initial commit of ebook 1463HEADmain

1 files changed, 6302 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/1463.txt b/1463.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a7a8d4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1463.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6302 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, by
+George Gissing
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
+
+
+Author: George Gissing
+
+Release Date: March 27, 2005  [eBook #1463]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY
+RYECROFT***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1903 Archibald Constable & Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The name of Henry Ryecroft never became familiar to what is called the
+reading public.  A year ago obituary paragraphs in the literary papers
+gave such account of him as was thought needful: the date and place of
+his birth, the names of certain books he had written, an allusion to his
+work in the periodicals, the manner of his death.  At the time it
+sufficed.  Even those few who knew the man, and in a measure understood
+him, must have felt that his name called for no further celebration; like
+other mortals, he had lived and laboured; like other mortals, he had
+entered into his rest.  To me, however, fell the duty of examining
+Ryecroft's papers; and having, in the exercise of my discretion, decided
+to print this little volume, I feel that it requires a word or two of
+biographical complement, just so much personal detail as may point the
+significance of the self-revelation here made.
+
+When first I knew him, Ryecroft had reached his fortieth year; for twenty
+years he had lived by the pen.  He was a struggling man, beset by poverty
+and other circumstances very unpropitious to mental work.  Many forms of
+literature had he tried; in none had he been conspicuously successful;
+yet now and then he had managed to earn a little more money than his
+actual needs demanded, and thus was enabled to see something of foreign
+countries.  Naturally a man of independent and rather scornful outlook,
+he had suffered much from defeated ambition, from disillusions of many
+kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time
+of which I am speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind
+and temper so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with
+him, one did not know but that he led a calm, contented life.  Only after
+several years of friendship was I able to form a just idea of what the
+man had gone through, or of his actual existence.  Little by little
+Ryecroft had subdued himself to a modestly industrious routine.  He did a
+great deal of mere hack-work; he reviewed, he translated, he wrote
+articles; at long intervals a volume appeared under his name.  There were
+times, I have no doubt, when bitterness took hold upon him; not seldom he
+suffered in health, and probably as much from moral as from physical over-
+strain; but, on the whole, he earned his living very much as other men
+do, taking the day's toil as a matter of course, and rarely grumbling
+over it.
+
+Time went on; things happened; but Ryecroft was still laborious and poor.
+In moments of depression he spoke of his declining energies, and
+evidently suffered under a haunting fear of the future.  The thought of
+dependence had always been intolerable to him; perhaps the only boast I
+at any time heard from his lips was that he had never incurred debt.  It
+was a bitter thought that, after so long and hard a struggle with
+unkindly circumstance, he might end his life as one of the defeated.
+
+A happier lot was in store for him.  At the age of fifty, just when his
+health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement, Ryecroft had
+the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly released from toil, and to
+enter upon a period of such tranquillity of mind and condition as he had
+never dared to hope.  On the death of an acquaintance, more his friend
+than he imagined, the wayworn man of letters learnt with astonishment
+that there was bequeathed to him a life annuity of three hundred pounds.
+Having only himself to support (he had been a widower for several years,
+and his daughter, an only child, was married), Ryecroft saw in this
+income something more than a competency.  In a few weeks he quitted the
+London suburb where of late he had been living, and, turning to the part
+of England which he loved best, he presently established himself in a
+cottage near Exeter, where, with a rustic housekeeper to look after him,
+he was soon thoroughly at home.  Now and then some friend went down into
+Devon to see him; those who had that pleasure will not forget the plain
+little house amid its half-wild garden, the cosy book-room with its fine
+view across the valley of the Exe to Haldon, the host's cordial, gleeful
+hospitality, rambles with him in lanes and meadows, long talks amid the
+stillness of the rural night.  We hoped it would all last for many a
+year; it seemed, indeed, as though Ryecroft had only need of rest and
+calm to become a hale man.  But already, though he did not know it, he
+was suffering from a disease of the heart, which cut short his life after
+little more than a lustrum of quiet contentment.  It had always been his
+wish to die suddenly; he dreaded the thought of illness, chiefly because
+of the trouble it gave to others.  On a summer evening, after a long walk
+in very hot weather, he lay down upon the sofa in his study, and there--as
+his calm face declared--passed from slumber into the great silence.
+
+When he left London, Ryecroft bade farewell to authorship.  He told me
+that he hoped never to write another line for publication.  But, among
+the papers which I looked through after his death, I came upon three
+manuscript books which at first glance seemed to be a diary; a date on
+the opening page of one of them showed that it had been begun not very
+long after the writer's settling in Devon.  When I had read a little in
+these pages, I saw that they were no mere record of day-to-day life;
+evidently finding himself unable to forego altogether the use of the pen,
+the veteran had set down, as humour bade him, a thought, a reminiscence,
+a bit of reverie, a description of his state of mind, and so on, dating
+such passage merely with the month in which it was written.  Sitting in
+the room where I had often been his companion, I turned page after page,
+and at moments it was as though my friend's voice sounded to me once
+more.  I saw his worn visage, grave or smiling; recalled his familiar
+pose or gesture.  But in this written gossip he revealed himself more
+intimately than in our conversation of the days gone by.  Ryecroft had
+never erred by lack of reticence; as was natural in a sensitive man who
+had suffered much, he inclined to gentle acquiescence, shrank from
+argument, from self-assertion.  Here he spoke to me without restraint,
+and, when I had read it all through, I knew the man better than before.
+
+Assuredly, this writing was not intended for the public, and yet, in many
+a passage, I seemed to perceive the literary purpose--something more than
+the turn of phrase, and so on, which results from long habit of
+composition.  Certain of his reminiscences, in particular, Ryecroft could
+hardly have troubled to write down had he not, however vaguely,
+entertained the thought of putting them to some use.  I suspect that, in
+his happy leisure, there grew upon him a desire to write one more book, a
+book which should be written merely for his own satisfaction.  Plainly,
+it would have been the best he had it in him to do.  But he seems never
+to have attempted the arrangement of these fragmentary pieces, and
+probably because he could not decide upon the form they should take.  I
+imagine him shrinking from the thought of a first-person volume; he would
+feel it too pretentious; he would bid himself wait for the day of riper
+wisdom.  And so the pen fell from his hand.
+
+Conjecturing thus, I wondered whether the irregular diary might not have
+wider interest than at first appeared.  To me, its personal appeal was
+very strong; might it not be possible to cull from it the substance of a
+small volume which, at least for its sincerity's sake, would not be
+without value for those who read, not with the eye alone, but with the
+mind?  I turned the pages again.  Here was a man who, having his desire,
+and that a very modest one, not only felt satisfied, but enjoyed great
+happiness.  He talked of many different things, saying exactly what he
+thought; he spoke of himself, and told the truth as far as mortal can
+tell it.  It seemed to me that the thing had human interest.  I decided
+to print.
+
+The question of arrangement had to be considered; I did not like to offer
+a mere incondite miscellany.  To supply each of the disconnected passages
+with a title, or even to group them under subject headings, would have
+interfered with the spontaneity which, above all, I wished to preserve.
+In reading through the matter I had selected, it struck me how often the
+aspects of nature were referred to, and how suitable many of the
+reflections were to the month with which they were dated.  Ryecroft, I
+knew, had ever been much influenced by the mood of the sky, and by the
+procession of the year.  So I hit upon the thought of dividing the little
+book into four chapters, named after the seasons.  Like all
+classifications, it is imperfect, but 'twill serve.
+
+G. G.
+
+
+
+
+SPRING
+
+
+I.
+
+
+For more than a week my pen has lain untouched.  I have written nothing
+for seven whole days, not even a letter.  Except during one or two bouts
+of illness, such a thing never happened in my life before.  In my life;
+the life, that is, which had to be supported by anxious toil; the life
+which was not lived for living's sake, as all life should be, but under
+the goad of fear.  The earning of money should be a means to an end; for
+more than thirty years--I began to support myself at sixteen--I had to
+regard it as the end itself.
+
+I could imagine that my old penholder feels reproachfully towards me.  Has
+it not served me well?  Why do I, in my happiness, let it lie there
+neglected, gathering dust?  The same penholder that has lain against my
+forefinger day after day, for--how many years?  Twenty, at least; I
+remember buying it at a shop in Tottenham Court Road.  By the same token
+I bought that day a paper-weight, which cost me a whole shilling--an
+extravagance which made me tremble.  The penholder shone with its new
+varnish, now it is plain brown wood from end to end.  On my forefinger it
+has made a callosity.
+
+Old companion, yet old enemy!  How many a time have I taken it up,
+loathing the necessity, heavy in head and heart, my hand shaking, my eyes
+sick-dazzled!  How I dreaded the white page I had to foul with ink!  Above
+all, on days such as this, when the blue eyes of Spring laughed from
+between rosy clouds, when the sunlight shimmered upon my table and made
+me long, long all but to madness, for the scent of the flowering earth,
+for the green of hillside larches, for the singing of the skylark above
+the downs.  There was a time--it seems further away than childhood--when
+I took up my pen with eagerness; if my hand trembled it was with hope.
+But a hope that fooled me, for never a page of my writing deserved to
+live.  I can say that now without bitterness.  It was youthful error, and
+only the force of circumstance prolonged it.  The world has done me no
+injustice; thank Heaven I have grown wise enough not to rail at it for
+this!  And why should any man who writes, even if he write things
+immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect?  Who asked him to publish?
+Who promised him a hearing?  Who has broken faith with him?  If my
+shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots, and I, in some mood of
+cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just
+cause of complaint.  But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you
+for it?  If it is honest journeywork, yet lacks purchasers, at most you
+may call yourself a hapless tradesman.  If it come from on high, with
+what decency do you fret and fume because it is not paid for in heavy
+cash?  For the work of man's mind there is one test, and one alone, the
+judgment of generations yet unborn.  If you have written a great book,
+the world to come will know of it.  But you don't care for posthumous
+glory.  You want to enjoy fame in a comfortable armchair.  Ah, that is
+quite another thing.  Have the courage of your desire.  Admit yourself a
+merchant, and protest to gods and men that the merchandise you offer is
+of better quality than much which sells for a high price.  You may be
+right, and indeed it is hard upon you that Fashion does not turn to your
+stall.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The exquisite quiet of this room!  I have been sitting in utter idleness,
+watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight upon the carpet,
+which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye wander from one framed
+print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books.  Within the
+house nothing stirs.  In the garden I can hear singing of birds, I can
+hear the rustle of their wings.  And thus, if it please me, I may sit all
+day long, and into the profounder quiet of the night.
+
+My house is perfect.  By great good fortune I have found a housekeeper no
+less to my mind, a low-voiced, light-footed woman of discreet age, strong
+and deft enough to render me all the service I require, and not afraid of
+solitude.  She rises very early.  By my breakfast-time there remains
+little to be done under the roof save dressing of meals.  Very rarely do
+I hear even a clink of crockery; never the closing of a door or window.
+Oh, blessed silence!
+
+There is not the remotest possibility of any one's calling upon me, and
+that I should call upon any one else is a thing undreamt of.  I owe a
+letter to a friend; perhaps I shall write it before bedtime; perhaps I
+shall leave it till to-morrow morning.  A letter of friendship should
+never be written save when the spirit prompts.  I have not yet looked at
+the newspaper.  Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk;
+it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self-
+torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new
+occasions of peril and of strife.  I grudge to give the first freshness
+of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.
+
+My house is perfect.  Just large enough to allow the grace of order in
+domestic circumstance; just that superfluity of intramural space, to lack
+which is to be less than at one's ease.  The fabric is sound; the work in
+wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a more honest age than
+ours.  The stairs do not creak under my step; I am waylaid by no unkindly
+draught; I can open or close a window without muscle-ache.  As to such
+trifles as the tint and device of wall-paper, I confess my indifference;
+be the walls only unobtrusive, and I am satisfied.  The first thing in
+one's home is comfort; let beauty of detail be added if one has the
+means, the patience, the eye.
+
+To me, this little book-room is beautiful, and chiefly because it is
+home.  Through the greater part of life I was homeless.  Many places have
+I inhabited, some which my soul loathed, and some which pleased me well;
+but never till now with that sense of security which makes a home.  At
+any moment I might have been driven forth by evil hap, by nagging
+necessity.  For all that time did I say within myself: Some day,
+perchance, I shall have a home; yet the "perchance" had more and more of
+emphasis as life went on, and at the moment when fate was secretly
+smiling on me, I had all but abandoned hope.  I have my home at last.
+When I place a new volume on my shelves, I say: Stand there whilst I have
+eyes to see you; and a joyous tremor thrills me.  This house is mine on a
+lease of a score of years.  So long I certainly shall not live; but, if I
+did, even so long should I have the wherewithal to pay my rent and buy my
+food.
+
+I think with compassion of the unhappy mortals for whom no such sun will
+ever rise.  I should like to add to the Litany a new petition: "For all
+inhabitants of great towns, and especially for all such as dwell in
+lodgings, boarding-houses, flats, or any other sordid substitute for Home
+which need or foolishness may have contrived."
+
+In vain I have pondered the Stoic virtues.  I know that it is folly to
+fret about the spot of one's abode on this little earth.
+
+   All places that the eye of heaven visits
+   Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.
+
+But I have always worshipped wisdom afar off.  In the sonorous period of
+the philosopher, in the golden measure of the poet, I find it of all
+things lovely.  To its possession I shall never attain.  What will it
+serve me to pretend a virtue of which I am incapable?  To me the place
+and manner of my abode is of supreme import; let it be confessed, and
+there an end of it.  I am no cosmopolite.  Were I to think that I should
+die away from England, the thought would be dreadful to me.  And in
+England, this is the dwelling of my choice; this is my home.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+I am no botanist, but I have long found pleasure in herb-gathering.  I
+love to come upon a plant which is unknown to me, to identify it with the
+help of my book, to greet it by name when next it shines beside my path.
+If the plant be rare, its discovery gives me joy.  Nature, the great
+Artist, makes her common flowers in the common view; no word in human
+language can express the marvel and the loveliness even of what we call
+the vulgarest weed, but these are fashioned under the gaze of every
+passer-by.  The rare flower is shaped apart, in places secret, in the
+Artist's subtler mood; to find it is to enjoy the sense of admission to a
+holier precinct.  Even in my gladness I am awed.
+
+To-day I have walked far, and at the end of my walk I found the little
+white-flowered wood-ruff.  It grew in a copse of young ash.  When I had
+looked long at the flower, I delighted myself with the grace of the slim
+trees about it--their shining smoothness, their olive hue.  Hard by stood
+a bush of wych elm; its tettered bark, overlined as if with the character
+of some unknown tongue, made the young ashes yet more beautiful.
+
+It matters not how long I wander.  There is no task to bring me back; no
+one will be vexed or uneasy, linger I ever so late.  Spring is shining
+upon these lanes and meadows; I feel as if I must follow every winding
+track that opens by my way.  Spring has restored to me something of the
+long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without weariness; I sing to
+myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew in boyhood.
+
+That reminds me of an incident.  Near a hamlet, in a lonely spot by a
+woodside, I came upon a little lad of perhaps ten years old, who, his
+head hidden in his arms against a tree trunk, was crying bitterly.  I
+asked him what was the matter, and, after a little trouble--he was better
+than a mere bumpkin--I learnt that, having been sent with sixpence to pay
+a debt, he had lost the money.  The poor little fellow was in a state of
+mind which in a grave man would be called the anguish of despair; he must
+have been crying for a long time; every muscle in his face quivered as if
+under torture, his limbs shook; his eyes, his voice, uttered such misery
+as only the vilest criminal should be made to suffer.  And it was because
+he had lost sixpence!
+
+I could have shed tears with him--tears of pity and of rage at all this
+spectacle implied.  On a day of indescribable glory, when earth and
+heaven shed benedictions upon the soul of man, a child, whose nature
+would have bidden him rejoice as only childhood may, wept his heart out
+because his hand had dropped a sixpenny piece!  The loss was a very
+serious one, and he knew it; he was less afraid to face his parents, than
+overcome by misery at the thought of the harm he had done them.  Sixpence
+dropped by the wayside, and a whole family made wretched!  What are the
+due descriptive terms for a state of "civilization" in which such a thing
+as this is possible?
+
+I put my hand into my pocket, and wrought sixpennyworth of miracle.
+
+It took me half an hour to recover my quiet mind.  After all, it is as
+idle to rage against man's fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a
+fool.  For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle.  Why, I have
+known the day when it would have been beyond my power altogether, or else
+would have cost me a meal.  Wherefore, let me again be glad and thankful.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+There was a time in my life when, if I had suddenly been set in the
+position I now enjoy, conscience would have lain in ambush for me.  What!
+An income sufficient to support three or four working-class families--a
+house all to myself--things beautiful wherever I turn--and absolutely
+nothing to do for it all!  I should have been hard put to it to defend
+myself.  In those days I was feelingly reminded, hour by hour, with what
+a struggle the obscure multitudes manage to keep alive.  Nobody knows
+better than I do _quam parvo liceat producere vitam_.  I have hungered in
+the streets; I have laid my head in the poorest shelter; I know what it
+is to feel the heart burn with wrath and envy of "the privileged
+classes."  Yes, but all that time I was one of "the privileged" myself,
+and now I can accept a recognized standing among them without shadow of
+self-reproach.
+
+It does not mean that my larger sympathies are blunted.  By going to
+certain places, looking upon certain scenes, I could most effectually
+destroy all the calm that life has brought me.  If I hold apart and
+purposely refuse to look that way, it is because I believe that the world
+is better, not worse, for having one more inhabitant who lives as becomes
+a civilized being.  Let him whose soul prompts him to assail the iniquity
+of things, cry and spare not; let him who has the vocation go forth and
+combat.  In me it would be to err from Nature's guidance.  I know, if I
+know anything, that I am made for the life of tranquillity and
+meditation.  I know that only thus can such virtue as I possess find
+scope.  More than half a century of existence has taught me that most of
+the wrong and folly which darken earth is due to those who cannot possess
+their souls in quiet; that most of the good which saves mankind from
+destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness.  Every day
+the world grows noisier; I, for one, will have no part in that increasing
+clamour, and, were it only by my silence, I confer a boon on all.
+
+How well would the revenues of a country be expended, if, by mere
+pensioning, one-fifth of its population could be induced to live as I do!
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+"Sir," said Johnson, "all the arguments which are brought to represent
+poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil.  You never find
+people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a
+plentiful fortune."
+
+He knew what he was talking of, that rugged old master of common sense.
+Poverty is of course a relative thing; the term has reference, above all,
+to one's standing as an intellectual being.  If I am to believe the
+newspapers, there are title-bearing men and women in England who, had
+they an assured income of five-and-twenty, shillings per week, would have
+no right to call themselves poor, for their intellectual needs are those
+of a stable-boy or scullery wench.  Give me the same income and I can
+live, but I am poor indeed.
+
+You tell me that money cannot buy the things most precious.  Your
+commonplace proves that you have never known the lack of it.  When I
+think of all the sorrow and the barrenness that has been wrought in my
+life by want of a few more pounds per annum than I was able to earn, I
+stand aghast at money's significance.  What kindly joys have I lost,
+those simple forms of happiness to which every heart has claim, because
+of poverty!  Meetings with those I loved made impossible year after year;
+sadness, misunderstanding, nay, cruel alienation, arising from inability
+to do the things I wished, and which I might have done had a little money
+helped me; endless instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed
+or forbidden by narrow means.  I have lost friends merely through the
+constraints of my position; friends I might have made have remained
+strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is
+enforced at times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often
+cursed my life solely because I was poor.  I think it would scarce be an
+exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be paid
+for in coin of the realm.
+
+"Poverty," said Johnson again, "is so great an evil, and pregnant with so
+much temptation, so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you
+to avoid it."
+
+For my own part, I needed no injunction to that effort of avoidance.  Many
+a London garret knows how I struggled with the unwelcome chamber-fellow.
+I marvel she did not abide with me to the end; it is a sort of
+inconsequence in Nature, and sometimes makes me vaguely uneasy through
+nights of broken sleep.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+How many more springs can I hope to see?  A sanguine temper would say ten
+or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six.  That is a great
+many.  Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously, lovingly watched from
+the first celandine to the budding of the rose; who shall dare to call it
+a stinted boon?  Five or six times the miracle of earth reclad, the
+vision of splendour and loveliness which tongue has never yet described,
+set before my gazing.  To think of it is to fear that I ask too much.
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+"Homo animal querulum cupide suis incumbens miseriis."  I wonder where
+that comes from.  I found it once in Charron, quoted without reference,
+and it has often been in my mind--a dreary truth, well worded.  At least,
+it was a truth for me during many a long year.  Life, I fancy, would very
+often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases
+numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide.  For some there is
+great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the
+profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding.  Happily, the trick
+with me has never been retrospective; indeed, it was never, even with
+regard to instant suffering, a habit so deeply rooted as to become a
+mastering vice.  I knew my own weakness when I yielded to it; I despised
+myself when it brought me comfort; I could laugh scornfully, even "cupide
+meis incumbens miseriis."  And now, thanks be to the unknown power which
+rules us, my past has buried its dead.  More than that; I can accept with
+sober cheerfulness the necessity of all I lived through.  So it was to
+be; so it was.  For this did Nature shape me; with what purpose, I shall
+never know; but, in the sequence of things eternal, this was my place.
+
+Could I have achieved so much philosophy if, as I ever feared, the
+closing years of my life had passed in helpless indigence?  Should I not
+have sunk into lowest depths of querulous self-pity, grovelling there
+with eyes obstinately averted from the light above?
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+The early coming of spring in this happy Devon gladdens my heart.  I
+think with chill discomfort of those parts of England where the primrose
+shivers beneath a sky of threat rather than of solace.  Honest winter,
+snow-clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; but
+that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping gloom of
+March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May--how often
+has it robbed me of heart and hope.  Here, scarce have I assured myself
+that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of
+hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me
+with anticipation of bud and bloom.  Even under this grey-billowing sky,
+which tells that February is still in rule:--
+
+   Mild winds shake the elder brake,
+   And the wandering herdsmen know
+   That the whitethorn soon will blow.
+
+I have been thinking of those early years of mine in London, when the
+seasons passed over me unobserved, when I seldom turned a glance towards
+the heavens, and felt no hardship in the imprisonment of boundless
+streets.  It is strange now to remember that for some six or seven years
+I never looked upon a meadow, never travelled even so far as to the tree-
+bordered suburbs.  I was battling for dear life; on most days I could not
+feel certain that in a week's time I should have food and shelter.  It
+would happen, to be sure, that in hot noons of August my thoughts
+wandered to the sea; but so impossible was the gratification of such
+desire that it never greatly troubled me.  At times, indeed, I seem all
+but to have forgotten that people went away for holiday.  In those poor
+parts of the town where I dwelt, season made no perceptible difference;
+there were no luggage-laden cabs to remind me of joyous journeys; the
+folk about me went daily to their toil as usual, and so did I.  I
+remember afternoons of languor, when books were a weariness, and no
+thought could be squeezed out of the drowsy brain; then would I betake
+myself to one of the parks, and find refreshment without any enjoyable
+sense of change.  Heavens, how I laboured in those days!  And how far I
+was from thinking of myself as a subject for compassion!  That came
+later, when my health had begun to suffer from excess of toil, from bad
+air, bad food and many miseries; then awoke the maddening desire for
+countryside and sea-beach--and for other things yet more remote.  But in
+the years when I toiled hardest and underwent what now appear to me
+hideous privations, of a truth I could not be said to suffer at all.  I
+did not suffer, for I had no sense of weakness.  My health was proof
+against everything, and my energies defied all malice of circumstance.
+With however little encouragement, I had infinite hope.  Sound sleep
+(often in places I now dread to think of) sent me fresh to the battle
+each morning, my breakfast, sometimes, no more than a slice of bread and
+a cup of water.  As human happiness goes, I am not sure that I was not
+then happy.
+
+Most men who go through a hard time in their youth are supported by
+companionship.  London has no _pays latin_, but hungry beginners in
+literature have generally their suitable comrades, garreteers in the
+Tottenham Court Road district, or in unredeemed Chelsea; they make their
+little _vie de Boheme_, and are consciously proud of it.  Of my position,
+the peculiarity was that I never belonged to any cluster; I shrank from
+casual acquaintance, and, through the grim years, had but one friend with
+whom I held converse.  It was never my instinct to look for help, to seek
+favour for advancement; whatever step I gained was gained by my own
+strength.  Even as I disregarded favour so did I scorn advice; no counsel
+would I ever take but that of my own brain and heart.  More than once I
+was driven by necessity to beg from strangers the means of earning bread,
+and this of all my experiences was the bitterest; yet I think I should
+have found it worse still to incur a debt to some friend or comrade.  The
+truth is that I have never learnt to regard myself as a "member of
+society."  For me, there have always been two entities--myself and the
+world, and the normal relation between these two has been hostile.  Am I
+not still a lonely man, as far as ever from forming part of the social
+order?
+
+This, of which I once was scornfully proud, seems to me now, if not a
+calamity, something I would not choose if life were to live again.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+For more than six years I trod the pavement, never stepping once upon
+mother earth--for the parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of
+grass.  Then the worst was over.  Say I the worst?  No, no; things far
+worse were to come; the struggle against starvation has its cheery side
+when one is young and vigorous.  But at all events I had begun to earn a
+living; I held assurance of food and clothing for half a year at a time;
+granted health, I might hope to draw my not insufficient wages for many a
+twelvemonth.  And they were the wages of work done independently, when
+and where I would.  I thought with horror of lives spent in an office,
+with an employer to obey.  The glory of the career of letters was its
+freedom, its dignity!
+
+The fact of the matter was, of course, that I served, not one master, but
+a whole crowd of them.  Independence, forsooth!  If my writing failed to
+please editor, publisher, public, where was my daily bread?  The greater
+my success, the more numerous my employers.  I was the slave of a
+multitude.  By heaven's grace I had succeeded in pleasing (that is to
+say, in making myself a source of profit to) certain persons who
+represented this vague throng; for the time, they were gracious to me;
+but what justified me in the faith that I should hold the ground I had
+gained?  Could the position of any toiling man be more precarious than
+mine?  I tremble now as I think of it, tremble as I should in watching
+some one who walked carelessly on the edge of an abyss.  I marvel at the
+recollection that for a good score of years this pen and a scrap of paper
+clothed and fed me and my household, kept me in physical comfort, held at
+bay all those hostile forces of the world ranged against one who has no
+resource save in his own right hand.
