthorp, as I am now living, had he written essays as I am now writing them, his English Essays would have been as good as his Gascon ones. Looking on, the country cart would not for nothing have passed him on the road to market, the setting sun would be arrested in its splendid colours, the idle chimes of the church would be translated into a thoughtful music. As it is, the village life goes on, and there is no result. My sentences are not much more brilliant than the speeches of the clowns; in my book there is little more life than there is in the market-place on the days when there is no market.
Let me curiously analyse eternal farewells, and the last pressures of loving hands. Let me smile at faces bewept, and the nodding plumes and slow paces of funerals. Let me write down brave heroical sentences—sentences that defy death, as brazen Goliath the hosts of Israel.
“When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who has learnt to die, has forgot to serve. There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Aemilius answered him whom the miserable king of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ’Let him make that request to himself.’ In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, but thoughtful; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than the imaginations of death, even in the gayest and most wanton time of my age. In the company of ladies, and in the height of mirth, some have perhaps thought me possessed of some jealousy, or meditating upon the uncertainty of some imagined hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one surprised a few days before with a burning fever, of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then; and for aught I knew, the same destiny was attending me. Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other.” . . . . “Why dost thou fear this last day? It contributes no more to thy destruction than every one of the rest. The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does but confer it. Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it. These are the good lessons our mother nature teaches. I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death—whether we look upon it as to our own particular danger, or that of another—should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it were not so, it would be an army of whining milksops,) and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than others of better quality and education; and I do verily believe, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living, the cries of mothers, wives and children, the visits of astonished and affected friends, the attendance of pale and blubbered servants, a dark room set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physicians
“Men feare death as children feare to goe in the darke; and as that natural feare in children is increased with tales, so in the other. Certainly the contemplation of death as the wages of sinne, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the feare of it as a tribute unto nature, is weake. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes mixture of vanitie and of superstition. You shal reade in some of the friars’ books of mortification, that a man should thinke unto himself what the paine is if he have but his finger-end pressed or tortured; and thereby imagine what the pains of death are when the whole body is corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with lesse paine than the torture of a Lemme. For the most vitall parts are not the quickest of sense. Groanes and convulsions, and a discoloured face, and friends weeping, and blackes and obsequies, and the like, shew death terrible. It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the minde of man so weake but it mates and masters the feare of death; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can winne the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death, love subjects it, honour aspireth to it, griefe fleeth to it, feare pre-occupieth it; nay, we read, after Otho the emperour had slaine himselfe, pitty, (which is the tenderest of affections,) provoked many to die, out of meer compassion to their soveraigne, and as the truest sort of followers. . . . . It is as naturall to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and, therefore, a minde mixt and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the sadness of death. But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc Dimittis, when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envie.” [2]
These sentences of the great essayists are brave and ineffectual as Leonidas and his Greeks. Death cares very little for sarcasm or trope; hurl at him a javelin or a rose, it is all one. We build around ourselves ramparts of stoical maxims, edifying to witness, but when the terror comes these yield as the knots of river flags to the shoulder of Behemoth.
Death is terrible only in presence. When distant, or supposed to be distant, we can call him hard or tender names, nay, even poke our poor fun at him. Mr. Punch, on one occasion, when he wished to ridicule the useful-information leanings of a certain periodical publication, quoted from its pages the sentence, “Man is mortal,” and people were found to grin broadly over the exquisite stroke of humour. Certainly the words, and the fact they contain, are trite enough. Utter the sentence gravely in any company, and you are certain to provoke laughter. And yet some subtile recognition of the fact of death runs constantly through the warp and woof of the most ordinary human existence. And this recognition does not always terrify. The spectre has the most cunning disguises, and often when near us we are unaware of the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the sweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasures with which we behold the vapours of morning; it comes between the passionate lips of lovers; it lives in the thrill of kisses. “An inch deeper, and you will find the emperor.” Probe joy to its last fibre, and you will find death. And it is the most merciful of all the merciful provisions of nature, that a haunting sense of insecurity should deepen the enjoyment of what we have secured; that the pleasure of our warm human day and its activities should to some extent arise from a vague consciousness of the waste night which environs it, in which no arm is raised, in which no voice is ever heard. Death is the ugly fact which nature has to hide, and she hides it well. Human life were otherwise an impossibility. The pantomime runs on merrily enough; but when once Harlequin lifts his vizor, Columbine disappears, the jest is frozen on the Clown’s lips, and the hand of the filching Pantaloon is arrested in the act. Wherever death looks, there is silence and trembling. But although on every man he will one day or another look, he is coy of revealing himself till the appointed time. He makes his approaches like an Indian warrior, under covers and ambushes. We have our parts to play, and he remains hooded till they are played out. We are agitated by our passions, we busily pursue our ambitions, we are acquiring money or reputation, and all at once, in the centre of our desires, we discover the “Shadow feared of man.” And so nature fools the poor human mortal evermore. When she means to be deadly, she dresses her face in smiles; when she selects a victim, she sends him a poisoned rose. There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey.
And death is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is as common as births; it is of more frequent occurrence than marriages and the attainment of majorities. But the difference between death and other forms of human experience lies in this, that we can gain no information about it. The dead man is wise, but he is silent. We cannot wring his secret from him. We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which gathers on the rigid face. As a consequence, when our thought rests on death we are smitten with isolation and loneliness. We are without company on the dark road; and we have advanced so far upon it that we cannot hear the voices of our friends. It is in this sense of loneliness, this consciousness of identity and nothing more, that the terror of dying consists. And yet, compared to that road, the most populous thoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert. What enumerator will take for us the census of dead? And this matter of death and dying, like most things else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own fears and hopes. Death, terrible to look forward to, may be pleasant even to look back at. Could we be admitted to the happy fields, and hear the conversations which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that to conquer death a man has but to die; that by that act terror is softened into familiarity, and that the remembrance of death becomes but as the remembrance of yesterday. To these fortunate ones death may be but a date, and dying a subject fruitful in comparisons, a matter on which experiences may be serenely compared. Meantime, however, we have not yet reached that measureless content, and death scares, piques, tantalises, as mind and nerve are built. Situated as we are, knowing that it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it curiously, at times. Nothing interests us so much. The Highland seer pretended that he could see the winding-sheet high upon the breast of the man for whom death was waiting. Could we behold any such visible sign, the man who bore it, no matter where he stood—even if he were a slave watching Caesar pass—would usurp every eye. At the coronation of a king, the wearing of that order would dim royal robe, quench the sparkle of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald’s cry. Death makes the meanest beggar august, and that augustness would assert itself in the presence of a king. And it is this curiosity with regard to everything related to death and dying which makes us treasure up the last sayings of great men, and attempt to wring out of them tangible meanings. Was Goethe’s “Light—light, more light!” a prayer, or a statement of spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the fact that the room in which he lay was filling with the last twilight? In consonance with our own natures, we interpret it the one way or the other—he is beyond our questioning. For the same reason it is that men take interest in executions—from Charles I. on the scaffold at Whitehall, to Porteous in the Grassmarket execrated by the mob. These men are not dulled by disease, they are not delirious with fever; they look death in the face, and what in these circumstances they say and do has the strangest fascination for us.
What does the murderer think when his eyes are forever blinded by the accursed nightcap? In what form did thought condense itself between the gleam of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles’s head in the saw-dust? This kind of speculation may be morbid, but it is not necessarily so. All extremes of human experience touch us; and we have all the deepest personal interest in the experience of death. Out of all we know about dying we strive to clutch something which may break its solitariness, and relieve us by a touch of companionship.
To denude death of its terrible associations were a vain attempt. The atmosphere is always cold around an iceberg. In the contemplation of dying the spirit may not flinch, but pulse and heart, colour and articulation, are always cowards. No philosophy will teach them bravery in the stern presence. And yet there are considerations which rob death of its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. The thoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, and in certain moved moments, which, after they have gone, we can recognise to have been our happiest, some subtle thought of death has been curiously intermixed. And this subtle intermixture it is which gives the happy moment its character—which makes the difference between the gladness of a child, resident in mere animal health and impulse, and too volatile to be remembered, and the serious joy of a man, which looks before and after, and takes in both this world and the next. Speaking broadly, it may be said that it is from some obscure recognition of the fact of death that life draws its final sweetness. An obscure, haunting recognition, of course; for if more than that, if the thought becomes palpable, defined, and present, it swallows up everything. The howling of the winter wind outside increases the warm satisfaction of a man in bed; but this satisfaction is succeeded by quite another feeling when the wind grows into a tempest, and threatens to blow the house down. And this remote recognition of death may exist almost constantly in a man’s mind, and give to his life keener zest and relish. His lights may burn the brighter for it, and his wines taste sweeter. For it is on the tapestry or a dim ground that the figures come out in the boldest relief and the brightest colour.
If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. The brutes die even as we; but it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. If nature cunningly hides death, and so permits us to play out our little games, it is easily seen that our knowing it to be inevitable, that to every one of us it will come one day or another, is a wonderful spur to action. We really do work while it is called to-day, because the night cometh when no man can work. We may not expect it soon—it may not have sent
Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty and elevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and that melancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leaf brings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoys the beauty, but his knowledge that it is fleeting, and that he fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something the beautiful object and the gazer are alike raised.
Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant emotion is mixed and deepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have never encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. All great joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexity and the deepness of its reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enough from a single key, but the richest music is that in which the whole force of the instrument is employed, in the production of which every key is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestic tones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. Pleasures which rise beyond the mere gratification of the senses are dependant for their exquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which they evoke. And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning pathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.
In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap for it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly. Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. Into our commonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swan from the airy void into the ordinary
In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, and attains thereby a certain picturesqueness. The grim thought stands in the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thought of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young man cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably comfortable persons. When a man’s mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death as an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use of it in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine. In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, most pretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he does the memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in a reverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of the magnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, and while undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his “Lara,” as he informs us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes in whose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who then affected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felt his richest wines powdered with the dust of graves,—of which wine, notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him,—wrote,
“That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least.”
The sleep referred to being death. This was meant to take away the reader’s breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself to his pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with this Shakspeare’s far out-looking and thought-heavy lines—lines which, under the same image, represent death—
“To
die—to sleep;—
To sleep! perchance to dream;—ay,
there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams
may come!”
And you see at once how a man’s notions of death and dying are deepened by a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little as youth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart to poke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or to stick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasure from the irrelevancy.
The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out of a great battle. Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seems to have been charmed. And knowing how it fared with his friends—perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down, silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimation of the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will accept of it, the day after—a man, as he draws near middle age, begins to suspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught in a shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, he anxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to the colour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws out toward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are felt to be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is the pleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow of delight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-plucked flowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearance of nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occupies a post, and is in discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illness and convalescence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be a cruel interruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person is harassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength. He is placed hors de combat; all the while he is conscious that the battle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal a misfortune. Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced, he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attention which sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, and accept them as before as compensation in full. The world is ever with him; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself in an intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and a fatal issue—which in such cases is ever
We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed sayings; we wish to know how the matter stands; how the whole thing looks to the dying. Unhappily—perhaps, on the whole, happily—we can gather no information from these. The dying are nearly as reticent as the dead. The inferences we draw from the circumstances of death, the pallor, the sob, the glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. Manfred exclaims, “Old man, ’tis not so difficult to die!” Sterling wrote Carlyle “that it was all very strange, yet not so strange as it seemed to the lookers on.” And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The world has lasted six thousand years now, and, with the exception of those at present alive, the millions who have breathed upon it—splendid emperors, horny-fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought has never stirred—have died, and what they have done, we also shall be able to do. It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our fears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we shall be as wise as they—and as taciturn.
[1] Montaigne.
[2] Bacon.
If it be assumed that the North Briton is, to an appreciable extent, a different creature from the Englishman, the assumption is not likely to provoke dispute. No one will deny us the prominence of our cheek-bones, and our pride in the same. How far the difference extends, whether it involves merit or demerit, are questions not now sought to be settled. Nor is it important to discover how the difference arose;
Chaucer must always remain a name in British literary history. He appeared at a time when the Saxon and Norman races had become fused, and when ancient bitternesses were lost in the proud title of Englishman. He was the first great poet the island produced; and he wrote for the most part in the language of the people, with just the slightest infusion of the courtlier Norman element, which gives to his writings something of the high-bred air that the short upper-lip gives to the human countenance. In his earlier poems he was under the influence of the Provencal Troubadours, and in his “Flower and the Leaf,” and other works of a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinal virtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautiful ladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held
Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had, both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, no one of them can be compared with him for a moment. The “Moral Gower” was his friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkle of his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve and Lydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names are retained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found a place in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour, who although deficient in tenderness and imagination, deserves praise for his sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. “The Bruce” is really a fine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas is a very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poetic fire in him. He rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, and he fights the battle of Bannockburn over again with great valour, shouting, and flapping of standards. In England, nature seemed to have exhausted herself in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt came, the immediate precursors of Spenser, Shakspeare, and their companions.
While in England the note of the nightingale suddenly ceased, to be succeeded by the mere chirping of the barn-door sparrows, the divine and melancholy voice began to be heard further north. It was during that most barren period of English poetry—extending from Chaucer’s death till the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign—that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly, splendidly—to be matched only by that other uprising nearer our own time, equally unexpected and splendid, of Burns and Scott. And it is curious to notice in this brilliant outburst of northern genius how much is owing to Chaucer; the cast of language is identical, the literary form is the same, there is the same way of looking at nature, the same allegorical forests, the troops of ladies, the same processions of cardinal virtues. James I., whose long captivity in England made him acquainted with Chaucer’s works was the leader of the poetic movement which culminated in Dunbar, and died away in Sir David Lindsay just before the noise and turmoil of the Reformation set in. In the concluding stanza of the “Quair,” James records his obligation to those—
“Masters
dear,
Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes
sate
Of retorick, while they were
livand here,
Superlative as poets laureate
Of morality and eloquence ornate.”
But while, during the reigns of the Jameses, Scottish genius was being acted upon by the broader and deeper genius of England, Scotland, quite unconsciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full of all spiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure nooks and corners, the Scottish ballads were growing up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules, rude in structure and expression, yet, at the same time, full of vitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of rustic festivals, and the piteousness of domestic tragedies. The stormy feudal time out of which they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, but they remained, made brighter by each succeeding summer, like the wildflowers that blow in the chinks of ruins. And when English poetry had become artificial and cold, the lucubrations of forgotten Scottish minstrels, full of the touches that make the whole world kin, brought new life with them. Scotland had invaded England more than once, but the blue bonnets never went over the border so triumphantly as when they did so in the shape of songs and ballads.
James IV., if not the wisest, was certainly the most brilliant monarch of his name; and he was fortunate beyond the later Stuarts in this, that during his lifetime no new popular tide had set in which it behooved him to oppose or to float upon. For him in all its essentials to-day had flowed quietly out of yesterday, and he lived unperplexed by fear of change. With something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a merrier monarch than his dark-featured and saturnine descendant who bore the appellation. He was fond of martial sports, he loved to glitter at tournaments, his court was crowded with singing men and singing women. Yet he had his gloomy moods and superstitious despondencies. He could not forget that he had appeared in arms against his father; even while he whispered in the ear of beauty the iron belt of penance was fretting his side, and he alternated the splendid revel with the cell of the monk. In these days, and for long after, the Borders were disturbed, and the Highland clans, setting royal authority at defiance, were throttling each other in their mists. The Catholic religion was yet unsapped, and the wealth of the country resided in the hands of the nobles and the churchmen. Edinburgh towered high on the ridge between Holyrood and the Castle, its streets reddened with feud at intervals, and its merchants clustering round the Cathedral of St. Giles like bees in a honeycomb; and the king, when he looked across the faint azure of the Forth, beheld the long coast of Fife dotted with little towns, where ships were moored that traded with France and Holland, and brought with them cargoes of silk and wines. James was a popular monarch; he was beloved by the nobles and by the people. He loved justice, he cultivated his marine, and he built the Great Michael—the Great Eastern of that day. He had valiant seamen, and more than once Barton sailed into Leith with a string of English prizes. When he fell with all his nobility at Flodden, there came upon Scotland the woe with which she was so familiar—
“Woe to that realme that haith an ower young king.”
A long regency followed; disturbing elements of religion entered into the life of the nation, and the historical stream which had flowed smoothly for a series of years became all at once convulsed and turbulent, as if it had entered upon a gorge of rapids. It was in this pleasant interregnum of the reign of the fourth James, when ancient disorders had to a certain extent been repressed, and when religious difficulties ahead were yet undreamed of, that the poet Dunbar flourished—a nightingale singing in a sunny lull of the Scottish historical storm.
Modern readers are acquainted with Dunbar chiefly through the medium of Mr. David Laing’s beautiful edition of his works published in 1834, and by good Dr. Irving’s intelligent and admirable compacted “History of Scottish Poetry,” published the other day. Irving’s work, if deficient somewhat in fluency and grace of style, is characterised by conscientiousness of statement and by the ripest knowledge. Yet, despite the researches of these competent writers, of the events of the poet’s life not much is known. He was born about 1460, and from an unquotable allusion in one of his poems, he is supposed to have been a native of the Lothians. His name occurs in the register of the University of St. Andrews as a Bachelor of Arts. With the exception of these entries in the college register, there is nothing authentically known of his early life. We have no portrait of him, and cannot by that means decipher him. We do not know with certainty from what family he sprang. Beyond what light his poems may throw on them, we have no knowledge of his habits and personal tastes. He exists for the most part in rumour, and the vague shadows of things. It appears that in early life he became a friar of the order of St. Francis; and in the capacity of a travelling priest tells us that “he preached in Derntown kirk and in Canterbury;” that he “passed at Dover across the Channel, and went through Picardy teaching the people.” He does not seem to have taken kindly to his profession. His works are full of sarcastic allusions to the clergy, and in no measured terms he denounces their luxury, their worldly-mindedness, and their desire for high place and fat livings. Yet these denunciations have no very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a disappointed candidate, rather than of a prophet; and, to the last, he seems to have expected preferment in the Church. Not without a certain pathos he writes, when he had become familiar with disappointment, and the sickness of hope deferred—
“I wes in youth an nureiss knee,
Dandely! bischop, dandely!