+
+But I was thinking of the year which saw my first exodus from London.  On
+an irresistible impulse, I suddenly made up my mind to go into Devon, a
+part of England I had never seen.  At the end of March I escaped from my
+grim lodgings, and, before I had time to reflect on the details of my
+undertaking, I found myself sitting in sunshine at a spot very near to
+where I now dwell--before me the green valley of the broadening Exe and
+the pine-clad ridge of Haldon.  That was one of the moments of my life
+when I have tasted exquisite joy.  My state of mind was very strange.
+Though as boy and youth I had been familiar with the country, had seen
+much of England's beauties, it was as though I found myself for the first
+time before a natural landscape.  Those years of London had obscured all
+my earlier life; I was like a man town-born and bred, who scarce knows
+anything but street vistas.  The light, the air, had for me something of
+the supernatural--affected me, indeed, only less than at a later time did
+the atmosphere of Italy.  It was glorious spring weather; a few white
+clouds floated amid the blue, and the earth had an intoxicating
+fragrance.  Then first did I know myself for a sun-worshipper.  How had I
+lived so long without asking whether there was a sun in the heavens or
+not?  Under that radiant firmament, I could have thrown myself upon my
+knees in adoration.  As I walked, I found myself avoiding every strip of
+shadow; were it but that of a birch trunk, I felt as if it robbed me of
+the day's delight.  I went bare-headed, that the golden beams might shed
+upon me their unstinted blessing.  That day I must have walked some
+thirty miles, yet I knew not fatigue.  Could I but have once more the
+strength which then supported me!
+
+I had stepped into a new life.  Between the man I had been and that which
+I now became there was a very notable difference.  In a single day I had
+matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt, that I suddenly entered
+into conscious enjoyment of powers and sensibilities which had been
+developing unknown to me.  To instance only one point: till then I had
+cared very little about plants and flowers, but now I found myself
+eagerly interested in every blossom, in every growth of the wayside.  As
+I walked I gathered a quantity of plants, promising myself to buy a book
+on the morrow and identify them all.  Nor was it a passing humour; never
+since have I lost my pleasure in the flowers of the field, and my desire
+to know them all.  My ignorance at the time of which I speak seems to me
+now very shameful; but I was merely in the case of ordinary people,
+whether living in town or country.  How many could give the familiar name
+of half a dozen plants plucked at random from beneath the hedge in
+springtime?  To me the flowers became symbolical of a great release, of a
+wonderful awakening.  My eyes had all at once been opened; till then I
+had walked in darkness, yet knew it not.
+
+Well do I remember the rambles of that springtide.  I had a lodging in
+one of those outer streets of Exeter which savour more of country than of
+town, and every morning I set forth to make discoveries.  The weather
+could not have been more kindly; I felt the influences of a climate I had
+never known; there was a balm in the air which soothed no less than it
+exhilarated me.  Now inland, now seaward, I followed the windings of the
+Exe.  One day I wandered in rich, warm valleys, by orchards bursting into
+bloom, from farmhouse to farmhouse, each more beautiful than the other,
+and from hamlet to hamlet bowered amid dark evergreens; the next, I was
+on pine-clad heights, gazing over moorland brown with last year's
+heather, feeling upon my face a wind from the white-flecked Channel.  So
+intense was my delight in the beautiful world about me that I forgot even
+myself; I enjoyed without retrospect or forecast; I, the egoist in grain,
+forgot to scrutinize my own emotions, or to trouble my happiness by
+comparison with others' happier fortune.  It was a healthful time; it
+gave me a new lease of life, and taught me--in so far as I was
+teachable--how to make use of it.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+Mentally and physically, I must be much older than my years.  At three-
+and-fifty a man ought not to be brooding constantly on his vanished
+youth.  These days of spring which I should be enjoying for their own
+sake, do but turn me to reminiscence, and my memories are of the springs
+that were lost.
+
+Some day I will go to London and revisit all the places where I housed in
+the time of my greatest poverty.  I have not seen them for a quarter of a
+century or so.  Not long ago, had any one asked me how I felt about these
+memories, I should have said that there were certain street names,
+certain mental images of obscure London, which made me wretched as often
+as they came before me; but, in truth, it is a very long time since I was
+moved to any sort of bitterness by that retrospect of things hard and
+squalid.  Now, owning all the misery of it in comparison with what should
+have been, I find that part of life interesting and pleasant to look back
+upon--greatly more so than many subsequent times, when I lived amid
+decencies and had enough to eat.  Some day I will go to London, and spend
+a day or two amid the dear old horrors.  Some of the places, I know, have
+disappeared.  I see the winding way by which I went from Oxford Street,
+at the foot of Tottenham Court Road, to Leicester Square, and, somewhere
+in the labyrinth (I think of it as always foggy and gas-lit) was a shop
+which had pies and puddings in the window, puddings and pies kept hot by
+steam rising through perforated metal.  How many a time have I stood
+there, raging with hunger, unable to purchase even one pennyworth of
+food!  The shop and the street have long since vanished; does any man
+remember them so feelingly as I?  But I think most of my haunts are still
+in existence: to tread again those pavements, to look at those grimy
+doorways and purblind windows, would affect me strangely.
+
+I see that alley hidden on the west side of Tottenham Court Road, where,
+after living in a back bedroom on the top floor, I had to exchange for
+the front cellar; there was a difference, if I remember rightly, of
+sixpence a week, and sixpence, in those days, was a very great
+consideration--why, it meant a couple of meals.  (I once _found_ sixpence
+in the street, and had an exultation which is vivid in me at this
+moment.)  The front cellar was stone-floored; its furniture was a table,
+a chair, a wash-stand, and a bed; the window, which of course had never
+been cleaned since it was put in, received light through a flat grating
+in the alley above.  Here I lived; here _I wrote_.  Yes, "literary work"
+was done at that filthy deal table, on which, by the bye, lay my Homer,
+my Shakespeare, and the few other books I then possessed.  At night, as I
+lay in bed, I used to hear the tramp, tramp of a _posse_ of policemen who
+passed along the alley on their way to relieve guard; their heavy feet
+sometimes sounded on the grating above my window.
+
+I recall a tragi-comical incident of life at the British Museum.  Once,
+on going down into the lavatory to wash my hands, I became aware of a
+notice newly set up above the row of basins.  It ran somehow thus:
+"Readers are requested to bear in mind that these basins are to be used
+only for casual ablutions."  Oh, the significance of that inscription!
+Had I not myself, more than once, been glad to use this soap and water
+more largely than the sense of the authorities contemplated?  And there
+were poor fellows working under the great dome whose need, in this
+respect, was greater than mine.  I laughed heartily at the notice, but it
+meant so much.
+
+Some of my abodes I have utterly forgotten; for one reason or another, I
+was always moving--an easy matter when all my possessions lay in one
+small trunk.  Sometimes the people of the house were intolerable.  In
+those days I was not fastidious, and I seldom had any but the slightest
+intercourse with those who dwelt under the same roof, yet it happened now
+and then that I was driven away by human proximity which passed my
+endurance.  In other cases I had to flee from pestilential conditions.
+How I escaped mortal illness in some of those places (miserably fed as I
+always was, and always over-working myself) is a great mystery.  The
+worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria--traceable, I
+imagine, to the existence of a dust-bin _under the staircase_.  When I
+spoke of the matter to my landlady, she was at first astonished, then
+wrathful, and my departure was expedited with many insults.
+
+On the whole, however, I had nothing much to complain of except my
+poverty.  You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-sixpence
+a week--the most I ever could pay for a "furnished room with attendance"
+in those days of pretty stern apprenticeship.  And I was easily
+satisfied; I wanted only a little walled space in which I could seclude
+myself, free from external annoyance.  Certain comforts of civilized life
+I ceased even to regret; a stair-carpet I regarded as rather extravagant,
+and a carpet on the floor of my room was luxury undreamt of.  My sleep
+was sound; I have passed nights of dreamless repose on beds which it
+would now make my bones ache only to look at.  A door that locked, a fire
+in winter, a pipe of tobacco--these were things essential; and, granted
+these, I have been often richly contented in the squalidest garret.  One
+such lodging is often in my memory; it was at Islington, not far from the
+City Road; my window looked upon the Regent's Canal.  As often as I think
+of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever knew; for
+three successive days, at least, my lamp had to be kept burning; when I
+looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few blurred lights in the
+street beyond the Canal, but for the most part nothing but a yellowish
+darkness, which caused the glass to reflect the firelight and my own
+face.  Did I feel miserable?  Not a bit of it.  The enveloping gloom
+seemed to make my chimney-corner only the more cosy.  I had coals, oil,
+tobacco in sufficient quantity; I had a book to read; I had work which
+interested me; so I went forth only to get my meals at a City Road coffee-
+shop, and hastened back to the fireside.  Oh, my ambitions, my hopes!  How
+surprised and indignant I should have felt had I known of any one who
+pitied me!
+
+Nature took revenge now and then.  In winter time I had fierce sore
+throats, sometimes accompanied by long and savage headaches.  Doctoring,
+of course, never occurred to me; I just locked my door, and, if I felt
+very bad indeed, went to bed--to lie there, without food or drink, till I
+was able to look after myself again.  I could never ask from a landlady
+anything which was not in our bond, and only once or twice did I receive
+spontaneous offer of help.  Oh, it is wonderful to think of all that
+youth can endure!  What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I
+remember thirty years ago!
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+Would I live it over again, that life of the garret and the cellar?  Not
+with the assurance of fifty years' contentment such as I now enjoy to
+follow upon it!  With man's infinitely pathetic power of resignation, one
+sees the thing on its better side, forgets all the worst of it, makes out
+a case for the resolute optimist.  Oh, but the waste of energy, of zeal,
+of youth!  In another mood, I could shed tears over that spectacle of
+rare vitality condemned to sordid strife.  The pity of it!  And--if our
+conscience mean anything at all--the bitter wrong!
+
+Without seeking for Utopia, think what a man's youth might be.  I suppose
+not one in every thousand uses half the possibilities of natural joy and
+delightful effort which lie in those years between seventeen and seven-
+and-twenty.  All but all men have to look back upon beginnings of life
+deformed and discoloured by necessity, accident, wantonness.  If a young
+man avoid the grosser pitfalls, if he keep his eye fixed steadily on what
+is called the main chance, if, without flagrant selfishness, he prudently
+subdue every interest to his own (by "interest" understanding only
+material good), he is putting his youth to profit, he is an exemplar and
+a subject of pride.  I doubt whether, in our civilization, any other
+ideal is easy of pursuit by the youngster face to face with life.  It is
+the only course altogether safe.  Yet compare it with what might be, if
+men respected manhood, if human reason were at the service of human
+happiness.  Some few there are who can look back upon a boyhood of
+natural delights, followed by a decade or so of fine energies honourably
+put to use, blended therewith, perhaps, a memory of joy so exquisite that
+it tunes all life unto the end; they are almost as rare as poets.  The
+vast majority think not of their youth at all, or, glancing backward, are
+unconscious of lost opportunity, unaware of degradation suffered.  Only
+by contrast with this thick-witted multitude can I pride myself upon my
+youth of endurance and of combat.  I had a goal before me, and not the
+goal of the average man.  Even when pinched with hunger, I did not
+abandon my purposes, which were of the mind.  But contrast that starved
+lad in his slum lodging with any fair conception of intelligent and
+zealous youth, and one feels that a dose of swift poison would have been
+the right remedy for such squalid ills.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+As often as I survey my bookshelves I am reminded of Lamb's "ragged
+veterans."  Not that all my volumes came from the second-hand stall; many
+of them were neat enough in new covers, some were even stately in
+fragrant bindings, when they passed into my hands.  But so often have I
+removed, so rough has been the treatment of my little library at each
+change of place, and, to tell the truth, so little care have I given to
+its well-being at normal times (for in all practical matters I am idle
+and inept), that even the comeliest of my books show the results of
+unfair usage.  More than one has been foully injured by a great nail
+driven into a packing-case--this but the extreme instance of the wrongs
+they have undergone.  Now that I have leisure and peace of mind, I find
+myself growing more careful--an illustration of the great truth that
+virtue is made easy by circumstance.  But I confess that, so long as a
+volume hold together, I am not much troubled as to its outer appearance.
+
+I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in
+one from their own shelf.  To me that is unintelligible.  For one thing,
+I know every book of mine by its _scent_, and I have but to put my nose
+between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  My Gibbon, for
+example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and
+read and read again for more than thirty years--never do I open it but
+the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of
+that moment when I received it as a prize.  Or my Shakespeare, the great
+Cambridge Shakespeare--it has an odour which carries me yet further back
+in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old
+enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a
+treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn
+the leaves.  The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and
+what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand.
+For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.  My eyes
+being good as ever, I take the Globe volume, which I bought in days when
+such a purchase was something more than an extravagance; wherefore I
+regard the book with that peculiar affection which results from
+sacrifice.
+
+Sacrifice--in no drawing-room sense of the word.  Dozens of my books were
+purchased with money which ought to have been spent upon what are called
+the necessaries of life.  Many a time I have stood before a stall, or a
+bookseller's window, torn by conflict of intellectual desire and bodily
+need.  At the very hour of dinner, when my stomach clamoured for food, I
+have been stopped by sight of a volume so long coveted, and marked at so
+advantageous a price, that I _could_ not let it go; yet to buy it meant
+pangs of famine.  My Heyne's _Tibullus_ was grasped at such a moment.  It
+lay on the stall of the old book-shop in Goodge Street--a stall where now
+and then one found an excellent thing among quantities of rubbish.
+Sixpence was the price--sixpence!  At that time I used to eat my mid-day
+meal (of course my dinner) at a coffee-shop in Oxford Street, one of the
+real old coffee-shops, such as now, I suppose, can hardly be found.
+Sixpence was all I had--yes, all I had in the world; it would purchase a
+plate of meat and vegetables.  But I did not dare to hope that the
+_Tibullus_ would wait until the morrow, when a certain small sum fell due
+to me.  I paced the pavement, fingering the coppers in my pocket, eyeing
+the stall, two appetites at combat within me.  The book was bought and I
+went home with it, and as I made a dinner of bread and butter I gloated
+over the pages.
+
+In this _Tibullus_ I found pencilled on the last page: "Perlegi, Oct. 4,
+1792."  Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago?
+There was no other inscription.  I like to imagine some poor scholar,
+poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his
+blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did.  How much _that_ was
+I could not easily say.  Gentle-hearted Tibullus!--of whom there remains
+to us a poet's portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the
+kind in Roman literature.
+
+   An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
+   Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?
+
+So with many another book on the thronged shelves.  To take them down is
+to recall, how vividly, a struggle and a triumph.  In those days money
+represented nothing to me, nothing I cared to think about, but the
+acquisition of books.  There were books of which I had passionate need,
+books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment.  I could see them, of
+course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as
+having and holding them, my own property, on my own shelf.  Now and then
+I have bought a volume of the raggedest and wretchedest aspect,
+dishonoured with foolish scribbling, torn, blotted--no matter, I liked
+better to read out of that than out of a copy that was not mine.  But I
+was guilty at times of mere self-indulgence; a book tempted me, a book
+which was not one of those for which I really craved, a luxury which
+prudence might bid me forego.  As, for instance, my _Jung-Stilling_.  It
+caught my eye in Holywell Street; the name was familiar to me in
+_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, and curiosity grew as I glanced over the pages.
+But that day I resisted; in truth, I could not afford the eighteen-pence,
+which means that just then I was poor indeed.  Twice again did I pass,
+each time assuring myself that _Jung-Stilling_ had found no purchaser.
+There came a day when I was in funds.  I see myself hastening to Holywell
+Street (in those days my habitual pace was five miles an hour), I see the
+little grey old man with whom I transacted my business--what was his
+name?--the bookseller who had been, I believe, a Catholic priest, and
+still had a certain priestly dignity about him.  He took the volume,
+opened it, mused for a moment, then, with a glance at me, said, as if
+thinking aloud: "Yes, I wish I had time to read it."
+
+Sometimes I added the labour of a porter to my fasting endured for the
+sake of books.  At the little shop near Portland Road Station I came upon
+a first edition of Gibbon, the price an absurdity--I think it was a
+shilling a volume.  To possess those clean-paged quartos I would have
+sold my coat.  As it happened, I had not money enough with me, but
+sufficient at home.  I was living at Islington.  Having spoken with the
+bookseller, I walked home, took the cash, walked back again, and--carried
+the tomes from the west end of Euston Road to a street in Islington far
+beyond the _Angel_.  I did it in two journeys--this being the only time
+in my life when I thought of Gibbon in avoirdupois.  Twice--three times,
+reckoning the walk for the money--did I descend Euston Road and climb
+Pentonville on that occasion.  Of the season and the weather I have no
+recollection; my joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other
+thought.  Except, indeed, of the weight.  I had infinite energy, but not
+much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a
+chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching--exultant!
+
+The well-to-do person would hear this story with astonishment.  Why did I
+not get the bookseller to send me the volumes?  Or, if I could not wait,
+was there no omnibus along that London highway?  How could I make the
+well-to-do person understand that I did not feel able to afford, that
+day, one penny more than I had spent on the book?  No, no, such labour-
+saving expenditure did not come within my scope; whatever I enjoyed I
+earned it, literally, by the sweat of my brow.  In those days I hardly
+knew what it was to travel by omnibus.  I have walked London streets for
+twelve and fifteen hours together without ever a thought of saving my
+legs, or my time, by paying for waftage.  Being poor as poor can be,
+there were certain things I had to renounce, and this was one of them.
+
+Years after, I sold my first edition of Gibbon for even less than it cost
+me; it went with a great many other fine books in folio and quarto, which
+I could not drag about with me in my constant removals; the man who
+bought them spoke of them as "tomb-stones."  Why has Gibbon no market
+value?  Often has my heart ached with regret for those quartos.  The joy
+of reading the Decline and Fall in that fine type!  The page was
+appropriate to the dignity of the subject; the mere sight of it tuned
+one's mind.  I suppose I could easily get another copy now; but it would
+not be to me what that other was, with its memory of dust and toil.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who
+remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station.  It had a
+peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind--chiefly theology and
+classics--and for the most part those old editions which are called
+worthless, which have no bibliopolic value, and have been supplanted for
+practical use by modern issues.  The bookseller was very much a
+gentleman, and this singular fact, together with the extremely low prices
+at which his volumes were marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he
+kept the shop for mere love of letters.  Things in my eyes inestimable I
+have purchased there for a few pence, and I don't think I ever gave more
+than a shilling for any volume.  As I once had the opportunity of
+perceiving, a young man fresh from class-rooms could only look with
+wondering contempt on the antiquated stuff which it rejoiced me to gather
+from that kindly stall, or from the richer shelves within.  My _Cicero's
+Letters_ for instance: podgy volumes in parchment, with all the notes of
+Graevius, Gronovius, and I know not how many other old scholars.  Pooh!
+Hopelessly out of date.  But I could never feel that.  I have a deep
+affection for Graevius and Gronovius and the rest, and if I knew as much
+as they did, I should be well satisfied to rest under the young man's
+disdain.  The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example--were
+there no more--burns before one as a sacred fire, for ever unquenchable.
+In what modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in
+the annotations of old scholars?
+
+Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere school-book;
+you feel so often that the man does not regard his author as literature,
+but simply as text.  Pedant for pedant, the old is better than the new.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+To-day's newspaper contains a yard or so of reading about a spring horse-
+race.  The sight of it fills me with loathing.  It brings to my mind that
+placard I saw at a station in Surrey a year or two ago, advertising
+certain races in the neighbourhood.  Here is the poster, as I copied it
+into my note-book:
+
+   "Engaged by the Executive to ensure order and comfort to the public
+   attending this meeting:--
+
+   14 detectives (racing),
+   15 detectives (Scotland Yard),
+   7 police inspectors,
+   9 police sergeants,
+   76 police, and a supernumerary contingent of specially selected men
+   from the Army Reserve and the Corps of Commissionaires.
+
+   The above force will be employed solely for the purpose of maintaining
+   order and excluding bad characters, etc.  They will have the
+   assistance also of a strong force of the Surrey Constabulary."
+
+I remember, once, when I let fall a remark on the subject of horse-racing
+among friends chatting together, I was voted "morose."  Is it really
+morose to object to public gatherings which their own promoters declare
+to be dangerous for all decent folk?  Every one knows that horse-racing
+is carried on mainly for the delight and profit of fools, ruffians, and
+thieves.  That intelligent men allow themselves to take part in the
+affair, and defend their conduct by declaring that their presence
+"maintains the character of a sport essentially noble," merely shows that
+intelligence can easily enough divest itself of sense and decency.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Midway in my long walk yesterday, I lunched at a wayside inn.  On the
+table lay a copy of a popular magazine.  Glancing over this miscellany, I
+found an article, by a woman, on "Lion Hunting," and in this article I
+came upon a passage which seemed worth copying.
+
+"As I woke my husband, the lion--which was then about forty yards
+off--charged straight towards us, and with my .303 I hit him full in the
+chest, as we afterwards discovered, tearing his windpipe to pieces and
+breaking his spine.  He charged a second time, and the next shot hit him
+through the shoulder, tearing his heart to ribbons."
+
+It would interest me to look upon this heroine of gun and pen.  She is
+presumably quite a young woman; probably, when at home, a graceful figure
+in drawing-rooms.  I should like to hear her talk, to exchange thoughts
+with her.  She would give one a very good idea of the matron of old Rome
+who had her seat in the amphitheatre.  Many of those ladies, in private
+life, must have been bright and gracious, high-bred and full of agreeable
+sentiment; they talked of art and of letters; they could drop a tear over
+Lesbia's sparrow; at the same time, they were connoisseurs in torn
+windpipes, shattered spines and viscera rent open.  It is not likely that
+many of them would have cared to turn their own hands to butchery, and,
+for the matter of that, I must suppose that our Lion Huntress of the
+popular magazine is rather an exceptional dame; but no doubt she and the
+Roman ladies would get on very well together, finding only a few
+superficial differences.  The fact that her gory reminiscences are
+welcomed by an editor with the popular taste in view is perhaps more
+significant than appears either to editor or public.  Were this lady to
+write a novel (the chances are she will) it would have the true note of
+modern vigour.  Of course her style has been formed by her favourite
+reading; more than probably, her ways of thinking and feeling owe much to
+the same source.  If not so already, this will soon, I daresay, be the
+typical Englishwoman.  Certainly, there is "no nonsense about her."  Such
+women should breed a remarkable race.
+
+I left the inn in rather a turbid humour.  Moving homeward by a new way,
+I presently found myself on the side of a little valley, in which lay a
+farm and an orchard.  The apple trees were in full bloom, and, as I stood
+gazing, the sun, which had all that day been niggard of its beams, burst
+forth gloriously.  For what I then saw, I have no words; I can but dream
+of the still loveliness of that blossomed valley.  Near me, a bee was
+humming; not far away, a cuckoo called; from the pasture of the farm
+below came a bleating of lambs.
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+I am no friend of the people.  As a force, by which the tenor of the time
+is conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear; as a visible
+multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to abhorrence.
+For the greater part of my life, the people signified to me the London
+crowd, and no phrase of temperate meaning would utter my thoughts of them
+under that aspect.  The people as country-folk are little known to me;
+such glimpses as I have had of them do not invite to nearer acquaintance.
+Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic, and I dread to think of
+what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly.
+
+Right or wrong, this is my temper.  But he who should argue from it that
+I am intolerant of all persons belonging to a lower social rank than my
+own would go far astray.  Nothing is more rooted in my mind than the vast
+distinction between the individual and the class.  Take a man by himself,
+and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition
+for good; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to
+one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready
+for any evil to which contagion prompts him.  It is because nations tend
+to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because
+individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.
+
+In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had
+made so little progress.  Now, looking at men in the multitude, I marvel
+that they have advanced so far.
+
+Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person by his
+intellectual power and attainment.  I could see no good where there was
+no logic, no charm where there was no learning.  Now I think that one has
+to distinguish between two forms of intelligence, that of the brain, and
+that of the heart, and I have come to regard the second as by far the
+more important.  I guard myself against saying that intelligence does not
+matter; the fool is ever as noxious as he is wearisome.  But assuredly
+the best people I have known were saved from folly not by the intellect
+but by the heart.  They come before me, and I see them greatly ignorant,
+strongly prejudiced, capable of the absurdest mis-reasoning; yet their
+faces shine with the supreme virtues, kindness, sweetness, modesty,
+generosity.  Possessing these qualities, they at the same time understand
+how to use them; they have the intelligence of the heart.
+
+This poor woman who labours for me in my house is even such a one.  From
+the first I thought her an unusually good servant; after three years of
+acquaintance, I find her one of the few women I have known who merit the
+term of excellent.  She can read and write--that is all.  More
+instruction would, I am sure, have harmed her, for it would have confused
+her natural motives, without supplying any clear ray of mental guidance.
+She is fulfilling the offices for which she was born, and that with a
+grace of contentment, a joy of conscientiousness, which puts her high
+among civilized beings.  Her delight is in order and in peace; what
+greater praise can be given to any of the children of men?
+
+The other day she told me a story of the days gone by.  Her mother, at
+the age of twelve, went into domestic service; but on what conditions,
+think you?  The girl's father, an honest labouring man, _paid_ the person
+whose house she entered one shilling a week for her instruction in the
+duties she wished to undertake.  What a grinning stare would come to the
+face of any labourer nowadays, who should be asked to do the like!  I no
+longer wonder that my housekeeper so little resembles the average of her
+kind.
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+A day of almost continuous rain, yet for me a day of delight.  I had
+breakfasted, and was poring over the map of Devon (how I love a good
+map!) to trace an expedition that I have in view, when a knock came at my
+door, and Mrs. M. bore in a great brown-paper parcel, which I saw at a
+glance must contain books.  The order was sent to London a few days ago;
+I had not expected to have my books so soon.  With throbbing heart I set
+the parcel on a clear table; eyed it whilst I mended the fire; then took
+my pen-knife, and gravely, deliberately, though with hand that trembled,
+began to unpack.