And quhen that age now dois me greif,
Ane sempill vicar I can nocht be.”
It is not known when he entered the service of King James. From his poems it appears that he was employed as a clerk or secretary in several of the missions despatched to foreign courts. It is difficult to guess in what capacity Dunbar served at Holyrood. He was all his life a priest, and expected preferment from his royal patron. We know that he performed mass in the presence. Yet when the king in one of his dark moods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the capital to the religious gloom of the convent of Franciscans at Stirling, we find the poet inditing a parody on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the calendar, to transport the princely penitent from Stirling, “where ale is thin and small,” to Edinburgh, where there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, and the fragrant clarets of France. And in another of his poems, he describes himself as dancing in the queen’s chamber so zealously that he lost one of his slippers, a mishap which provoked her Majesty to great mirth. Probably, as the king was possessed of considerable literary taste, and could appreciate Dunbar’s fancy and satire, he kept him attached to his person, with the intention of conferring a benefice on him when one fell vacant; and when a benefice did fall vacant, felt compelled to bestow it on the cadet of some powerful family in the state,—for it was always the policy of James to stand well with his nobles. He remembered too well the deaths of his father and great-grandfather to give unnecessary offense to his great barons. From his connexion with the court, the poet’s life may be briefly epitomised. In August, 1500, his royal master granted Dunbar an annual pension of 10 pounds for life, or till such time as he should be promoted to a benefice of the annual value of 40 pounds. In 1501, he visited England in the train of the ambassadors sent thither to negotiate the king’s marriage. The marriage took place in May, 1503, on which occasion the high-piled capital wore holiday attire, balconies blazed with scarlet cloth, and the loyal multitude shouted as bride and bridegroom rode past, with the chivalry of two kingdoms in their train. Early in May, Dunbar composed his most celebrated poem in honour of the event. Next year he said mass in the king’s presence for the first time, and received a liberal reward. In 1505, he received a sum in addition to his stated pension, and two years thereafter his pension was doubled. In August, 1510, his pension was increased to 80 pounds per annum, until he became possessed of a benefice of the annual value of 10 pounds or upwards. In 1513, Flodden was fought, and in the confusion consequent on the king’s death, Dunbar and his slowly-increasing pensions disappear from the records of things. We do not know whether he received his benefice; we do not know the date of his death, and to this day his grave is secret as the grave of Moses.
Knowing but little of Dunbar’s life, our interest is naturally concentrated on what of his writings remain to us. And to modern eyes the old poet is a singular spectacle. His language is different than ours; his mental structure and modes of thought are unfamiliar; in his intellectual world, as we map it out to ourselves, it is difficult to conceive how a comfortable existence could be attained. Times, manners, and ideas have changed, and we look upon Dunbar with a certain reverential wonder and curiosity as we look upon Tantallon, standing up, grim and gray, in the midst of the modern landscape. The grand old fortress is a remnant of a state of things which have utterly passed away. Curiously, as we walk beside it, we think of the actual human life its walls contained. In those great fire-places logs actually burned once, and in winter nights men-at-arms spread out big palms against the grateful heat. In those empty apartments was laughter, and feasting, and serious talk enough in troublous times, and births, and deaths, and the bringing home of brides in their blushes. This empty moat was filled with water, to keep at bay long-forgotten enemies, and yonder loop-hole was made narrow, as a protection from long-moulded arrows. In Tantallon we know the Douglasses lived in state, and bearded kings, and hung out banners to the breeze; but a sense of wonder is mingled with our knowledge, for the bothy of the Lothian farmer is even more in accordance with our methods of conducting life. Dunbar affects us similarly. We know that he possessed a keen intellect, a blossoming fancy, a satiric touch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the “Flyting” and the “Lament for the Makars,” there is difficulty in making one’s ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yet remote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separated from him by centuries, and that chasm we are unable to bridge properly.
The first thing that strikes the reader of these poems is their variety and intellectual range. It may be said that—partly from constitutional turn of thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time in which he lived, when families rose to splendour and as suddenly collapsed, when the steed that bore his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned at evening masterless to the castle-gate—Dunbar’s prevailing mood of mind is melancholy; that he, with a certain fondness for the subject, as if it gave him actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of mortal prosperity, the advance of age putting out the lights of youth, and cancelling the rapture of the lover, and the certainty of death. This is a favourite path of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with a gloomy sedateness of acquiescence,
In his allegorical poems—“The Golden Targe,” “The Merle and the Nightingale,” “The Thistle and the Rose”—Dunbar’s fancy has full scope. As allegories, they are, perhaps, not worth much; at all events, modern readers do not care for the adventures of “Quaking Dread and Humble Obedience”; nor are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended by her fair damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and Lusty Cheer. The whole conduct and machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer performed in earls’ mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud and recite a poetical address to Majesty. In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded. Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in its stead. The Lord Mavor’s Show, the last remnant of the antique spectacular taste, does not move us now; it is held a public nuisance; it provokes the rude “chaff” of the streets. Our very mobs have become critical. Gog and Magog are dethroned. The knight feels the satiric comments through his armour. The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed. But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music.
Quick surprises of beauty, and a rapid succession of pictures, keep the attention awake. Now it is—
“May,
of mirthful monethis queen,
Betwixt April and June, her sisters sheen,
Within the garden walking up and down.”
Now—
“The god of windis, Eolus,
With variand look, richt like a lord unstable.”
Now the nightingale—
“Never sweeter noise was heard with
livin’ man,
Nor made this merry, gentle nightingale;
Her sound went with the river as it ran
Out throw the fresh and flourished lusty
vale.”
And now a spring morning—
“Ere Phoebus was in purple cape
revest,
Up raise the lark, the heaven’s
minstrel fine
In May, in till a morrow mirthfullest.
“Full angel-like thir birdis sang
their hours
Within their curtains green, in to their
hours
Apparelled white and red with bloomes
sweet;
Enamelled was the field with all colours,
The pearly droppis shook in silver shours;
While all in balm did branch and leavis
fleet.
To part fra Phoebus did Aurora greet,
Her crystal tears I saw hing on the flours,
Whilk he for love all drank up with his
heat.
“For mirth of May, with skippis
and with hops,
The birdis sang upon the tender crops,
With curious notes, as Venus’ chapel
clerks;
The roses young, new spreading of their
knops,
Were powderit bricht with heavenly beriall
drops,
Through beams red, burning as ruby sparks;
The skies rang for shouting of the larks,
The purple heaven once scal’t in
silver slops,
Oure gilt the trees, branches, leaves,
and barks.”
The finest of Dunbar’s poems in this style is “The Thistle and the Rose.” It was written in celebration of the marriage of James with the Princess Margaret of England, and the royal pair are happily represented as the national emblems. It, of course, opens with a description of a spring morning. Dame Nature resolves that every bird, beast, and flower should compeer before her highness; the roe is commanded to summon the animals, the restless swallow the birds, and the “conjured” yarrow the herbs and flowers. In the twinkling of an eye they stand before the queen. The lion and the eagle are crowned, and are instructed to be humble and just, and to exercise their powers mercifully:—
“Then callit she all flouris that
grew in field,
Discerning all their seasons
and effeirs,
Upon the awful thistle she beheld
And saw him keepit with a
bush of spears:
Consid’ring him so able
for the weirs,
A radius crown of rubies she him gave,
And said, ‘In field, go forth and
fend the lave.’”
The rose, also, is crowned, and the poet gives utterance to the universal joy on occasion of the marriage—type of peace between two kingdoms. Listen to the rich music of according voices:—
“Then all the birds sang with voice
on hicht,
Whose mirthful soun’
was marvellous to hear;
The mavis sang, Hail Rose, most rich and
richt,
That does up flourish under
Phoebus’ sphere,
Hail, plant of youth, hail
Princess, dochter dear;
Hail blosom breaking out of the bluid
royal,
Whose precious virtue is imperial.
“The merle she sang, Hail, Rose
of most delight,
Hail, of all floris queen
an’ sovereign!
The lark she sang, Hail, Rose both red
and white;
Most pleasant flower, of michty
colours twane:
The nichtingale sang, Hail,
Nature’s suffragane,
In beauty, nurture, and every nobleness,
In rich array, renown, and gentleness.
“The common voice up raise of birdes
small,
Upon this wise, Oh, blessit
be the hour
That thou was chosen to be our principal!
Welcome to be our Princess
of honour,
Our pearl, our pleasance,
and our paramour,
Our peace, our play, our plain felicity;
Christ thee comfort from all adversity.”
But beautiful as these poems are, it is as a satirist that Dunbar has performed his greatest feats. He was by nature “dowered with the scorn of scorn,” and its edge was whetted by life-long disappointment. Like Spenser, he knew—
“What Hell it is in suing long to bide.”
And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is the shortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric rage breaks out in single lines of fire. And although his satire is often almost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct is healthy at bottom. He hates Vice, although his hand is too often in the kennel to pelt her withal. He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate, and upbraids him with his secret sins in language unsuited to modern ears. His greater satires have a wild sheen of imagination about them. They are far from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his contempt breaks through the bounds of time and space, and brings the spiritual world on the stage. He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh for their habits of profane swearing, and the result is a poem, which probably gave Coleridge the hint of his “Devil’s Walk.” Dunbar’s satire is entitled the “Devil’s Inquest.” He represents the Fiend passing up through the market, and chuckling as he listens to the strange oaths of cobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, and minstrel. He comments on what he hears and sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is the conclusion of the piece:—
“Ane thief said, God that ever I
chaip,
Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip,
But I in hell for geir wald
be.
The Devil said, ’Welcome in a raip:
Renounce thy God, and cum
to me.’
“The fishwives net and swore with
granes,
And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes;
They gave them, with ane shout
on hie.
The Devil said, ’Welcome all at
anes;
Renounce your God, and cum
to me.’
“The rest of craftis great aiths
swair,
Their wark and craft had nae compair,
Ilk ane unto their qualitie.
The Devil said then, withouten mair,
‘Renounce your God,
and cum to me.’”
But the greatest of Dunbar’s satires—in fact, the greatest of all his poems—is that entitled “The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins.” It is short, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The pictures rise on the reader’s eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound of farce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined—the wildest grotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceives himself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision he heard Mahoun command that the wretched who “had ne’er been shriven” should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves; “holy harlots” appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles the faces of the onlookers; but when a string of “priests with their shaven necks” come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with the laughter of all the fiends. Then “The Seven Deadly Sins” begin to leap at once:—
“And first of all the dance was
Pride,
With hair wyld back and bonnet on side.”
He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire.
“Then Ire came in with sturt and
strife;
His hand was aye upon his knife;”
and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, smiting each other with swords, jagging each other with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secret hatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, backbiters, calumniators and all the human serpentry that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then came Covetousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the fiends gave to drink of newly-molten gold.
“Syne Swearness, at the second bidding,
Came like a sow out of a midding:”
and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed them with a bridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a turn in the fire to make them nimbler. Then came Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evil companions, “full strange of countenance, like torches burning bright.” Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy that he could hardly move:—
“Him followed mony foul drunkart
With can and callop, cup and quart,
In surfeit and excess.”
“Drink, aye they cried,” with their parched lips; and the fiends gave them hot lead to lap. Minstrels, it appears, are not to be found in that dismal place:—
“Nae minstrels played to them but
doubt,
For gleemen there were halden out
By day and eik by nicht:
Except a minstrel that slew a man,
So to his heritage he wan,
And entered by brieve of richt.”
And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil is resolved to make high holiday:
“Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan
Padyane,
Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane,
Far north-wast in a neuck;
Be he the coronach had done shout,
Ersche men so gatherit him about,
In hell great room they took.
Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter,
Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter,
And roup like raven and rook.
The Devil sae deaved was with their yell,
That in the deepest pot of hell
He smorit them with smook.”
There is one other poem of Dunbar’s which may be quoted as a contrast to what has been already given. It is remarkable as being the only one in which he assumes the character of a lover. The style of thought is quite modern; bereave it of its uncouth orthography, and it might have been written to-day. It is turned with much skill and grace. The constitutional melancholy of the man comes out in it; as, indeed, it always does when he finds a serious topic. It possesses more tenderness and sentiment than is his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems, breathing a mournful fragrance:—
“Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes,
Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes,
Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir,
And every vertew that to hevin is dear,
Except onlie that ye ar mercyles,
“Into your garthe this day I did
persew:
Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of
dew,
Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer
to seyne,
And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene:
Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of
rew.
“I doute that March, with his cauld
blastis keyne,
Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of
mene;
Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart
sic pane,
That I wald mak to plant his rute agane,
So comfortand his levis unto me bene.”
The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea of the old poet’s general power—his music, his picturesque faculty, his colour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to form any very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the most part occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relieve him from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although the writer is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, his personality is not made clear to us. There is great gap of time between him and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in the products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo’s cheek, and the satyr’s shaggy limbs, are explainable partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been transmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with us the merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectual purity—although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheen before we hand them on to our children—are no more to be placed to our personal credits than Dryden’s satire, Pope’s epigram, Marlborough’s battles, Burke’s speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. The
Rightly or wrongly, during the last twenty or thirty years a strong feeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and a still stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments. Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether such execution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certain that it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. In consequence of this, executions have become rare; and it is quite clear that many scoundrels, well worthy of the noose, contrive to escape it. When, on the occasion of a wretch being turned off, the spectators are few, it is remarked by the newspapers that the mob is beginning to lose its proverbial cruelty, and to be stirred by humane pulses; when they are numerous, and especially when girls and women form a majority, the circumstance is noticed and deplored. It is plain enough that, if the newspaper considered
It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions—the artisans and country people who take up their stations overnight as close to the barriers as possible, and the wealthier classes who occupy hired windows and employ opera-glasses—are merely drawn together by a morbid relish for horrible sights. He is a bold man who will stand forward as the advocate of such persons—so completely is the popular mind made up as to their tastes and motives. It is not disputed that the large body of the mob, and of the occupants at windows, have been drawn together by an appetite for excitement; but it is quite possible that many come there from an impulse
To be publicly put to death, for whatever reason, must ever be a serious matter. It is always bitter, but there are degrees in its bitterness. It is easy to die like Stephen with an opened heaven above you, crowded with angel faces. It is easy to die like Balmerino with a chivalrous sigh for the White Rose, and an audible “God bless King James.” Such men die for a cause in which they glory, and are supported thereby; they are conducted to the portals of the next world by the angels, Faith, Pity, Admiration. But it is not easy to die in expiation of a crime like murder, which engirdles you with trembling and horror even in the loneliest places, which cuts you off from the sympathies of your kind, which reduces the universe to two elements—a sense of personal identity, and a memory of guilt. In so dying, there must be inconceivable bitterness; a man can have no other support than what strength he may pluck from despair, or from the iron with which nature may have originally braced heart and nerve. Yet, taken as a whole, criminals on the scaffold comport themselves creditably. They look Death in the face when he wears his cruelest aspect, and if they flinch somewhat, they can at least bear to look. I believe that, for the criminal, execution within the prison walls, with no witnesses save some half-dozen official persons, would be infinitely more terrible than execution in the presence of a curious, glaring mob. The daylight and the publicity are alien elements, which wean the man a little from himself. He steadies his dizzy brain on the crowd beneath and around him. He has his last part to play, and his manhood rallies to play it well. Nay, so subtly is vanity intertwined with our motives, the noblest and the most ignoble, that I can fancy a poor wretch with the noose dangling at his ear, and with barely five minutes to live, soothed somewhat with the idea that his firmness and composure will earn him the approbation, perhaps the pity, of the spectators. He would take with him, if he could, the good opinion of his fellows. This composure of criminals puzzles one. Have they looked at death so long and closely, that familiarity has robbed it of terror? Has life treated them so harshly, that they are tolerably well pleased to be quit of it on any terms? Or is the whole thing mere blind stupor and delirium, in which thought is paralysed, and the man an automaton? Speculation is useless. The fact remains that criminals for the most part die well and bravely. It is said that the championship of England was to be decided at some little distance from London on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out on the scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result had yet become known. Jack Ketch was not aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take place so inconveniently early in the day. Think of a poor Thurtell forced to take his long journey an hour, perhaps, before the arrival of intelligence so important!
More than twenty years ago I saw two men executed, and the impression then made remains fresh to this day. For this there were many reasons. The deed for which the men suffered created an immense sensation. They were hanged on the spot where the murder was committed—on a rising ground, some four miles north-east of the city; and as an attempt at rescue was apprehended, there was a considerable display of military force on the occasion. And when, in the dead silence of thousands, the criminals stood beneath the halters, an incident occurred, quite natural and slight in itself, but when taken in connection with the business then proceeding, so unutterably tragic, so overwhelming in its pathetic suggestion of contrast, that the feeling of it has never departed, and never will. At the time, too, I speak of, I was very young; the world was like a die newly cut, whose every impression is fresh and vivid.
While the railway which connects two northern capitals was being built, two brothers from Ireland, named Doolan, were engaged upon it in the capacity of navvies. For some fault or negligence, one of the brothers was dismissed by the overseer—a Mr. Green—of that particular portion of the line on which they were employed. The dismissed brother went off in search of work, and the brother who remained—Dennis was the Christian name of him—brooded over this supposed wrong, and in his dull, twilighted brain revolved projects of vengeance. He did not absolutely mean to take Green’s life, but he meant to thrash him within an inch of it. Dennis, anxious to thrash Green, but not quite seeing his way to it, opened his mind one afternoon, when work was over, to his friends—fellow-Irishmen and navvies—Messrs. Redding and Hickie. These took up Doolan’s wrong as their own, and that evening, by the dull light of a bothy fire, they held a rude parliament, discussing ways and means of revenge. It was arranged that Green should be thrashed—the amount of thrashing left an open question, to be decided, unhappily, when the blood was up and the cinder of rage blown into a flame. Hickie’s spirit was found not to be a mounting one, and it was arranged that the active partners in the game should be Doolan and Redding. Doolan, as the aggrieved party, was to strike the first blow, and Redding, as the aggrieved party’s particular friend, asked and obtained permission to strike the second. The main conspirators, with a fine regard for the feelings of the weaker Hickie, allowed him to provide the weapons of assault,—so that by some slight filament of aid he might connect himself with the good cause. The unambitious Hickie at once applied himself to his duty. He went out, and in due time returned with two sufficient iron pokers. The weapons were examined, approved of, and carefully laid aside. Doolan, Redding, and Hickie ate their suppers, and retired to their several couches to sleep, peacefully enough no doubt. About the same time, too, Green, the English overseer, threw down his weary limbs, and entered on his last sleep—little dreaming what the morning had in store for him.