+
+It is a joy to go through booksellers' catalogues, ticking here and there
+a possible purchase.  Formerly, when I could seldom spare money, I kept
+catalogues as much as possible out of sight; now I savour them page by
+page, and make a pleasant virtue of the discretion I must needs impose
+upon myself.  But greater still is the happiness of unpacking volumes
+which one has bought without seeing them.  I am no hunter of rarities; I
+care nothing for first editions and for tall copies; what I buy is
+literature, food for the soul of man.  The first glimpse of bindings when
+the inmost protective wrapper has been folded back!  The first scent of
+_books_!  The first gleam of a gilded title!  Here is a work the name of
+which has been known to me for half a lifetime, but which I never yet
+saw; I take it reverently in my hand, gently I open it; my eyes are dim
+with excitement as I glance over chapter-headings, and anticipate the
+treat which awaits me.  Who, more than I, has taken to heart that
+sentence of the _Imitatio_--"In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam
+inveni nisi in angulo cum libro"?
+
+I had in me the making of a scholar.  With leisure and tranquillity of
+mind, I should have amassed learning.  Within the walls of a college, I
+should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my imagination ever busy
+with the old world.  In the introduction to his History of France,
+Michelet says: "J'ai passe a cote du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour
+la vie."  That, as I can see now, was my true ideal; through all my
+battlings and miseries I have always lived more in the past than in the
+present.  At the time when I was literally starving in London, when it
+seemed impossible that I should ever gain a living by my pen, how many
+days have I spent at the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if
+I had been without a care!  It astounds me to remember that, having
+breakfasted on dry bread, and carrying in my pocket another piece of
+bread to serve for dinner, I settled myself at a desk in the great
+Reading-Room with books before me which by no possibility could be a
+source of immediate profit.  At such a time, I worked through German
+tomes on Ancient Philosophy.  At such a time, I read Appuleius and
+Lucian, Petronius and the Greek Anthology, Diogenes Laertius and--heaven
+knows what!  My hunger was forgotten; the garret to which I must return
+to pass the night never perturbed my thoughts.  On the whole, it seems to
+me something to be rather proud of; I smile approvingly at that thin,
+white-faced youth.  Me?  My very self?  No, no!  He has been dead these
+thirty years.
+
+Scholarship in the high sense was denied me, and now it is too late.  Yet
+here am I gloating over Pausanias, and promising myself to read every
+word of him.  Who that has any tincture of old letters would not like to
+read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and references to
+him?  Here are the volumes of Dahn's _Die Konige der Germanen_: who would
+not like to know all he can about the Teutonic conquerors of Rome?  And
+so on, and so on.  To the end I shall be reading--and forgetting.  Ah,
+that's the worst of it!  Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any
+time possessed, I might call myself a learned man.  Nothing surely is so
+bad for the memory as long-enduring worry, agitation, fear.  I cannot
+preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall,
+persistently, rejoicingly.  Would I gather erudition for a future life?
+Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget.  I have the happiness of
+the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise
+unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go
+downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading,
+all day long?  Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a
+long year?
+
+I dare not think of those I have left behind me, there in the ink-stained
+world.  It would make me miserable, and to what purpose?  Yet, having
+once looked that way, think of them I must.  Oh, you heavy-laden, who at
+this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because
+there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be
+uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only
+means of earning bread!  Year after year the number of you is multiplied;
+you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling,
+exchanging maledictions.  Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque and
+heart-breaking!
+
+Innumerable are the men and women now writing for bread, who have not the
+least chance of finding in such work a permanent livelihood.  They took
+to writing because they knew not what else to do, or because the literary
+calling tempted them by its independence and its dazzling prizes.  They
+will hang on to the squalid profession, their earnings eked out by
+begging and borrowing, until it is too late for them to do anything
+else--and then?  With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say
+that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to
+"literature," commits no less than a crime.  If my voice had any
+authority, I would cry this truth aloud wherever men could hear.  Hateful
+as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the
+literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others.  Oh,
+your prices per thousand words!  Oh, your paragraphings and your
+interviewings!  And oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden
+in the fray.
+
+Last midsummer I received a circular from a typewriting person,
+soliciting my custom; some one who had somehow got hold of my name, and
+fancied me to be still in purgatory.  This person wrote: "If you should
+be in need of any extra assistance in the pressure of your Christmas
+work, I hope," etc.
+
+How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper?  "The pressure
+of your Christmas work"!  Nay, I am too sick to laugh.
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+Some one, I see, is lifting up his sweet voice in praise of Conscription.
+It is only at long intervals that one reads this kind of thing in our
+reviews or newspapers, and I am happy in believing that most English
+people are affected by it even as I am, with the sickness of dread and of
+disgust.  That the thing is impossible in England, who would venture to
+say?  Every one who can think at all sees how slight are our safeguards
+against that barbaric force in man which the privileged races have so
+slowly and painfully brought into check.  Democracy is full of menace to
+all the finer hopes of civilization, and the revival, in not unnatural
+companionship with it, of monarchic power based on militarism, makes the
+prospect dubious enough.  There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter,
+and the nations will be tearing at each other's throats.  Let England be
+imperilled, and Englishmen will fight; in such extremity there is no
+choice.  But what a dreary change must come upon our islanders if,
+without instant danger, they bend beneath the curse of universal
+soldiering!  I like to think that they will guard the liberty of their
+manhood even beyond the point of prudence.
+
+A lettered German, speaking to me once of his year of military service,
+told me that, had it lasted but a month or two longer, he must have
+sought release in suicide.  I know very well that my own courage would
+not have borne me to the end of the twelvemonth; humiliation, resentment,
+loathing, would have goaded me to madness.  At school we used to be
+"drilled" in the playground once a week; I have but to think of it, even
+after forty years, and there comes back upon me that tremor of passionate
+misery which, at the time, often made me ill.  The senseless routine of
+mechanic exercise was in itself all but unendurable to me; I hated the
+standing in line, the thrusting-out of arms and legs at a signal, the
+thud of feet stamping in constrained unison.  The loss of individuality
+seemed to me sheer disgrace.  And when, as often happened, the
+drill-sergeant rebuked me for some inefficiency as I stood in line, when
+he addressed me as "Number Seven!"  I burned with shame and rage.  I was
+no longer a human being; I had become part of a machine, and my name was
+"Number Seven."  It used to astonish me when I had a neighbour who went
+through the drill with amusement, with zealous energy; I would gaze at
+the boy, and ask myself how it was possible that he and I should feel so
+differently.  To be sure, nearly all my schoolfellows either enjoyed the
+thing, or at all events went through it with indifference; they made
+friends with the sergeant, and some were proud of walking with him "out
+of bounds."  Left, right!  Left, right!  For my own part, I think I have
+never hated man as I hated that broad-shouldered, hard-visaged, brassy-
+voiced fellow.  Every word he spoke to me, I felt as an insult.  Seeing
+him in the distance, I have turned and fled, to escape the necessity of
+saluting, and, still more, a quiver of the nerves which affected me so
+painfully.  If ever a man did me harm, it was he; harm physical and
+moral.  In all seriousness I believe that something of the nervous
+instability from which I have suffered since boyhood is traceable to
+those accursed hours of drill, and I am very sure that I can date from
+the same wretched moments a fierceness of personal pride which has been
+one of my most troublesome characteristics.  The disposition, of course,
+was there; it should have been modified, not exacerbated.
+
+In younger manhood it would have flattered me to think that I alone on
+the school drill-ground had sensibility enough to suffer acutely.  Now I
+had much rather feel assured that many of my schoolfellows were in the
+same mind of subdued revolt.  Even of those who, boylike, enjoyed their
+drill, scarce one or two, I trust, would have welcomed in their prime of
+life the imposition of military servitude upon them and their countrymen.
+From a certain point of view, it would be better far that England should
+bleed under conquest than that she should be saved by eager, or careless,
+acceptance of Conscription.  That view will not be held by the English
+people; but it would be a sorry thing for England if the day came when no
+one of those who love her harboured such a thought.
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+It has occurred to me that one might define Art as: an expression,
+satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life.  This is applicable to every
+form of Art devised by man, for, in his creative moment, whether he
+produce a great drama or carve a piece of foliage in wood, the artist is
+moved and inspired by supreme enjoyment of some aspect of the world about
+him; an enjoyment in itself keener than that experienced by another man,
+and intensified, prolonged, by the power--which comes to him we know not
+how--of recording in visible or audible form that emotion of rare
+vitality.  Art, in some degree, is within the scope of every human being,
+were he but the ploughman who utters a few would-be melodious notes, the
+mere outcome of health and strength, in the field at sunrise; he sings,
+or tries to, prompted by an unusual gusto in being, and the rude stave is
+all his own.  Another was he, who also at the plough, sang of the daisy,
+of the field-mouse, or shaped the rhythmic tale of Tam o' Shanter.  Not
+only had life a zest for him incalculably stronger and subtler than that
+which stirs the soul of Hodge, but he uttered it in word and music such
+as go to the heart of mankind, and hold a magic power for ages.
+
+For some years there has been a great deal of talk about Art in our
+country.  It began, I suspect, when the veritable artistic impulse of the
+Victorian time had flagged, when the energy of a great time was all but
+exhausted.  Principles always become a matter of vehement discussion when
+practice is at ebb.  Not by taking thought does one become an artist, or
+grow even an inch in that direction--which is not at all the same as
+saying that he who _is_ an artist cannot profit by conscious effort.
+Goethe (the example so often urged by imitators unlike him in every
+feature of humanity) took thought enough about his Faust; but what of
+those youthtime lyrics, not the least precious of his achievements, which
+were scribbled as fast as pen could go, thwartwise on the paper, because
+he could not stop to set it straight?  Dare I pen, even for my own eyes,
+the venerable truth that an artist is born and not made?  It seems not
+superfluous, in times which have heard disdainful criticism of Scott, on
+the ground that he had no artistic conscience, that he scribbled without
+a thought of style, that he never elaborated his scheme before
+beginning--as Flaubert, of course you know, invariably did.  Why, after
+all, has one not heard that a certain William Shakespeare turned out his
+so-called works of art with something like criminal carelessness?  Is it
+not a fact that a bungler named Cervantes was so little in earnest about
+his Art that, having in one chapter described the stealing of Sancho's
+donkey, he presently, in mere forgetfulness, shows us Sancho riding on
+Dapple, as if nothing had happened?  Does not one Thackeray shamelessly
+avow on the last page of a grossly "subjective" novel that he had killed
+Lord Farintosh's mother at one page and brought her to life again at
+another?  These sinners against Art are none the less among the world's
+supreme artists, for they _lived_, in a sense, in a degree,
+unintelligible to these critics of theirs, and their work is an
+expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life.
+
+Some one, no doubt, hit upon this definition of mine long ago.  It
+doesn't matter; is it the less original with me?  Not long since I should
+have fretted over the possibility, for my living depended on an avoidance
+of even seeming plagiarism.  Now I am at one with Lord Foppington, and
+much disposed to take pleasure in the natural sprouts of my own
+wit--without troubling whether the same idea has occurred to others.
+Suppose me, in total ignorance of Euclid, to have discovered even the
+simplest of his geometrical demonstrations, shall I be crestfallen when
+some one draws attention to the book?  These natural sprouts are, after
+all, the best products of our life; it is a mere accident that they may
+have no value in the world's market.  One of my conscious efforts, in
+these days of freedom, is to live intellectually for myself.  Formerly,
+when in reading I came upon anything that impressed or delighted me, down
+it went in my note-book, for "use."  I could not read a striking verse,
+or sentence of prose, without thinking of it as an apt quotation in
+something I might write--one of the evil results of a literary life.  Now
+that I strive to repel this habit of thought, I find myself asking: To
+what end, then, do I read and remember?  Surely as foolish a question as
+ever man put to himself.  You read for your own pleasure, for your solace
+and strengthening.  Pleasure, then, purely selfish?  Solace which endures
+for an hour, and strengthening for no combat?  Ay, but I know, I know.
+With what heart should I live here in my cottage, waiting for life's end,
+were it not for those hours of seeming idle reading?
+
+I think sometimes, how good it were had I some one by me to listen when I
+am tempted to read a passage aloud.  Yes, but is there any mortal in the
+whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic
+understanding?--nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my
+appreciation.  Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing.  All
+through life we long for it: the desire drives us, like a demon, into
+waste places; too often ends by plunging us into mud and morass.  And,
+after all, we learn that the vision was illusory.  To every man is it
+decreed: thou shalt live alone.  Happy they who imagine that they have
+escaped the common lot; happy, whilst they imagine it.  Those to whom no
+such happiness has ever been granted at least avoid the bitterest of
+disillusions.  And is it not always good to face a truth, however
+discomfortable?  The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile
+hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm.
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+All about my garden to-day the birds are loud.  To say that the air is
+filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless piping, whistling,
+trilling, which at moments rings to heaven in a triumphant unison, a wild
+accord.  Now and then I notice one of the smaller songsters who seems to
+strain his throat in a madly joyous endeavour to out-carol all the rest.
+It is a chorus of praise such as none other of earth's children have the
+voice or the heart to utter.  As I listen, I am carried away by its
+glorious rapture; my being melts in the tenderness of an impassioned joy;
+my eyes are dim with I know not what profound humility.
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+Were one to look at the literary journals only, and thereafter judge of
+the time, it would be easy to persuade oneself that civilization had
+indeed made great and solid progress, and that the world stood at a very
+hopeful stage of enlightenment.  Week after week, I glance over these
+pages of crowded advertisement; I see a great many publishing-houses
+zealously active in putting forth every kind of book, new and old; I see
+names innumerable of workers in every branch of literature.  Much that is
+announced declares itself at once of merely ephemeral import, or even of
+no import at all; but what masses of print which invite the attention of
+thoughtful or studious folk!  To the multitude is offered a long
+succession of classic authors, in beautiful form, at a minimum cost;
+never were such treasures so cheaply and so gracefully set before all who
+can prize them.  For the wealthy, there are volumes magnificent; lordly
+editions; works of art whereon have been lavished care and skill and
+expense incalculable.  Here is exhibited the learning of the whole world
+and of all the ages; be a man's study what it will, in these columns, at
+one time or another he shall find that which appeals to him.  Here are
+labours of the erudite, exercised on every subject that falls within
+learning's scope.  Science brings forth its newest discoveries in earth
+and heaven; it speaks to the philosopher in his solitude, and to the
+crowd in the market-place.  Curious pursuits of the mind at leisure are
+represented in publications numberless; trifles and oddities of
+intellectual savour; gatherings from every byway of human interest.  For
+other moods there are the fabulists; to tell truth, they commonly hold
+the place of honour in these varied lists.  Who shall count them?  Who
+shall calculate their readers?  Builders of verse are many; yet the
+observer will note that contemporary poets have but an inconspicuous
+standing in this index of the public taste.  Travel, on the other hand,
+is largely represented; the general appetite for information about lands
+remote would appear to be only less keen than for the adventures of
+romance.
+
+With these pages before one's eyes, must one not needs believe that
+things of the mind are a prime concern of our day?  Who are the
+purchasers of these volumes ever pouring from the press?  How is it
+possible for so great a commerce to flourish save as a consequence of
+national eagerness in this intellectual domain?  Surely one must take for
+granted that throughout the land, in town and country, private libraries
+are growing apace; that by the people at large a great deal of time is
+devoted to reading; that literary ambition is one of the commonest spurs
+to effort?
+
+It is the truth.  All this may be said of contemporary England.  But is
+it enough to set one's mind at ease regarding the outlook of our
+civilization?
+
+Two things must be remembered.  However considerable this literary
+traffic, regarded by itself, it is relatively of small extent.  And, in
+the second place, literary activity is by no means an invariable proof of
+that mental attitude which marks the truly civilized man.
+
+Lay aside the "literary organ," which appears once a week, and take up
+the newspaper, which comes forth every day, morning and evening.  Here
+you get the true proportion of things.  Read your daily news-sheet--that
+which costs threepence or that which costs a halfpenny--and muse upon the
+impression it leaves.  It may be that a few books are "noticed"; granting
+that the "notice" is in any way noticeable, compare the space it occupies
+with that devoted to the material interests of life: you have a gauge of
+the real importance of intellectual endeavour to the people at large.  No,
+the public which reads, in any sense of the word worth considering, is
+very, very small; the public which would feel no lack if all
+book-printing ceased to-morrow, is enormous.  These announcements of
+learned works which strike one as so encouraging, are addressed, as a
+matter of fact, to a few thousand persons, scattered all over the English-
+speaking world.  Many of the most valuable books slowly achieve the sale
+of a few hundred copies.  Gather from all the ends of the British Empire
+the men and women who purchase grave literature as a matter of course,
+who habitually seek it in public libraries, in short who regard it as a
+necessity of life, and I am much mistaken if they could not comfortably
+assemble in the Albert Hall.
+
+But even granting this, is it not an obvious fact that our age tends to
+the civilized habit of mind, as displayed in a love for intellectual
+things?  Was there ever a time which saw the literature of knowledge and
+of the emotions so widely distributed?  Does not the minority of the
+truly intelligent exercise a vast and profound influence?  Does it not in
+truth lead the way, however slowly and irregularly the multitude may
+follow?
+
+I should like to believe it.  When gloomy evidence is thrust upon me, I
+often say to myself: Think of the frequency of the reasonable man; think
+of him everywhere labouring to spread the light; how is it possible that
+such efforts should be overborne by forces of blind brutality, now that
+the human race has got so far?--Yes, yes; but this mortal whom I caress
+as reasonable, as enlightened and enlightening, this author,
+investigator, lecturer, or studious gentleman, to whose coat-tails I
+cling, does he always represent justice and peace, sweetness of manners,
+purity of life--all the things which makes for true civilization?  Here
+is a fallacy of bookish thought.  Experience offers proof on every hand
+that vigorous mental life may be but one side of a personality, of which
+the other is moral barbarism.  A man may be a fine archaeologist, and yet
+have no sympathy with human ideals.  The historian, the biographer, even
+the poet, may be a money-market gambler, a social toady, a clamorous
+Chauvinist, or an unscrupulous wire-puller.  As for "leaders of science,"
+what optimist will dare to proclaim them on the side of the gentle
+virtues?  And if one must needs think in this way of those who stand
+forth, professed instructors and inspirers, what of those who merely
+listen?  The reading-public--oh, the reading-public!  Hardly will a
+prudent statistician venture to declare that one in every score of those
+who actually read sterling books do so with comprehension of their
+author.  These dainty series of noble and delightful works, which have so
+seemingly wide an acceptance, think you they vouch for true appreciation
+in all who buy them?  Remember those who purchase to follow the fashion,
+to impose upon their neighbour, or even to flatter themselves; think of
+those who wish to make cheap presents, and those who are merely pleased
+by the outer aspect of the volume.  Above all, bear in mind that busy
+throng whose zeal is according neither to knowledge nor to conviction,
+the host of the half-educated, characteristic and peril of our time.
+They, indeed, purchase and purchase largely.  Heaven forbid that I should
+not recognize the few among them whose bent of brain and of conscience
+justifies their fervour; to such--the ten in ten thousand--be all aid and
+brotherly solace!  But the glib many, the perky mispronouncers of titles
+and of authors' names, the twanging murderers of rhythm, the maulers of
+the uncut edge at sixpence extra, the ready-reckoners of bibliopolic
+discount--am I to see in these a witness of my hope for the century to
+come?
+
+I am told that their semi-education will be integrated.  We are in a
+transition stage, between the bad old time when only a few had academic
+privileges, and that happy future which will see all men liberally
+instructed.  Unfortunately for this argument, education is a thing of
+which only the few are capable; teach as you will, only a small
+percentage will profit by your most zealous energy.  On an ungenerous
+soil it is vain to look for rich crops.  Your average mortal will be your
+average mortal still: and if he grow conscious of power, if he becomes
+vocal and self-assertive, if he get into his hands all the material
+resources of the country, why, you have a state of things such as at
+present looms menacingly before every Englishman blessed--or cursed--with
+an unpopular spirit.
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+Every morning when I awake, I thank heaven for silence.  This is my
+orison.  I remember the London days when sleep was broken by clash and
+clang, by roar and shriek, and when my first sense on returning to
+consciousness was hatred of the life about me.  Noises of wood and metal,
+clattering of wheels, banging of implements, jangling of bells--all such
+things are bad enough, but worse still is the clamorous human voice.
+Nothing on earth is more irritating to me than a bellow or scream of
+idiot mirth, nothing more hateful than a shout or yell of brutal anger.
+Were it possible, I would never again hear the utterance of a human
+tongue, save from those few who are dear to me.
+
+Here, wake at what hour I may, early or late, I lie amid gracious
+stillness.  Perchance a horse's hoof rings rhythmically upon the road;
+perhaps a dog barks from a neighbour farm; it may be that there comes the
+far, soft murmur of a train from the other side of Exe; but these are
+almost the only sounds that could force themselves upon my ear.  A voice,
+at any time of the day, is the rarest thing.
+
+But there is the rustle of branches in the morning breeze; there is the
+music of a sunny shower against the window; there is the matin song of
+birds.  Several times lately I have lain wakeful when there sounded the
+first note of the earliest lark; it makes me almost glad of my restless
+nights.  The only trouble that touches me in these moments is the thought
+of my long life wasted amid the senseless noises of man's world.  Year
+after year this spot has known the same tranquillity; with ever so little
+of good fortune, with ever so little wisdom, beyond what was granted me,
+I might have blessed my manhood with calm, might have made for myself in
+later life a long retrospect of bowered peace.  As it is, I enjoy with
+something of sadness, remembering that this melodious silence is but the
+prelude of that deeper stillness which waits to enfold us all.
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+Morning after morning, of late, I have taken my walk in the same
+direction, my purpose being to look at a plantation of young larches.
+There is no lovelier colour on earth than that in which they are now
+clad; it seems to refresh as well as gladden my eyes, and its influence
+sinks deep into my heart.  Too soon it will change; already I think the
+first radiant verdure has begun to pass into summer's soberness.  The
+larch has its moment of unmatched beauty--and well for him whose chance
+permits him to enjoy it, spring after spring.
+
+Could anything be more wonderful than the fact that here am I, day by
+day, not only at leisure to walk forth and gaze at the larches, but
+blessed with the tranquillity of mind needful for such enjoyment?  On any
+morning of spring sunshine, how many mortals find themselves so much at
+peace that they are able to give themselves wholly to delight in the
+glory of heaven and of earth?  Is it the case with one man in every fifty
+thousand?  Consider what extraordinary kindness of fate must tend upon
+one, that not a care, not a preoccupation, should interfere with his
+contemplative thought for five or six days successively!  So rooted in
+the human mind (and so reasonably rooted) is the belief in an Envious
+Power, that I ask myself whether I shall not have to pay, by some
+disaster, for this period of sacred calm.  For a week or so I have been
+one of a small number, chosen out of the whole human race by fate's
+supreme benediction.  It may be that this comes to every one in turn; to
+most, it can only be once in a lifetime, and so briefly.  That my own lot
+seems so much better than that of ordinary men, sometimes makes me
+fearful.
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+
+Walking in a favourite lane to-day, I found it covered with shed blossoms
+of the hawthorn.  Creamy white, fragrant even in ruin, lay scattered the
+glory of the May.  It told me that spring is over.
+
+Have I enjoyed it as I should?  Since the day that brought me freedom,
+four times have I seen the year's new birth, and always, as the violet
+yielded to the rose, I have known a fear that I had not sufficiently
+prized this boon of heaven whilst it was with me.  Many hours I have
+spent shut up among my books, when I might have been in the meadows.  Was
+the gain equivalent?  Doubtfully, diffidently, I hearken what the mind
+can plead.
+
+I recall my moments of delight, the recognition of each flower that
+unfolded, the surprise of budding branches clothed in a night with green.
+The first snowy gleam upon the blackthorn did not escape me.  By its
+familiar bank, I watched for the earliest primrose, and in its copse I
+found the anemone.  Meadows shining with buttercups, hollows sunned with
+the marsh marigold held me long at gaze.  I saw the sallow glistening
+with its cones of silvery fur, and splendid with dust of gold.  These
+common things touch me with more of admiration and of wonder each time I
+behold them.  They are once more gone.  As I turn to summer, a misgiving
+mingles with my joy.
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER
+
+
+I.
+
+
+To-day, as I was reading in the garden, a waft of summer perfume--some
+hidden link of association in what I read--I know not what it may have
+been--took me back to school-boy holidays; I recovered with strange
+intensity that lightsome mood of long release from tasks, of going away
+to the seaside, which is one of childhood's blessings.  I was in the
+train; no rushing express, such as bears you great distances; the sober
+train which goes to no place of importance, which lets you see the white
+steam of the engine float and fall upon a meadow ere you pass.  Thanks to
+a good and wise father, we youngsters saw nothing of seaside places where
+crowds assemble; I am speaking, too, of a time more than forty years ago,
+when it was still possible to find on the coasts of northern England,
+east or west, spots known only to those who loved the shore for its
+beauty and its solitude.  At every station the train stopped; little
+stations, decked with beds of flowers, smelling warm in the sunshine
+where country-folk got in with baskets, and talked in an unfamiliar
+dialect, an English which to us sounded almost like a foreign tongue.
+Then the first glimpse of the sea; the excitement of noting whether tide
+was high or low--stretches of sand and weedy pools, or halcyon wavelets
+frothing at their furthest reach, under the sea-banks starred with
+convolvulus.  Of a sudden, _our_ station!
+
+Ah, that taste of the brine on a child's lips!  Nowadays, I can take
+holiday when I will, and go whithersoever it pleases me; but that salt
+kiss of the sea air I shall never know again.  My senses are dulled; I
+cannot get so near to Nature; I have a sorry dread of her clouds, her
+winds, and must walk with tedious circumspection where once I ran and
+leapt exultingly.  Were it possible, but for one half-hour, to plunge and
+bask in the sunny surf, to roll on the silvery sand-hills, to leap from
+rock to rock on shining sea-ferns, laughing if I slipped into the
+shallows among starfish and anemones!  I am much older in body than in
+mind; I can but look at what I once enjoyed.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+I have been spending a week in Somerset.  The right June weather put me
+in the mind for rambling, and my thoughts turned to the Severn Sea.  I
+went to Glastonbury and Wells, and on to Cheddar, and so to the shore of
+the Channel at Clevedon, remembering my holiday of fifteen years ago, and
+too often losing myself in a contrast of the man I was then and what I am
+now.  Beautiful beyond all words of description that nook of oldest
+England; but that I feared the moist and misty winter climate, I should
+have chosen some spot below the Mendips for my home and resting-place.
+Unspeakable the charm to my ear of those old names; exquisite the quiet
+of those little towns, lost amid tilth and pasture, untouched as yet by
+the fury of modern life, their ancient sanctuaries guarded, as it were,
+by noble trees and hedges overrun with flowers.  In all England there is
+no sweeter and more varied prospect than that from the hill of the Holy
+Thorn at Glastonbury; in all England there is no lovelier musing place
+than the leafy walk beside the Palace Moat at Wells.  As I think of the
+golden hours I spent there, a passion to which I can give no name takes
+hold upon me; my heart trembles with an indefinable ecstasy.
+
+There was a time of my life when I was consumed with a desire for foreign
+travel; an impatience of everything familiar fretted me through all the
+changing year.  If I had not at length found the opportunity to escape,
+if I had not seen the landscapes for which my soul longed, I think I must
+have moped to death.  Few men, assuredly, have enjoyed such wanderings
+more than I, and few men revive them in memory with a richer delight or
+deeper longing.  But--whatever temptation comes to me in mellow autumn,
+when I think of the grape and of the olive--I do not believe I shall ever
+again cross the sea.  What remains to me of life and of energy is far too
+little for the enjoyment of all I know, and all I wish to know, of this
+dear island.
+
+As a child I used to sleep in a room hung round with prints after English
+landscape painters--those steel engravings so common half a century ago,
+which bore the legend, "From the picture in the Vernon Gallery."  Far
+more than I knew at the time, these pictures impressed me; I gazed and
+gazed at them, with that fixed attention of a child which is half
+curiosity, half reverie, till every line of them was fixed in my mind; at
+this moment I see the black-and-white landscapes as if they were hanging
+on the wall before me, and I have often thought that this early training
+of the imagination--for such it was--has much to do with the passionate
+love of rural scenery which lurked within me even when I did not
+recognize it, and which now for many a year has been one of the emotions
+directing my life.  Perhaps, too, that early memory explains why I love a
+good black-and-white print even more than a good painting.  And--to draw
+yet another inference--here may be a reason for the fact that, through my
+youth and early manhood, I found more pleasure in Nature as represented
+by art than in Nature herself.  Even during that strange time when
+hardships and passions held me captive far from any glimpse of the
+flowering earth, I could be moved, and moved deeply, by a picture of the
+simplest rustic scene.  At rare moments, when a happy chance led me into
+the National Gallery, I used to stand long before such pictures as "The
+Valley Farm," "The Cornfield," "Mousehold Heath."  In the murk confusion
+of my heart these visions of the world of peace and beauty from which I
+was excluded--to which, indeed, I hardly ever gave a thought--touched me
+to deep emotion.  But it did not need--nor does it now--the magic of a
+master to awake that mood in me.  Let me but come upon the poorest little
+woodcut, the cheapest "process" illustration, representing a thatched
+cottage, a lane, a field, and I hear that music begin to murmur.  It is a
+passion--Heaven be thanked--that grows with my advancing years.  The last
+thought of my brain as I lie dying will be that of sunshine upon an
+English meadow.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Sitting in my garden amid the evening scent of roses, I have read through
+Walton's _Life of Hooker_; could any place and time have been more
+appropriate?  Almost within sight is the tower of Heavitree
+church--Heavitree, which was Hooker's birthplace.  In other parts of
+England he must often have thought of these meadows falling to the green
+valley of the Exe, and of the sun setting behind the pines of Haldon.
+Hooker loved the country.  Delightful to me, and infinitely touching, is
+that request of his to be transferred from London to a rural
+living--"where I can see God's blessing spring out of the earth."  And
+that glimpse of him where he was found tending sheep, with a Horace in
+his hand.  It was in rural solitudes that he conceived the rhythm of
+mighty prose.  What music of the spheres sang to that poor,
+vixen-haunted, pimply-faced man!
+
+The last few pages I read by the light of the full moon, that of
+afterglow having till then sufficed me.  Oh, why has it not been granted
+me in all my long years of pen-labour to write something small and
+perfect, even as one of these lives of honest Izaak!  Here is literature,
+look you--not "literary work."  Let me be thankful that I have the mind
+to enjoy it; not only to understand, but to savour, its great goodness.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+It is Sunday morning, and above earth's beauty shines the purest, softest
+sky this summer has yet gladdened us withal.  My window is thrown open; I
+see the sunny gleam upon garden leaves and flowers; I hear the birds
+whose wont it is to sing to me; ever and anon the martins that have their
+home beneath my eaves sweep past in silence.  Church bells have begun to
+chime; I know the music of their voices, near and far.
+
+There was a time when it delighted me to flash my satire on the English
+Sunday; I could see nothing but antiquated foolishness and modern
+hypocrisy in this weekly pause from labour and from bustle.  Now I prize
+it as an inestimable boon, and dread every encroachment upon its restful
+stillness.  Scoff as I might at "Sabbatarianism," was I not always glad
+when Sunday came?  The bells of London churches and chapels are not
+soothing to the ear, but when I remember their sound--even that of the
+most aggressively pharisaic conventicle, with its one dire clapper--I
+find it associated with a sense of repose, of liberty.  This day of the
+seven I granted to my better genius; work was put aside, and, when Heaven
+permitted, trouble forgotten.
+
+When out of England I have always missed this Sunday quietude, this
+difference from ordinary days which seems to affect the very atmosphere.
+It is not enough that people should go to church, that shops should be
+closed and workyards silent; these holiday notes do not make a Sunday.
+Think as one may of its significance, our Day of Rest has a peculiar
+sanctity, felt, I imagine, in a more or less vague way, even by those who
+wish to see the village lads at cricket and theatres open in the town.
+The idea is surely as good a one as ever came to heavy-laden mortals; let
+one whole day in every week be removed from the common life of the world,
+lifted above common pleasures as above common cares.  With all the abuses
+of fanaticism, this thought remained rich in blessings; Sunday has always
+brought large good to the generality, and to a chosen number has been the
+very life of the soul, however heretically some of them understood the
+words.  If its ancient use perish from among us, so much the worse for
+our country.  And perish no doubt it will; only here in rustic solitude
+can one forget the changes that have already made the day less sacred to
+multitudes.  With it will vanish that habit of periodic calm, which, even
+when it has become so largely void of conscious meaning, is, one may
+safely say, the best spiritual boon ever bestowed upon a people.  The
+most difficult of all things to attain, the most difficult of all to
+preserve, the supreme benediction of the noblest mind, this calm was once
+breathed over the whole land as often as sounded the last stroke of
+weekly toil; on Saturday at even began the quiet and the solace.  With
+the decline of old faith, Sunday cannot but lose its sanction, and no
+loss among the innumerable that we are suffering will work so effectually
+for popular vulgarization.  What hope is there of guarding the moral
+beauty of the day when the authority which set it apart is no longer
+recognized?--Imagine a bank-holiday once a week!
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+On Sunday I come down later than usual; I make a change of dress, for it
+is fitting that the day of spiritual rest should lay aside the livery of
+the laborious week.  For me, indeed, there is no labour at any time, but
+nevertheless does Sunday bring me repose.  I share in the common
+tranquillity; my thought escapes the workaday world more completely than
+on other days.
+
+It is not easy to see how this house of mine can make to itself a Sunday
+quiet, for at all times it is well-nigh soundless; yet I find a
+difference.  My housekeeper comes into the room with her Sunday smile;
+she is happier for the day, and the sight of her happiness gives me
+pleasure.  She speaks, if possible, in a softer voice; she wears a
+garment which reminds me that there is only the lightest and cleanest
+housework to be done.  She will go to church, morning and evening, and I
+know that she is better for it.  During her absence I sometimes look into
+rooms which on other days I never enter; it is merely to gladden my eyes
+with the shining cleanliness, the perfect order, I am sure to find in the
+good woman's domain.  But for that spotless and sweet-smelling kitchen,
+what would it avail me to range my books and hang my pictures?  All the
+tranquillity of my life depends upon the honest care of this woman who
+lives and works unseen.  And I am sure that the money I pay her is the
+least part of her reward.  She is such an old-fashioned person that the
+mere discharge of what she deems a duty is in itself an end to her, and
+the work of her hands in itself a satisfaction, a pride.
+
+When a child, I was permitted to handle on Sunday certain books which
+could not be exposed to the more careless usage of common days; volumes
+finely illustrated, or the more handsome editions of familiar authors, or
+works which, merely by their bulk, demanded special care.  Happily, these
+books were all of the higher rank in literature, and so there came to be
+established in my mind an association between the day of rest and names
+which are the greatest in verse and prose.  Through my life this habit
+has remained with me; I have always wished to spend some part of the
+Sunday quiet with books which, at most times, it is fatally easy to leave
+aside, one's very knowledge and love of them serving as an excuse for
+their neglect in favour of print which has the attraction of newness.
+Homer and Virgil, Milton and Shakespeare; not many Sundays have gone by
+without my opening one or other of these.  Not many Sundays?  Nay, that
+is to exaggerate, as one has the habit of doing.  Let me say rather that,
+on many a rest-day I have found mind and opportunity for such reading.
+Nowadays mind and opportunity fail me never.  I may take down my Homer or
+my Shakespeare when I choose, but it is still on Sunday that I feel it
+most becoming to seek the privilege of their companionship.  For these
+great ones, crowned with immortality, do not respond to him who
+approaches them as though hurried by temporal care.  There befits the
+garment of solemn leisure, the thought attuned to peace.  I open the
+volume somewhat formally; is it not sacred, if the word have any meaning
+at all?  And, as I read, no interruption can befall me.  The note of a
+linnet, the humming of a bee, these are the sounds about my sanctuary.
+The page scarce rustles as it turns.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+Of how many dwellings can it be said that no word of anger is ever heard
+beneath its roof, and that no unkindly feeling ever exists between the
+inmates?  Most men's experience would seem to justify them in declaring
+that, throughout the inhabited world, no such house exists.  I, knowing
+at all events of one, admit the possibility that there may be more; yet I
+feel that it is to hazard a conjecture; I cannot point with certainty to
+any other instance, nor in all my secular life (I speak as one who has
+quitted the world) could I have named a single example.
+
+It is so difficult for human beings to live together; nay, it is so
+difficult for them to associate, however transitorily, and even under the
+most favourable conditions, without some shadow of mutual offence.
+Consider the differences of task and of habit, the conflict of
+prejudices, the divergence of opinions (though that is probably the same
+thing), which quickly reveal themselves between any two persons brought
+into more than casual contact, and think how much self-subdual is
+implicit whenever, for more than an hour or two, they co-exist in seeming
+harmony.  Man is not made for peaceful intercourse with his fellows; he
+is by nature self-assertive, commonly aggressive, always critical in a
+more or less hostile spirit of any characteristic which seems strange to
+him.  That he is capable of profound affections merely modifies here and
+there his natural contentiousness, and subdues its expression.  Even
+love, in the largest and purest sense of the word, is no safeguard
+against perilous irritation and sensibilities inborn.  And what were the
+durability of love without the powerful alliance of habit?
+
+Suppose yourself endowed with such power of hearing that all the talk
+going on at any moment beneath the domestic roofs of any town became
+clearly audible to you; the dominant note would be that of moods,
+tempers, opinions at jar.  Who but the most amiable dreamer can doubt it?
+This, mind you, is not the same thing as saying that angry emotion is the
+ruling force in human life; the facts of our civilization prove the
+contrary.  Just because, and only because, the natural spirit of conflict
+finds such frequent scope, does human society hold together, and, on the
+whole, present a pacific aspect.  In the course of ages (one would like
+to know how many) man has attained a remarkable degree of self-control;
+dire experience has forced upon him the necessity of compromise, and
+habit has inclined him (the individual) to prefer a quiet, orderly life.
+But by instinct he is still a quarrelsome creature, and he gives vent to
+the impulse as far as it is compatible with his reasoned interests--often,
+to be sure, without regard for that limit.  The average man or woman is
+always at open discord with some one; the great majority could not live
+without oft-recurrent squabble.  Speak in confidence with any one you
+like, and get him to tell you how many cases of coldness, alienation, or
+downright enmity, between friends and kinsfolk, his memory registers; the
+number will be considerable, and what a vastly greater number of everyday
+"misunderstandings" may be thence inferred!  Verbal contention is, of
+course, commoner among the poor and the vulgar than in the class of well-
+bred people living at their ease, but I doubt whether the lower ranks of
+society find personal association much more difficult than the refined
+minority above them.  High cultivation may help to self-command, but it
+multiplies the chances of irritative contact.  In mansion, as in hovel,
+the strain of life is perpetually felt--between the married, between
+parents and children, between relatives of every degree, between
+employers and employed.  They debate, they dispute, they wrangle, they
+explode--then nerves are relieved, and they are ready to begin over
+again.  Quit the home and quarrelling is less obvious, but it goes on all
+about one.  What proportion of the letters delivered any morning would be
+found to be written in displeasure, in petulance, in wrath?  The postbag
+shrieks insults or bursts with suppressed malice.  Is it not
+wonderful--nay, is it not the marvel of marvels--that human life has
+reached such a high point of public and private organization?
+
+And gentle idealists utter their indignant wonder at the continuance of
+war!  Why, it passes the wit of man to explain how it is that nations are
+ever at peace!  For, if only by the rarest good fortune do individuals
+associate harmoniously, there would seem to be much less likelihood of
+mutual understanding and good-will between the peoples of alien lands.  As
+a matter of fact, no two nations are ever friendly, in the sense of truly
+liking each other; with the reciprocal criticism of countries there
+always mingles a sentiment of animosity.  The original meaning of
+_hostis_ is merely stranger, and a stranger who is likewise a foreigner
+will only by curious exception fail to stir antipathy in the average
+human being.  Add to this that a great number of persons in every country
+find their delight and their business in exasperating international
+disrelish, and with what vestige of common sense can one feel surprise
+that war is ceaselessly talked of, often enough declared.  In days gone
+by, distance and rarity of communication assured peace between many
+realms.  Now that every country is in proximity to every other, what need
+is there to elaborate explanations of the distrust, the fear, the hatred,
+which are a perpetual theme of journalists and statesmen?  By
+approximation, all countries have entered the sphere of natural quarrel.
+That they find plenty of things to quarrel about is no cause for
+astonishment.  A hundred years hence there will be some possibility of
+perceiving whether international relations are likely to obey the law
+which has acted with such beneficence in the life of each civilized
+people; whether this country and that will be content to ease their
+tempers with bloodless squabbling, subduing the more violent promptings
+for the common good.  Yet I suspect that a century is a very short time
+to allow for even justifiable surmise of such an outcome.  If by any
+chance newspapers ceased to exist . . .
+
+Talk of war, and one gets involved in such utopian musings!
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+I have been reading one of those prognostic articles on international
+politics which every now and then appear in the reviews.  Why I should so
+waste my time it would be hard to say; I suppose the fascination of
+disgust and fear gets the better of me in a moment's idleness.  This
+writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the
+certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar
+satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind.  His
+phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of
+his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces
+which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent
+irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the
+"inevitable."  Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the
+event.
+
+But I will read no more such writing.  This resolution I make and will
+keep.  Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the calm of a
+whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it?  What is it to me if
+nations fall a-slaughtering each other?  Let the fools go to it!  Why
+should they not please themselves?  Peace, after all, is the aspiration
+of the few; so it always; was, and ever will be.  But have done with the
+nauseous cant about "dire calamity."  The leaders and the multitude hold
+no such view; either they see in war a direct and tangible profit, or
+they are driven to it, with heads down, by the brute that is in them.  Let
+them rend and be rent; let them paddle in blood and viscera till--if that
+would ever happen--their stomachs turn.  Let them blast the cornfield and
+the orchard, fire the home.  For all that, there will yet be found some
+silent few, who go their way amid the still meadows, who bend to the
+flower and watch the sunset; and these alone are worth a thought.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+In this hot weather I like to walk at times amid the full glow of the
+sun.  Our island sun is never hot beyond endurance, and there is a
+magnificence in the triumph of high summer which exalts one's mind.  Among
+streets it is hard to bear, yet even there, for those who have eyes to
+see it, the splendour of the sky lends beauty to things in themselves
+mean or hideous.  I remember an August bank-holiday, when, having for
+some reason to walk all across London, I unexpectedly found myself
+enjoying the strange desertion of great streets, and from that passed to
+surprise in the sense of something beautiful, a charm in the vulgar
+vista, in the dull architecture, which I had never known.  Deep and clear-
+marked shadows, such as one only sees on a few days of summer, are in
+themselves very impressive, and become more so when they fall upon
+highways devoid of folk.  I remember observing, as something new, the
+shape of familiar edifices, of spires, monuments.  And when at length I
+sat down, somewhere on the Embankment, it was rather to gaze at leisure
+than to rest, for I felt no weariness, and the sun, still pouring upon me
+its noontide radiance, seemed to fill my veins with life.
+
+That sense I shall never know again.  For me Nature has comforts,
+raptures, but no more invigoration.  The sun keeps me alive, but cannot,
+as in the old days, renew my being.  I would fain learn to enjoy without
+reflecting.
+
+My walk in the golden hours leads me to a great horse-chestnut, whose
+root offers a convenient seat in the shadow of its foliage.  At that
+resting-place I have no wide view before me, but what I see is enough--a
+corner of waste land, over-flowered with poppies and charlock, on the
+edge of a field of corn.  The brilliant red and yellow harmonize with the
+glory of the day.  Near by, too, is a hedge covered with great white
+blooms of the bindweed.  My eyes do not soon grow weary.
+
+A little plant of which I am very fond is the rest-harrow.  When the sun
+is hot upon it, the flower gives forth a strangely aromatic scent, very
+delightful to me.  I know the cause of this peculiar pleasure.  The rest-
+harrow sometimes grows in sandy ground above the seashore.  In my
+childhood I have many a time lain in such a spot under the glowing sky,
+and, though I scarce thought of it, perceived the odour of the little
+rose-pink flower when it touched my face.  Now I have but to smell it,
+and those hours come back again.  I see the shore of Cumberland, running
+north to St. Bee's Head; on the sea horizon a faint shape which is the
+Isle of Man; inland, the mountains, which for me at that time guarded a
+region of unknown wonder.  Ah, how long ago!
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+I read much less than I used to do; I think much more.  Yet what is the
+use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life?  Better,
+perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one's futile self in the
+activity of other minds.
+
+This summer I have taken up no new book, but have renewed my acquaintance
+with several old ones which I had not opened for many a year.  One or two
+have been books such as mature men rarely read at all--books which it is
+one's habit to "take as read"; to presume sufficiently known to speak of,
+but never to open.  Thus, one day my hand fell upon the _Anabasis_, the
+little Oxford edition which I used at school, with its boyish sign-manual
+on the fly-leaf, its blots and underlinings and marginal scrawls.  To my
+shame I possess no other edition; yet this is a book one would like to
+have in beautiful form.  I opened it, I began to read--a ghost of boyhood
+stirring in my heart--and from chapter to chapter was led on, until after
+a few days I had read the whole.
+
+I am glad this happened in the summer-time, I like to link childhood with
+these latter days, and no better way could I have found than this return
+to a school-book, which, even as a school-book, was my great delight.
+
+By some trick of memory I always associate school-boy work on the
+classics with a sense of warm and sunny days; rain and gloom and a chilly
+atmosphere must have been far the more frequent conditions, but these
+things are forgotten.  My old Liddell and Scott still serves me, and if,
+in opening it, I bend close enough to catch the _scent_ of the leaves, I
+am back again at that day of boyhood (noted on the fly-leaf by the hand
+of one long dead) when the book was new and I used it for the first time.
+It was a day of summer, and perhaps there fell upon the unfamiliar page,
+viewed with childish tremor, half apprehension and half delight, a mellow
+sunshine, which was to linger for ever in my mind.
+
+But I am thinking of the _Anabasis_.  Were this the sole book existing in
+Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order
+to read it.  The _Anabasis_ is an admirable work of art, unique in its
+combination of concise and rapid narrative with colour and
+picturesqueness.  Herodotus wrote a prose epic, in which the author's
+personality is ever before us.  Xenophon, with curiosity and love of
+adventure which mark him of the same race, but self-forgetful in the
+pursuit of a new artistic virtue, created the historical romance.  What a
+world of wonders in this little book, all aglow with ambitions and
+conflicts, with marvels of strange lands; full of perils and rescues,
+fresh with the air of mountain and of sea!  Think of it for a moment by
+the side of Caesar's Commentaries; not to compare things incomparable,
+but in order to appreciate the perfect art which shines through
+Xenophon's mastery of language, his brevity achieving a result so
+different from that of the like characteristic in the Roman writer.
+Caesar's conciseness comes of strength and pride; Xenophon's, of a vivid
+imagination.  Many a single line of the _Anabasis_ presents a picture
+which deeply stirs the emotions.  A good instance occurs in the fourth
+book, where a delightful passage of unsurpassable narrative tells how the
+Greeks rewarded and dismissed a guide who had led them through dangerous
+country.  The man himself was in peril of his life; laden with valuable
+things which the soldiers had given him in their gratitude, he turned to
+make his way through the hostile region.  [Greek text].  "When evening
+came he took leave of us, and went his way by night."  To my mind, words
+of wonderful suggestiveness.  You see the wild, eastern landscape, upon
+which the sun has set.  There are the Hellenes, safe for the moment on
+their long march, and there the mountain tribesman, the serviceable
+barbarian, going away, alone, with his tempting guerdon, into the hazards
+of the darkness.
+
+Also in the fourth book, another picture moves one in another way.  Among
+the Carduchian Hills two men were seized, and information was sought from
+them about the track to be followed.  "One of them would say nothing, and
+kept silence in spite of every threat; so, in the presence of his
+companion, he was slain.  Thereupon that other made known the man's
+reason for refusing to point out the way; in the direction the Greeks
+must take there dwelt a daughter of his, who was married."
+
+It would not be easy to express more pathos than is conveyed in these few
+words.  Xenophon himself, one may be sure, did not feel it quite as we
+do, but he preserved the incident for its own sake, and there, in a line
+or two, shines something of human love and sacrifice, significant for all
+time.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+I sometimes think I will go and spend the sunny half of a twelvemonth in
+wandering about the British Isles.  There is so much of beauty and
+interest that I have not seen, and I grudge to close my eyes on this
+beloved home of ours, leaving any corner of it unvisited.  Often I wander
+in fancy over all the parts I know, and grow restless with desire at
+familiar names which bring no picture to memory.  My array of county
+guide-books (they have always been irresistible to me on the stalls) sets
+me roaming; the only dull pages in them are those that treat of
+manufacturing towns.  Yet I shall never start on that pilgrimage.  I am
+too old, too fixed in habits.  I dislike the railway; I dislike hotels.  I
+should grow homesick for my library, my garden, the view from my windows.
+And then--I have such a fear of dying anywhere but under my own roof.
+
+As a rule, it is better to revisit only in imagination the places which
+have greatly charmed us, or which, in the retrospect, seem to have done
+so.  Seem to have charmed us, I say; for the memory we form, after a
+certain lapse of time, of places where we lingered, often bears but a
+faint resemblance to the impression received at the time; what in truth
+may have been very moderate enjoyment, or enjoyment greatly disturbed by
+inner or outer circumstances, shows in the distance as a keen delight, or
+as deep, still happiness.  On the other hand, if memory creates no
+illusion, and the name of a certain place is associated with one of the
+golden moments of life, it were rash to hope that another visit would
+repeat the experience of a bygone day.  For it was not merely the sights
+that one beheld which were the cause of joy and peace; however lovely the
+spot, however gracious the sky, these things external would not have
+availed, but for contributory movements of mind and heart and blood, the
+essentials of the man as then he was.
+
+Whilst I was reading this afternoon my thoughts strayed, and I found
+myself recalling a hillside in Suffolk, where, after a long walk I rested
+drowsily one midsummer day twenty years ago.  A great longing seized me;
+I was tempted to set off at once, and find again that spot under the high
+elm trees, where, as I smoked a delicious pipe, I heard about me the
+crack, crack, crack of broom-pods bursting in the glorious heat of the
+noontide sun.  Had I acted upon the impulse, what chance was there of my
+enjoying such another hour as that which my memory cherished?  No, no; it
+is not the _place_ that I remember; it is the time of life, the
+circumstances, the mood, which at that moment fell so happily together.
+Can I dream that a pipe smoked on that same hillside, under the same
+glowing sky, would taste as it then did, or bring me the same solace?
+Would the turf be so soft beneath me?  Would the great elm-branches
+temper so delightfully the noontide rays beating upon them?  And, when
+the hour of rest was over, should I spring to my feet as then I did,
+eager to put forth my strength again?  No, no; what I remember is just
+one moment of my earlier life, linked by accident with that picture of
+the Suffolk landscape.  The place no longer exists; it never existed save
+for me.  For it is the mind which creates the world about us, and, even
+though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see
+what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with
+which yours is touched.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+I awoke a little after four o'clock.  There was sunlight upon the blind,
+that pure gold of the earliest beam which always makes me think of
+Dante's angels.  I had slept unusually well, without a dream, and felt
+the blessing of rest through all my frame; my head was clear, my pulse
+beat temperately.  And, when I had lain thus for a few minutes, asking
+myself what book I should reach from the shelf that hangs near my pillow,
+there came upon me a desire to rise and go forth into the early morning.
+On the moment I bestirred myself.  The drawing up of the blind, the
+opening of the window, only increased my zeal, and I was soon in the
+garden, then out in the road, walking light-heartedly I cared not
+whither.
+
+How long is it since I went forth at the hour of summer sunrise?  It is
+one of the greatest pleasures, physical and mental, that any man in
+moderate health can grant himself; yet hardly once in a year do mood and
+circumstance combine to put it within one's reach.  The habit of lying in
+bed hours after broad daylight is strange enough, if one thinks of it; a
+habit entirely evil; one of the most foolish changes made by modern
+system in the healthier life of the old time.  But that my energies are
+not equal to such great innovation, I would begin going to bed at sunset
+and rising with the beam of day; ten to one, it would vastly improve my
+health, and undoubtedly it would add to the pleasures of my existence.
+
+When travelling, I have now and then watched the sunrise, and always with
+an exultation unlike anything produced in me by other aspects of nature.