Uprose the sun, and uprose Doolan and Redding, and dressed, and thrust each his sufficient iron poker up the sleeve of his blouse, and went forth. They took up their station on a temporary wooden bridge which spanned the line, and waited there. Across the bridge, as was expected, did Green ultimately come. He gave them good morning; asked, “why they were loafing about?” received no very pertinent answer, perhaps did not care to receive one; whistled—the unsuspecting man!—thrust his hands into his breeches pockets, turned his back on them, and leaned over the railing of the bridge, inspecting the progress of the works beneath. The temptation was really too great. What could wild Irish flesh and blood do? In a moment out from the sleeve of Doolan’s blouse came the hidden poker, and the first blow was struck, bringing Green to the ground. The friendly Redding, who had bargained for the second, and who, naturally enough, was in fear of being cut out altogether, jumped on the prostrate man, and fulfilled his share of the bargain with a will. It was Redding it was supposed who sped the unhappy Green. They overdid their work—like young authors—giving many more blows than were sufficient, and then fled. The works, of course, were that morning in consternation. Redding and Hickie were, if I remember rightly, apprehended in the course of the day. Doolan got off, leaving no trace of his whereabouts.
These particulars were all learned subsequently. The first intimation which we schoolboys received of anything unusual having occurred, was the sight of a detachment of soldiers with fixed bayonets, trousers rolled up over muddy boots, marching past the front of the Cathedral hurriedly home to barracks. This was a circumstance somewhat unusual. We had, of course, frequently seen a couple of soldiers trudging along with sloped muskets, and that cruel glitter of steel which no one of us could look upon quite unmoved; but in such cases, the deserter walking between them in his shirt-sleeves, his pinioned hands covered from public gaze by the loose folds of his great-coat, explained everything. But from the hurried march of these mud-splashed men, nothing could be gathered, and we were left to speculate upon its meaning. Gradually, however, before the evening fell, the rumour of a murder having been committed spread through the city, and with that I instinctively connected the apparition of the file of muddy soldiers. Next day, murder was in every mouth. My school-fellows talked of it to the detriment of their lessons; it flavoured the tobacco of the fustian artisan as he smoked to work after breakfast; it walked on ’Change amongst the merchants. It was known that two of the persons implicated had been captured, but that the other, and guiltiest, was still at large; and in a few days out on every piece of boarding and blank wall came the “Hue and cry”—describing Doolan like a photograph, to the colour and cut of
Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in the Spring Assize the three men were brought to trial. The jury found them guilty, but recommended Hickie to mercy on account of some supposed weakness of mind on his part. Sentence was, of course, pronounced with the usual solemnities. They were set apart to die; and when snug abed o’ nights—for imagination is most mightily moved by contrast—I crept into their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which was not my own. As already said, Hickie was recommended to mercy, and the recommendation was ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to.
The evening before the execution has arrived, and the reader has now to imagine the early May sunset falling pleasantly on the outskirts of the city. The houses looking out upon an open square or space, have little plots of garden-ground in their fronts, in which mahogany-coloured wall-flowers and mealy auriculas are growing. The side of this square, along which the City Road stretches northward, is occupied by a blind-asylum, a brick building, the bricks painted red and picked out with white, after the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemetery wall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathedral; and beyond that, on the other side of the ravine, rising out of the populous city of the dead, a stone John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bible clutched in his outstretched and menacing hand. On all this the May sunset is striking, dressing everything in its warm, pleasant pink, lingering in the tufts of foliage that nestle around the asylum, and dipping the building itself one half in light, one half in tender shade. This open space or square is an excellent place for the games of us boys, and “Prisoner’s Base” is being carried out with as much earnestness as the business of life now by those of us who are left. The girls, too, have their games of a quiet kind, which we held in huge scorn and contempt. In two files, linked arm-in-arm, they alternately dance towards each other and then retire, singing the while, in their clear, girlish treble, verses, the meaning and pertinence of which time has worn away—
“The Campsie Duke’s a-riding, a-riding, a-riding,”
being the oft-recurring “owercome,” or refrain. All this is going on in the pleasant sunset light, when by the apparition of certain waggons coming up from the city, piled high with blocks and beams, and guarded by a dozen dragoons, on whose brazen helmets the sunset danced, every game is dismembered, and we are in a moment a mere mixed mob of boys and girls, flocking around to stare and wonder. Just at this place something went wrong with one of the waggon wheels, and the procession came to a stop. A crowd collected, and we heard some of the grown-up people say, that the scaffold was being carried out for the ceremony of to-morrow. Then, more intensely than ever, one realised the condition of the doomed men. We were at our happy games in the sunset, they were entering on their last night on earth. After hammering and delay the wheel was put to rights, the sunset died out, waggons and dragoons got into motion and disappeared; and all the night through, whether awake or asleep, I saw the torches burning, and heard the hammers clinking, and witnessed as clearly as if I had been an onlooker, the horrid structure rising, till it stood complete, with a huge cross-beam from which two empty halters hung, in the early morning light.
Next morning the whole city was in commotion. Whether the authorities were apprehensive that a rescue would be attempted, or were anxious merely to strike terror into the hundreds of wild Irishry engaged on the railway, I cannot say: in any case, there was a display of military force quite unusual. The carriage in which the criminals—Catholics both—and their attendant priests were seated, was guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets; indeed, the whole regiment then lying in the city was massed in front and behind, with a cold, frightful glitter of steel. Besides the foot soldiers, there were dragoons, and two pieces of cannon; a whole little army, in fact. With a slenderer force battles have been won which have made a mark in history. What did the prisoners think of their strange importance, and of the tramp and hurly-burly all around? When the procession moved out of the city, it seemed to draw with it almost the entire population; and when once the country roads were reached, the crowds spread over the fields on either side, ruthlessly treading down the tender wheat braird. I got a glimpse of the doomed, blanched faces which had haunted me so long, at the turn of the road, where, for the first time, the black cross-beam with its empty halters first became visible to them. Both turned and regarded it with a long, steady look; that done, they again bent their heads attentively to the words of the clergyman. I suppose in that long, eager, fascinated gaze they practically died—that for them death had no additional bitterness. When the mound was reached on which the scaffold stood, there was immense confusion. Around it
This ghastly lark’s flight, when the circumstances are taken in consideration, is, I am inclined to think, more terrible than anything of the same kind which I have encountered in books. The artistic uses of contrast as background and accompaniment, are well known to nature and the poets. Joy is continually worked on sorrow, sorrow on joy; riot is framed in peace, peace in riot. Lear and the Fool always go together. Trafalgar is being fought while Napoleon is sitting on horseback watching the Austrian army laying down its arms at Ulm. In Hood’s poem, it is when looking on the released schoolboys at their games that Eugene Aram remembers he is a murderer. And these two poor Irish labourers could not die without hearing a lark singing in their ears. It is nature’s fashion. She never quite goes along with us. She is sombre at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.
There is a stronger element of terror in this incident of the lark than in any story of a similar kind I can remember.
A good story is told of an Irish gentleman—still known in London society—who inherited the family estates and the family banshee. The estates he lost—no uncommon circumstance in the history of Irish gentlemen,—but the banshee, who expected no favours, stuck to him in his adversity, and crossed the channel with him, making herself known only on occasions of death-beds and sharp family misfortunes. This gentleman had an ear, and, seated one night at the opera, the keen—heard once or twice before on memorable occasions—thrilled through the din of the orchestra and the passion of the singers. He hurried home, of course, found his immediate family well, but on the morrow a telegram arrived with the announcement of a brother’s death. Surely of all superstitions that is the most imposing which makes the other world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. For the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman’s female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour being somewhat late, she opened it in astonishment, and was still more astonished to hear him on entering abuse Scripture-reading. He behaved altogether in an unprecedented manner, and in many ways terrified the poor girl. Ultimately he knelt before her, and laid his head on her lap. You can fancy her consternation when glancing down she discovered that, instead of hair, the head was covered with the moss of the moorland. By a sacred name she adjured him to tell who he was, and in a moment the figure was gone. It was the Fiend, of course—diminished sadly since Milton saw him bridge chaos—fallen from worlds to kitchen-wenches. But just think how in the story, in half-pity, in half-terror, the popular feeling of homelessness, of being outcast, of being unsheltered as waste and desert places, has incarnated itself in that strange covering of the head. It is a true supernatural touch. One other story I have heard in the misty Hebrides: A Skye gentleman was riding along an empty moorland road. All at once, as if it had sprung from the ground, the empty road was crowded by a funeral procession. Instinctively he drew his horse to a side to let it pass, which it did without sound of voice, without tread of foot. Then he knew it was an apparition. Staring on it, he knew every person who either bore the corpse or walked behind as mourners. There were the neighbouring proprietors at whose houses he dined,
Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apex resting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of time does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly it creeps up from snow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to rest for a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. Judging from my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater than from June to January—the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longer than the period from Midsummer to Christmas. This feeling arises, I should fancy, from the preponderance of light on that half of the dial on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the half on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to the eye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, often wearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle. Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and the surplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies, oppresses, sometimes appalls. From the sense of time we can only shelter ourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some three or four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is often greater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of those endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching from half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that for too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight is always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely change, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brain they beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings. We see too much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering evening light, with its suggestions of eternity and death, which one cannot for the soul of one put into words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of a sensitive human mortal. The day
Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best. That peculiar burden of time I have been speaking of, does not affect me now. The day is short, and I can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have my lighted room and my books. Should black care haunt me, I throw it off the scent in Spenser’s forests, or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare’s men and women, who are by far the best company I have met with, or am like to meet with, on earth. I am sitting at this present moment with my curtains drawn; the cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in the room, and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking to the fire in return. I put off the outer world with my great-coat and boots, and put on contentment and idleness with my slippers. On the hearth-rug, Pepper, coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light and heat. An imaginative sense of the cold outside increases my present comfort—just as one never hugs one’s own good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortune which has overtaken others. Winter has fallen on Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered with snow as when covered with apple blossom. Outside, the ground is hard as iron; and over the low dark hill, lo! the tender radiance that precedes the morn. Every window in the little village has its light, and to the traveller coming on, enveloped in his breath, the whole place shines like a congregation of glow-worms. A pleasant enough sight to him if his home be there! At this present season, the canal is not such a pleasant promenade as it was in summer. The barges come and go as usual, but at this time I do not envy the bargemen quite so much. The horse comes smoking along; the tarpaulin which covers the merchandise is sprinkled with hoar-frost; and the helmsman, smoking his short pipe for the mere heat of it, cowers over a few red cinders contained in a framework of iron. The labour of the poor fellows will soon be over for a time; for if this
I am a Christian, I hope, although far from a muscular one—consequently I cannot join the skaters on the lake. The floor of ice, with the people upon it, will be but a picture to me. And, in truth, it is in its pictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season. As an artist, winter can match summer any day. The heavy, feathery flakes have been falling all the night through, we shall suppose, and when you get up in the morning the world is draped in white. What a sight it is! It is the world you knew, but yet a different one. The familiar look has gone, and another has taken its place; and a not unpleasant puzzlement arises in your mind, born of the patent and the remembered aspect. It reminds you of a friend who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whom there is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange. How purely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen! How exquisite and virginal the repose! It touches you like some perfection of music. And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles. Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a jeweller he is! How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulations with his frosts! The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire is thicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Go into the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl and diamond—pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt into tears and fall but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does he work in black and white alone. He has on his palette more gorgeous colours than those in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about three o’clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sun in the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen, and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see the black skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory. Nor need I speak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue, crowded with star and planet, “burnished by the frost,” is glittering like the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day.
For years and years now I have watched the seasons come and go around Dreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for the first time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; then by day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a big red moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mighty wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on the roads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks stood around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys; then the woods reddened, the beech hedges became russet, and every puff of wind made rustle the withered leaves; then the sunset came before the early dark, and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which are ever a prophecy of cold; then out of a low dingy heaven came all day, thick and silent, the whirling snow,—and so by exquisite succession of sight and sound have I been taken from the top of the year to the bottom of it, from midsummer, with its unreaped harvests, to the night on which I am sitting here—Christmas, 1862.
Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a levee of departed Christmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study of imagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched and gemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, for I know they are the numbers of my years. The visages of two or three are sad enough, but on the whole ’tis a congregation of jolly ghosts. The nostrils of my memory are assailed by a faint odour of plum-pudding and burnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a whisk of women’s dresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by friends. Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made grave, on which the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in white like the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of dance music, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I know that sprig of Mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung the girl I loved—girl no more now than I am a boy—and kissed her spite of blush and pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in hand, over which blue tongues of flame are playing, do I know—most ancient apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to very days of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in a ghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrust their fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also would I drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burial service murmur.
Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their marriage, of the birth of their first-born, and they hold—although they spread no feast, and ask no friends to assist—many another anniversary besides. On many a day in every year does a man remember what took place on that self-same day in some former year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, as the case may be. Could I ever hope to write a decent Essay, I should like to write one “On the Revisiting of Places.” It is strange how important the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to double back on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, to meet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in which my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. The only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected with myself. I don’t think this passion of reminiscence is debased by the slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under the light of which in the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplate with the most curious interest. I stare on the windows of the houses in which I once lived, with a feeling which I should find difficult to express in words. I think of the life I led there, of the good and the bad news that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who was born; and were it at all possible, I should like to knock at the once familiar door, and look at the old walls—which could speak to me so strangely—once again. To revisit that city is like walking away back into my yesterdays. I startle myself with myself at the corners of streets, I confront forgotten bits of myself at the entrance to houses. In windows which to another man would seem blank and meaningless, I find personal poems too deep to be ever turned into rhymes—more pathetic, mayhap, than I have ever found on printed page. The spot of ground on which a man has stood is for ever interesting to him. Every experience is an anchor holding him the more firmly to existence. It is for this reason that we hold our sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries of joy and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back upon ourselves, living over again the memorable experience. The full yellow moon of next September will gather into itself the light of the full yellow moons of Septembers long ago. In this Christmas night all the other Christmas nights of my life live. How warm, breathing, full of myself is the year 1862, now almost gone! How bare, cheerless, unknown, the year 1863, about to come in! It stretches before me in imagination like some great, gaunt untenanted ruin of a Colosseum, in which no footstep falls, no voice is heard; and by this night year its naked chambers and windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will be clothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with covering ivies. Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.
This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. The smith’s hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver’s flying shuttle is at rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rang from the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk the villagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces—the latter a little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; in the maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers—and took their places decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautiful prayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at any other period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time the barriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the worshipper of to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest in their graves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a kinship with the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout lips of the Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur; along this road of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothers and sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as ours at present approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman—who is no Boanerges, or Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of charity and kindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the clergyman, I say—for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and one must double back to secure connexion—read out in that silvery voice of his, which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the New Testament that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the red-faced rustic congregation hung on the good man’s voice as he spoke of the Infant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared in mid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its station in the sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid their gifts of frankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child. With the story every one was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the persuasive melody of the reader’s voice, it seemed to all quite new—at least, they listened attentively as if it were. The discourse that followed possessed no remarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the goodness of the Maker of heaven and earth, and the shortness of time, with the duties of thankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am persuaded that every one who heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind. And so the service remitted us all to our own homes, to what roast-beef and plum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings around cheerful fires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the absent.
From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to hold Christmas alone. I have no one with me at table, and my own thoughts must be my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to think how much kindly feeling exists this present night in England. By imagination I can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently join in every roar of merriment. I become a sort of universal guest. With what propriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December rains and snows! How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom everything is turned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christmas at midsummer! The face of Christmas glows all the brighter for the cold. The heart warms as the frost increases. Estrangements which have embittered the whole year, melt in to-night’s hospitable smile. There are warmer hand-shakings on this night than during the by-past twelve months. Friend lives in the mind of friend. There is more charity at this time than at any other. You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbed musicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any other time you would consider their performance a nuisance, and call angrily for the police. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, come home at this season to the bosoms of the rich, and they give of their abundance. The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast. Good feeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding. The Master’s words, “The poor ye have always with you,” wear at this time a deep significance. For at least one night on each year over all Christendom there is brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their families, or by a solitary fire like me, when they remember the light that shone over the poor clowns huddling on the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition of shining angels overhead, the song “Peace on earth and good-will toward men,” which for the first time hallowed the midnight air,—pray for that strain’s fulfilment, that battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall be brethren owning one Father in heaven.
Although suggested by the season, and by a solitary dinner, it is not my purpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk. Let all that pass. This is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world’s greatest event. To one day all the early world looked forward; to the same day the later world looks back. That day holds time together. Isaiah, standing on the peaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations of many centuries, and saw on the horizon the new star arise, and was glad. On this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Pagan heaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of its snows. On this night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing voice was heard shrieking on the Aegean, “Pan is dead, great Pan is dead!” On this night, according to the fine reverence of the poets, all things that blast and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influence:—
“Some say
that ever ’gainst the season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated
The bird of dawning singeth all night
long;
And then they say no spirit dares stir
abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets
strike;
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to
charm:
So hallowed and so gracious is the time.”
The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new faith has been a favourite subject with the poets; and it has been my custom for many seasons to read Milton’s “Hymn to the Nativity” on the evening of Christmas-day. The bass of heaven’s deep organ seems to blow in the lines, and slowly and with many echoes the strain melts into silence. To my ear the lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling organ of a cathedral, when the afternoon light streaming through the painted windows fills the place with solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom. To-night I shall float my lonely hours away on music:—
“The
oracles are dumb,
No
voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof
in words deceiving:
Apollo
from his shrine
Can
no more divine
With hollow shriek the steep
of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance
or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the
prophetic cell.
“The
lonely mountains o’er,
And
the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and
loud lament:
From
haunted spring, and dale
Edged
with poplars pale,
The parting genius is with
sighing sent:
With flower-enwoven
tresses torn
The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled
thickets mourn.
“Peor
and Baalim
Forsake
their temples dim
With that twice-battered god
of Palestine;
And
mooned Ashtaroth,
Heaven’s
queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers’
holy shine!
The Lybic Hammon
shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded
Thammuz mourn.
“And
sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath
left in shadows dread
His burning idol, all of blackest
hue:
In
vain with cymbals’ ring
They
call the grisly king
In dismal dance about the
furnace blue:
The Brutish gods
of Nile as fast,
Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste.
“He
feels from Juda’s land
The
dreaded Infant’s hand,
The rays of Bethlehem blind
his dusky eyne:
Nor
all the gods beside
Dare
longer there abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in
snaky twine.
Our Babe to shew
His Godhead true
Can in His swaddling bands control the
damned crew.”
These verses, as if loath to die, linger with a certain persistence in mind and ear. This is the “mighty line” which critics talk about! And just as in an infant’s face you may discern the rudiments of the future man, so in the glorious hymn may be traced the more majestic lineaments of the “Paradise Lost.”
Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinities which I can call to remembrance, and at the same time the most eloquent celebration of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has been uttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be termed a Christian poet. It is one of the choruses in “Hellas,” and perhaps had he lived longer amongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. Of this I am certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant genius was rapidly changing,—that for him the cross was gathering attractions round it,—that the wall which he complained had been built up between his heart and his intellect was being broken down, and that rays of a strange splendour were already streaming upon him through the interstices. What a contrast between the darkened glory of “Queen Mab”—of which in afterlife he was ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression of opinion—and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem!—
“A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror came:
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with
light.
Hell, sin, and slavery came
Like bloodhounds mild and
tame,
Nor prey’d until their lord had
taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set;
While blazon’d, as on heaven’s
immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.
“Swift as the radiant shapes of
sleep,
From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes:
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared
on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their water turned to blood, their dew
to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.”
For my own part, I cannot read these lines without emotion—not so much for their beauty as for the change in the writer’s mind which they suggest. The self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianity should have touched this man more deeply than almost any other. That it was beginning to touch and mould him, I verily believe. He died and made that sign. Of what music did that storm in Spezia Bay rob the world!
“The Cross leads generations on.” Believing as I do that my own personal decease is not more certain than that our religion will subdue the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughts around the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. There are the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headed gods of India, the Chinaman’s heathenism,
Once again, for the purpose of taking away all solitariness of feeling, and of connecting myself, albeit only in fancy, with the proper gladness of the time, let me think of the comfortable family dinners now being drawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made, quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from the feelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeats lapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight of all, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beaming juvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass of happy laughter which a clown’s joke brings down in mighty avalanches. In the pit, sober people relax themselves, and suck oranges, and quaff ginger-pop; in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks the Fairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, and Master, that to be a clown must be the pinnacle of human happiness: while up in the galleries the hard literal world is for an hour sponged out and obliterated; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his delight when the policeman comes to grief, the harsh call of his master, and Cinderella, when the demons are foiled, and the long parted lovers meet and embrace in a paradise of light and pink gauze, the grates that must be scrubbed tomorrow. All bands and trappings of toil are for one hour loosened by the hands of imaginative sympathy. What happiness a single theatre can contain! And those of maturer years, or of more meditative temperament, sitting at the pantomime, can extract out of the shifting scenes meanings suitable to themselves; for the pantomime is a symbol or adumbration of human life. Have we not all known Harlequin, who rules the roast, and has the pretty Columbine to himself? Do we not all know that rogue of a clown with his peculating fingers, who brazens out of every scrape, and who conquers the world by good humour and ready wit? And have we not seen Pantaloons not a few, whose fate it is to get all the kicks and lose all the halfpence, to fall through all the trap doors, break their shins over all the barrows, and be forever captured by the policeman, while the true pilferer, the clown, makes his escape with the booty in his possession?
By this time I should think every Christmas dinner at Dreamthorp or elsewhere has come to an end. Even now in the great cities the theatres will be dispersing. The clown has wiped the paint off his face. Harlequin has laid aside his wand, and divested himself of his glittering raiment; Pantaloon, after refreshing himself with a pint of porter, is rubbing his aching joints; and Columbine, wrapped up in a shawl, and with sleepy eyelids, has gone home in a cab. Soon, in the great theatre, the lights will be put out, and the empty stage will be left to ghosts. Hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. I look out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way of powdery splendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of stars and planets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armed apparition of Orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable space, gleaming overhead; and the familiar constellation of the Plough dipping down into the west; and I think when I go in again that there is one Christmas the less between me and my grave.
Mr. Hazlitt has written many essays, but none pleasanter than that entitled “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” which, in the edition edited by his son, opens the Wintersloe series. It relates almost entirely to Coleridge; containing sketches of his personal appearance, fragments of his conversation, and is filled with a young man’s generous enthusiasm, belief, admiration, as with sunrise. He had met Coleridge, walked with him, talked with him, and the high intellectual experience not only made him better acquainted with his own spirit and its folded powers, but—as is ever the case with such spiritual encounters—it touched and illuminated the dead outer world. The road between Wem and Shrewsbury was familiar enough to Hazlitt, but as the twain passed along it on that winter day, it became etherealised, poetic—wonderful, as if leading across the Delectable Mountains to the Golden City, whose gleam is discernible on the horizon. The milestones were mute with attention, the pines upon the hill had ears for the stranger as he passed. Eloquence made the red leaves rustle on the oak; made the depth of heaven seem as if swept by a breath of spring; and when the evening star appeared, Hazlitt saw it
We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but most of us are so to a large extent. A large proportion of mankind feel a quite peculiar interest in famous writers. They like to read about them, to know what they said on this or the other occasion, what sort of house they inhabited, what fashion of dress they wore, if they liked any particular dish for dinner, what kind of women they fell in love with, and whether their domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse. Concerning such men no bit of information is too trifling; everything helps to make out the mental image we have dimly formed for ourselves. And this kind of interest is heightened by the artistic way in which time occasionally groups them. The race is gregarious, they are visible to us in clumps like primroses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash light on each other like gems in a diadem. We think of the wild geniuses who came up from the universities to London in the dawn of the English drama. Greene, Nash, Marlowe—our first professional men of letters—how they cracked their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched they were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it from them as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they shook the stage. Then we think of the “Mermaid” in session, with Shakspeare’s bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and Ben Jonson’s truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, the thunder-peals of laughter.
“What
things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid? Heard words
that hath been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they
came
Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.”
Then there is the “Literary Club,” with Johnson, and Garrick, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Goldsmith sitting in perpetuity in Boswell. The Doctor has been talking there for a hundred years, and there will he talk for many a hundred more. And we of another generation, and with other things to think about, can enter any night we please, and hear what is going on. Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire sitting at Lord Monboddo’s with Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest. These went into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlessly enough, and now they cannot return even if they would. They are defrauded of oblivion. Not yet have they tasted forgetfulness and the grave. The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day arrives—and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach—him they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king. Then there are the Lakers,—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth. What talk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what contempt of critics, what a hail of fine things! Then there is Charles Lamb’s room in Inner Temple Lane, the hush of a whist table in one corner, the host stuttering puns as he deals the cards; and sitting round about. Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and the primrose, and Hazlitt maddened by Waterloo and St. Helena, and Godwin with his wild theories, and Kemble with his Roman look. And before the morning comes, and Lamb stutters yet more thickly—for there is a slight flavour of punch in the apartment—what talk there has been of Hogarth’s prints, of Izaak Walton, of the old dramatists, of Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urn Burial,” with Elia’s quaint humour breaking through every interstice, and flowering in every fissure and cranny of the conversation! One likes to think of these social gatherings of wit and geniuses; they are more interesting than conclaves of kings or convocations of bishops. One would like to have been the waiter at the “Mermaid,” and to have stood behind Shakspeare’s chair. What was that functionary’s opinion of his guests? Did he listen and become witty by infection? or did he, when his task was over, retire unconcernedly to chalk up the tavern score? One envies somewhat the damsel who brought Lamb the spirit-case and the hot water. I think of these meetings, and, in lack of companionship, frame for myself imaginary conversations—not so brilliant, of course, as Mr. Landor’s, but yet sufficient to make pleasant for me the twilight hour while the lamp is yet unlit, and my solitary room is filled with ruddy lights and shadows of the fire.
Of human notabilities men of letters are the most interesting, and this arises mainly from their outspokenness as a class. The writer makes himself known in a way that no other man makes himself known. The distinguished engineer may be as great a man as the distinguished writer, but as a rule we know little about him. We see him invent a locomotive, or bridge a strait, but there our knowledge stops; we look at the engine, we walk across the bridge, we admire the ingenuity of the one, we are grateful for the conveniency of the other, but to our apprehensions the engineer is undeciphered all the while. Doubtless he reveals himself in his work as the poet reveals himself in his song, but then this revelation is made in a tongue unknown to the majority. After all, we do not feel that we get nearer him. The man of letters, on the other hand, is outspoken, he takes you into his confidence, he keeps no secret from you. Be you beggar, be you king, you are welcome. He is no respecter of persons. He gives without reserve his fancies, his wit, his wisdom; he makes you a present of all that the painful or the happy years have brought him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men of letters are a peculiar class. They are never commonplace or prosaic—at least those of them that mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy, melodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, they furnish the subjects of our best talk. They are full of generous impulses and sentiments, and keep the world young. They have said fine things on every phase of human experience. The air is full of their voices. Their books are the world’s holiday and playground, and into these neither care, nor the dun, nor despondency can follow the enfranchised man. Men of letters forerun science as the morning star the dawn. Nothing has been invented, nothing has been achieved, but has gleamed a bright-coloured Utopia in the eyes of one or the other of these men. Several centuries before the Great Exhibition of 1851 rose in Hyde Park, a wondrous hall of glass stood, radiant in sunlight, in the verse of Chaucer. The electric telegraph is not so swift as the flight of Puck. We have not yet realised the hippogriff of Ariosto. Just consider what a world this would be if ruled by the best thoughts of men of letters! Ignorance would die at once, war would cease, taxation would be lightened, not only every Frenchman, but every man in the world, would have his hen in the pot. May would not marry January. The race of lawyers and physicians would be extinct. Fancy a world the affairs of which are directed by Goethe’s wisdom and Goldsmith’s heart! In such a case, methinks the millennium were already come. Books are a finer world within the world. With books are connected all my desires and aspirations. When I go to my long sleep, on a book will my head be pillowed. I care for no other fashion of greatness. I’d as lief not be remembered at all as remembered in connection
But what of the literary life? How fares it with the men whose days and nights are devoted to the writing of books? We know the famous men of letters; we give them the highest place in our regards; we crown them with laurels so thickly that we hide the furrows on their foreheads. Yet we must remember that there are men of letters who have been equally sanguine, equally ardent, who have pursued perfection equally unselfishly, but who have failed to make themselves famous. We know the ships that come with streaming pennons into the immortal ports; we know but little of the ships that have gone on fire on the way thither,—that have gone down at sea. Even with successful men we cannot know precisely how matters have gone. We read the fine raptures of the poet, but we do not know into what kind of being he relapses when the inspiration is over, any more than, seeing and hearing the lark shrilling at the gate of heaven, we know with what effort it has climbed thither, or into what kind of nest it must descend. The lark is not always singing; no more is the poet. The lark is only interesting while singing; at other times it is but a plain brown bird. We may not be able to recognise the poet when he doffs his singing robes; he may then sink to the level of his admirers. We laugh at the fancies of the humourists, but he may have written his brilliant things in a dismal enough mood. The writer is not continually dwelling amongst the roses and lilies of life, he is not continually uttering generous sentiments, and saying fine things. On him, as on his brethren, the world presses with its prosaic needs. He has to make love and marry, and run the usual matrimonial risks. The income-tax collector visits him as well as others. Around his head at Christmas-times drives a snow-storm of bills. He must keep the wolf from the door, and he has only his goose-quills to confront it with. And here it is, having to deal with alien powers, that his special temperament comes into play, and may work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on the road. A man may be able to disentangle intricate problems, be able to recall the past, and yet be cozened by an ordinary knave. The finest expression will not liquidate a butcher’s account. If Apollo puts his name to a bill, he must meet it when it becomes due, or go into the gazette. Armies are not always cheering on the heights which they have won; there are forced marches, occasional shortness of provisions, bivouacs on muddy plains, driving in of pickets, and the like, although these inglorious items are forgotten when we read the roll of victories inscribed on their banners. The books of the great writer are only portions of the great writer. His life acts on his writings; his writings react on his life. His life may impoverish his books; his books may impoverish his life.
“Apollo’s branch that might have grown full straight,”
may have the worm of a vulgar misery gnawing at its roots. The heat of inspiration may be subtracted from the household fire; and those who sit by it may be the colder in consequence. A man may put all his good things in his books, and leave none for his life, just as a man may expend his fortune on a splendid dress, and carry a pang of hunger beneath it.
There are few less exhilarating books than the biographies of men of letters, and of artists generally; and this arises from the pictures of comparative defeat which, in almost every instance, such books contain. In these books we see failure more or less,—seldom clear, victorious effort. If the art is exquisite, the marble is flawed; if the marble is pure, there is defect in art. There is always something lacking in the poem; there is always irremediable defect in the picture. In the biography we see persistent, passionate effort, and almost constant repulse. If, on the whole, victory is gained, one wing of the army has been thrown into confusion. In the life of a successful farmer, for instance, one feels nothing of this kind; his year flows on harmoniously, fortunately; through ploughing, seed-time, growth of grain, the yellowing of it beneath meek autumn suns and big autumn moons, the cutting of it down, riotous harvest-home, final sale, and large balance at the banker’s. From the point of view of almost unvarying success the farmer’s life becomes beautiful, poetic. Everything is an aid and help to him. Nature puts her shoulder to his wheel. He takes the winds, the clouds, the sunbeams, the rolling stars into partnership, and, asking no dividend, they let him retain the entire profits. As a rule, the lives of men of letters do not flow on in this successful way. In their case there is always either defect in the soil or defect in the husbandry. Like the Old Guard at Waterloo, they are fighting bravely on a lost field. In literary biography there is always an element of tragedy, and the love we bear the dead is mingled with pity. Of course the life of a man of letters is more perilous than the life of a farmer; more perilous than almost any other kind of life which it is given a human being to conduct. It is more difficult to obtain the mastery over spiritual ways and means than over material ones, and he must command both. Properly to conduct his life he must not only take large crops off his fields, he must also leave in his fields the capacity of producing large crops. It is easy to drive in your chariot two horses of one breed; not so easy when the one is of terrestrial stock, the other of celestial; in every respect different—in colour, temper, and pace.
At the outset of his career, the man of letters is confronted by the fact that he must live. The obtaining of a livelihood is preliminary to everything else. Poets and cobblers are placed on the same level so far. If the writer can barter MSS. for sufficient coin, he may proceed to develop himself; if he cannot so barter it, there is a speedy end of himself, and of his development also. Literature has become a profession; but it is in several respects different from the professions by which other human beings earn their bread. The man of letters, unlike the clergyman, the physician, or the lawyer, has to undergo no special preliminary training for his work, and while engaged in it, unlike the professional persons named, he has no accredited status. Of course, to earn any success, he must start with as much special knowledge, with as much dexterity in his craft, as your ordinary physician; but then he is not recognised till once he is successful. When a man takes a physician’s degree, he has done something; when a man betakes himself to literary pursuits, he has done nothing—till once he is lucky enough to make his mark. There is no special preliminary training for men of letters, and as a consequence, their ranks are recruited from the vagrant talent of the world. Men that break loose from the professions, who stray from the beaten tracks of life, take refuge in literature. In it are to be found doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and the motley nation of Bohemians. Any one possessed of a nimble brain, a quire of paper, a steel-pen and ink-bottle, can start business. Any one who chooses may enter the lists, and no questions are asked concerning his antecedents. The battle is won by sheer strength of brain. From all this it comes that the man of letters has usually a history of his own: his individuality is more pronounced than the individuality of other men; he has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are unconventional in a world of conventions; they are fanciful, and are constantly misunderstood in prosaic relations. They are wise enough in their books, for there they are sovereigns, and can shape everything to their own likings; out of their books, they are not unfrequently extremely foolish, for they exist then in the territory of an alien power, and are constantly knocking their heads against existing orders of things. Men of letters take prosaic men out of themselves; but they are weak where the prosaic men are strong. They have their own way in the world of ideas, prosaic men in the world of facts. From his practical errors the writer learns something, if not always humility and amendment. A memorial flower grows on every spot where he has come to grief; and the chasm he cannot over-leap he bridges with a rainbow.
But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself; and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceed simultaneously and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the main difficulty of the literary life. Out of his thought the man must bring fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turns subserve thought. It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such a life, that while the balance at the banker’s increases, intellectual resource should increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be made in the faculty of expression alone,—progress at the same time should be made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds. Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short time the man feels that he has expressed himself,—that now he can only more or less dexterously repeat himself,—more or less prettily become his own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing; but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the only thing he has acquired,—when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not create,—he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once become “a base mechanical,” and his successes are not much higher than the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of proper relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best authors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary life. Frequently a man’s first book is good, and all his after productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. The men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. A man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. “I sat down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on the blank unfinished paper. I can write fast
Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writer is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at intervals respire, and in their happiest moments. Such conceptions of great writers are to some extent erroneous. Through the medium of their books
Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majority of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling. Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire which may be seen over three counties. If, during thirty years, the annoyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing when you are hurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a mass and endured at once, it would be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the same space of time, all the little titillations of a man’s vanity were gathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure of being crowned would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanimity of an ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will the equanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive of the race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the fine tissues of the nerves. Literary composition is, I take it, with the exception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, the most exhausting to which a human being can apply himself. Just consider the situation. Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper, who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramples heedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise as Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morning to his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would be unmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declared that the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting from the censure of the meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this! Will such a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance? Will he throw himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber is lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When his harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient. Thinking of these things, I do not wonder at Hazlitt’s spleen, at Charles Lamb’s punch, at Coleridge’s opium. I think of the days spent in writing, and of the nights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is no refreshment. I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; of Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances; of Southey sitting vacantly in his library,
But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary limitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as their more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to be endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul—his experiences are docketed in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams “shop,” as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by their profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course of time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. The agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks—the man of letters constantly of books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate neighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable review,—he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowing effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable one. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his day, tells us, in “Beppo,”
“One hates an author that’s
all author; fellows
In foolscap uniforms turn’d up with
ink.”