+I remember daybreak on the Mediterranean; the shapes of islands growing
+in hue after hue of tenderest light, until they floated amid a sea of
+glory.  And among the mountains--that crowning height, one moment a cold
+pallor, the next soft-glowing under the touch of the rosy-fingered
+goddess.  These are the things I shall never see again; things, indeed,
+so perfect in memory that I should dread to blur them by a newer
+experience.  My senses are so much duller; they do not show me what once
+they did.
+
+How far away is that school-boy time, when I found a pleasure in getting
+up and escaping from the dormitory whilst all the others were still
+asleep.  My purpose was innocent enough; I got up early only to do my
+lessons.  I can see the long school-room, lighted by the early sun; I can
+smell the school-room odour--a blend of books and slates and wall-maps
+and I know not what.  It was a mental peculiarity of mine that at five
+o'clock in the morning I could apply myself with gusto to mathematics, a
+subject loathsome to me at any other time of the day.  Opening the book
+at some section which was wont to scare me, I used to say to myself:
+"Come now, I'm going to tackle this this morning!  If other boys can
+understand it, why shouldn't I?"  And in a measure I succeeded.  In a
+measure only; there was always a limit at which my powers failed me,
+strive as I would.
+
+In my garret-days it was seldom that I rose early: with the exception of
+one year--or the greater part of a twelvemonth--during which I was
+regularly up at half-past five for a special reason.  I had undertaken to
+"coach" a man for the London matriculation; he was in business, and the
+only time he could conveniently give to his studies was before breakfast.
+I, just then, had my lodgings near Hampstead Road; my pupil lived at
+Knightsbridge; I engaged to be with him every morning at half-past six,
+and the walk, at a brisk pace, took me just about an hour.  At that time
+I saw no severity in the arrangement, and I was delighted to earn the
+modest fee which enabled me to write all day long without fear of hunger;
+but one inconvenience attached to it.  I had no watch, and my only means
+of knowing the time was to hear the striking of a clock in the
+neighbourhood.  As a rule, I awoke just when I should have done; the
+clock struck five, and up I sprang.  But occasionally--and this when the
+mornings had grown dark--my punctual habit failed me; I would hear the
+clock chime some fraction of the hour, and could not know whether I had
+awoke too soon or slept too long.  The horror of unpunctuality, which has
+always been a craze with me, made it impossible to lie waiting; more than
+once I dressed and went out into the street to discover as best I could
+what time it was, and one such expedition, I well remember, took place
+between two and three o'clock on a morning of foggy rain.
+
+It happened now and then that, on reaching the house at Knightsbridge, I
+was informed that Mr. --- felt too tired to rise.  This concerned me
+little, for it meant no deduction of fee; I had the two hours' walk, and
+was all the better for it.  Then the appetite with which I sat down to
+breakfast, whether I had done my coaching or not!  Bread and butter and
+coffee--such coffee!--made the meal, and I ate like a navvy.  I was in
+magnificent spirits.  All the way home I had been thinking of my day's
+work, and the morning brain, clarified and whipped to vigour by that
+brisk exercise, by that wholesome hunger, wrought its best.  The last
+mouthful swallowed, I was seated at my writing-table; aye, and there I
+sat for seven or eight hours, with a short munching interval, working as
+only few men worked in all London, with pleasure, zeal, hope. . . .
+
+Yes, yes, those were the good days.  They did not last long; before and
+after them were cares, miseries, endurance multiform.  I have always felt
+grateful to Mr. --- of Knightsbridge; he gave me a year of health, and
+almost of peace.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+A whole day's walk yesterday with no plan; just a long ramble of hour
+after hour, entirely enjoyable.  It ended at Topsham, where I sat on the
+little churchyard terrace, and watched the evening tide come up the broad
+estuary.  I have a great liking for Topsham, and that churchyard,
+overlooking what is not quite sea, yet more than river, is one of the
+most restful spots I know.  Of course the association with old Chaucer,
+who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps my mood.  I came home very tired;
+but I am not yet decrepit, and for that I must be thankful.
+
+The unspeakable blessedness of having a _home_!  Much as my imagination
+has dwelt upon it for thirty years, I never knew how deep and exquisite a
+joy could lie in the assurance that one is _at home_ for ever.  Again and
+again I come back upon this thought; nothing but Death can oust me from
+my abiding place.  And Death I would fain learn to regard as a friend,
+who will but intensify the peace I now relish.
+
+When one is at home, how one's affections grow about everything in the
+neighbourhood!  I always thought with fondness of this corner of Devon,
+but what was that compared with the love which now strengthens in me day
+by day!  Beginning with my house, every stick and stone of it is dear to
+me as my heart's blood; I find myself laying an affectionate hand on the
+door-post, giving a pat, as I go by, to the garden gate.  Every tree and
+shrub in the garden is my beloved friend; I touch them, when need is,
+very tenderly, as though carelessness might pain, or roughness injure
+them.  If I pull up a weed in the walk, I look at it with a certain
+sadness before throwing it away; it belongs to my home.
+
+And all the country round about.  These villages, how delightful are
+their names to my ear!  I find myself reading with interest all the local
+news in the Exeter paper.  Not that I care about the people; with barely
+one or two exceptions, the people are nothing to me, and the less I see
+of them the better I am pleased.  But the _places_ grow ever more dear to
+me.  I like to know of anything that has happened at Heavitree, or
+Brampford Speke, or Newton St. Cyres.  I begin to pride myself on knowing
+every road and lane, every bridle path and foot-way for miles about.  I
+like to learn the names of farms and of fields.  And all this because
+here is my abiding place, because I am home for ever.
+
+It seems to me that the very clouds that pass above my house are more
+interesting and beautiful than clouds elsewhere.
+
+And to think that at one time I called myself a socialist, communist,
+anything you like of the revolutionary kind!  Not for long, to be sure,
+and I suspect that there was always something in me that scoffed when my
+lips uttered such things.  Why, no man living has a more profound sense
+of property than I; no man ever lived, who was, in every fibre, more
+vehemently an individualist.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+In this high summertide, I remember with a strange feeling that there are
+people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in cities, who
+throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in public eating-
+houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre.  They call it life; they call
+it enjoyment.  Why, so it is, for them; they are so made.  The folly is
+mine, to wonder that they fulfil their destiny.
+
+But with what deep and quiet thanksgiving do I remind myself that never
+shall I mingle with that well-millinered and tailored herd!  Happily, I
+never saw much of them.  Certain occasions I recall when a supposed
+necessity took me into their dismal precincts; a sick buzzing in the
+brain, a languor as of exhausted limbs, comes upon me with the memory.
+The relief with which I stepped out into the street again, when all was
+over!  Dear to me then was poverty, which for the moment seemed to make
+me a free man.  Dear to me was the labour at my desk, which, by
+comparison, enabled me to respect myself.
+
+Never again shall I shake hands with man or woman who is not in truth my
+friend.  Never again shall I go to see acquaintances with whom I have no
+acquaintance.  All men my brothers?  Nay, thank Heaven, that they are
+not!  I will do harm, if I can help it, to no one; I will wish good to
+all; but I will make no pretence of personal kindliness where, in the
+nature of things, it cannot be felt.  I have grimaced a smile and
+pattered unmeaning words to many a person whom I despised or from whom in
+heart I shrank; I did so because I had not courage to do otherwise.  For
+a man conscious of such weakness, the best is to live apart from the
+world.  Brave Samuel Johnson!  One such truth-teller is worth all the
+moralists and preachers who ever laboured to humanise mankind.  Had _he_
+withdrawn into solitude, it would have been a national loss.  Every one
+of his blunt, fearless words had more value than a whole evangel on the
+lips of a timidly good man.  It is thus that the commonalty, however well
+clad, should be treated.  So seldom does the fool or the ruffian in
+broadcloth hear his just designation; so seldom is the man found who has
+a right to address him by it.  By the bandying of insults we profit
+nothing; there can be no useful rebuke which is exposed to a _tu quoque_.
+But, as the world is, an honest and wise man should have a rough tongue.
+Let him speak and spare not!
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+Vituperation of the English climate is foolish.  A better climate does
+not exist--for healthy people; and it is always as regards the average
+native in sound health that a climate must be judged.  Invalids have no
+right whatever to talk petulantly of the natural changes of the sky;
+Nature has not _them_ in view; let them (if they can) seek exceptional
+conditions for their exceptional state, leaving behind them many a
+million of sound, hearty men and women who take the seasons as they come,
+and profit by each in turn.  In its freedom from extremes, in its common
+clemency, even in its caprice, which at the worst time holds out hope,
+our island weather compares well with that of other lands.  Who enjoys
+the fine day of spring, summer, autumn, or winter so much as an
+Englishman?  His perpetual talk of the weather is testimony to his keen
+relish for most of what it offers him; in lands of blue monotony, even as
+where climatic conditions are plainly evil, such talk does not go on.  So,
+granting that we have bad days not a few, that the east wind takes us by
+the throat, that the mists get at our joints, that the sun hides his
+glory too often and too long, it is plain that the result of all comes to
+good, that it engenders a mood of zest under the most various aspects of
+heaven, keeps an edge on our appetite for open-air life.
+
+I, of course, am one of the weaklings who, in grumbling at the weather,
+merely invite compassion.  July, this year, is clouded and windy, very
+cheerless even here in Devon; I fret and shiver and mutter to myself
+something about southern skies.  Pshaw!  Were I the average man of my
+years, I should be striding over Haldon, caring not a jot for the heavy
+sky, finding a score of compensations for the lack of sun.  Can I not
+have patience?  Do I not know that, some morning, the east will open like
+a bursting bud into warmth and splendour, and the azure depths above will
+have only the more solace for my starved anatomy because of this
+protracted disappointment?
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+I have been at the seaside--enjoying it, yes, but in what a doddering,
+senile sort of way!  Is it I who used to drink the strong wind like wine,
+who ran exultingly along the wet sands and leapt from rock to rock,
+barefoot, on the slippery seaweed, who breasted the swelling breaker, and
+shouted with joy as it buried me in gleaming foam?  At the seaside I knew
+no such thing as bad weather; there were but changes of eager mood and
+full-blooded life.  Now, if the breeze blow too roughly, if there come a
+pelting shower, I must look for shelter, and sit with my cloak about me.
+It is but a new reminder that I do best to stay at home, travelling only
+in reminiscence.
+
+At Weymouth I enjoyed a hearty laugh, one of the good things not easy to
+get after middle age.  There was a notice of steamboats which ply along
+the coast, steamboats recommended to the public as being "_replete with
+lavatories and a ladies' saloon_."  Think how many people read this
+without a chuckle!
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+In the last ten years I have seen a good deal of English inns in many
+parts of the country, and it astonishes me to find how bad they are.  Only
+once or twice have I chanced upon an inn (or, if you like, hotel) where I
+enjoyed any sort of comfort.  More often than not, even the beds are
+unsatisfactory--either pretentiously huge and choked with drapery, or
+hard and thinly accoutred.  Furnishing is uniformly hideous, and there is
+either no attempt at ornament (the safest thing) or a villainous taste
+thrusts itself upon one at every turn.  The meals, in general, are coarse
+and poor in quality, and served with gross slovenliness.
+
+I have often heard it said that the touring cyclist has caused the
+revival of wayside inns.  It may be so, but the touring cyclist seems to
+be very easily satisfied.  Unless we are greatly deceived by the old
+writers, an English inn used to be a delightful resort, abounding in
+comfort, and supplied with the best of food; a place, too, where one was
+sure of welcome at once hearty and courteous.  The inns of to-day, in
+country towns and villages, are not in that good old sense inns at all;
+they are merely public-houses.  The landlord's chief interest is the sale
+of liquor.  Under his roof you may, if you choose, eat and sleep, but
+what you are expected to do is to drink.  Yet, even for drinking, there
+is no decent accommodation.  You will find what is called a bar-parlour,
+a stuffy and dirty room, with crazy chairs, where only the sodden dram-
+gulper could imagine himself at ease.  Should you wish to write a letter,
+only the worst pen and the vilest ink is forthcoming; this, even in the
+"commercial room" of many an inn which seems to depend upon the custom of
+travelling tradesmen.  Indeed, this whole business of innkeeping is
+incredibly mismanaged.  Most of all does the common ineptitude or
+brutality enrage one when it has possession of an old and picturesque
+house, such as reminds you of the best tradition, a house which might be
+made as comfortable as house can be, a place of rest and mirth.
+
+At a public-house you expect public-house manners, and nothing better
+will meet you at most of the so-called inns or hotels.  It surprises me
+to think in how few instances I have found even the pretence of civility.
+As a rule, the landlord and landlady are either contemptuously superior
+or boorishly familiar; the waiters and chambermaids do their work with an
+indifference which only softens to a condescending interest at the moment
+of your departure, when, if the tip be thought insufficient, a sneer or a
+muttered insult speeds you on your way.  One inn I remember, where,
+having to go in and out two or three times in a morning, I always found
+the front door blocked by the portly forms of two women, the landlady and
+the barmaid, who stood there chatting and surveying the street.  Coming
+from within the house, I had to call out a request for passage; it was
+granted with all deliberation, and with not a syllable of apology.  This
+was the best "hotel" in a Sussex market town.
+
+And the food.  Here, beyond doubt, there is grave degeneracy.  It is
+impossible to suppose that the old travellers by coach were contented
+with entertainment such as one gets nowadays at the table of a country
+hotel.  The cooking is wont to be wretched; the quality of the meat and
+vegetables worse than mediocre.  What!  Shall one ask in vain at an
+English inn for an honest chop or steak?  Again and again has my appetite
+been frustrated with an offer of mere sinew and scrag.  At a hotel where
+the charge for lunch was five shillings, I have been sickened with pulpy
+potatoes and stringy cabbage.  The very joint--ribs or sirloin, leg or
+shoulder--is commonly a poor, underfed, sapless thing, scorched in an
+oven; and as for the round of beef, it has as good as
+disappeared--probably because it asks too much skill in the salting.  Then
+again one's breakfast bacon; what intolerable stuff, smelling of
+saltpetre, has been set before me when I paid the price of the best
+smoked Wiltshire!  It would be mere indulgence of the spirit of grumbling
+to talk about poisonous tea and washy coffee; every one knows that these
+drinks cannot be had at public tables; but what if there be real reason
+for discontent with one's pint of ale?  Often, still, that draught from
+the local brewery is sound and invigorating, but there are grievous
+exceptions, and no doubt the tendency is here, as in other things--a
+falling off, a carelessness, if not a calculating dishonesty.  I foresee
+the day when Englishmen will have forgotten how to brew beer; when one's
+only safety will lie in the draught imported from Munich.
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+I was taking a meal once at a London restaurant--not one of the great
+eating-places to which men most resort, but a small establishment on the
+same model in a quiet neighbourhood--when there entered, and sat down at
+the next table, a young man of the working class, whose dress betokened
+holiday.  A glance told me that he felt anything but at ease; his mind
+misgave him as he looked about the long room and at the table before him;
+and when a waiter came to offer him the card, he stared blankly in
+sheepish confusion.  Some strange windfall, no doubt, had emboldened him
+to enter for the first time such a place as this, and now that he was
+here, he heartily wished himself out in the street again.  However, aided
+by the waiter's suggestions, he gave an order for a beef-steak and
+vegetables.  When the dish was served, the poor fellow simply could not
+make a start upon it; he was embarrassed by the display of knives and
+forks, by the arrangement of the dishes, by the sauce bottles and the
+cruet-stand, above all, no doubt, by the assembly of people not of his
+class, and the unwonted experience of being waited upon by a man with a
+long shirt-front.  He grew red; he made the clumsiest and most futile
+efforts to transport the meat to his plate; food was there before him,
+but, like a very Tantalus, he was forbidden to enjoy it.  Observing with
+all discretion, I at length saw him pull out his pocket handkerchief,
+spread it on the table, and, with a sudden effort, fork the meat off the
+dish into this receptacle.  The waiter, aware by this time of the
+customer's difficulty, came up and spoke a word to him.  Abashed into
+anger, the young man roughly asked what he had to pay.  It ended in the
+waiter's bringing a newspaper, wherein he helped to wrap up meat and
+vegetables.  Money was flung down, and the victim of a mistaken ambition
+hurriedly departed, to satisfy his hunger amid less unfamiliar
+surroundings.
+
+It was a striking and unpleasant illustration of social differences.
+Could such a thing happen in any country but England?  I doubt it.  The
+sufferer was of decent appearance, and, with ordinary self-command, might
+have taken his meal in the restaurant like any one else, quite unnoticed.
+But he belonged to a class which, among all classes in the world, is
+distinguished by native clownishness and by unpliability to novel
+circumstance.  The English lower ranks had need be marked by certain
+peculiar virtues to atone for their deficiencies in other respects.
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+It is easy to understand that common judgment of foreigners regarding the
+English people.  Go about in England as a stranger, travel by rail, live
+at hotels, see nothing but the broadly public aspect of things, and the
+impression left upon you will be one of hard egoism, of gruffness and
+sullenness; in a word, of everything that contrasts most strongly with
+the ideal of social and civic life.  And yet, as a matter of fact, no
+nation possesses in so high a degree the social and civic virtues.  The
+unsociable Englishman, quotha?  Why, what country in the world can show
+such multifarious, vigorous and cordial co-operation, in all ranks, but
+especially, of course, among the intelligent, for ends which concern the
+common good?  Unsociable!  Why, go where you will in England you can
+hardly find a man--nowadays, indeed, scarce an educated woman--who does
+not belong to some alliance, for study or sport, for municipal or
+national benefit, and who will not be seen, in leisure time, doing his
+best as a social being.  Take the so-called sleepy market-town; it is
+bubbling with all manner of associated activities, and these of the quite
+voluntary kind, forms of zealously united effort such as are never dreamt
+of in the countries supposed to be eminently "social."  Sociability does
+not consist in a readiness to talk at large with the first comer.  It is
+not dependent upon natural grace and suavity; it is compatible, indeed,
+with thoroughly awkward and all but brutal manners.  The English have
+never (at all events, for some two centuries past) inclined to the purely
+ceremonial or mirthful forms of sociability; but as regards every prime
+interest of the community--health and comfort, well-being of body and of
+soul--their social instinct is supreme.
+
+Yet it is so difficult to reconcile this indisputable fact with that
+other fact, no less obvious, that your common Englishman seems to have no
+geniality.  From the one point of view, I admire and laud my fellow
+countryman; from the other, I heartily dislike him and wish to see as
+little of him as possible.  One is wont to think of the English as a
+genial folk.  Have they lost in this respect?  Has the century of science
+and money-making sensibly affected the national character?  I think
+always of my experience at the English inn, where it is impossible not to
+feel a brutal indifference to the humane features of life; where food is
+bolted without attention, liquor swallowed out of mere habit, where even
+good-natured accost is a thing so rare as to be remarkable.
+
+Two things have to be borne in mind: the extraordinary difference of
+demeanour which exists between the refined and the vulgar English, and
+the natural difficulty of an Englishman in revealing his true self save
+under the most favourable circumstances.
+
+So striking is the difference of manner between class and class that the
+hasty observer might well imagine a corresponding and radical difference
+of mind and character.  In Russia, I suppose, the social extremities are
+seen to be pretty far apart, but, with that possible exception, I should
+think no European country can show such a gap as yawns to the eye between
+the English gentleman and the English boor.  The boor, of course, is the
+multitude; the boor impresses himself upon the traveller.  When relieved
+from his presence, one can be just to him; one can remember that his
+virtues--though elementary, and strictly in need of direction--are the
+same, to a great extent, as those of the well-bred man.  He does not
+represent--though seeming to do so--a nation apart.  To understand this
+multitude, you must get below its insufferable manners, and learn that
+very fine civic qualities can consist with a personal bearing almost
+wholly repellent.
+
+Then, as to the dogged reserve of the educated man, why, I have only to
+look into myself.  I, it is true, am not quite a representative
+Englishman; my self-consciousness, my meditative habit of mind, rather
+dim my national and social characteristics; but set me among a few
+specimens of the multitude, and am I not at once aware of that
+instinctive antipathy, that shrinking into myself, that something like
+unto scorn, of which the Englishman is accused by foreigners who casually
+meet him?  Peculiar to me is the effort to overcome this first impulse--an
+effort which often enough succeeds.  If I know myself at all, I am not an
+ungenial man; and yet I am quite sure that many people who have known me
+casually would say that my fault is a lack of geniality.  To show my true
+self, I must be in the right mood and the right circumstances--which,
+after all, is merely as much as saying that I am decidedly English.
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey.  Not the manufactured
+stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me
+by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden.  It gives,
+I confess, more pleasure to my eye than to my palate; but I like to taste
+of it, because it is honey.
+
+There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an
+unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was
+no extravagance.  Think merely how one's view of common things is
+affected by literary association.  What were honey to me if I knew
+nothing of Hymettus and Hybla?--if my mind had no stores of poetry, no
+memories of romance?  Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it
+some pleasantness of rustic odour; but of what poor significance even
+that, if the country were to me mere grass and corn and vegetables, as to
+the man who has never read nor wished to read.  For the Poet is indeed a
+Maker: above the world of sense, trodden by hidebound humanity, he builds
+that world of his own whereto is summoned the unfettered spirit.  Why
+does it delight me to see the bat flitting at dusk before my window, or
+to hear the hoot of the owl when all the ways are dark?  I might regard
+the bat with disgust, and the owl either with vague superstition or not
+heed it at all.  But these have their place in the poet's world, and
+carry me above this idle present.
+
+I once passed a night in a little market-town where I had arrived tired
+and went to bed early.  I slept forthwith, but was presently awakened by
+I knew not what; in the darkness there sounded a sort of music, and, as
+my brain cleared, I was aware of the soft chiming of church bells.  Why,
+what hour could it be?  I struck a light and looked at my watch.
+Midnight.  Then a glow came over me.  "We have heard the chimes at
+midnight, Master Shallow!"  Never till then had _I_ heard them.  And the
+town in which I slept was Evesham, but a few miles from
+Stratford-on-Avon.  What if those midnight bells had been to me but as
+any other, and I had reviled them for breaking my sleep?--Johnson did not
+much exaggerate.
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+It is the second Jubilee.  Bonfires blaze upon the hills, making one
+think of the watchman on Agamemnon's citadel.  (It were more germane to
+the matter to think of Queen Elizabeth and the Armada.)  Though wishing
+the uproar happily over, I can see the good in it as well as another man.
+English monarchy, as we know it, is a triumph of English common sense.
+Grant that men cannot do without an overlord; how to make that
+over-lordship consist with the largest practical measure of national and
+individual liberty?  We, at all events, have for a time solved the
+question.  For a time only, of course; but consider the history of
+Europe, and our jubilation is perhaps justified.
+
+For sixty years has the British Republic held on its way under one
+President.  It is wide of the mark to object that other Republics, which
+change their President more frequently, support the semblance of over-
+lordship at considerably less cost to the people.  Britons are minded for
+the present that the Head of their State shall be called King or Queen;
+the name is pleasant to them; it corresponds to a popular sentiment,
+vaguely understood, but still operative, which is called loyalty.  The
+majority thinking thus, and the system being found to work more than
+tolerably well, what purpose could be served by an attempt at _novas
+res_?  The nation is content to pay the price; it is the nation's affair.
+Moreover, who can feel the least assurance that a change to one of the
+common forms of Republicanism would be for the general advantage?  Do we
+find that countries which have made the experiment are so very much
+better off than our own in point of stable, quiet government and of
+national welfare?  The theorist scoffs at forms which have survived their
+meaning, at privilege which will bear no examination, at compromises
+which sound ludicrous, at submissions which seem contemptible; but let
+him put forward his practical scheme for making all men rational,
+consistent, just.  Englishmen, I imagine, are not endowed with these
+qualities in any extraordinary degree.  Their strength, politically
+speaking, lies in a recognition of expediency, complemented by respect
+for the established fact.  One of the facts particularly clear to them is
+the suitability to their minds, their tempers, their habits, of a system
+of polity which has been established by the slow effort of generations
+within this sea-girt realm.  They have nothing to do with ideals: they
+never trouble themselves to think about the Rights of Man.  If you talk
+to them (long enough) about the rights of the shopman, or the ploughman,
+or the cat's-meat-man, they will lend ear, and, when the facts of any
+such case have been examined, they will find a way of dealing with them.
+This characteristic of theirs they call Common Sense.  To them, all
+things considered, it has been of vast service; one may even say that the
+rest of the world has profited by it not a little.  That Uncommon Sense
+might now and then have stood them even in better stead is nothing to the
+point.  The Englishman deals with things as they are, and first and
+foremost accepts his own being.
+
+This Jubilee declares a legitimate triumph of the average man.  Look back
+for threescore years, and who shall affect to doubt that the time has
+been marked by many improvements in the material life of the English
+people?  Often have they been at loggerheads among themselves, but they
+have never flown at each other's throats, and from every grave dispute
+has resulted some substantial gain.  They are a cleaner people and a more
+sober; in every class there is a diminution of brutality; education--stand
+for what it may--has notably extended; certain forms of tyranny have been
+abolished; certain forms of suffering, due to heedlessness or ignorance,
+have been abated.  True, these are mere details; whether they indicate a
+solid advance in civilization cannot yet be determined.  But assuredly
+the average Briton has cause to jubilate; for the progressive features of
+the epoch are such as he can understand and approve, whereas the doubt
+which may be cast upon its ethical complexion is for him either
+non-existent or unintelligible.  So let cressets flare into the night
+from all the hills!  It is no purchased exultation, no servile flattery.
+The People acclaims itself, yet not without genuine gratitude and
+affection towards the Representative of its glory and its power.  The
+Constitutional Compact has been well preserved.  Review the record of
+kingdoms, and say how often it has come to pass that sovereign and people
+rejoiced together over bloodless victories.
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their breakfast
+on the question of diet.  They agreed that most people ate too much meat,
+and one of them went so far as to declare that, for his part, he rather
+preferred vegetables and fruit.  "Why," he said, "will you believe me
+that I sometimes make a breakfast of apples?"  This announcement was
+received in silence; evidently the two listeners didn't quite know what
+to think of it.  Thereupon the speaker, in rather a blustering tone,
+cried out, "Yes, I can make a very good breakfast on _two or three pounds
+of apples_."
+
+Wasn't it amusing?  And wasn't it characteristic?  This honest Briton had
+gone too far in frankness.  'Tis all very well to like vegetables and
+fruits up to a certain point; but to breakfast on apples!  His
+companions' silence proved that they were just a little ashamed of him;
+his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to right himself in their
+opinion, nothing better occurred to the man than to protest that he ate
+apples, yes, but not merely one or two; he ate them largely, _by the
+pound_!  I laughed at the fellow, but I thoroughly understood him; so
+would every Englishman; for at the root of our being is a hatred of
+parsimony.  This manifests itself in all sorts of ludicrous or
+contemptible forms, but no less is it the source of our finest qualities.
+An Englishman desires, above all, to live largely; on that account he not
+only dreads, but hates and despises, poverty.  His virtues are those of
+the free-handed and warm-hearted opulent man; his weaknesses come of the
+sense of inferiority (intensely painful and humiliating) which attaches
+in his mind to one who cannot spend and give; his vices, for the most
+part, originate in loss of self-respect due to loss of secure position.
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+For a nation of this temper, the movement towards democracy is fraught
+with peculiar dangers.  Profoundly aristocratic in his sympathies, the
+Englishman has always seen in the patrician class not merely a social,
+but a moral, superiority; the man of blue blood was to him a living
+representative of those potencies and virtues which made his ideal of the
+worthy life.  Very significant is the cordial alliance from old time
+between nobles and people; free, proud homage on one side answering to
+gallant championship on the other; both classes working together in the
+cause of liberty.  However great the sacrifices of the common folk for
+the maintenance of aristocratic power and splendour, they were gladly
+made; this was the Englishman's religion, his inborn _pietas_; in the
+depths of the dullest soul moved a perception of the ethic meaning
+attached to lordship.  Your Lord was the privileged being endowed by
+descent with generous instincts, and possessed of means to show them
+forth in act.  A poor noble was a contradiction in terms; if such a
+person existed, he could only be spoken of with wondering sadness, as
+though he were the victim of some freak of nature.  The Lord was
+Honourable, Right Honourable; his acts, his words virtually constituted
+the code of honour whereby the nation lived.
+
+In a new world, beyond the ocean, there grew up a new race, a scion of
+England, which shaped its life without regard to the principle of
+hereditary lordship; and in course of time this triumphant Republic began
+to shake the ideals of the Motherland.  Its civilization, spite of
+superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it
+superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad
+picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the
+old cult.  Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but
+evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth.  If it has done us good,
+assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable.  In old England, democracy is
+a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line of
+its progress seems hitherto a mere track of ruin.  In the very word is
+something from which we shrink; it seems to signify nothing less than a
+national apostasy, a denial of the faith in which we won our glory.  The
+democratic Englishman is, by the laws of his own nature, in parlous case;
+he has lost the ideal by which he guided his rude, prodigal, domineering
+instincts; in place of the Right Honourable, born to noble things, he has
+set up the mere Plebs, born, more likely than not, for all manner of
+baseness.  And, amid all his show of loud self-confidence, the man is
+haunted with misgiving.
+
+The task before us is no light one.  Can we, whilst losing the class,
+retain the idea it embodied?  Can we English, ever so subject to the
+material, liberate ourselves from that old association, yet guard its
+meaning in the sphere of spiritual life?  Can we, with eyes which have
+ceased to look reverently on worn-out symbols, learn to select from among
+the grey-coated multitude, and place in reverence even higher him who
+"holds his patent of nobility straight from Almighty God"?  Upon that
+depends the future of England.  In days gone by, our very Snob bore
+testimony after his fashion to our scorn of meanness; he at all events
+imagined himself to be imitating those who were incapable of a sordid
+transaction, of a plebeian compliance.  But the Snob, one notes, is in
+the way of degeneracy; he has new exemplars; he speaks a ruder language.
+Him, be sure, in one form or another, we shall have always with us, and
+to observe his habits is to note the tenor of the time.  If he have at
+the back of his dim mind no living ideal which lends his foolishness a
+generous significance, then indeed--_videant consules_.
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+A visit from N-.  He stayed with me two days, and I wish he could have
+stayed a third.  (Beyond the third day, I am not sure that any man would
+be wholly welcome.  My strength will bear but a certain amount of
+conversation, even the pleasantest, and before long I desire solitude,
+which is rest.)
+
+The mere sight of N-, to say nothing of his talk, did me good.  If
+appearances can ever be trusted, there are few men who get more enjoyment
+out of life.  His hardships were never excessive; they did not affect his
+health or touch his spirits; probably he is in every way a better man for
+having--as he says--"gone through the mill."  His recollection of the
+time when he had to work hard for a five-pound note, and was not always
+sure of getting it, obviously lends gusto to his present state of ease.  I
+persuaded him to talk about his successes, and to give me a glimpse of
+their meaning in solid cash.  Last Midsummer day, his receipts for the
+twelvemonth were more than two thousand pounds.  Nothing wonderful, of
+course, bearing in mind what some men are making by their pen; but very
+good for a writer who does not address the baser throng.  Two thousand
+pounds in a year!  I gazed at him with wonder and admiration.
+
+I have known very few prosperous men of letters; N--- represents for me
+the best and brightest side of literary success.  Say what one will after
+a lifetime of disillusion, the author who earns largely by honest and
+capable work is among the few enviable mortals.  Think of N---'s
+existence.  No other man could do what he is doing, and he does it with
+ease.  Two, or at most three, hours' work a day--and that by no means
+every day--suffices to him.  Like all who write, he has his unfruitful
+times, his mental worries, his disappointments, but these bear no
+proportion to the hours of happy and effective labour.  Every time I see
+him he looks in better health, for of late years he has taken much more
+exercise, and he is often travelling.  He is happy in his wife and
+children; the thought of all the comforts and pleasures he is able to
+give them must be a constant joy to him; were he to die, his family is
+safe from want.  He has friends and acquaintances as many as he desires;
+congenial folk gather at his table; he is welcome in pleasant houses near
+and far; his praise is upon the lips of all whose praise is worth having.
+With all this, he has the good sense to avoid manifest dangers; he has
+not abandoned his privacy, and he seems to be in no danger of being
+spoilt by good fortune.  His work is more to him than a means of earning
+money; he talks about a book he has in hand almost as freshly and keenly
+as in the old days, when his annual income was barely a couple of
+hundred.  I note, too, that his leisure is not swamped with the
+publications of the day; he reads as many old books as new, and keeps
+many of his early enthusiasms.
+
+He is one of the men I heartily like.  That he greatly cares for me I do
+not suppose, but this has nothing to do with the matter; enough that he
+likes my society well enough to make a special journey down into Devon.  I
+represent to him, of course, the days gone by, and for their sake he will
+always feel an interest in me.  Being ten years my junior, he must
+naturally regard me as an old buffer; I notice, indeed, that he is just a
+little too deferential at moments.  He feels a certain respect for some
+of my work, but thinks, I am sure, that I ceased writing none too
+soon--which is very true.  If I had not been such a lucky fellow--if at
+this moment I were still toiling for bread--it is probable that he and I
+would see each other very seldom; for N--- has delicacy, and would shrink
+from bringing his high-spirited affluence face to face with Grub Street
+squalor and gloom; whilst I, on the other hand, should hate to think that
+he kept up my acquaintance from a sense of decency.  As it is we are very
+good friends, quite unembarrassed, and--for a couple of days--really
+enjoy the sight and hearing of each other.  That I am able to give him a
+comfortable bedroom, and set before him an eatable dinner, flatters my
+pride.  If I chose at any time to accept his hearty invitation, I can do
+so without moral twinges.
+
+Two thousand pounds!  If, at N---'s age, I had achieved that income, what
+would have been the result upon me?  Nothing but good, I know; but what
+form would the good have taken?  Should I have become a social man, a
+giver of dinners, a member of clubs?  Or should I merely have begun, ten
+years sooner, the life I am living now?  That is more likely.
+
+In my twenties I used to say to myself: what a splendid thing it will be
+_when_ I am the possessor of a thousand pounds!  Well, I have never
+possessed that sum--never anything like it--and now never shall.  Yet it
+was not an extravagant ambition, methinks, however primitive.
+
+As we sat in the garden dusk, the scent of our pipes mingling with that
+of roses, N--- said to me in a laughing tone: "Come now, tell me how you
+felt when you first heard of your legacy?"  And I could not tell him; I
+had nothing to say; no vivid recollection of the moment would come back
+to me.  I am afraid N--- thought he had been indiscreet, for he passed
+quickly to another subject.  Thinking it over now, I see, of course, that
+it would be impossible to put into words the feeling of that supreme
+moment of life.  It was not joy that possessed me; I did not exult; I did
+not lose control of myself in any way.  But I remember drawing one or two
+deep sighs, as if all at once relieved of some distressing burden or
+constraint.  Only some hours after did I begin to feel any kind of
+agitation.  That night I did not close my eyes; the night after I slept
+longer and more soundly than I remember to have done for a score of
+years.  Once or twice in the first week I had a hysterical feeling; I
+scarce kept myself from shedding tears.  And the strange thing is that it
+seems to have happened so long ago; I seem to have been a free man for
+many a twelvemonth, instead of only for two.  Indeed, that is what I have
+often thought about forms of true happiness; the brief are quite as
+satisfying as those that last long.  I wanted, before my death, to enjoy
+liberty from care, and repose in a place I love.  That was granted me;
+and, had I known it only for one whole year, the sum of my enjoyment
+would have been no whit less than if I live to savour it for a decade.
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+The honest fellow who comes to dig in my garden is puzzled to account for
+my peculiarities; I often catch a look of wondering speculation in his
+eye when it turns upon me.  It is all because I will not let him lay out
+flower-beds in the usual way, and make the bit of ground in front of the
+house really neat and ornamental.  At first he put it down to meanness,
+but he knows by now that that cannot be the explanation.  That I really
+prefer a garden so poor and plain that every cottager would be ashamed of
+it, he cannot bring himself to believe, and of course I have long since
+given up trying to explain myself.  The good man probably concludes that
+too many books and the habit of solitude have somewhat affected what he
+would call my "reasons."
+
+The only garden flowers I care for are the quite old-fashioned roses,
+sunflowers, hollyhocks, lilies and so on, and these I like to see growing
+as much as possible as if they were wild.  Trim and symmetrical beds are
+my abhorrence, and most of the flowers which are put into them--hybrids
+with some grotesque name--Jonesia, Snooksia--hurt my eyes.  On the other
+hand, a garden is a garden, and I would not try to introduce into it the
+flowers which are my solace in lanes and fields.  Foxgloves, for
+instance--it would pain me to see them thus transplanted.
+
+I think of foxgloves, for it is the moment of their glory.  Yesterday I
+went to the lane which I visit every year at this time, the deep, rutty
+cart-track, descending between banks covered with giant fronds of the
+polypodium, and overhung with wych-elm and hazel, to that cool, grassy
+nook where the noble flowers hang on stems all but of my own height.
+Nowhere have I seen finer foxgloves.  I suppose they rejoice me so
+because of early memories--to a child it is the most impressive of wild
+flowers; I would walk miles any day to see a fine cluster, as I would to
+see the shining of purple loosestrife by the water edge, or white lilies
+floating upon the still depth.
+
+But the gardener and I understand each other as soon as we go to the back
+of the house, and get among the vegetables.  On that ground he finds me
+perfectly sane.  And indeed I am not sure that the kitchen garden does
+not give me more pleasure than the domain of flowers.  Every morning I
+step round before breakfast to see how things are "coming on."  It is
+happiness to note the swelling of pods, the healthy vigour of potato
+plants, aye, even the shooting up of radishes and cress.  This year I
+have a grove of Jerusalem artichokes; they are seven or eight feet high,
+and I seem to get vigour as I look at the stems which are all but trunks,
+at the great beautiful leaves.  Delightful, too, are the scarlet runners,
+which have to be propped again and again, or they would break down under
+the abundance of their yield.  It is a treat to me to go among them with
+a basket, gathering; I feel as though Nature herself showed kindness to
+me, in giving me such abundant food.  How fresh and wholesome are the
+odours--especially if a shower has fallen not long ago!
+
+I have some magnificent carrots this year--straight, clean, tapering, the
+colour a joy to look upon.
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+
+For two things do my thoughts turn now and then to London.  I should like
+to hear the long note of a master's violin, or the faultless cadence of
+an exquisite voice, and I should like to see pictures.  Music and
+painting have always meant much to me; here I can enjoy them only in
+memory.
+
+Of course there is the discomfort of concert-hall and exhibition-rooms.
+My pleasure in the finest music would be greatly spoilt by having to sit
+amid a crowd, with some idiot audible on right hand or left, and the show
+of pictures would give me a headache in the first quarter of an hour.
+_Non sum qualis eram_ when I waited several hours at the gallery door to
+hear Patti, and knew not a moment's fatigue to the end of the concert; or
+when, at the Academy, I was astonished to find that it was four o'clock,
+and I had forgotten food since breakfast.  The truth is, I do not much
+enjoy anything nowadays which I cannot enjoy _alone_.  It sounds morose;
+I imagine the comment of good people if they overheard such a confession.
+Ought I, in truth, to be ashamed of it?
+
+I always read the newspaper articles on exhibitions of pictures, and with
+most pleasure when the pictures are landscapes.  The mere names of
+paintings often gladden me for a whole day--those names which bring
+before the mind a bit of seashore, a riverside, a glimpse of moorland or
+of woods.  However feeble his criticism, the journalist generally writes
+with appreciation of these subjects; his descriptions carry me away to
+all sorts of places which I shall never see again with the bodily eye,
+and I thank him for his unconscious magic.  Much better this, after all,
+than really going to London and seeing the pictures themselves.  They
+would not disappoint me; I love and honour even the least of English
+landscape painters; but I should try to see too many at once, and fall
+back into my old mood of tired grumbling at the conditions of modern
+life.  For a year or two I have grumbled little--all the better for me.
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+
+Of late, I have been wishing for music.  An odd chance gratified my
+desire.
+
+I had to go into Exeter yesterday.  I got there about sunset, transacted
+my business, and turned to walk home again through the warm twilight.  In
+Southernhay, as I was passing a house of which the ground-floor windows
+stood open, there sounded the notes of a piano--chords touched by a
+skilful hand.  I checked my step, hoping, and in a minute or two the
+musician began to play that nocturne of Chopin which I love best--I don't
+know how to name it.  My heart leapt.  There I stood in the thickening
+dusk, the glorious sounds floating about me; and I trembled with very
+ecstasy of enjoyment.  When silence came, I waited in the hope of another
+piece, but nothing followed, and so I went my way.
+
+It is well for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I
+should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by
+haphazard.  As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and
+reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude to my
+unknown benefactor--a state of mind I have often experienced in the days
+long gone by.  It happened at times--not in my barest days, but in those
+of decent poverty--that some one in the house where I lodged played the
+piano--and how it rejoiced me when this came to pass!  I say "played the
+piano"--a phrase that covers much.  For my own part, I was very tolerant;
+anything that could by the largest interpretation be called music, I
+welcomed and was thankful; for even "five-finger exercises" I found, at
+moments, better than nothing.  For it was when I was labouring at my desk
+that the notes of the instrument were grateful and helpful to me.  Some
+men, I believe, would have been driven frantic under the circumstances;
+to me, anything like a musical sound always came as a godsend; it tuned
+my thoughts; it made the words flow.  Even the street organs put me in a
+happy mood; I owe many a page to them--written when I should else have
+been sunk in bilious gloom.
+
+More than once, too, when I was walking London streets by night,
+penniless and miserable, music from an open window has stayed my step,
+even as yesterday.  Very well can I remember such a moment in Eaton
+Square, one night when I was going back to Chelsea, tired, hungry, racked
+by frustrate passions.  I had tramped miles and miles, in the hope of
+wearying myself so that I could sleep and forget.  Then came the piano
+notes--I saw that there was festival in the house--and for an hour or so
+I revelled as none of the bidden guests could possibly be doing.  And
+when I reached my poor lodgings, I was no longer envious nor mad with
+desires, but as I fell asleep I thanked the unknown mortal who had played
+for me, and given me peace.
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+
+To-day I have read _The Tempest_.  It is perhaps the play that I love
+best, and, because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass
+it over in opening the book.  Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare,
+having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than
+I supposed.  So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever
+be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read
+them.
+
+I like to believe that this was the poet's last work, that he wrote it in
+his home at Stratford, walking day by day in the fields which had taught
+his boyhood to love rural England.  It is ripe fruit of the supreme
+imagination, perfect craft of the master hand.  For a man whose life's
+business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that
+of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere
+command of words, every achievement of those even who, apart from him,
+are great?  I could fancy that, in _The Tempest_, he wrought with a
+peculiar consciousness of this power, smiling as the word of inimitable
+felicity, the phrase of incomparable cadence, was whispered to him by the
+Ariel that was his genius.  He seems to sport with language, to amuse
+himself with new discovery of its resources.  From king to beggar, men of
+every rank and every order of mind have spoken with his lips; he has
+uttered the lore of fairyland; now it pleases him to create a being
+neither man nor fairy, a something between brute and human nature, and to
+endow its purposes with words.  These words, how they smack of the moist
+and spawning earth, of the life of creatures that cannot rise above the
+soil!  We do not think of it enough; we stint our wonder because we fall
+short in appreciation.  A miracle is worked before us, and we scarce give
+heed; it has become familiar to our minds as any other of nature's
+marvels, which we rarely pause to reflect upon.
+
+_The Tempest_ contains the noblest meditative passage in all the plays;
+that which embodies Shakespeare's final view of life, and is the
+inevitable quotation of all who would sum the teachings of philosophy.  It
+contains his most exquisite lyrics, his tenderest love passages, and one
+glimpse of fairyland which--I cannot but think--outshines the utmost
+beauty of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_: Prospero's farewell to the "elves
+of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves."  Again a miracle; these
+are things which cannot be staled by repetition.  Come to them often as
+you will, they are ever fresh as though new minted from the brain of the
+poet.  Being perfect, they can never droop under that satiety which
+arises from the perception of fault; their virtue can never be so
+entirely savoured as to leave no pungency of gusto for the next approach.
+
+Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England,
+one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue.  If I
+try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears
+him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the
+labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a
+sense of chill discouragement, of dreary deprivation.  I am wont to think
+that I can read Homer, and, assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I;
+but can I for a moment dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his
+word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas
+lived?  I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than
+a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for
+its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the
+world's primeval glory.  Let every land have joy of its poet; for the
+poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness, all that
+incommunicable heritage for which men live and die.  As I close the book,
+love and reverence possess me.  Whether does my full heart turn to the
+great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he has laid his spell?  I
+know not.  I cannot think of them apart.  In the love and reverence
+awakened by that voice of voices, Shakespeare and England are but one.
+
+
+
+
+AUTUMN
+
+
+I.
+
+
+This has been a year of long sunshine.  Month has followed upon month
+with little unkindness of the sky; I scarcely marked when July passed
+into August, August into September.  I should think it summer still, but
+that I see the lanes yellow-purfled with flowers of autumn.
+
+I am busy with the hawkweeds; that is to say, I am learning to
+distinguish and to name as many as I can.  For scientific classification
+I have little mind; it does not happen to fall in with my habits of
+thought; but I like to be able to give its name (the "trivial" by choice)
+to every flower I meet in my walks.  Why should I be content to say, "Oh,
+it's a hawkweed"?  That is but one degree less ungracious than if I
+dismissed all the yellow-rayed as "dandelions."  I feel as if the flower
+were pleased by my recognition of its personality.  Seeing how much I owe
+them, one and all, the least I can do is to greet them severally.  For
+the same reason I had rather say "hawkweed" than "hieracium"; the
+homelier word has more of kindly friendship.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows not
+why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling suggestion.
+Yesterday I was walking at dusk.  I came to an old farmhouse; at the
+garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it was our doctor's gig.
+Having passed, I turned to look back.  There was a faint afterglow in the
+sky beyond the chimneys; a light twinkled at one of the upper windows.  I
+said to myself, "Tristram Shandy," and hurried home to plunge into a book
+which I have not opened for I dare say twenty years.
+
+Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the
+Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I become
+to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual.  A book worth
+rising for; much better worth than old Burton, who pulled Johnson out of
+bed.  A book which helps one to forget the idle or venomous chatter going
+on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish hope for a world "which has
+such people in't."
+
+These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves at
+the moment when I hungered for them.  But it often happens that the book
+which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I
+breathe regretfully and put aside the thought.  Ah! the books that one
+will never read again.  They gave delight, perchance something more; they
+left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by for ever.  I
+have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me.  Books
+gentle and quieting; books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to
+be pored over, not once but many a time.  Yet never again shall I hold
+them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few.  Perhaps
+when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into
+my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I
+owed a kindness--friends passed upon the way.  What regret in that last
+farewell!
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Every one, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles
+me.  I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association
+or suggestion that I can discover, there rises before me the vision of a
+place I know.  Impossible to explain why that particular spot should show
+itself to my mind's eye; the cerebral impulse is so subtle that no search
+may trace its origin.  If I am reading, doubtless a thought, a phrase,
+possibly a mere word, on the page before me serves to awaken memory.  If
+I am otherwise occupied, it must be an object seen, an odour, a touch;
+perhaps even a posture of the body suffices to recall something in the
+past.  Sometimes the vision passes, and there an end; sometimes, however,
+it has successors, the memory working quite independently of my will, and
+no link appearing between one scene and the next.
+
+Ten minutes ago I was talking with my gardener.  Our topic was the nature
+of the soil, whether or not it would suit a certain kind of vegetable.  Of
+a sudden I found myself gazing at--the Bay of Avlona.  Quite certainly my
+thoughts had not strayed in that direction.  The picture that came before
+me caused me a shock of surprise, and I am still vainly trying to
+discover how I came to behold it.
+
+A happy chance that I ever saw Avlona.  I was on my way from Corfu to
+Brindisi.  The steamer sailed late in the afternoon; there was a little
+wind, and as the December night became chilly, I soon turned in.  With
+the first daylight I was on deck, expecting to find that we were near the
+Italian port; to my surprise, I saw a mountainous shore, towards which
+the ship was making at full speed.  On inquiry, I learnt that this was
+the coast of Albania; our vessel not being very seaworthy, and the wind
+still blowing a little (though not enough to make any passenger
+uncomfortable), the captain had turned back when nearly half across the
+Adriatic, and was seeking a haven in the shelter of the snow-topped
+hills.  Presently we steamed into a great bay, in the narrow mouth of
+which lay an island.  My map showed me where we were, and with no small
+interest I discovered that the long line of heights guarding the bay on
+its southern side formed the Acroceraunian Promontory.  A little town
+visible high up on the inner shore was the ancient Aulon.
+
+Here we anchored, and lay all day long.  Provisions running short, a boat
+had to be sent to land, and the sailors purchased, among other things,
+some peculiarly detestable bread--according to them, _cotto al sole_.
+There was not a cloud in the sky; till evening, the wind whistled above
+our heads, but the sea about us was blue and smooth.  I sat in hot
+sunshine, feasting my eyes on the beautiful cliffs and valleys of the
+thickly-wooded shore.  Then came a noble sunset; then night crept gently
+into the hollows of the hills, which now were coloured the deepest,
+richest green.  A little lighthouse began to shine.  In the perfect calm
+that had fallen, I heard breakers murmuring softly upon the beach.
+
+At sunrise we entered the port of Brindisi.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+The characteristic motive of English poetry is love of nature, especially
+of nature as seen in the English rural landscape.  From the "Cuckoo Song"
+of our language in its beginnings to the perfect loveliness of Tennyson's
+best verse, this note is ever sounding.  It is persistent even amid the
+triumph of the drama.  Take away from Shakespeare all his bits of natural
+description, all his casual allusions to the life and aspects of the
+country, and what a loss were there!  The reign of the iambic couplet
+confined, but could not suppress, this native music; Pope
+notwithstanding, there came the "Ode to Evening" and that "Elegy" which,
+unsurpassed for beauty of thought and nobility of utterance in all the
+treasury of our lyrics, remains perhaps the most essentially English poem
+ever written.
+
+This attribute of our national mind availed even to give rise to an
+English school of painting.  It came late; that it ever came at all is
+remarkable enough.  A people apparently less apt for that kind of
+achievement never existed.  So profound is the English joy in meadow and
+stream and hill, that, unsatisfied at last with vocal expression, it took
+up the brush, the pencil, the etching tool, and created a new form of
+art.  The National Gallery represents only in a very imperfect way the
+richness and variety of our landscape work.  Were it possible to collect,
+and suitably to display, the very best of such work in every vehicle, I
+know not which would be the stronger emotion in an English heart, pride
+or rapture.
+
+One obvious reason for the long neglect of Turner lies in the fact that
+his genius does not seem to be truly English.  Turner's landscape, even
+when it presents familiar scenes, does not show them in the familiar
+light.  Neither the artist nor the intelligent layman is satisfied.  He
+gives us glorious visions; we admit the glory--but we miss something
+which we deem essential.  I doubt whether Turner tasted rural England; I
+doubt whether the spirit of English poetry was in him; I doubt whether
+the essential significance of the common things which we call beautiful
+was revealed to his soul.  Such doubt does not affect his greatness as a
+poet in colour and in form, but I suspect that it has always been the
+cause why England could not love him.  If any man whom I knew to be a man
+of brains confessed to me that he preferred Birket Foster, I should
+smile--but I should understand.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+A long time since I wrote in this book.  In September I caught a cold,
+which meant three weeks' illness.
+
+I have not been suffering; merely feverish and weak and unable to use my
+mind for anything but a daily hour or two of the lightest reading.  The
+weather has not favoured my recovery, wet winds often blowing, and not
+much sun.  Lying in bed, I have watched the sky, studied the clouds,
+which--so long as they are clouds indeed, and not a mere waste of grey
+vapour--always have their beauty.  Inability to read has always been my
+horror; once, a trouble of the eyes all but drove me mad with fear of
+blindness; but I find that in my present circumstances, in my own still
+house, with no intrusion to be dreaded, with no task or care to worry me,
+I can fleet the time not unpleasantly even without help of books.
+Reverie, unknown to me in the days of bondage, has brought me solace; I
+hope it has a little advanced me in wisdom.
+
+For not, surely, by deliberate effort of thought does a man grow wise.
+The truths of life are not discovered by us.  At moments unforeseen, some
+gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching it to an emotion
+which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into thought.  This can
+happen only in a calm of the senses, a surrender of the whole being to
+passionless contemplation.  I understand, now, the intellectual mood of
+the quietist.