And his lordship’s “hate” in the matter is understandable enough. In his own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who were not “all authors,” just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton are almost the only representatives of the class in ours. This professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also. It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which has taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Our writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate. Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand, and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so many cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the teapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of all professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal happiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to be weak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently the most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man’s most vital material—utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives. These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all the more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; you cannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love and love’s delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the colder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing an imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while standing by his friend’s grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emerging from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet’s silvery interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the autumn on Ann Hathaway’s cheek. It is in some such way as this that a man’s books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius may make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, one can explain satisfactorily enough to one’s self the domestic misadventures of men of letters—of poets especially. We know the poets only in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives see the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how they have appreciated that.
The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writing the be-all and end-all of his existence—to grow his literature out of his history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of soils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit. The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for the second, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for. The man of letters, as time passes on, and the professional impulse works deeper, ceases to regard the world with a single eye. The man slowly merges into the artist. He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turn these into artistic shapes. He plucks “copy” from rising and setting suns. He sees marketable pathos in his friend’s death-bed. He carries the peal of his daughter’s marriage-bells into his sentences or his rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine and the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar temperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a purpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world and its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out of everything the bee seeks wax and honey. A curious instance of this mode of looking at things occurs in Goethe’s “Letters from Italy,” with whom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teeming world to more effect than any man of his time:—
“From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief in a Deity.
“A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as the soil was burning its feet. I did her this service out of honour to the strong light of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, but I could get nothing from it in any way.”
It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help thinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simple living—all hearty and final enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, death and marriage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what befalls him, what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect him as they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be built with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In giving emotional material artistic form, there is indisputably a certain noble pleasure; but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of the circle and sympathies of his fellows. I do not say that this kind of life makes a man selfish, but it often makes him seem so; and the results of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships, for instance, are
“From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine”
is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the little churchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills. If you go to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into the woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time. Thoughts must come naturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed—even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past—like exotics. And it is the misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford to wait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcing process, with the results which were to be expected.
The present writer remembers to have been visited once by a strange feeling of puzzlement; and the puzzled feeling arose out of the following circumstance:—He was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—the feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in his mind. And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence before him, to enter into it, to understand it, and his inability to accomplish it, or indeed to make any way toward the accomplishment of it. The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognisance; but he could get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him, and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love or hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition, of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could not compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism! Happily before fancy had time to play another vagary, with a snort and pull the train moved on, and my truckful of horned friends were left gazing into empty space, with the same wistful, patient, and melancholy expression with which, for the space of five minutes or so, they had surveyed and bewildered me.
A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have indicated, besets one not unfrequently in the contemplation of men and women. You are brought in contact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, to enter into him, in a word to be him, and, if you are utterly foiled in the attempt, you cannot flatter yourself that you have been successful to the measure of your desire. A person interests, or piques, or tantalises you, you do your best to make him out; yet strive as you will, you cannot read the riddle of his personality. From the invulnerable fortress of his own nature he smiles contemptuously on the beleaguering armies of your curiosity and analysis. And it is not only the stranger that thus defeats you; it may be the brother brought up by the same fireside with you, the best friend whom you have known from early school and college days, the very child, perhaps, that bears your name, and with whose moral and mental apparatus you think you are as familiar as with your own. In the midst of the most amicable relationships and the best understandings, human beings are, at times, conscious of a cold feeling of strangeness—the friend is actuated by a feeling which never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part of his character becomes visible, and while at one moment you stood in such close neighbourhood, that you could feel his arm touch your own, in the next there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty space betwixt him and you in which the wind is blowing. You and he become separate entities. He is related to you as Border peel is related to Border peel on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea. It is not meant that any quarrel or direct misunderstanding should have taken place, simply that feeling of foreignness is meant to be indicated which occurs now and then in the intercourse of the most affectionate; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends and lovers that with whatsoever flowery bands they may be linked, they are separated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each other partially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men and women thus, and to be forced to rearrange them. It is a misfortune to have to manoeuvre one’s heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army. The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage a parricide. From these accidents to the affections, and from the efforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look.
Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that, the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portion of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit wiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Our knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations. And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his own foot-rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness that is in the world looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if noble, all the nobleness in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always the same height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribe to one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the same thing. The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every one has access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, what coarse stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people are attired.
We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, the spring is outside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with a sense of newness, of strangeness, of resurrection. It shoots boyhood again into the blood of middle age. That tender greening of the black bough and the red field,—that coming again of the new-old flowers,—that re-birth of love in all the family of birds, with cooings, and caressings, and building of nests in wood and brake,—that strange glory of sunshine in the air,—that stirring of life in the green mould, making even churchyards beautiful,—seems like the creation of a new world. And yet—and yet, even with the lamb in the sunny field, the lark mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholy side, and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, preaching of decay with all his painted woods. For the flowers that make sweet the moist places in the forest are not the same that bloomed the year before. Another lark sings above the furrowed field. Nature rolls on in her eternal course, repeating her tale of spring, summer, autumn, winter; but life in man and beast is transitory, and other living creatures take their places. It is quite certain that one or other of the next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will awake no throb of transport in my veins. But will it be less bright on that account? Will the lamb be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated to-morrow, next spring
And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in itself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till by imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. We receive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun’s light from the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixture of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan prepared his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his jest’s prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a roar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new auditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only when these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl’s face that he is smitten by transport—only then is he truly happy. In that junction of hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. The countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves of Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see them eat it is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over. There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become acquainted with his own lineaments.
The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled to discover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into the world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is in this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes biographical. Everything a man says or does is in consistency with himself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that we arrive at the truth concerning him. A man is one; and every outcome of him has a family resemblance. Goldsmith did not “write like an angel and talk like poor Poll,” as we may in part discern from Boswell’s “Johnson.” Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerest nonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man was lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room. To describe a character by antithesis is like painting a portrait in black and white—all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour are lost. The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength, or by his nice tact in using his strength. The distance to which your gun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon the force of its charge. A runner’s speed and endurance depends upon his depth of chest and elasticity of limb. If a poet’s lines lack harmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of harmony in himself. We see why Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life. No one can dip into the “Excursion” without discovering that Wordsworth was devoid of humour, and that he cared more for the narrow Cumberland vale than he did for the big world. The flavour of opium can be detected in the “Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.” A man’s word or deed takes us back to himself, as the sunbeam takes us back to the sun. It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice. If you do your fair day’s work, you are certain to get your fair day’s wage—in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen at country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of arm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and the amount of the recoil—dependent, of course, on the force with which it is struck—is represented by a series of notches or marks. The world is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name in literature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined by the force or the art with which the buffer is struck. Into the world a man brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue of its results.
There are some men who have no individuality, just as there are some men who have no face. These are to be described by generals, not by particulars. They are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are important solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman’s hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who are in all probability sleeping quietly in their graves. They retain dead men’s ideas, just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of the set sun. They are not light—they are twilight. To know how to deal with such men—to know how to use them—is the problem which ambitious force is called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force of character, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. The forceful man is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, but long after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on a shore a thousand miles away. It is curious how swiftly influences travel from centre to circumference. A certain empress invents a gracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to the pole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother, lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit of the satirists, are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea go round civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a heavier martyrology than many a creed. The world is used easily, if one can only hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, of whatever kind, is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond, and the world is its pane of glass. In a world so commonplace as this, the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing. Humorousness, eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle, are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and take away its sameness. It is well that a man should be known by something else than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anything else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority.
In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value; in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficult thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiar something resident in a poem
Each man is the most important thing in the world to himself; but why is he to himself so important? Simply because he is a personality with capacities of pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be pleased, who can be disappointed, who labours and expects his hire, in whose consciousness, in fact, for the time being, the whole universe lives. He is, and everything else is relative. Confined to his own personality, making it his tower of outlook, from which only he can survey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather high estimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. This high estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant, and it—or rather our proneness to form it—we are accustomed to call vanity. Vanity—which really helps to keep the race alive—has been treated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It does not quite deserve the hard names it has been called. It interpenetrates everything a man says or does, but it inter-penetrates for a useful purpose. If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, it at least does the service of an alloy—making the precious metal workable. Nature gave man his powers, appetites, aspirations, and along with these a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of consciousness to its decease, making the best part of life rapture, and the worst part endurable. But for vanity the race would have
As each man is to himself the most important thing in the world, each man is an egotist in his thinkings, in his desires, in his fears. It does not, however, follow that each man must be an egotist—as the word is popularly understood—in his speech. But even although this were the case, the world would be divided into egotists, likable and unlikable. There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vainglorious kind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which the man is at once altar, priest, censer, and divinity; a kind which deals with the accidents and wrappages of the speaker, his equipage, his riches, his family, his servants, his furniture and array. The other kind has no taint of self-aggrandisement, but is rooted in the faculties of love and humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because it includes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness. The one is the offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a large and genial one. There are persons who are the terrors of society. Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with a certain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people’s corns. They
In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends entirely upon the egotist. If he be a conceited man, full of self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel. When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer a coxcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, with a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader as well. A man may write about himself during his whole life without once tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be interesting in himself—be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers, so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. tells me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude to X. for the information. Possibly, if my establishments boast only of Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to ride, and all the more if I can indulge in that only on occasions of solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor of a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs me that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early snowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he
After all, the only thing a man knows is himself. The world outside he can know only by hearsay. His shred of personality is all he has; than that, he is nothing richer nothing poorer. Everything else is mere accident and appendage. Alexander must not be measured by the shoutings of his armies, nor Lazarus at Dives’ gates by his sores. And a man knows himself only in part. In every nature, as in Australia, there is an unexplored territory—green, well-watered regions or mere sandy deserts; and into that territory experience is making progress day by day. We can remember when we knew only the outer childish rim—and from the crescent guessed the sphere; whether, as we advanced, these have been realised, each knows for himself.
When a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends, he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. They possess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of Solon, nor the wit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of Napoleon III. If pushed hard he will be constrained to admit that he has known each and all get angry without sufficient occasion, make at times the foolishest remarks,
On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I am at present sitting—bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking out with blind, majestic eyes—are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy, and with whose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in which I nightly slumber, each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins. These favourite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. I am on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than my heart. Milton is not there, neither is Wordsworth; Shakspeare, if he had written comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, but the presence of the five great tragedies,—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra—for this last should be always included among his supreme efforts—has made me place him on the shelf where the mighty men repose, himself the mightiest of all. Reading Milton is like dining off gold plate in a company of kings; very splendid, very ceremonious, and not a little appalling. Him I read but seldom, and
First; then, on this special shelf stands Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.”
It is difficult to explain why I like these short sketches and essays, written in the author’s early youth, better than his later, more finished, and better-known novels and romances. The world sets greater store by “The Scarlet Letter” and “Transformation” than by this little book—and, in such matters of liking against the judgment of the world, there is no appeal. I think the reason of my liking consists in this—that the novels were written for the world, while the tales seem written for the author; in these he is actor and audience in one. Consequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer an artist in his first sketch than in his finished picture. And after all, one takes the greatest pleasure in those books in which a peculiar personality is most clearly revealed. A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker; and Mr. Hawthorne’s personality is peculiar, and specially peculiar in a new country like America. He is quiet, fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit. Although a Yankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. His thinking and his style have an antique air. His roots strike down through the visible mould of the present, and draw sustenance from the generations under ground. The ghosts that haunt the chamber of his mind are the ghosts of dead men and women. He has a strong smack of the Puritan; he wears around him, in the New England town, something of the darkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest. He is a shy, silent, sensitive, much ruminating man, with no special overflow of animal spirits. He loves solitude, and the things which age has made reverent. There is nothing modern about him. Emerson’s writing has a cold cheerless glitter, like the new
Then this writer has a strangely weird power. He loves ruins like the ivy, he skims the twilight like the bat, he makes himself a familiar of the phantoms of the heart and brain. He is fascinated by the jarred brain and the ruined heart. Other men collect china, books, pictures, jewels; this writer collects singular human experiences, ancient wrongs and agonies, murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to have no motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his chamber of horrors Madame Tussaud’s is nothing. With proud, prosperous, healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a cracked piano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms. All this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praise I am writing. I read “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and find it the first sketch of “The Scarlet Letter.” In “Wakefield,”—the story of the man who left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but who yet looked upon her every day to appease his burning curiosity as to her manner of enduring his absence—I find the keenest analysis of an almost incomprehensible act.
And then Mr. Hawthorne has a skill in constructing allegories which no one of his contemporaries, either English or American, possesses. These allegorical papers may be read with pleasure for their ingenuity, their grace, their poetical feeling; but just as, gazing on the surface of a stream, admiring the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made by the butterfly falling into it, you begin to be conscious that there is something at the bottom, and gradually a dead face wavers upwards from the oozy weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, so through Mr. Hawthorne’s graceful sentences, if read attentively, begins to flash the hidden meaning, a meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care to express formally and in set terms, and which he merely suggests and leaves the reader to make out for himself. If you have the book I am writing about, turn up “David Swan,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “The Fancy Show-box,” and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean.
The next two books on my shelf—books at this moment leaning on the “Twice-Told Tales”—are Professor Aytoun’s “Ballads of Scotland,” and the “Lyra Germanica.” These books I keep side by side with a purpose. The forms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but a strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor Aytoun’s book, and all this modern life—with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament—fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied ruins, are warm with household fires, and filled with human activities. Every Border keep is a home: brides are taken there in their blushes; children are born there; gray men, the crucifix held over them, die there. The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, by secret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and the bale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and marry, and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and the Flower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her husband’s platter. A time of strife and foray, of plundering and burning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime for revenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade. I open the German book, and find a warfare conducted in a different manner. Here the Devil rides about wasting and destroying. Here temptations lie in wait for the soul; here pleasures, like glittering meteors, lure it into marshes and abysses. Watch and ward are kept here, and to sleep at the post is death. Fortresses are built on the rock of God’s promises—inaccessible to the arrows of the wicked,—and therein dwell many trembling
In glancing over these German hymns, one is struck by their adaptation to the seasons and occurrences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, the writer’s religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its place in week-days as well. In these hymns there is little gloom, a healthy human cheerfulness pervades many of them, and this is surely as it ought to be. These hymns, as I have said, are adapted to the occasions of ordinary life; and this speaks favourably of the piety which produced them. I do not suppose that we English are less religious than other nations, but we are undemonstrative in this, as in most things. We have the sincerest horror of over-dressing ourselves in fine sentiments. We are a little shy of religion. We give it a day entirely to itself, and make it a stranger to the other six. We confine it in churches, or in the closet at home, and never think of taking it with us to the street, or into our business, or with us to the festival, or the gathering of friends. Dr. Arnold used to complain that he could get religious subjects treated in a masterly way, but could not get common subjects treated in a religious spirit. The Germans have done better; they have melted down the Sunday into the week. They have hymns embodying confessions of sin, hymns in the near prospect of death: and they have—what is more important—spiritual songs that may be sung by soldiers on the march, by the artisan at the loom, by the peasant following his team, by the mother among her children, and by the maiden sitting at her wheel listening for the step of her lover. Religion is thus brought in to refine and hallow the sweet necessities and emotions of life, to cheer its weariness, and to exalt its sordidness. The German life revolves like the village festival with the pastor in the midst—joy and laughter and merry games do not fear the holy man, for he wears no unkindness in his eye, but his presence checks everything boisterous or unseemly,—the rude word, the petulant act,—and when it has run its course, he uplifts his hands and leaves his benediction on his children.
The “Lyra Germanica” contains the utterances of pious German souls in all conditions of life during many centuries. In it hymns are to be found written not only by poor clergymen, and still poorer precentors, by ribbon-manufacturers and shoemakers, who, amid rude environments, had a touch of celestial melody in their hearts, but by noble ladies and gentlemen, and crowned kings. The oldest in the collection
This book contains surely one of the most touching of human compositions,—a song of Luther’s. The great Reformer’s music resounds to this day in our churches; and one of the rude hymns he wrote has such a step of thunder in it that the father of Frederick the Great, Mr. Carlyle tells us, used to call it “God Almighty’s Grenadier March.” This one I speak of is of another mood, and is soft as tears. To appreciate it thoroughly, one must think of the burly, resolute, humourous, and withal tender-hearted man, and of the work he accomplished. He it was, the Franklin’s kite, led by the highest hand, that went up into the papal thundercloud hanging black over Europe; and the angry fire that broke upon it burned it not, and in roars of boltless thunder the apparition collapsed, and the sun of truth broke through the inky fragments on the nations once again. He it was who, when advised not to trust himself in Worms, declared, “Although there be as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, I will go.” He it was who, when brought to bay in the splendid assemblage, said, “It is neither safe nor prudent to do aught against conscience. Here stand I—I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.” The rock cannot move—the lightnings may splinter it. Think of these things, and then read Luther’s “Christmas Carol,” with its tender inscription, “Luther—written for his little son Hans, 1546.” Coming from another pen, the stanzas were perhaps not much; coming from his, they move one like the finest eloquence. This song sunk deep into the hearts of the common people, and is still sung from the dome of the Kreuz Kirche in Dresden before daybreak on Christmas morning.