+
+Of course my good housekeeper has tended me perfectly, with the minimum
+of needless talk.  Wonderful woman!
+
+If the evidence of a well-spent life is necessarily seen in "honour,
+love, obedience, troops of friends," mine, it is clear, has fallen short
+of a moderate ideal.  Friends I have had, and have; but very few.  Honour
+and obedience--why, by a stretch, Mrs. M--- may perchance represent these
+blessings.  As for love--?
+
+Let me tell myself the truth.  Do I really believe that at any time of my
+life I have been the kind of man who merits affection?  I think not.  I
+have always been much too self-absorbed; too critical of all about me;
+too unreasonably proud.  Such men as I live and die alone, however much
+in appearance accompanied.  I do not repine at it; nay, lying day after
+day in solitude and silence, I have felt glad that it was so.  At least I
+give no one trouble, and that is much.  Most solemnly do I hope that in
+the latter days no long illness awaits me.  May I pass quickly from this
+life of quiet enjoyment to the final peace.  So shall no one think of me
+with pained sympathy or with weariness.  One--two--even three may
+possibly feel regret, come the end how it may, but I do not flatter
+myself that to them I am more than an object of kindly thought at long
+intervals.  It is enough; it signifies that I have not erred wholly.  And
+when I think that my daily life testifies to an act of kindness such as I
+could never have dreamt of meriting from the man who performed it, may I
+not be much more than content?
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+How I envy those who become prudent without thwackings of experience!
+Such men seem to be not uncommon.  I don't mean cold-blooded calculators
+of profit and loss in life's possibilities; nor yet the plodding dull,
+who never have imagination enough to quit the beaten track of security;
+but bright-witted and large-hearted fellows who seem always to be led by
+common sense, who go steadily from stage to stage of life, doing the
+right, the prudent things, guilty of no vagaries, winning respect by
+natural progress, seldom needing aid themselves, often helpful to others,
+and, through all, good-tempered, deliberate, happy.  How I envy them!
+
+For of myself it might be said that whatever folly is possible to a
+moneyless man, that folly I have at one time or another committed.  Within
+my nature there seemed to be no faculty of rational self-guidance.  Boy
+and man, I blundered into every ditch and bog which lay within sight of
+my way.  Never did silly mortal reap such harvest of experience; never
+had any one so many bruises to show for it.  Thwack, thwack!  No sooner
+had I recovered from one sound drubbing than I put myself in the way of
+another.  "Unpractical" I was called by those who spoke mildly; "idiot"--I
+am sure--by many a ruder tongue.  And idiot I see myself, whenever I
+glance back over the long, devious road.  Something, obviously, I lacked
+from the beginning, some balancing principle granted to most men in one
+or another degree.  I had brains, but they were no help to me in the
+common circumstances of life.  But for the good fortune which plucked me
+out of my mazes and set me in paradise, I should no doubt have blundered
+on to the end.  The last thwack of experience would have laid me low just
+when I was becoming really a prudent man.
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+This morning's sunshine faded amid slow-gathering clouds, but something
+of its light seems still to linger in the air, and to touch the rain
+which is falling softly.  I hear a pattering upon the still leafage of
+the garden; it is a sound which lulls, and tunes the mind to calm
+thoughtfulness.
+
+I have a letter to-day from my old friend in Germany, E. B.  For many and
+many a year these letters have made a pleasant incident in my life; more
+than that, they have often brought me help and comfort.  It must be a
+rare thing for friendly correspondence to go on during the greater part
+of a lifetime between men of different nationalities who see each other
+not twice in two decades.  We were young men when we first met in London,
+poor, struggling, full of hopes and ideals; now we look back upon those
+far memories from the autumn of life.  B. writes to-day in a vein of
+quiet contentment, which does me good.  He quotes Goethe: "_Was man in
+der Jugend begehrt hat man im Alter die Fulle_."
+
+These words of Goethe's were once a hope to me; later, they made me shake
+my head incredulously; now I smile to think how true they have proved in
+my own case.  But what, exactly, do they mean?  Are they merely an
+expression of the optimistic spirit?  If so, optimism has to content
+itself with rather doubtful generalities.  Can it truly be said that most
+men find the wishes of their youth satisfied in later life?  Ten years
+ago, I should have utterly denied it, and could have brought what seemed
+to me abundant evidence in its disproof.  And as regards myself, is it
+not by mere happy accident that I pass my latter years in such enjoyment
+of all I most desired?  Accident--but there is no such thing.  I might
+just as well have called it an accident had I succeeded in earning the
+money on which now I live.
+
+From the beginning of my manhood, it is true, I longed for bookish
+leisure; that, assuredly, is seldom even one of the desires in a young
+man's heart, but perhaps it is one of those which may most reasonably
+look for gratification later on.  What, however, of the multitudes who
+aim only at wealth, for the power and the pride and the material
+pleasures which it represents?  We know very well that few indeed are
+successful in that aim; and, missing it, do they not miss everything?  For
+them, are not Goethe's words mere mockery?
+
+Apply them to mankind at large, and perhaps, after all, they are true.
+The fact of national prosperity and contentment implies, necessarily, the
+prosperity and contentment of the greater number of the individuals of
+which the nation consists.  In other words, the average man who is past
+middle life has obtained what he strove for--success in his calling.  As
+a young man, he would not, perhaps, have set forth his aspirations so
+moderately, but do they not, as a fact, amount to this?  In defence of
+the optimistic view, one may urge how rare it is to meet with an elderly
+man who harbours a repining spirit.  True; but I have always regarded as
+a fact of infinite pathos the ability men have to subdue themselves to
+the conditions of life.  Contentment so often means resignation,
+abandonment of the hope seen to be forbidden.
+
+I cannot resolve this doubt.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's _Port Royal_, a book I have often
+thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that
+period, always held me aloof.  Happily, chance and mood came together,
+and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth acquiring.  It is the
+kind of book which, one may reasonably say, tends to edification.  One is
+better for having lived a while with "Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best
+of them were, surely, not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.
+
+Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; we are among
+theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the
+early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which
+seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint
+of mortality.
+
+A gallery of impressive and touching portraits.  The great-souled M. de
+Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre, who, at
+the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to meditation and
+penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs, his conflicts of
+soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good Lancelot, ideal
+schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical books; the vigorous
+Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-suffering for the faith
+that was in him; and all the smaller names--Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole,
+Hamon--spirits of exquisite humility and sweetness--a perfume rises from
+the page as one reads about them.  But best of all I like M. de
+Tillemont; I could have wished for myself even such a life as his;
+wrapped in silence and calm, a life of gentle devotion and zealous study.
+From the age of fourteen, he said, his intellect had occupied itself with
+but one subject, that of ecclesiastical history.  Rising at four o'clock,
+he read and wrote until half-past nine in the evening, interrupting his
+work only to say the Offices of the Church, and for a couple of hours'
+breathing at mid-day.  Few were his absences.  When he had to make a
+journey, he set forth on foot, staff in hand, and lightened the way by
+singing to himself a psalm or canticle.  This man of profound erudition
+had as pure and simple a heart as ever dwelt in mortal.  He loved to stop
+by the road and talk with children, and knew how to hold their attention
+whilst teaching them a lesson.  Seeing boy or girl in charge of a cow, he
+would ask: "How is it that you, a little child, are able to control that
+animal, so much bigger and stronger?"  And he would show the reason,
+speaking of the human soul.  All this about Tillemont is new to me; well
+as I knew his name (from the pages of Gibbon), I thought of him merely as
+the laborious and accurate compiler of historical materials.  Admirable
+as was his work, the spirit in which he performed it is the thing to
+dwell upon; he studied for study's sake, and with no aim but truth; to
+him it was a matter of indifference whether his learning ever became
+known among men, and at any moment he would have given the fruits of his
+labour to any one capable of making use of them.
+
+Think of the world in which the Jansenists were living; the world of the
+Fronde, of Richelieu and Mazarin, of his refulgent Majesty Louis XIV.
+Contrast Port-Royal with Versailles, and--whatever one's judgment of
+their religious and ecclesiastical aims--one must needs say that these
+men lived with dignity.  The Great Monarch is, in comparison, a poor,
+sordid creature.  One thinks of Moliere refused burial--the king's
+contemptuous indifference for one who could do no more to amuse him being
+a true measure of the royal greatness.  Face to face with even the least
+of these grave and pious men, how paltry and unclean are all those
+courtly figures; not _there_ was dignity, in the palace chambers and the
+stately gardens, but in the poor rooms where the solitaries of Port-Royal
+prayed and studied and taught.  Whether or not the ideal for mankind,
+their life was worthy of man.  And what is rarer than a life to which
+that praise can be given?
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+It is amusing to note the superficial forms of reaction against
+scientific positivism.  The triumph of Darwin was signalized by the
+invention of that happy word Agnostic, which had great vogue.  But
+agnosticism, as a fashion, was far too reasonable to endure.  There came
+a rumour of Oriental magic, (how the world repeats itself!) and presently
+every one who had nothing better to do gossipped about "esoteric
+Buddhism"--the saving adjective sounded well in a drawing-room.  It did
+not hold very long, even with the novelists; for the English taste this
+esotericism was too exotic.  Somebody suggested that the old
+table-turning and spirit-rapping, which had homely associations, might be
+re-considered in a scientific light, and the idea was seized upon.
+Superstition pranked in the professor's spectacles, it set up a
+laboratory, and printed grave reports.  Day by day its sphere widened.
+Hypnotism brought matter for the marvel-mongers, and there followed a
+long procession of words in limping Greek--a little difficult till
+practice had made perfect.  Another fortunate terminologist hit upon the
+word "psychical"--the _p_ might be sounded or not, according to the taste
+and fancy of the pronouncer--and the fashionable children of a scientific
+age were thoroughly at ease.  "There _must_ be something, you know; one
+always felt that there _must_ be something."  And now, if one may judge
+from what one reads, psychical "science" is comfortably joining hands
+with the sorcery of the Middle Ages.  It is said to be a lucrative moment
+for wizards that peep and that mutter.  If the law against
+fortune-telling were as strictly enforced in the polite world as it
+occasionally is in slums and hamlets, we should have a merry time.  But
+it is difficult to prosecute a Professor of Telepathy--and how he would
+welcome the advertisement!
+
+Of course I know very well that all that make use of these words are not
+in one and the same category.  There is a study of the human mind, in
+health and in disease, which calls for as much respect as any other study
+conscientiously and capably pursued; that it lends occasion to fribbles
+and knaves is no argument against any honest tendency of thought.  Men
+whom one cannot but esteem are deeply engaged in psychical
+investigations, and have convinced themselves that they are brought into
+touch with phenomena inexplicable by the commonly accepted laws of life.
+Be it so.  They may be on the point of making discoveries in the world
+beyond sense.  For my own part, everything of this kind not only does not
+interest me; I turn from it with the strongest distaste.  If every wonder-
+story examined by the Psychical Society were set before me with
+irresistible evidence of its truth, my feeling (call it my prejudice)
+would undergo no change whatever.  No whit the less should I yawn over
+the next batch, and lay the narratives aside with--yes, with a sort of
+disgust.  "An ounce of civet, good apothecary!"  Why it should be so with
+me I cannot say.  I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies of
+spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical application
+of electricity.  Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with
+astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway
+I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before.
+The thing has simply no concern for me, and I care not a _volt_ if to-
+morrow the proclaimed discovery be proved a journalist's mistake or
+invention.
+
+Am I, then, a hidebound materialist?  If I know myself, hardly that.
+Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that of
+the agnostic.  He corrected me.  "The agnostic grants that there _may_ be
+something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no such
+admission.  For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the
+non-existent.  We see what is, and we see all."  Now this gave me a sort
+of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much intelligence
+could hold such a view.  So far am I from feeling satisfied with any
+explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me,
+that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the
+universe.  To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse
+than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing--that we know
+nothing.  What!  Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at
+it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and
+so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings?  What is
+all this but words, words, words?  Interesting, yes, as observation; but,
+the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of
+hopeless questioning.  One may gaze and think till the brain whirls--till
+the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the
+very sun in heaven.  Nothing to be known?  The flower simply a flower,
+and there an end on't?  The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his
+senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the
+natural mechanism of which he forms a part?  I find it very hard to
+believe that this is the conviction of any human mind.  Rather I would
+think that despair at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with
+those who pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of
+everything beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception
+which seems obtuseness.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the
+unknown.  In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words?  It may be
+that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in
+the world's dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of
+Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch
+before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have
+learnt the wherefore of his being.  The prophets, the martyrs, their
+noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to
+eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a
+vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was
+in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge
+Supreme--all gone down into silence, and the globe that bare them
+circling dead and cold through soundless space.  The most tragic aspect
+of such a tragedy is that it is not unthinkable.  The soul revolts, but
+dare not see in this revolt the assurance of its higher destiny.  Viewing
+our life thus, is it not easier to believe that the tragedy is played
+with no spectator?  And of a truth, of a truth, what spectator can there
+be?  The day may come when, to all who live, the Name of Names will be
+but an empty symbol, rejected by reason and by faith.  Yet the tragedy
+will be played on.
+
+It is not, I say, unthinkable; but that is not the same thing as to
+declare that life has no meaning beyond the sense it bears to human
+intelligence.  The intelligence itself rejects such a supposition; in my
+case, with impatience and scorn.  No theory of the world which ever came
+to my knowledge is to me for one moment acceptable; the possibility of an
+explanation which would set my mind at rest is to me inconceivable; no
+whit the less am I convinced that there is a Reason of the All; one which
+transcends my understanding, one no glimmer of which will ever touch my
+apprehension; a Reason which must imply a creative power, and therefore,
+even whilst a necessity of my thought, is by the same criticized into
+nothing.  A like antinomy with that which affects our conception of the
+infinite in time and space.  Whether the rational processes have reached
+their final development, who shall say?  Perhaps what seem to us the
+impassable limits of thought are but the conditions of a yet early stage
+in the history of man.  Those who make them a proof of a "future state"
+must necessarily suppose gradations in that futurity; does the savage,
+scarce risen above the brute, enter upon the same "new life" as the man
+of highest civilization?  Such gropings of the mind certify our
+ignorance; the strange thing is that they can be held by any one to
+demonstrate that our ignorance is final knowledge.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+Yet that, perhaps, will be the mind of coming man; if not the final
+attainment of his intellectual progress, at all events a long period of
+self-satisfaction, assumed as finality.  We talk of the "ever aspiring
+soul"; we take for granted that if one religion passes away, another must
+arise.  But what if man presently find himself without spiritual needs?
+Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of
+our life to-day seem to point towards it.  If the habits of thought
+favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast
+calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment,
+the age of true positivism may arise.  Then it will be the common
+privilege, "rerum cognoscere causas"; the word supernatural will have no
+sense; superstition will be a dimly understood trait of the early race;
+and where now we perceive an appalling Mystery, everything will be lucid
+and serene as a geometric demonstration.  Such an epoch of Reason might
+be the happiest the world could know.  Indeed, it would either be that,
+or it would never come about at all.  For suffering and sorrow are the
+great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very
+surely upon the rationalist millennium.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+The free man, says Spinoza, thinks of nothing less often than of death.
+Free, in his sense of the word, I may not call myself.  I think of death
+very often; the thought, indeed, is ever in the background of my mind;
+yet free in another sense I assuredly am, for death inspires me with no
+fear.  There was a time when I dreaded it; but that, merely because it
+meant disaster to others who depended upon my labour; the cessation of
+being has never in itself had power to afflict me.  Pain I cannot well
+endure, and I do indeed think with apprehension of being subjected to the
+trial of long deathbed torments.  It is a sorry thing that the man who
+has fronted destiny with something of manly calm throughout a life of
+stress and of striving, may, when he nears the end, be dishonoured by a
+weakness which is mere disease.  But happily I am not often troubled by
+that dark anticipation.
+
+I always turn out of my way to walk through a country churchyard; these
+rural resting-places are as attractive to me as a town cemetery is
+repugnant.  I read the names upon the stones, and find a deep solace in
+thinking that for all these the fret and the fear of life are over.  There
+comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged
+man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come,
+and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon?  There
+is no such gratulation as _Hic jacet_.  There is no such dignity as that
+of death.  In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have
+followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these
+have achieved.  I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their
+vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.  The dead, amid this
+leafy silence, seem to whisper encouragement to him whose fate yet
+lingers: As we are, so shalt thou be; and behold our quiet!
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+Many a time, when life went hard with me, I have betaken myself to the
+Stoics, and not all in vain.  Marcus Aurelius has often been one of my
+bedside books; I have read him in the night watches, when I could not
+sleep for misery, and when assuredly I could have read nothing else.  He
+did not remove my burden; his proofs of the vanity of earthly troubles
+availed me nothing; but there was a soothing harmony in his thought which
+partly lulled my mind, and the mere wish that I could find strength to
+emulate that high example (though I knew that I never should) was in
+itself a safeguard against the baser impulses of wretchedness.  I read
+him still, but with no turbid emotion, thinking rather of the man than of
+the philosophy, and holding his image dear in my heart of hearts.
+
+Of course the intellectual assumption which makes his system untenable by
+the thinker of our time is: that we possess a knowledge of the absolute.
+Noble is the belief that by exercise of his reason a man may enter into
+communion with that Rational Essence which is the soul of the world; but
+precisely because of our inability to find within ourselves any such sure
+and certain guidance do we of to-day accept the barren doom of
+scepticism.  Otherwise, the Stoic's sense of man's subordination in the
+universal scheme, and of the all-ruling destiny, brings him into touch
+with our own philosophical views, and his doctrine concerning the
+"sociable" nature of man, of the reciprocal obligations which exist
+between all who live, are entirely congenial to the better spirit of our
+day.  His fatalism is not mere resignation; one has not only to accept
+one's lot, whatever it is, as inevitable, but to accept it with joy, with
+praises.  Why are we here?  For the same reason that has brought about
+the existence of a horse, or of a vine, to play the part allotted to us
+by Nature.  As it is within our power to understand the order of things,
+so are we capable of guiding ourselves in accordance therewith; the will,
+powerless over circumstance, is free to determine the habits of the soul.
+The first duty is self-discipline; its correspondent first privilege is
+an inborn knowledge of the law of life.
+
+But we are fronted by that persistent questioner who will accept no _a
+priori_ assumption, however noble in its character and beneficent in its
+tendency.  How do we know that the reason of the Stoic is at harmony with
+the world's law?  I, perhaps, may see life from a very different point of
+view; to me reason may dictate, not self-subdual, but self-indulgence; I
+may find in the free exercise of all my passions an existence far more
+consonant with what seems to me the dictate of Nature.  I am proud;
+Nature has made me so; let my pride assert itself to justification.  I am
+strong; let me put forth my strength, it is the destiny of the feeble to
+fall before me.  On the other hand, I am weak and I suffer; what avails a
+mere assertion that fate is just, to bring about my calm and glad
+acceptance of this down-trodden doom?  Nay, for there is that within my
+soul which bids me revolt, and cry against the iniquity of some power I
+know not.  Granting that I am compelled to acknowledge a scheme of things
+which constrains me to this or that, whether I will or no, how can I be
+sure that wisdom or moral duty lies in acquiescence?  Thus the unceasing
+questioner; to whom, indeed, there is no reply.  For our philosophy sees
+no longer a supreme sanction, and no longer hears a harmony of the
+universe.
+
+"He that is unjust is also impious.  For the Nature of the Universe,
+having made all reasonable creatures one for another, to the end that
+they should do one another good; more or less, according to the several
+persons and occasions; but in no wise hurt one another; it is manifest
+that he that doth transgress against this her will, is guilty of impiety
+towards the most ancient and venerable of all the Deities."  How gladly
+would I believe this!  That injustice is impiety, and indeed the supreme
+impiety, I will hold with my last breath; but it were the merest
+affectation of a noble sentiment if I supported my faith by such a
+reasoning.  I see no single piece of strong testimony that justice is the
+law of the universe; I see suggestions incalculable tending to prove that
+it is not.  Rather must I apprehend that man, in some inconceivable way,
+may at his best moments represent a Principle darkly at strife with that
+which prevails throughout the world as known to us.  If the just man be
+in truth a worshipper of the most ancient of Deities, he must needs
+suppose, either that the object of his worship belongs to a fallen
+dynasty, or--what from of old has been his refuge--that the sacred fire
+which burns within him is an "evidence of things not seen."  What if I am
+incapable of either supposition?  There remains the dignity of a hopeless
+cause--"_sed victa Catoni_."  But how can there sound the hymn of praise?
+
+"That is best for everyone, which the common Nature of all doth send unto
+everyone, and then is it best, when she doth send it."  The optimism of
+Necessity, and perhaps, the highest wisdom man can attain unto.  "Remember
+that unto reasonable creatures only is it granted that they may willingly
+and freely submit."  No one could be more sensible than I of the
+persuasiveness of this high theme.  The words sing to me, and life is
+illumined with soft glory, like that of the autumn sunset yonder.
+"Consider how man's life is but for a very moment of time, and so depart
+meek and contented: even as if a ripe olive falling should praise the
+ground that bare her, and give thanks to the tree that begat her."  So
+would I fain think, when the moment comes.  It is the mood of strenuous
+endeavour, but also the mood of rest.  Better than the calm of achieved
+indifference (if that, indeed, is possible to man); better than the
+ecstasy which contemns the travail of earth in contemplation of bliss to
+come.  But, by no effort attainable.  An influence of the unknown powers;
+a peace that falleth upon the soul like dew at evening.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+I have had one of my savage headaches.  For a day and a night I was in
+blind torment.  Have at it, now, with the stoic remedy.  Sickness of the
+body is no evil.  With a little resolution and considering it as a
+natural issue of certain natural processes, pain may well be borne.  One's
+solace is, to remember that it cannot affect the soul, which partakes of
+the eternal nature.  This body is but as "the clothing, or the cottage,
+of the mind."  Let flesh be racked; I, the very I, will stand apart, lord
+of myself.
+
+Meanwhile, memory, reason, every faculty of my intellectual part, is
+being whelmed in muddy oblivion.  Is the soul something other than the
+mind?  If so, I have lost all consciousness of its existence.  For me,
+mind and soul are one, and, as I am too feelingly reminded, that element
+of my being is _here_, where the brain throbs and anguishes.  A little
+more of such suffering, and I were myself no longer; the body
+representing me would gesticulate and rave, but I should know nothing of
+its motives, its fantasies.  The very I, it is too plain, consists but
+with a certain balance of my physical elements, which we call health.
+Even in the light beginnings of my headache, I was already not myself; my
+thoughts followed no normal course, and I was aware of the abnormality.  A
+few hours later, I was but a walking disease; my mind--if one could use
+the word--had become a barrel-organ, grinding in endless repetition a bar
+or two of idle music.
+
+What trust shall I repose in the soul that serves me thus?  Just as much,
+one would say, as in the senses, through which I know all that I can know
+of the world in which I live, and which, for all I can tell, may deceive
+me even more grossly in their common use than they do on certain
+occasions where I have power to test them; just as much, and no more--if
+I am right in concluding that mind and soul are merely subtle functions
+of body.  If I chance to become deranged in certain parts of my physical
+mechanism, I shall straightway be deranged in my wits; and behold that
+Something in me which "partakes of the eternal" prompting me to pranks
+which savour little of the infinite wisdom.  Even in its normal condition
+(if I can determine what that is) my mind is obviously the slave of
+trivial accidents; I eat something that disagrees with me, and of a
+sudden the whole aspect of life is changed; this impulse has lost its
+force, and another which before I should not for a moment have
+entertained, is all-powerful over me.  In short, I know just as little
+about myself as I do about the Eternal Essence, and I have a haunting
+suspicion that I may be a mere automaton, my every thought and act due to
+some power which uses and deceives me.
+
+Why am I meditating thus, instead of enjoying the life of the natural
+man, at peace with himself and the world, as I was a day or two ago?
+Merely, it is evident, because my health has suffered a temporary
+disorder.  It has passed; I have thought enough about the unthinkable; I
+feel my quiet returning.  Is it any merit of mine that I begin to be in
+health once more?  Could I, by any effort of the will, have shunned this
+pitfall?
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of
+long ago.  I had somehow escaped into the country, and on a long walk
+began to feel mid-day hunger.  The wayside brambles were fruiting; I
+picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within sight of an inn where
+I might have made a meal.  But my hunger was satisfied; I had no need of
+anything more, and, as I thought of it, a strange feeling of surprise, a
+sort of bewilderment, came upon me.  What!  Could it be that I had eaten,
+and eaten sufficiently, _without paying_?  It struck me as an
+extraordinary thing.  At that time, my ceaseless preoccupation was how to
+obtain money to keep myself alive.  Many a day I had suffered hunger
+because I durst not spend the few coins I possessed; the food I could buy
+was in any case unsatisfactory, unvaried.  But here Nature had given me a
+feast, which seemed delicious, and I had eaten all I wanted.  The wonder
+held me for a long time, and to this day I can recall it, understand it.
+
+I think there could be no better illustration of what it means to be very
+poor in a great town.  And I am glad to have been through it.  To those
+days of misery I owe much of the contentment which I now enjoy; not by
+mere force of contrast, but because I have been better taught than most
+men the facts which condition our day to day existence.  To the ordinary
+educated person, freedom from anxiety as to how he shall merely be fed
+and clothed is a matter of course; questioned, he would admit it to be an
+agreeable state of things, but it is no more a source of conscious joy to
+him than physical health to the thoroughly sound man.  For me, were I to
+live another fifty years, this security would be a delightful surprise
+renewed with every renewal of day.  I know, as only one with my
+experience can, all that is involved in the possession of means to live.
+The average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad
+and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting his
+next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die.  There is
+no such school of political economy.  Go through that course of lectures,
+and you will never again become confused as to the meaning of elementary
+terms in that sorry science.