There is no more delightful reading in the world than these Scottish ballads. The mailed knight, the Border peel, the moonlight raid, the lady at her bower window—all these have disappeared from the actual world, and lead existence now as songs. Verses and snatches of these ballads are continually haunting and twittering about my memory, as in summer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves of my dwelling. I know them so well, and they meet a mortal man’s experience so fully, that I am sure—with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare—I could conduct the whole of my business by quotation,—do all its love-making, pay all its tavern-scores, quarrel and make friends again, in their words, far better than I could in my own. If you know these ballads, you will find that they mirror perfectly your every mood. If you are weary and down-hearted, behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with the very sigh you have heaved. If you are merry, a stanza is dancing to the tune of your own mirth. If you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, here is the finest language for your using. If you hate, here are words which are daggers. If you like battle, here for two hundred years have trumpets been blowing and banners flapping. If you are dying, plentiful are the broken words here which have hovered on failing lips. Turn where you will, some fragment of a ballad is sure to meet you. Go into the loneliest places of experience and passion, and you discover that you are walking in human footprints. If you should happen to lift the first volume of Professor Aytoun’s “Ballads of Scotland,” the book of its own accord will open at “Clerk Saunders,” and by that token you will guess that the ballad has been read and re-read a thousand times. And what a ballad it is! The story in parts is somewhat perilous to deal with, but with what instinctive delicacy the whole matter is managed! Then what tragic pictures, what pathos, what manly and womanly love! Just fancy how the sleeping lovers, the raised torches, and the faces of the seven brothers looking on, would gleam on the canvas of Mr. Millais!—
“’For in may come my seven
bauld brothers,
Wi’ torches burning
bright.’
“It was about the midnight hour,
And they were fa’en
asleep,
When in and came her seven brothers,
And stood at her bed feet.
“Then out and spake the first o’
them,
’We ‘ll awa’
and let them be.’
Then out and spake the second o’
them,
‘His father has nae
mair than he.’
“Then out and spake the third o’
them,
‘I wot they are lovers
dear.’
Then out and spake the fourth o’
them,
‘They ha’e lo’ed
for mony a year.’
“Then out and spake the fifth o’
them,
‘It were sin true love
to twain.’
‘’Twere shame,’ out
spake the sixth o’ them,
‘To slay a sleeping
man!’
“Then up and gat the seventh o’
them,
And never word spake he,
But he has striped his bright-brown brand
Through Saunders’s fair
bodie.
“Clerk Saunders he started, and
Margaret she turn’d
Into his arms as asleep she
lay,
And sad and silent was the night
That was atween thir twae.”
Could a word be added or taken from these verses without spoiling the effect? You never think of the language, so vividly is the picture impressed on the imagination. I see at this moment the sleeping pair, the bright burning torches, the lowering faces of the brethren, and the one fiercer and darker than the others.
Pass we now to the Second Part—
“Sae painfully she clam’ the
wa’,
She clam’ the wa’
up after him;
Hosen nor shoon upon her feet
She had na time to put them
on.
“’Is their ony room at your
head, Saunders?
Is there ony room at your
feet?
Or ony room at your side, Saunders,
Where fain, fain I wad sleep?’”
In that last line the very heart-strings crack. She is to be pitied far more than Clerk Saunders, lying stark with the cruel wound beneath his side, the love-kisses hardly cold yet upon his lips.
It may be said that the books of which I have been speaking attain to the highest literary excellence by favour of simplicity and unconsciousness. Neither the German nor the Scotsman considered himself an artist. The Scot sings a successful foray, in which perhaps he was engaged, and he sings as he fought. In combat he did not dream of putting himself in a heroic position, or of flourishing his blade in a manner to be admired. A thrust of a lance would soon have finished him if he had. The pious German is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into sudden thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or groans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at least from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicity and fearlessness, full of its own emotion, and unthinking of others or of their opinions, which characterise these old writings.
The eighteenth century must ever remain the most brilliant and interesting period of English literary history. It is interesting not only on account of its splendour, but because it is so well known. We are familiar with the faces of its great men by portraits, and with the events of their lives by innumerable biographies. Every reader is acquainted with Pope’s restless jealousy, Goldsmith’s pitted countenance and plum-coloured coat, Johnson’s surly manners and countless eccentricities, and with the tribe of poets who lived for months ignorant of clean linen, who were hunted by bailiffs, who smelt of stale punch, and who wrote descriptions of the feasts of the gods
As a matter of course, on this special shelf of books will be found Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”—a work in our literature unique, priceless. That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly venerating Scottish gentleman,—that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness, blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth,—has written the finest book of its kind which our nation possesses. It is quite impossible to over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence. The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot of departed English worthies. In virtue of Boswell’s labours, we know Johnson—the central man of his time—better than Burke did, or Reynolds,—far better even than Boswell did. We know how he expressed himself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he ate, drank, and slept. Boswell’s unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained. This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay. Bozzy is really a wizard: he makes the sun stand still. Till his work is done, the future stands respectfully aloof. Out of ever-shifting time he has made fixed and permanent certain years, and in these Johnson talks and argues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, and Goldsmith, with hollowed hand, whispers a sly remark to his neighbour. There have they
By the strangest freak of chance or liking, the next book on my shelf contains the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. This volume, adorned by a hideous portrait of the author, I can well remember picking up at a bookstall for a few pence many years ago. It seems curious to me that this man is not in these days better known. A more singular man has seldom existed,—seldom a more genuine. His first business speculation failed, but when about forty he commenced again, and this time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. His warehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with bars of iron, with a bust of Shakspeare looking down on the whole. His country-house contained busts; of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who earned a competence as an iron-merchant; here is a monomaniac on the Corn-laws, who loved nature as intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is a John Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious verse,—Apollo with iron dust on his face, wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders! If you wish to form some idea of the fierce discontent which thirty years ago existed amongst the working men of England, you should read the Corn-law Rhymes. The Corn-laws are to him the twelve plagues of Egypt rolled together. On account of them he denounces his country as the Hebrew prophets were wont to denounce Tyre and Sidon. His rage breaks out into curses, which are not forgiveness. He is maddened by the memory of Peterloo. Never, perhaps, was a sane human being so tyrannised over by a single idea. A skeleton was found on one of the Derbyshire hills. Had the man been crossed in love? had he crept up there to die in the presence of the stars? “Not at all,” cries Elliott; “he was a victim of the Corn-laws, who preferred dying on the mountain-top to receiving parish pay.” In his wild poem all the evil kings in Hades descend from their thrones when King George enters. They only let slip the dogs of war; he taxed the people’s bread. “Sleep on, proud Britoness!” he exclaims over a woman at rest in the grave she had purchased. In one of his articles in Tait’s Magazine, he seriously proposed that tragedies should be written showing the evils of the Corn-laws, and that on a given night they should be performed in every theatre of the kingdom, so that the nation might, by the speediest possible process, be converted
There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but this gossiping must be drawn to a close. When I began, the wind was bending the trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, petulant dashes. For hours now, wind and rain have ceased, the trees are motionless, the garden walk is dry. The early light of wintry sunset is falling across my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite is dipped in tender rose. Less stern he looks, but not less sad, than he did in the morning. The sky is clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapour stretches up into its depths. The air is cold with frost, and the rain which those dark clouds in the east hold will fall during the night in silent, feathery flakes. When I wake to-morrow, the world will be changed, frosty forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree branches will be furred with snows; and to the crumbs which it is my daily custom to sprinkle on the shrubbery walk will come the lineal descendant of the charitable redbreast that covered up with leaves the sleeping children in the wood.
Chaucer is admitted on all hands to be a great poet, but, by the general public at least, he is not frequently read. He is like a cardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little practical acquaintance. And for this there are many and obvious reasons. He is an ancient, and the rich old mahogany is neglected for the new and glittering veneer. He is occasionally gross; often tedious and obscure; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers, to cite the opinions of Greek and Roman authors; and practice and patience are required to melt the frost of his orthography, and let his music flow freely. In the conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, and slow-paced. He wrote in a leisurely world, when there was plenty of time for writing and reading, long before the advent of the printer’s devil or of Mr. Mudie. There is little of the lyrical element in him. He does not dazzle by sentences. He is not quotable. He does not shine in extracts so much as in entire poems. There is a pleasant equality about his writing; he advances through a story at an even pace, glancing round him on everything with curious, humourous eyes, and having his say about everything. He is the prince of story-tellers, and however much he may move others, he is not moved himself. His mood is so kindly that he seems always to have written after dinner, or after hearing good news,—that he had received from the king another grant of wine, for instance,—and he discourses of love and lovers’ raptures, and the disappointments of life, half sportively, half sadly, like one who has passed through all, felt the sweetness and the bitterness of it, and been able to strike a balance. He had his share of crosses and misfortune, but his was a nature which time and sorrow could only mellow and sweeten; and for all that had come and gone, he loved his “books clothed in black and red,” to sit at good men’s feasts; and if silent at table, as the Countess of Pembroke reported, the “stain upon his lip was wine.” Chaucer’s face is to his writings the best preface and commentary; it is contented-looking, like one familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and self-contained somewhat, as if he preferred his own company to the noisy and rude companionship of his fellows; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, as of one who had a keen relish for the pleasures that leave no bitter traces. Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannot think of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light of a smile is diffused over it. In face and turn of genius he differs in every respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer and Spenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song: the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, the other through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted
Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer’s characteristic is intensity, Spenser’s remoteness, Milton’s sublimity, and Shakspeare’s everything. The sentence is epigrammatic and memorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires a little explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron is intense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like the one, nor nature like the other. He would not have cared much for either of these poets. And yet, so far as straightforwardness in dealing with a subject, and complete though quiet realisation of it goes to make up intensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies his critic. There is no wastefulness or explosiveness about the old writer. He does his work silently, and with no appearance of effort. His poetry shines upon us like a May morning; but the streak over the eastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that bathes the
And, with his noticing eyes, into what a brilliant, many tinted world was Chaucer born! In his day life had a certain breadth, colour, and picturesqueness which it does not possess now. It wore a braver dress, and flaunted more in the sun. Five centuries effect a great change on manners. A man may nowadays, and without the slightest suspicion of the fact, brush clothes with half the English peerage on a sunny afternoon in Pall Mall. Then it was quite different. The fourteenth century loved magnificence and show. Great lords kept princely state in the country; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, what waving of plumes, and shaking of banners, and glittering of rich dresses! Religion was picturesque, with dignitaries, and cathedrals, and fuming incense, and the Host carried through the streets. The franklin kept open house, the city merchant feasted kings, the outlaw roasted his venison beneath the greenwood tree. There was a gallant monarch and a gallant court. The eyes of the Countess of Salisbury shed influence; Maid Marian laughed in Sherwood. London is already a considerable place, numbering, perhaps, two hundred thousand inhabitants, the houses clustering close and high along the river banks; and on the beautiful April nights the nightingales are
Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law and disliked it,—a circumstance common enough in the lives of men of letters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, what he did when he was a student, we are unable to discover. Only for a moment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peaked and gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscan friar (friar’s offence unknown), for which amusement he was next morning fined two shillings. History has preserved this for us, but has forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of all his poems. What curious flies are sometimes found in the historic amber! On Chaucer’s own authority, we know that he served under Edward III. in his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a French prison. On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in the king’s household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposed to have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heard from his lips the story of “Griselda,”—a tradition which one would like to believe. He had his share of the sweets and the bitters of life. He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs of poverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was comptroller of the customs for wools; from which post he was dismissed,—why, we know not; although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing out of the accounts in Chaucer’s own hand the condition of his holding office, and having one’s surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners, meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and their deaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king’s smile and its withdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane and thoughtful spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies and knights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions; but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for him and all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betook himself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead of the “Romance of the Rose,” we have the “Canterbury Tales” and the first great English poet. One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days living at Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch the daisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset, and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth century lives,—riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkin and waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on the dais.
Chaucer’s early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a natural delight in sunshine and the greenness of foliage; but they have little human interest. They are allegories for the most part, more or less satisfactorily wrought out. The allegorical turn of thought, the delight in pageantry, the “clothing upon” of abstractions with human forms, flowered originally out of chivalry and the feudal times. Chaucer imported it from the French, and was proud of it in his early poems, as a young fellow of that day might be proud of his horse furniture, his attire, his waving plume. And the poetic fashion thus set retained its vitality for a long while,—indeed, it was only thoroughly made an end of by the French Revolution, which made an end of so much else. About the last trace of its influence is to be found in Burns’ sentimental correspondence with Mrs. M’Lehose, in which the lady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet signs himself Sylvander. It was at best a mere beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet and nature; and passion put his foot through it at once. After Chaucer’s youth was over, he discarded somewhat scornfully these abstractions and shows of things. The “Flower and the Leaf” is a beautiful-tinted dream; the “Canterbury Tales” are as real as anything in Shakspeare or Burns. The ladies in the earlier poems dwell in forests, and wear coronals on their heads; the people in the “Tales” are engaged in the actual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes of mire upon their clothes. The separate poems which make up the “Canterbury Tales” were probably written at different periods, after youth was gone, and when he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and allegorical conceits; and we can fancy him, perhaps fallen on evil days and in retirement, anxious to gather up these loose efforts into one consummate whole. If of his flowers he would make a bouquet for posterity, it was of course necessary to procure a string to tie them together. These necessities, which ruin other men, are the fortunate chances of great poets. Then it was that the idea arose of a meeting of pilgrims at the Tabard in Southwark, of their riding to Canterbury, and of the different personages relating stories to beguile the tedium of the journey. The notion was a happy one, and the execution is superb. In those days, as we know, pilgrimages were of frequent occurrence; and in the motley group that congregated on such occasions, the painter of character had full scope. All conditions of people are comprised in the noisy band issuing from the courtyard of the Southwark inn on that May morning in the fourteenth century. Let us go nearer, and have a look at them.
There is a grave and gentle Knight, who has fought in many wars, and who has many a time hurled his adversary down in tournament before the eyes of all the ladies there, and who has taken the place of honour at many a mighty feast. There, riding beside him, is a blooming Squire, his son, fresh as the month of May, singing day and night from very gladness of heart,—an impetuous young fellow, who is looking forward to the time when he will flesh his maiden sword, and shout his first war-cry in a stricken field. There is an Abbot, mounted on a brown steed. He is middle-aged, his bald crown shines like glass, and his face looks as if it were anointed with oil. He has been a valiant trencher-man at many a well-furnished feast. Above all things, he loves hunting; and when he rides, men can hear his bridle ringing in the whistling wind loud and clear as a chapel bell. There is a thin, ill-conditioned Clerk, perched perilously on a steed as thin and ill-conditioned as himself. He will never be rich, I fear. He is a great student, and would rather have a few books bound in black and red hanging above his bed than be sheriff of the county. There is a Prioress, so gentle and tender-hearted that she weeps if she hears the whimper of a beaten hound, or sees a mouse caught in a trap. There rides the laughing Wife of Bath, bold-faced and fair. She is an adept in love-matters. Five husbands already “she has fried in their own grease” till they were glad to get into their graves to escape the scourge of her tongue. Heaven rest their souls, and swiftly send a sixth! She wears a hat large as a targe or buckler, brings the artillery of her eyes to bear on the young Squire, and jokes him about his sweetheart. Beside her is a worthy Parson, who delivers faithfully the message of his Master. Although he is poor, he gives away the half of his tithes in charity. His parish is waste and wide, yet if sickness or misfortune should befall one of his flock, he rides, in spite of wind, or rain, or thunder, to administer consolation. Among the crowd rides a rich Franklin, who sits in the Guildhall on the dais. He is profuse and hospitable as summer. All day his table stands in the hall covered with meats and drinks, and every one who enters is welcome. There is a Ship-man, whose beard has been shaken by many a tempest, whose cheek knows the kiss of the salt sea spray; a Merchant, with a grave look, clean and neat in his attire, and with plenty of gold in his purse. There is a Doctor of Physic, who has killed more men than the Knight, talking to a Clerk of Laws. There is a merry Friar, a lover of good cheer; and when seated in a tavern among his companions, singing songs it would be scarcely decorous to repeat, you may see his eyes twinkling in his head for joy, like stars on a frosty night. Beside him is a ruby-faced Sompnour, whose breath stinks of garlic and onions, who is ever roaring for wine,—strong wine, wine red as blood; and when drunk, he disdains English,—nothing
Had Chaucer spent his whole life in seeking, he could not have selected a better contemporary circumstance for securing variety of character than a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It comprises, as we see, all kinds and conditions of people. It is the fourteenth-century England in little. In our time, the only thing that could match it in this respect is Epsom down on the great race-day. But then Epsom down is too unwieldy; the crowd is too great, and it does not cohere, save for the few seconds when gay jackets are streaming towards the winning-post. The Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales,” in which we make the acquaintance of the pilgrims, is the ripest, most genial and humourous, altogether the most masterly thing which Chaucer has left us. In its own way, and within its own limits, it is the most wonderful thing in the language. The people we read about are as real as the people we brush clothes with in the street,—nay, much more real; for we not only see their faces, and the fashion and texture of their garments, we know also what they think, how they express themselves, and with what eyes they look out on the world. Chaucer’s art in this Prologue is simple perfection. He indulges in no irrelevant description, he airs no fine sentiments, he takes no special pains as to style or poetic ornament; but every careless touch tells, every sly line reveals character; the description of each man’s horse-furniture and array reads like a memoir. The Nun’s pretty oath bewrays her. We see the bold, well-favoured countenance of the Wife of Bath beneath her hat, as “broad as a buckler or a targe”; and the horse of the Clerk, “as lean as is a rake,” tells tales of his master’s cheer. Our modern dress is worthless as an indication of the character, or even of the social rank, of the wearer; in the olden time it was significant of personal tastes and appetites, of profession, and condition of life generally. See how Chaucer brings out a character by touching merely on a few points of attire and personal appearance:—
“I saw his sleeves were purfiled
at the hand
With fur, and that the finest of the land;
And for to fasten his hood under his chin
He had of gold ywrought a curious pin.
A love-knot in the greater end there was;
His head was bald, and shone as any glass,
And eke his face as if it was anoint.”
What more would you have? You could not have known the monk better if you had lived all your life in the monastery with him. The sleeves daintly purfiled with fur give one side of him, the curious pin with the love-knot another, and the shining crown and face complete the character and the picture. The sun itself could not photograph more truly.
On their way the pilgrims tell tales, and these are as various as their relaters; in fact, the Prologue is the soil out of which they all grow. Dramatic propriety is everywhere instinctively preserved. “The Knight’s Tale” is noble, splendid, and chivalric as his own nature; the tale told by the Wife of Bath is exactly what one would expect. With what good-humour the rosy sinner confesses her sins! how hilarious she is in her repentance! “The Miller’s Tale” is coarse and full-flavoured,—just the kind of thing to be told by a rough, humourous fellow who is hardly yet sober. And here it may be said that although there is a good deal of coarseness in the “Canterbury Tales,” there is not the slightest tinge of pruriency. There is such a single-heartedness and innocence in Chaucer’s vulgarest and broadest stories, such a keen eye for humour, and such a hearty enjoyment of it, and at the same time such an absence of any delight in impurity for impurity’s sake, that but little danger can arise from their perusal. He is so fond of fun that he will drink it out of a cup that is only indifferently clean. He writes often like Fielding, he never writes as Smollett sometimes does. These stories, ranging from the noble romance of Palamon and Arcite to the rude intrigues of Clerk Nicholas,—the one fitted to draw tears down the cheeks of noble ladies and gentlemen; the other to convulse with laughter the midriffs of illiterate clowns,—give one an idea of the astonishing range of Chaucer’s powers. He can suit himself to every company, make himself at home in every circumstance of life; can mingle in tournaments where beauty is leaning from balconies, and the knights, with spear in rest, wait for the blast of the trumpet; and he can with equal ease sit with a couple of drunken friars in a tavern laughing over the confessions they hear, and singing questionable catches between whiles. Chaucer’s range is wide as that of Shakspeare,—if we omit that side of Shakspeare’s mind which confronts the other world, and out of which Hamlet sprang,—and his men and women are even more real, and more easily matched in the living and breathing world. For in Shakspeare’s characters, as in his language, there is surplusage, superabundance; the measure is heaped and running over. From his sheer wealth, he is often the most undramatic of writers. He is so frequently greater than his occasion, he has no small change to suit emergencies, and we have guineas in place of groats. Romeo is more than a mortal lover, and Mercutio more than a mortal wit; the kings in the Shakspearian world are more kingly than earthly sovereigns; Rosalind’s laughter was never heard save in the Forest of Arden. His madmen seem to have eaten of some “strange root.” No such boon companion as Falstaff ever heard chimes at midnight. His very clowns are transcendental, with scraps of wisdom springing out of their foolishest speech. Chaucer, lacking Shakspeare’s excess and prodigality of genius,
The “Knight’s Tale”—which is the first told on the way to Canterbury—is a chivalrous legend, full of hunting, battle, and tournament. Into it, although the scene is laid in Greece, Chaucer has, with a fine scorn of anachronism, poured all the splendour, colour, pomp, and circumstance of the fourteenth century. It is brilliant as a banner displayed to the sunlight. It is real cloth of gold. Compared with it, “Ivanhoe” is a spectacle at Astley’s. The style is everywhere more adorned than is usual, although even here, and in the richest parts, the short, homely, caustic Chaucerian line is largely employed. The “Man of Law’s Tale,” again, is distinguished by quite a different merit. It relates the sorrows and patience of Constance, and is filled with the beauty of holiness. Constance might have been sister to Cordelia; she is one of the white lilies of womanhood. Her story is almost the tenderest in our literature. And Chaucer’s art comes out in this, that although she would spread her hair, nay, put her very heart beneath the feet of those who wrong her, we do not cease for one moment to respect her. This is a feat which has but seldom been achieved. It has long been a matter of reproach to Mr. Thackeray, for instance, that the only faculty with which he gifts his good women is a supreme faculty of tears. To draw any very high degree of female patience is one of the most difficult of tasks. If you represent a woman bearing wrong with a continuous unmurmuring meekness, presenting to blows, come from what quarter they may, nothing but a bent neck, and eyelids humbly drooped, you are in nine cases out of ten painting elaborately the portrait of a fool; and if you miss making her a fool, you are certain to make her a bore.
Chaucer’s orthography is unquestionably uncouth at first sight; but it is not difficult to read if you keep a good glossary beside you for occasional reference, and are willing to undergo a little trouble. The language is antique, but it is full of antique flavour. Wine of excellent vintage originally, it has improved through all the years it has been kept. A very little trouble on the reader’s part, in the reign of Anne, would have made him as intelligible as Addison; a very little more, in the reign of Queen Victoria, will make him more intelligible than Mr. Browning. Yet somehow it has been a favourite idea with many poets that he required modernisation, and that they were the men to do it. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have tried their hands on him. Wordsworth performed his work in a reverential enough spirit; but it may be doubted whether his efforts have brought the old poet a single new reader. Dryden and Pope did not translate or modernise Chaucer, they committed assault and battery upon him. They turned his exquisitely naive humour into their own coarseness, they put doubles entendre into his mouth, they blurred his female faces,—as a picture is blurred when the hand of a Vandal is drawn over its yet wet colours,—and they turned his natural descriptions into the natural descriptions of “Windsor Forest” and the “Fables.” The grand old writer does not need translation or modernisation; but perhaps, if it be done at all, it had better be reached in that way. For the benefit of younger readers, I subjoin short prose versions of two of the “Canterbury Tales,”—a story-book than which the world does not possess a better. Listen, then, to the tale the Knight told as the pilgrims rode to Canterbury:—
“There was once, as old stories tell, a certain Duke Theseus, lord and governor of Athens. The same was a great warrior and conqueror of realms. He defeated the Amazons, and wedded the queen of that country, Hypolita. After his marriage, the duke, his wife, and his sister Emily, with all their host, were riding towards Athens, when they were aware that a company of ladies, clad in black, were kneeling two by two on the highway, wringing their hands and filling the air with lamentations. The duke, beholding this piteous sight, reined in his steed and inquired the reason of their grief. Whereat one of the ladies, queen to the slain King Capeneus, told him that at the siege of Thebes (of which town they were), Creon, the conqueror, had thrown the bodies of their husbands in a heap, and would on no account allow them to be buried, so that their limbs were mangled by vultures and wild beasts. At the hearing of this great wrong, the duke started down from his horse, took the ladies one by one in his arms and comforted them, sent Hypolita and Emily home, displayed his great white banner, and immediately rode towards Thebes with his host. Arriving at the city, he attacked boldly, slew the tyrant Creon with his own hand, tore down the houses,—wall, roof, and rafter,—and then gave the bodies to the weeping ladies that they might be honourably interred. While searching amongst the slain Thebans, two young knights were found grievously wounded, and by the richness of their armour they were known to be of the blood royal. These young knights, Palamon and Arcite by name, the duke carried to Athens and flung into perpetual prison. Here they lived year by year in mourning and woe. It happened one May morning that Palamon, who by the clemency of his keeper was roaming about in an upper chamber, looked out and beheld Emily singing in the garden and gathering flowers. At the sight of the beautiful apparition he started and cried, ‘Ha!’ Arcite rose up, crying, ’Dear cousin, what is the matter?’ when he too was stricken to the heart by the shaft of her beauty. Then the prisoners began to dispute as to which had the better right to love her. Palamon said he had seen her first; Arcite said that in love each man fought for himself; and so they disputed day by day. Now, it so happened that at this time the Duke Perotheus came to visit his old playfellow and friend Theseus, and at his intercession Arcite was liberated, on the condition that on pain of death he should never again be found in the Athenian dominions. Then the two knights grieved in their hearts. ‘What matters liberty?’ said Arcite,—’I am a banished man! Palamon in his dungeon is happier than I. He can see Emily and be gladdened by her beauty!’ ‘Woe is me!’ said Palamon; ’here must I remain in durance. Arcite is abroad; he may make sharp war on the Athenian border, and win Emily by the sword.’ When Arcite returned to his native city he became so thin and pale with sorrow that his friends scarcely knew
“When the twelve months had nearly passed away, there was in Athens a great noise of workmen and hammers. The duke was busy with preparations. He built a large amphitheatre, seated, round and round, to hold thousands of people. He erected also three temples,—one for Diana, one for Mars, one for Venus; how rich these were, how full of paintings and images, the tongue cannot tell! Never was such preparation made in the world. At last the day arrived in which the knights were to make their entrance into the city. A noise of trumpets was heard, and through the city rode Palamon and his train. With him came Lycurgus, the king of Thrace. He stood in a great car of gold, drawn by four white bulls, and his face was like a griffin when he looked about. Twenty or more hounds used for hunting the lion and the bear ran about the wheels of his car; at his back rode a hundred lords, stern and stout. Another burst of trumpets, and Arcite entered with his troop. By his side rode Emetrius, the king of India, on a bay steed covered with cloth of gold. His hair was yellow, and glittered like the sun; when he looked upon the people, they thought his face was like the face of a lion; his voice was like the thunder of a trumpet. He bore a white eagle on his wrist, and tame lions and leopards ran among the horses of his train. They came to the city on a Sunday morning, and the jousts were to begin on Monday. What pricking of squires backwards and forwards, what clanking of hammers, what baying of hounds, that day! At last it was noon of Monday. Theseus declared from his throne that no blood was to be shed, that they should take prisoners only, and that he who was once taken prisoner should on no account again mingle in the fray. Then the duke, the queen, Emily, and the rest, rode to the lists with trumpets and melody. They had no sooner taken their places than through the gate of Mars rode Arcite and his hundred, displaying a red banner. At the self-same moment Palamon and his company entered by the gate of Venus, with a banner white as milk. They were then arranged in two ranks, their names were called over, the gates were shut, the herald gave his cry, loud and clear rang the trumpet, and crash went the spears, as if made of glass, when the knights met in battle shock. There might you see a knight unhorsed, a second crushing his way through the press, armed with a mighty mace, a third hurt and taken prisoner. Many a time that day in the swaying battle did the two Thebans meet, and thrice were they unhorsed. At last, near the setting of the sun, when Palamon was fighting with Arcite, he was wounded by Emetrius, and the battle thickened at the place. Emetrius, is thrown out of his saddle a spear’s length. Lycurgus is overthrown, and rolls on the ground, horse and man; and Palamon is dragged by main force to the stake. Then Theseus rose up where he sat, and cried, ’Ho! no more; Arcite of Thebes hath won Emily!’ at which the
The Man of Law’s tale runs in this wise:
“There dwelt in Syria once a company of merchants, who scented every land with their spices. They dealt in jewels, and cloth of gold, and sheeny satins. It so happened that while some of them were dwelling in Rome for traffic, the people talked of nothing save the wonderful beauty of Constance, the daughter of the emperor. She was so fair that every one who looked upon her face fell in love with her. In a short time the ships of the merchants, laden with rich wares, were furrowing the green sea, going home. When they came to their native city they could talk of nothing but the marvellous beauty of Constance. Their words being reported to the Sultan, he determined that none other should be his wife; and for this purpose he abandoned the religion of the false prophet, and was baptised in the Christian faith. Ambassadors passed between the courts, and the day came at length when Constance was to leave Rome for her husband’s palace in Syria. What kisses and tears and lingering embraces! What blessings on the little golden head which was so soon to lie in the bosom of a stranger! What state and solemnity in the procession which wound down from the shore to the ship! At last it was Syria. Crowds of people were standing on the beach. The mother of the Sultan was there; and when Constance stepped ashore, she took her in her arms and kissed her as if she had been her own child. Soon after, with trumpets and melody and the trampling of innumerable horses, the Sultan came. Everything was joy and happiness. But the smiling demoness, his mother, could not forgive him for changing his faith, and she resolved to slay him that very night, and seize the government of the kingdom. He and all his lords were stabbed in the rich hall while they were sitting at their wine. Constance alone escaped. She was then put into a ship alone, with food and clothes, and told that she might find her way back to Italy. She sailed away, and was never seen
“News had come to Rome of the cruelty of the Sultan’s mother to Constance, and an army was sent to waste her country. After the land had been burned and desolated, the commander was crossing the seas in triumph, when he met the ship sailing in which sat Constance and her little boy. They were both brought to Rome, and although the commander’s wife and Constance were cousins, the one did not know the other. By this time, remorse for the slaying of his mother had seized Alla’s mind, and he could find no rest. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Rome in search of peace. He crossed the Alps with his train, and entered the city with great glory and magnificence. One day he feasted at the commander’s house, at which Constance dwelt; and at her request her little son was admitted, and during the progress of the feast the child went and stood looking in the king’s face. ’What fair child is that standing yonder?’ said the king. ’By St. John; I know not!’ quoth the commander; ’he has a mother, but no father that I know of.’ And then he told the king—who seemed all the while like a man stunned—how he had found the mother and child floating about on the sea. The king rose from the table and sent for Constance; and when he saw her, and thought on all her wrongs, he could not refrain from tears. ‘This is your little son, Maurice,’ she said, as she led him in by the hand. Next day she met the emperor her father in the street, and, falling down on her knees before him, said, ’Father, has the remembrance of your young child Constance gone out of your mind? I am that Constance whom you sent to Syria, and who was thought to be lost in the sea.’ That day there was great joy in Rome; and soon afterwards Alla, with his wife and child, returned to England, where they lived in great prosperity till he died.”
Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from native instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, such as it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,—the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual,—and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have no ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of evil tidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, but I am devoured by an unappeasable curiosity as to the men who do act. I am not an actor, I am a spectator only. My sole occupation is sight-seeing. In a certain imperial idleness, I amuse myself with the world. Ambition! What do I care for ambition? The oyster with much pain produces its pearl. I take the pearl. Why should I produce one after this miserable, painful fashion? It would be but a flawed one, at best. These pearls I can pick up by the dozen. The production of them is going on all around me, and there will be a nice crop for the solitary man of the next century. Look at a certain silent emperor, for instance: a hundred years hence his pearl will be handed about from hand to hand; will be curiously scrutinised and valued; will be set in its place in the world’s cabinet. I confess I should like to see the completion of that filmy orb. Will it be pure in colour? Will its purity be marred by an ominous bloody streak? Of this I am certain, that in the cabinet in which the world keeps these peculiar treasures, no one will be looked at more frequently, or will provoke a greater variety of opinions as to its intrinsic worth. Why should I be ambitious? Shall I write verses? I am not likely to surpass Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Browning in that walk. Shall I be a musician? The blackbird singing this moment somewhere in my garden shrubbery puts me to instant shame. Shall I paint? The intensest scarlet on an artist’s palette is but ochre to that I saw this morning at sunrise. No, no, let me enjoy Mr. Tennyson’s verse, and the blackbird’s song, and the colours of sunrise, but do not let me emulate them. I am happier as it is. I do not need to make history,—there are plenty of people willing to save me trouble on that score. The cook makes the dinner, the guest eats it; and the last, not without reason, is considered the happier man.
In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world’s first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,—the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry “Bravo,” when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph’s splendid funeral procession,—all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham’s flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah’s camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king’s court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan’s pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.
The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees everything, but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded. My study-window looks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the on-goings of the quiet place. Around my house there is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassy plots, and fantastically clipped yews which have gathered their darkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials in which the sun is constantly telling his age; and statues green with neglect and the stains of the weather. The garden I love more than any place on earth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which is dignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit in the moss-house, which is warm and cosey as a bird’s nest, and wherein twilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for me in the curiously shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence and the pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees Nature takes me into her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It is curious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. The sickly seamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sicklier mignonette. The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever was Dutchman during the famous mania. The author finds a garden the best place to think out his thought. In the disabled statesman every restless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon his blossomed apple-trees. Is the fancy too far brought that this love for gardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in the world’s dawn when but two persons existed,—a gardener named Adam, and a gardener’s wife called Eve?
When I walk out of my house into my garden I walk out of my habitual self, my every-day thoughts, my customariness of joy or sorrow by which I recognise and assure myself of my own identity. These I leave behind me for a time, as the bather leaves his garments on the beach. This piece of garden-ground, in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdom with its own interests, annals, and incidents. Something is always happening in it. To-day is always different from yesterday. This spring a chaffinch built a nest in one of my yew-trees. The particular yew which the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped long ago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went by his name. The resemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intention was evident. In the black shock head of our first parent did the birds establish their habitation. A prettier, rounder, more comfortable nest I never saw, and many a wild swing it got when Adam bent his
His own children, and the children he happens to meet on the country road, a man regards with quite different eyes. The strange, sunburnt brats returning from a primrose-hunt and laden with floral spoils, may be as healthy looking, as pretty, as well-behaved, as sweet-tempered, as neatly dressed as those that bear his name,—may be in every respect as worthy of love and admiration; but then they have the misfortune not to belong to him. That little fact makes a great difference. He knows nothing about them; his acquaintance with them is born and dead in a moment. I like my garden better than any other garden, for the same reason. It is my own. And ownership in such a matter implies a great deal. When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sour moorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, built the moss-house, erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them with the mould which they love so well. I am the creator of every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in the wind. The rustle of my trees is to my ear what his child’s voice is to my friends the village doctor or the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of every tree and plant in my garden. I watch their growth as a father watches the growth of his children. It is curious enough, as showing from what sources objects derive their importance, that if you have once planted a tree for other than commercial purposes,—and in that case it is usually done by your orders and by the hands of hirelings,—you have always in it a peculiar interest. You care more for it than you care for all the forests of Norway or America. You have planted it, and that is sufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of the world. This personal interest I take in every inmate of my garden, and this interest I have increased by sedulous watching. But, really, trees and plants resemble human beings in many ways. You shake a packet of seed into your forcing-frame; and while some grow, others pine and die, or struggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms late in the season, and succumb at length. So far as one could discover, the seeds were originally alike,—they received the same care, they were fed by the same moisture and sunlight; but of no two of them are the issues the same. Do I not see something of this kind in the world of men, and can I not please myself with quaint analogies? These plants and trees have their seasons of illness and their sudden deaths. Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty miles, is smitten by some fell disease; its leaves take an unhealthy hue, and in a day or so it is sapless,—dead. A tree of mine, the first last spring to put out its leaves, and which wore them till November, made this spring no green response to the call of the sunshine. Marvelling what ailed it, I went to examine, and found it had been dead for months; and yet during the winter there had been no frost to speak of, and
I like flowering plants, but I like trees more,—for the reason, I suppose, that they are slower in coming to maturity, are longer lived, that you can become better acquainted with them, and that in the course of years memories and associations hang as thickly on their boughs as do leaves in summer or fruits in autumn. I do not wonder that great earls value their trees, and never, save in direst extremity, lift upon them the axe. Ancient descent and glory are made audible in the proud murmur of immemorial woods. There are forests in England whose leafy noises may be shaped into Agincourt and the names of the battle-fields of the Roses; oaks that dropped their acorns in the year that Henry VIII. held his Field of the Cloth of Gold, and beeches that gave shelter to the deer when Shakspeare was a boy. There they stand, in sun and shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished centuries; and sore must his need be who commands a woodland massacre. A great English tree, the rings of a century in its boll, is one of the noblest of natural objects; and it touches the imagination no less than the eye, for it grows out of tradition and a past order of things, and is pathetic with the suggestions of dead generations. Trees waving a colony of rooks in the wind to-day, are older than historic lines. Trees are your best antiques. There are cedars on Lebanon which the axes of Solomon spared, they say, when he was busy with his Temple; there are olives on Olivet that might have rustled in the ears of the Master and the Twelve; there are oaks in Sherwood which have tingled to the horn of Robin Hood, and have listened to Maid Marian’s laugh. Think of an existing Syrian cedar which is nearly as old as history, which was middle-aged before the wolf suckled Romulus! Think of an existing English elm in whose branches the heron was reared which the hawks of Saxon Harold killed! If you are a notable, and wish to be remembered, better plant a tree than build a city or strike a medal; it will outlast both.
My trees are young enough, and if they do not take me away into the past, they project me into the future. When I planted them, I knew I was performing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long. My oaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will they not outlive! I pluck my apples, my pears, my plums; and I know that from the same branches other hands will pluck apples, pears, and plums when this body of mine will have shrunk into a pinch of dust. I cannot dream with what year these hands will date their letters. A man does not plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity. And, sitting idly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will, to some small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me kindly, ye future men and women! When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam and spurt in your cider-presses, my plums will gather for you their misty bloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of my cherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend!
In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden rather than in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party. Every village has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not without one. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns my garden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequent converse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certain points of sympathy. Although this is not meant for a compliment, I take it for one. The poor faithful creature’s brain has strange visitors; now ’t is fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems in the queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilight which obscures objects, and his remarks seem to come from another world than that in which ordinary people live. He is the only original person of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form a singular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough at times, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and you think he must have wandered out of Shakspeare’s plays into this out-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visit me the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering after Red-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons. Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar. The sourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture of sweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikes himself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in his lozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of his many eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often to have a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculent and revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomy egotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flower stuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire.
The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine; they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a good-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a humourist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles. Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit and put a tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence for the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does not feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air. The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but he is impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence without feeling a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons,—to annoy if he cannot subdue; and when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism aside,—as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss of temper,—which, however, he regains before any harm is done; for the worthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him.
After an outburst, there is a truce between the friends for a while, till it is broken by theological battle over the age of the world, or some other the like remote matter, which seems important to me only in so far as it affords ground for disputation. These truces are broken sometimes by the doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T’other evening the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, smoking each a meditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and its lake, and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset. Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardly reach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of aspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction
“The world-old Fair of Vanity
Since Bunyan’s day has
grown discreeter
No more it flocks in crowds to see
A blazing Paul or Peter.
“Not that a single inch it swerves
From hate of saint or love
of sinner,
But martyrs shock aesthetic nerves,
And spoil the gout
of dinner.
“Raise but a shout, or flaunt a
scarf,—
Its mobs are all agog and
flying;
They ’ll cram the levee of a dwarf,
And leave a Haydon dying.
“They live upon each newest thing,
They fill their idle days
with seeing;
Fresh news of courtier and of king
Sustains their empty being.
“The statelier, from year to year,
Maintain their comfortable
stations
At the wide windows that o’erpeer
The public square of nations;
“While through it heaves, with cheers
and groans,
Harsh drums of battle in the
distance,
Frightful with gallows, ropes, and thrones,
The medley of existence;
“Amongst them tongues are wagging
much:
Hark to the philosophic sisters!
To his, whose keen satiric touch,
Like the Medusa, blisters!
“All things are made for talk,—St.
Paul;
The pattern of an altar cushion;
A Paris wild with carnival,
Or red with revolution.
“And much they knew, that sneering
crew,
Of things above the world
and under:
They search’d the hoary deep; they
knew
The secret of the thunder;
“The pure white arrow of the light
They split into its colours
seven;
They weighed the sun; they dwelt, like
night,
Among the stars of heaven;
“They ’ve found out life and
death,—the first
Is known but to the upper
classes;
The second, pooh! ’t is at the worst
A dissolution into gases.
“And vice and virtue are akin,
As black and white from Adam
issue,—
One flesh, one blood, though sheeted in
A different coloured tissue.
“Their science groped from star
to star;—
But then herself found nothing
greater.
What wonder?—in a Leyden jar
They bottled the Creator.
“Fires fluttered on their lightning-rod;
They cleared the human mind
from error;
They emptied heaven of its God,
And Tophet of its terror.
“Better the savage in his dance
Than these acute and syllogistic!
Better a reverent ignorance
Than knowledge atheistic!
“Have they dispelled one cloud that
lowers
So darkly on the human creature?
They with their irreligious powers
Have subjugated nature.
“But, as a satyr wins the charms
Of maiden in a forest hearted,
He finds, when clasped within his arms,
The outraged soul departed.”
When I had done reading these verses, he clergyman glanced slyly along to see the effect of his shot. The doctor drew two or three hurried whiffs, gave a huge grunt of scorn, then, turning sharply, asked, “What is ‘a reverent ignorance’? What is ’a knowledge atheistic’?” The clergyman, skewered by the sudden question, wriggled a little, and then began to explain,—with no great heart, however, for he had had his little joke out, and did not care to carry it further. The doctor listened for a little, and then, laying down his pipe, said, with some heat, “It won’t do. ’Reverent ignorance’ and such trash is a mere jingle of words; that you know as well as I. You stumbled on these verses, and brought them up here to throw them at me. They don’t harm me in the least, I can assure you. There is no use,” continued the doctor, mollifying at the sight of his friend’s countenance, and seeing how the land lay,—“there is no use speaking to our incurious, solitary friend here, who could bask comfortably in sunshine for a century, without once inquiring whence came the light and heat. But let me tell you,” lifting his pipe and shaking it across me at the clergyman, “that science has done services to your cloth which have not always received the most grateful acknowledgments. Why, man,” here he began to fill his pipe slowly, “the theologian and the man of science, although they seem to diverge and lose sight of each other, are all the while working to one end. Two exploring parties in Australia set out from one point; the one goes east, and the other west. They lose sight of each other, they know nothing of one another’s whereabouts; but they are all steering to one point,”—the sharp spirt of a fusee on the garden-seat came in here, followed by an aromatic flavour in the air,—“and when they do meet, which they are certain to do in the long run,”—here the doctor put the pipe in his mouth, and finished his speech with it there,—“the figure of the continent has become known, and may be set down in maps. The exploring parties have started long ago. What folly in the one to pooh-pooh or be suspicious of the exertions of the other. That party deserves the greatest credit which meets the other more than half way.”—“Bravo!” cried the clergyman, when the doctor had finished his oration; “I don’t know that I could fill your place at the bedside, but I am quite sure that you could fill mine in the pulpit.”—“I am not sure that the congregation would approve of the change,—I might disturb their slumbers;” and, pleased with his retort, his cheery laugh rose through a cloud of smoke into the sunset.
Heigho! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little affair of the doctor and the clergyman takes the dignity of an incident, and seems worthy of being recorded.
The doctor was anxious that, during the following winter, a short course of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, and in my garden he held several conferences on the matter with the clergyman and myself. It was arranged finally that the lectures should be delivered, and that one of them should be delivered by me. I need not say how pleasant was the writing out of my discourse, and how the pleasure was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my own temerity. My lecture I copied out in my most careful hand, and, as I had it by heart, I used to declaim passages of it ensconced in my moss-house, or concealed behind my shrubbery trees. In these places I tried it all over, sentence by sentence. The evening came at last which had been looked forward to for a couple of months or more. The small schoolroom was filled by forms on which the people sat, and a small reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on it, at the further end, waited for me. When I took my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struck into me a certain awe. I discovered in a moment why the orator of the hustings is so deferential to the mob. You may despise every individual member of your audience, but these despised individuals, in their capacity of a collective body, overpower you. I addressed the people with the most unfeigned respect. When I began, too, I found what a dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting the silence. You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. It is you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is going on, you can be critical as to its tone, volume, cadence, and other qualities, as if it was the voice of a stranger. Gradually, however, I got accustomed to my voice, and the respect which I entertained for my hearers so far relaxed that I was at last able to look them in the face. I saw the doctor and the clergyman smile encouragingly, and my half-witted gardener looking up at me with open mouth, and the atrabilious confectioner clap his hands, which made me take refuge in my paper again. I got to the end of my task without any remarkable incident, if I except the doctor’s once calling out “hear” loudly, which brought the heart into my mouth, and blurred half a sentence. When I sat down, there were the usual sounds of approbation, and the confectioner returned thanks, in the name of the audience.
Call it oddity, eccentricity, humour, or what you please, it is evident that the special flavour of mind or manner which, independently of fortune, station, or profession, sets a man apart and makes him distinguishable from his fellows, and which gives the charm of picturesqueness to society, is fast disappearing from amongst us. A man may count the odd people of his acquaintance on his fingers; and it is observable that these odd people are generally well stricken in years. They belong more to the past generation than to the present. Our young men are terribly alike. For these many years back, the young gentlemen I have had the fortune to encounter are clever, knowing, selfish, disagreeable; the young ladies are of one pattern, like minted sovereigns of the same reign,—excellent gold, I have no doubt, but each bearing the same awfully proper image and superscription. There are no blanks in the matrimonial lottery nowadays, but the prizes are all of a value, and there is but one kind of article given for the ticket. Courtship is an absurdity and a sheer waste of time. If a man could but close his eyes in a ball-room, dash into a bevy of muslin beauties, carry off the fair one that accident gives to his arms, his raid would be as reasonable and as likely to produce happiness as the more ordinary methods of procuring a spouse. If a man has to choose one guinea out of a bag containing one hundred and fifty, what can he do? What wonderful wisdom can he display in his choice? There is no appreciable difference of value in the golden pieces. The latest coined are a little fresher, that’s all. An act of uniformity, with heavy penalties for recusants, seems to have been passed upon the English race. That we can quite well account for this state of things, does not make the matter better, does not make it the less our duty to fight against it. We are apt to be told that men are too busy and women too accomplished for humour of speech or originality of character or manner. In the truth of this lies the pity of it. If, with the exceptions of hedges that divide fields, and streams that run as marches between farms, every inch of soil were drained, ploughed, manured, and under that improved cultivation rushing up into astonishing wheaten and oaten crops, enriching tenant and proprietor, the aspect of the country would be decidedly uninteresting, and would present scant attraction to the man riding or walking through it. In such a world the tourists would be few. Personally, I should detest a world all red and ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all covered with harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desiderate moors and barren places: the copse where you can flush the woodcock; the warren where, when you approach, you can see the twinkle of innumerable rabbit tails; and, to tell the truth, would not feel sorry although Reynard himself had a hole beneath the wooded bank, even if the demands of his rising family cost
I have advertised myself to speak of vagabonds, and I must explain what I mean by the term. We all know what was the doom of the first child born of man, and it is needless for me to say that I do not wish the spirit of Cain more widely diffused amongst my fellow-creatures. By vagabonds, I do not mean a tramp or a gipsy, or a thimble-rigger, or a brawler who is brought up with a black eye before a magistrate in the morning. The vagabond as I have him in my mind’s eye, and whom I dearly love, comes out of quite a different mould. The man I speak of, seldom, it is true, attains to the dignity of a churchwarden; he is never found sitting at a reformed town-council board; he has a horror of public platforms; he never by any chance heads a subscription list with a donation of fifty pounds. On the other hand, he is very far from being a “ne’er-do-weel,” as the Scotch phrase it, or an imprudent person. He does not play at “Aunt Sally” on a public race-course, he does not wrench knockers from the doors of slumbering citizens; he has never seen the interior of a police-cell. It is quite true, he has a peculiar way of looking at many things. If, for instance, he is brought up with cousin Milly, and loves her dearly, and the childish affection grows up and strengthens in the woman’s heart, and there is a fair chance for them fighting the world side by side, he marries her without too curiously considering whether his income will permit him to give dinner-parties, and otherwise fashionably see his friends. Very imprudent, no doubt. But you cannot convince my vagabond. With the strangest logical twist, which seems natural to him, he conceives that he marries for his own sake, and not for the sake of his acquaintances, and that the possession of a loving heart and a conscience void of reproach is worth, at any time an odd sovereign in his pocket. The vagabond is not a favourite with the respectable classes. He is particularly feared by mammas who have daughters to dispose of,—not that he is a bad son, or likely to prove a bad husband or a treacherous friend; but somehow gold does not stick to his fingers as it does to the fingers of some men. He is regardless of appearances. He chooses his friends neither for their fine houses nor their rare wines, but for their humours, their
Ah, me! what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago, when it was getting itself discovered—when the sunset gave up America, when a steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru! Then were the “Arabian Nights” commonplace, enchantments a matter of course, and romance the most ordinary thing in the world. Then man was courting Nature; now he has married her. Every mystery is dissipated.
In the fine sense in which I take the word, the English are the greatest vagabonds on the earth, and it is the healthiest trait in their national character. The first fine day in spring awakes the gipsy in the blood of the English workman, and incontinently he “babbles of green fields.” On the English gentleman lapped, in the most luxurious civilisation, and with the thousand powers and resources of wealth at his command, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest, a Bedouin-like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, and in a month the fiery dust rises in the track of his desert steed, or in the six months’ polar midnight he hears the big wave clashing on the icy shore. The close presence of the sea feeds the Englishman’s restlessness.
There is an amiability about the genuine vagabond which takes captive the heart. We do not love a man for his respectability, his prudence and foresight in business, his capacity of living within his income, or his balance at his banker’s. We all admit that prudence is an admirable virtue, and occasionally lament, about Christmas, when bills fall in, that we do not inherit it in a greater degree. But we speak about it in quite a cool way. It does not touch us with enthusiasm. If a calculating-machine had a hand to wring, it would find few to wring it warmly. The things that really move liking in human beings are the gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks of generosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the aboriginal savage, some
Commend me to Shakspeare’s vagabonds, the most delightful in the world! His sweet-blooded and liberal nature blossomed into all fine generosities as naturally as an apple-bough into pink blossoms and odours. Listen to Gonsalvo talking to the shipwrecked Milan nobles camped for the night in Prospero’s isle, full of sweet voices, with Ariel shooting through the enchanted air like a falling star;—
“Had I the plantation of this isle,
my lord,
I’ the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service none; contract, succession,
Bourne, bound of land, tilth, title, vineyard
none;
No use of metal coin, or wine, or oil;
No occupation—all men idle—all!
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;
All things in common nature should produce,
Without sweat or endurance; treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any
engine
Would I not have; but nature would bring
forth
Of its own kind all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.”
What think you of a world after that pattern? “As You Like it” is a vagabond play, and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows a forest peopled like Arden’s, with an exiled king drawing the sweetest, humanest lessons from misfortune; a melancholy Jacques, stretched by the river bank, moralising on the bleeding deer; a fair Rosalind, chanting her saucy cuckoo-song; fools like Touchstone—not like those of our acquaintance, my friends; and the whole place, from centre to circumference, filled with mighty oak bolls, all carven with lovers’ names,—if such a forest waved in wind, I say, I would, be my worldly prospects what they might, pack up at once, and cast in my lot with that vagabond company. For there I should find more gallant
The children of the brain become to us actual existences, more actual, indeed, than the people who impinge upon us in the street, or who live next door. We are more intimate with Shakspeare’s men and women than we are with our contemporaries, and they are, on the whole, better company. They are more beautiful in form and feature, and they express themselves in a way that the most gifted strive after in vain. What if Shakspeare’s people could walk out of the play-books and settle down upon some spot of earth and conduct life there? There would be found humanity’s whitest wheat, the world’s unalloyed gold. The very winds could not visit the place roughly. No king’s court could present you such an array. Where else could we find a philosopher like Hamlet? a friend like Antonio? a witty fellow like Mercutio? where else Imogen’s piquant’s face? Portia’s gravity and womanly sweetness? Rosalind’s true heart and silvery laughter? Cordelia’s beauty of holiness? These would form the centre of the court, but the purlieus, how many-coloured! Malvolio would walk mincingly in the sunshine there; Autolycus would filch purses. Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch would be eternal boon companions. And as Falstaff sets out homeward from the tavern, the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line of frigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to stand and answer to the watch as they are honest men. If Mr. Dickens’s characters were gathered together, they would constitute a town populous enough to send a representative to Parliament. Let us enter. The style of architecture is unparalleled. There is an individuality about the buildings. In some obscure way they remind one of human faces. There are houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary’s circus. Newman Noggs comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy’s
In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a standard or ideal is tacitly set up, to which every member is expected to conform on pain of having himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over him, the quick feelings of the vagabond are not frequently found. Yet, thanks to Nature, who sends her leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of debris, and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls and desert places, it is never altogether dead! And of vagabonds, not the least delightful is he who retains poetry and boyish spirits beneath the crust of a profession. Mr. Carlyle commends “central fire,” and very properly commends it most when “well covered in.” In the case of a professional man, this “central fire” does not manifest itself in wasteful explosiveness, but in secret genial heat, visible in fruits of charity and pleasant humour. The physician who is a humourist commends himself doubly to a sick-bed. His patients are as much indebted for their cure to his smile, his voice, and
The vagabond, as I have explained and sketched him, is not a man to tremble at, or avoid as if he wore contagion in his touch. He is upright, generous, innocent, is conscientious in the performance of his duties; and if a little eccentric and fond of the open air, he is full of good nature and mirthful charity. He may not make money so rapidly as you do, but I cannot help thinking that he enjoys life a great deal more. The quick feeling of life, the exuberance or animal spirits which break out in the traveller, the sportsman, the poet, the painter, should be more generally diffused. We should be all the better and all the happier for it. Life ought to be freer, heartier, more enjoyable than it is at present. If the professional fetter must be worn, let it be worn as lightly as possible. It should never be permitted to canker the limbs. We are a free people,—we have an unshackled press,—we have an open platform, and can say our say upon it, no king or despot making us afraid. We send representatives to Parliament; the franchise is always going to be extended. All this is very fine, and we do well to glory in our privileges as Britons. But, although we enjoy greater political freedom than any other people, we are the victims of a petty social tyranny. We are our own despots,—we