+
+I understand, far better than most men, what I owe to the labour of
+others.  This money which I "draw" at the four quarters of the year, in a
+sense falls to me from heaven; but I know very well that every drachm is
+sweated from human pores.  Not, thank goodness, with the declared tyranny
+of basest capitalism; I mean only that it is the product of human labour;
+perhaps wholesome, but none the less compulsory.  Look far enough, and it
+means muscular toil, that swinking of the ruder man which supports all
+the complex structure of our life.  When I think of him thus, the man of
+the people earns my gratitude.  That it is gratitude from afar, that I
+never was, and never shall be, capable of democratic fervour, is a
+characteristic of my mind which I long ago accepted as final.  I have
+known revolt against the privilege of wealth (can I not remember spots in
+London where I have stood, savage with misery, looking at the prosperous
+folk who passed?), but I could never feel myself at one with the native
+poor among whom I dwelt.  And for the simplest reason; I came to know
+them too well.  He who cultivates his enthusiasm amid graces and comforts
+may nourish an illusion with regard to the world below him all his life
+long, and I do not deny that he may be the better for it; for me, no
+illusion was possible.  I knew the poor, and I knew that their aims were
+not mine.  I knew that the kind of life (such a modest life!) which I
+should have accepted as little short of the ideal, would have been to
+them--if they could have been made to understand it--a weariness and a
+contempt.  To ally myself with them against the "upper world" would have
+been mere dishonesty, or sheer despair.  What they at heart desired, was
+to me barren; what I coveted, was to them for ever incomprehensible.
+
+That my own aim indicated an ideal which is the best for all to pursue, I
+am far from maintaining.  It may be so, or not; I have long known the
+idleness of advocating reform on a basis of personal predilection.  Enough
+to set my own thoughts in order, without seeking to devise a new economy
+for the world.  But it is much to see clearly from one's point of view,
+and therein the evil days I have treasured are of no little help to me.
+If my knowledge be only subjective, why, it only concerns myself; I
+preach to no one.  Upon another man, of origin and education like to
+mine, a like experience of hardship might have a totally different
+effect; he might identify himself with the poor, burn to the end of his
+life with the noblest humanitarianism.  I should no further criticize him
+than to say that he saw with other eyes than mine.  A vision, perhaps,
+larger and more just.  But in one respect he resembles me.  If ever such
+a man arises, let him be questioned; it will be found that he once made a
+meal of blackberries--and mused upon it.
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+I stood to-day watching harvesters at work, and a foolish envy took hold
+upon me.  To be one of those brawny, brown-necked men, who can string
+their muscles from dawn to sundown, and go home without an ache to the
+sound slumber which will make them fresh again for to-morrow's toil!  I
+am a man in the middle years, with limbs shaped as those of another, and
+subject to no prostrating malady, yet I doubt whether I could endure the
+lightest part of this field labour even for half an hour.  Is that indeed
+to be a man?  Could I feel surprised if one of these stalwart fellows
+turned upon me a look of good-natured contempt?  Yet he would never dream
+that I envied him; he would think it as probable, no doubt, that I should
+compare myself unfavourably with one of the farm horses.
+
+There comes the old idle dream: balance of mind and body, perfect
+physical health combined with the fulness of intellectual vigour.  Why
+should I not be there in the harvest field, if so it pleased me, yet none
+the less live for thought?  Many a theorist holds the thing possible, and
+looks to its coming in a better time.  If so, two changes must needs come
+before it; there will no longer exist a profession of literature, and all
+but the whole of every library will be destroyed, leaving only the few
+books which are universally recognized as national treasures.  Thus, and
+thus only, can mental and physical equilibrium ever be brought about.
+
+It is idle to talk to us of "the Greeks."  The people we mean when so
+naming them were a few little communities, living under very peculiar
+conditions, and endowed by Nature with most exceptional characteristics.
+The sporadic civilization which we are too much in the habit of regarding
+as if it had been no less stable than brilliant, was a succession of the
+briefest splendours, gleaming here and there from the coasts of the
+Aegean to those of the western Mediterranean.  Our heritage of Greek
+literature and art is priceless; the example of Greek life possesses for
+us not the slightest value.  The Greeks had nothing alien to study--not
+even a foreign or a dead language.  They read hardly at all, preferring
+to listen.  They were a slave-holding people, much given to social
+amusement, and hardly knowing what we call industry.  Their ignorance was
+vast, their wisdom a grace of the gods.  Together with their fair
+intelligence, they had grave moral weaknesses.  If we could see and speak
+with an average Athenian of the Periclean age, he would cause no little
+disappointment--there would be so much more of the barbarian in him, and
+at the same time of the decadent, than we had anticipated.  More than
+possibly, even his physique would be a disillusion.  Leave him in that
+old world, which is precious to the imagination of a few, but to the
+business and bosoms of the modern multitude irrelevant as Memphis or
+Babylon.
+
+The man of thought, as we understand him, is all but necessarily the man
+of impaired health.  The rare exception will be found to come of a stock
+which may, indeed, have been distinguished by intelligence, but
+represented in all its members the active rather than the studious or
+contemplative life; whilst the children of such fortunate thinkers are
+sure either to revert to the active type or to exhibit the familiar
+sacrifice of body to mind.  I am not denying the possibility of _mens
+sana in corpore sano_; that is another thing.  Nor do I speak of the
+healthy people (happily still numerous) who are at the same time bright-
+witted and fond of books.  The man I have in view is he who pursues the
+things of the mind with passion, who turns impatiently from all common
+interests or cares which encroach upon his sacred time, who is haunted by
+a sense of the infinity of thought and learning, who, sadly aware of the
+conditions on which he holds his mental vitality, cannot resist the
+hourly temptation to ignore them.  Add to these native characteristics
+the frequent fact that such a man must make merchandise of his
+attainments, must toil under the perpetual menace of destitution; and
+what hope remains that his blood will keep the true rhythm, that his
+nerves will play as Nature bade them, that his sinews will bide the
+strain of exceptional task?  Such a man may gaze with envy at those who
+"sweat in the eye of Phoebus," but he knows that no choice was offered
+him.  And if life has so far been benignant as to grant him frequent
+tranquillity of studious hours, let him look from the reapers to the
+golden harvest, and fare on in thankfulness.
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+That a labourer in the fields should stand very much on the level of the
+beast that toils with him, can be neither desirable nor necessary.  He
+does so, as a matter of fact, and one hears that only the dullest-witted
+peasant will nowadays consent to the peasant life; his children, taught
+to read the newspaper, make what haste they can to the land of
+promise--where newspapers are printed.  That here is something altogether
+wrong it needs no evangelist to tell us; the remedy no prophet has as yet
+even indicated.  Husbandry has in our time been glorified in eloquence
+which for the most part is vain, endeavouring, as it does, to prove a
+falsity--that the agricultural life is, in itself, favourable to gentle
+emotions, to sweet thoughtfulness, and to all the human virtues.
+Agriculture is one of the most exhausting forms of toil, and, in itself,
+by no means conducive to spiritual development; that it played a
+civilizing part in the history of the world is merely due to the fact
+that, by creating wealth, it freed a portion of mankind from the labour
+of the plough.  Enthusiasts have tried the experiment of turning
+husbandman; one of them writes of his experience in notable phrase.
+
+"Oh, labour is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it
+without becoming proportionately brutified.  Is it a praiseworthy matter
+that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and
+horses?  It is not so."
+
+Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne, at Brook Farm.  In the bitterness of his
+disillusion he went too far.  Labour may be, and very often is, an
+accursed and a brutalizing thing, but assuredly, it is not the curse of
+the world; nay, it is the world's supreme blessing.  Hawthorne had
+committed a folly, and he paid for it in loss of mental balance.  For
+him, plainly, it was no suitable task to feed cows and horses; yet many a
+man would perceive the nobler side of such occupation, for it signifies,
+of course, providing food for mankind.  The interest of this quotation
+lies in the fact that, all unconsciously, so intelligent a man as
+Hawthorne had been reduced to the mental state of our agricultural
+labourers in revolt against the country life.  Not only is his intellect
+in abeyance, but his emotions have ceased to be a true guide.  The worst
+feature of the rustic mind in our day, is not its ignorance or grossness,
+but its rebellious discontent.  Like all other evils, this is seen to be
+an inevitable outcome of the condition of things; one understands it only
+too well.  The bucolic wants to "better" himself.  He is sick of feeding
+cows and horses; he imagines that, on the pavement of London, he would
+walk with a manlier tread.
+
+There is no help in visions of Arcadia; yet it is plain fact that in days
+gone by the peasantry found life more than endurable, and yet were more
+intelligent than our clod-hoppers who still hold by the plough.  They had
+their folk-songs, now utterly forgotten.  They had romances and fairy
+lore, which their descendants could no more appreciate than an idyll of
+Theocritus.  Ah, but let it be remembered that they had also a _home_,
+and this is the illumining word.  If your peasant love the fields which
+give him bread, he will not think it hard to labour in them; his toil
+will no longer be as that of the beast, but upward-looking and touched
+with a light from other than the visible heavens.  No use to blink the
+hard and dull features of rustic existence; let them rather be insisted
+upon, that those who own and derive profit from the land may be constant
+in human care for the lives which make it fruitful.  Such care may
+perchance avail, in some degree, to counteract the restless tendency of
+the time; the dweller in a pleasant cottage is not so likely to wish to
+wander from it as he who shelters himself in a hovel.  Well-meaning folk
+talk about reawakening love of the country by means of deliberate
+instruction.  Lies any hope that way?  Does it seem to promise a return
+of the time when the old English names of all our flowers were common on
+rustic lips--by which, indeed, they were first uttered?  The fact that
+flowers and birds are well-nigh forgotten, together with the songs and
+the elves, shows how advanced is the process of rural degeneration.  Most
+likely it is foolishness to hope for the revival of any bygone social
+virtue.  The husbandman of the future will be, I daresay, a well-paid
+mechanic, of the engine-driver species; as he goes about his work he will
+sing the last refrain of the music-hall, and his oft-recurring holidays
+will be spent in the nearest great town.  For him, I fancy, there will be
+little attraction in ever such melodious talk about "common objects of
+the country."  Flowers, perhaps, at all events those of tilth and
+pasture, will have been all but improved away.  And, as likely as not,
+the word Home will have only a special significance, indicating the
+common abode of retired labourers who are drawing old-age pensions.
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+I cannot close my eyes upon this day without setting down some record of
+it; yet the foolish insufficiency of words!  At sunrise I looked forth;
+nowhere could I discern a cloud the size of a man's hand; the leaves
+quivered gently, as if with joy in the divine morning which glistened
+upon their dew.  At sunset I stood in the meadow above my house, and
+watched the red orb sink into purple mist, whilst in the violet heaven
+behind me rose the perfect moon.  All between, through the soft circling
+of the dial's shadow, was loveliness and quiet unutterable.  Never, I
+could fancy, did autumn clothe in such magnificence the elms and beeches;
+never, I should think, did the leafage on my walls blaze in such royal
+crimson.  It was no day for wandering; under a canopy of blue or gold,
+where the eye could fall on nothing that was not beautiful, enough to be
+at one with Nature in dreamy rest.  From stubble fields sounded the long
+caw of rooks; a sleepy crowing ever and anon told of the neighbour farm;
+my doves cooed above their cot.  Was it for five minutes, or was it for
+an hour, that I watched the yellow butterfly wafted as by an insensible
+tremor of the air amid the garden glintings?  In every autumn there comes
+one such flawless day.  None that I have known brought me a mind so
+touched to the fitting mood of welcome, and so fulfilled the promise of
+its peace.
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there
+sounded the voice of a countryman--strange to say--singing.  The notes
+were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment's musical
+sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that
+I knew not whether it was pain or delight.  For the sound seemed to me
+that of a peasant's song which I once heard whilst sitting among the
+ruins of Paestum.  The English landscape faded before my eyes.  I saw
+great Doric columns of honey-golden travertine; between them, as I looked
+one way, a deep strip of sea; when I turned, the purple gorges of the
+Apennine; and all about the temple, where I sat in solitude, a wilderness
+dead and still but for that long note of wailing melody.  I had not
+thought it possible that here, in my beloved home, where regret and
+desire are all but unknown to me, I could have been so deeply troubled by
+a thought of things far off.  I returned with head bent, that voice
+singing in my memory.  All the delight I have known in Italian travel
+burned again within my heart.  The old spell has not lost its power.
+Never, I know, will it again draw me away from England; but the Southern
+sunlight cannot fade from my imagination, and to dream of its glow upon
+the ruins of old time wakes in me the voiceless desire which once was
+anguish.
+
+In his _Italienische Reise_, Goethe tells that at one moment of his life
+the desire for Italy became to him a scarce endurable suffering; at
+length he could not bear to hear or to read of things Italian, even the
+sight of a Latin book so tortured him that he turned away from it; and
+the day arrived when, in spite of every obstacle, he yielded to the
+sickness of longing, and in secret stole away southward.  When first I
+read that passage, it represented exactly the state of my own mind; to
+think of Italy was to feel myself goaded by a longing which, at times,
+made me literally ill; I, too, had put aside my Latin books, simply
+because I could not endure the torment of imagination they caused me.  And
+I had so little hope (nay, for years no shadow of reasonable hope) that I
+should ever be able to appease my desire.  I taught myself to read
+Italian; that was something.  I worked (half-heartedly) at a colloquial
+phrase-book.  But my sickness only grew towards despair.
+
+Then came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a
+book I had written.  It was early autumn.  I chanced to hear some one
+speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+Truly, I grow aged.  I have no longer much delight in wine.
+
+But then, no wine ever much rejoiced me save that of Italy.  Wine-drinking
+in England is, after all, only make-believe, a mere playing with an
+exotic inspiration.  Tennyson had his port, whereto clings a good old
+tradition; sherris sack belongs to a nobler age; these drinks are not for
+us.  Let him who will, toy with dubious Bordeaux or Burgundy; to get good
+of them, soul's good, you must be on the green side of thirty.  Once or
+twice they have plucked me from despair; I would not speak unkindly of
+anything in cask or bottle which bears the great name of wine.  But for
+me it is a thing of days gone by.  Never again shall I know the mellow
+hour _cum regnat rosa, cum madent capilli_.  Yet how it lives in memory!
+
+"What call you this wine?" I asked of the temple-guardian at Paestum,
+when he ministered to my thirst.  "_Vino di Calabria_," he answered, and
+what a glow in the name!  There I drank it, seated against the column of
+Poseidon's temple.  There I drank it, my feet resting on acanthus, my
+eyes wandering from sea to mountain, or peering at little shells niched
+in the crumbling surface of the sacred stone.  The autumn day declined; a
+breeze of evening whispered about the forsaken shore; on the far summit
+lay a long, still cloud, and its hue was that of my Calabrian wine.
+
+How many such moments come back to me as my thoughts wander!  Dim little
+_trattorie_ in city byways, inns smelling of the sun in forgotten
+valleys, on the mountain side, or by the tideless shore, where the grape
+has given me of its blood, and made life a rapture.  Who but the veriest
+fanatic of teetotalism would grudge me those hours so gloriously
+redeemed?  No draught of wine amid the old tombs under the violet sky but
+made me for the time a better man, larger of brain, more courageous, more
+gentle.  'Twas a revelry whereon came no repentance.  Could I but live
+for ever in thoughts and feelings such as those born to me in the shadow
+of the Italian vine!  There I listened to the sacred poets; there I
+walked with the wise of old; there did the gods reveal to me the secret
+of their eternal calm.  I hear the red rillet as it flows into the rustic
+glass; I see the purple light upon the hills.  Fill to me again, thou of
+the Roman visage and all but Roman speech!  Is not yonder the long
+gleaming of the Appian Way?  Chant in the old measure, the song
+imperishable
+
+   "dum Capitolium
+   Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex--"
+
+aye, and for how many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the eternal
+silence.  Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he will; for him
+flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile, no melody.  Ere the
+sun set, and the darkness fall about us, fill again!
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+Is there, at this moment, any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but without
+means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain and steadfast
+courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret, and writes for dear
+life?  There must be, I suppose; yet all that I have read and heard of
+late years about young writers, shows them in a very different aspect.  No
+garretteers, these novelists and journalists awaiting their promotion.
+They eat--and entertain their critics--at fashionable restaurants; they
+are seen in expensive seats at the theatre; they inhabit handsome
+flats--photographed for an illustrated paper on the first excuse.  At the
+worst, they belong to a reputable club, and have garments which permit
+them to attend a garden party or an evening "at home" without attracting
+unpleasant notice.  Many biographical sketches have I read, during the
+last decade, making personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss
+That, whose book was--as the sweet language of the day will have
+it--"booming"; but never one in which there was a hint of stern struggle,
+of the pinched stomach and frozen fingers.  I surmise that the path of
+"literature" is being made too easy.  Doubtless it is a rare thing
+nowadays for a lad whose education ranks him with the upper middle class
+to find himself utterly without resources, should he wish to devote
+himself to the profession of letters.  And there is the root of the
+matter; writing has come to be recognized as a profession, almost as cut-
+and-dried as church or law; a lad may go into it with full parental
+approval, with ready avuncular support.  I heard not long ago of an
+eminent lawyer, who had paid a couple of hundred per annum for his son's
+instruction in the art of fiction--yea, the art of fiction--by a not very
+brilliant professor of that art.  Really, when one comes to think of it,
+an astonishing fact, a fact vastly significant.  Starvation, it is true,
+does not necessarily produce fine literature; but one feels uneasy about
+these carpet-authors.  To the two or three who have a measure of
+conscience and vision, I could wish, as the best thing, some calamity
+which would leave them friendless in the streets.  They would perish,
+perhaps.  But set that possibility against the all but certainty of their
+present prospect--fatty degeneration of the soul; and is it not
+acceptable?
+
+I thought of this as I stood yesterday watching a noble sunset, which
+brought back to my memory the sunsets of a London autumn, thirty years
+ago; more glorious, it seems to me, than any I have since beheld.  It
+happened that, on one such evening, I was by the river at Chelsea, with
+nothing to do except to feel that I was hungry, and to reflect that,
+before morning, I should be hungrier still.  I loitered upon Battersea
+Bridge--the old picturesque wooden bridge, and there the western sky took
+hold upon me.  Half an hour later, I was speeding home.  I sat down, and
+wrote a description of what I had seen, and straightway sent it to an
+evening newspaper, which, to my astonishment, published the thing next
+day--"On Battersea Bridge."  How proud I was of that little bit of
+writing!  I should not much like to see it again, for I thought it then
+so good that I am sure it would give me an unpleasant sensation now.
+Still, I wrote it because I enjoyed doing so, quite as much as because I
+was hungry; and the couple of guineas it brought me had as pleasant a
+ring as any money I ever earned.
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+I wonder whether it be really true, as I have more than once seen
+suggested, that the publication of Anthony Trollope's autobiography in
+some degree accounts for the neglect into which he and his works fell so
+soon after his death.  I should like to believe it, for such a fact would
+be, from one point of view, a credit to "the great big stupid public."
+Only, of course, from one point of view; the notable merits of Trollope's
+work are unaffected by one's knowledge of how that work was produced; at
+his best he is an admirable writer of the pedestrian school, and this
+disappearance of his name does not mean final oblivion.  Like every other
+novelist of note, he had two classes of admirers--those who read him for
+the sake of that excellence which here and there he achieved, and the
+undistinguishing crowd which found in him a level entertainment.  But it
+would be a satisfaction to think that "the great big stupid" was really,
+somewhere in its secret economy, offended by that revelation of
+mechanical methods which made the autobiography either a disgusting or an
+amusing book to those who read it more intelligently.  A man with a watch
+before his eyes, penning exactly so many words every quarter of an
+hour--one imagines that this picture might haunt disagreeably the
+thoughts even of Mudie's steadiest subscriber, that it might come between
+him or her and any Trollopean work that lay upon the counter.
+
+The surprise was so cynically sprung upon a yet innocent public.  At that
+happy time (already it seems so long ago) the literary news set before
+ordinary readers mostly had reference to literary work, in a reputable
+sense of the term, and not, as now, to the processes of "literary"
+manufacture and the ups and downs of the "literary" market.  Trollope
+himself tells how he surprised the editor of a periodical, who wanted a
+serial from him, by asking how many thousand words it should run to; an
+anecdote savouring indeed of good old days.  Since then, readers have
+grown accustomed to revelations of "literary" method, and nothing in that
+kind can shock them.  There has come into existence a school of
+journalism which would seem to have deliberately set itself the task of
+degrading authorship and everything connected with it; and these
+pernicious scribblers (or typists, to be more accurate) have found the
+authors of a fretful age only too receptive of their mercantile
+suggestions.  Yes, yes; I know as well as any man that reforms were
+needed in the relations between author and publisher.  Who knows better
+than I that your representative author face to face with your
+representative publisher was, is, and ever will be, at a ludicrous
+disadvantage?  And there is no reason in the nature and the decency of
+things why this wrong should not by some contrivance be remedied.  A big,
+blusterous, genial brute of a Trollope could very fairly hold his own,
+and exact at all events an acceptable share in the profits of his work.  A
+shrewd and vigorous man of business such as Dickens, aided by a lawyer
+who was his devoted friend, could do even better, and, in reaping
+sometimes more than his publisher, redress the ancient injustice.  But
+pray, what of Charlotte Bronte?  Think of that grey, pinched life, the
+latter years of which would have been so brightened had Charlotte Bronte
+received but, let us say, one third of what, in the same space of time,
+the publisher gained by her books.  I know all about this; alas! no man
+better.  None the less do I loathe and sicken at the manifold baseness,
+the vulgarity unutterable, which, as a result of the new order, is
+blighting our literary life.  It is not easy to see how, in such an
+atmosphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being.  May
+it, perhaps, be hoped that once again the multitude will be somehow
+touched with disgust?--that the market for "literary" news of this
+costermonger sort will some day fail?
+
+Dickens.  Why, there too was a disclosure of literary methods.  Did not
+Forster make known to all and sundry exactly how Dickens' work was done,
+and how the bargains for its production were made?  The multitudinous
+public saw him at his desk, learnt how long he sat there, were told that
+he could not get on without having certain little ornaments before his
+eyes, and that blue ink and a quill pen were indispensable to his
+writing; and did all this information ever chill the loyalty of a single
+reader?  There was a difference, in truth, between the picture of Charles
+Dickens sitting down to a chapter of his current novel, and that of the
+broad-based Trollope doing his so many words to the fifteen minutes.
+Trollope, we know, wronged himself by the tone and manner of his
+reminiscences; but that tone and manner indicated an inferiority of mind,
+of nature.  Dickens--though he died in the endeavour to increase (not for
+himself) an already ample fortune, disastrous influence of his time and
+class--wrought with an artistic ingenuousness and fervour such as
+Trollope could not even conceive.  Methodical, of course, he was; no long
+work of prose fiction was ever brought into existence save by methodical
+labour; but we know that there was no measuring of so many words to the
+hour.  The picture of him at work which is seen in his own letters is one
+of the most bracing and inspiring in the history of literature.  It has
+had, and will always have, a great part in maintaining Dickens' place in
+the love and reverence of those who understand.
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+As I walked to-day in the golden sunlight--this warm, still day on the
+far verge of autumn--there suddenly came to me a thought which checked my
+step, and for the moment half bewildered me.  I said to myself: My life
+is over.  Surely I ought to have been aware of that simple fact;
+certainly it has made part of my meditation, has often coloured my mood;
+but the thing had never definitely shaped itself, ready in words for the
+tongue.  My life is over.  I uttered the sentence once or twice, that my
+ear might test its truth.  Truth undeniable, however strange; undeniable
+as the figure of my age last birthday.
+
+My age?  At this time of life, many a man is bracing himself for new
+efforts, is calculating on a decade or two of pursuit and attainment.  I,
+too, may perhaps live for some years; but for me there is no more
+activity, no ambition.  I have had my chance--and I see what I made of
+it.
+
+The thought was for an instant all but dreadful.  What!  I, who only
+yesterday was a young man, planning, hoping, looking forward to life as
+to a practically endless career, I, who was so vigorous and scornful,
+have come to this day of definite retrospect?  How is it possible?  But,
+I have done nothing; I have had no time; I have only been preparing
+myself--a mere apprentice to life.  My brain is at some prank; I am
+suffering a momentary delusion; I shall shake myself, and return to
+common sense--to my schemes and activities and eager enjoyments.
+
+Nevertheless, my life is over.
+
+What a little thing!  I knew how the philosophers had spoken; I repeated
+their musical phrases about the mortal span--yet never till now believed
+them.  And this is all?  A man's life can be so brief and so vain?  Idly
+would I persuade myself that life, in the true sense, is only now
+beginning; that the time of sweat and fear was not life at all, and that
+it now only depends upon my will to lead a worthy existence.  That may be
+a sort of consolation, but it does not obscure the truth that I shall
+never again see possibilities and promises opening before me.  I have
+"retired," and for me as truly as for the retired tradesman, life is
+over.  I can look back upon its completed course, and what a little
+thing!  I am tempted to laugh; I hold myself within the limit of a smile.
+
+And that is best, to smile, not in scorn, but in all forbearance, without
+too much self-compassion.  After all, that dreadful aspect of the thing
+never really took hold of me; I could put it by without much effort.  Life
+is done--and what matter?  Whether it has been, in sum, painful or
+enjoyable, even now I cannot say--a fact which in itself should prevent
+me from taking the loss too seriously.  What does it matter?  Destiny
+with the hidden face decreed that I should come into being, play my
+little part, and pass again into silence; is it mine either to approve or
+to rebel?  Let me be grateful that I have suffered no intolerable wrong,
+no terrible woe of flesh or spirit, such as others--alas! alas!--have
+found in their lot.  Is it not much to have accomplished so large a part
+of the mortal journey with so much ease?  If I find myself astonished at
+its brevity and small significance, why, that is my own fault; the voices
+of those gone before had sufficiently warned me.  Better to see the truth
+now, and accept it, than to fall into dread surprise on some day of
+weakness, and foolishly to cry against fate.  I will be glad rather than
+sorry, and think of the thing no more.
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+Waking at early dawn used to be one of the things I most dreaded.  The
+night which made me capable of resuming labour had brought no such calm
+as should follow upon repose; I woke to a vision of the darkest miseries
+and lay through the hours of daybreak--too often--in very anguish.  But
+that is past.  Sometimes, ere yet I know myself, the mind struggles as
+with an evil spirit on the confines of sleep; then the light at my
+window, the pictures on my walls, restore me to happy consciousness,
+happier for the miserable dream.  Now, when I lie thinking, my worst
+trouble is wonder at the common life of man.  I see it as a thing so
+incredible that it oppresses the mind like a haunting illusion.  Is it
+the truth that men are fretting, raving, killing each other, for matters
+so trivial that I, even I, so far from saint or philosopher, must needs
+fall into amazement when I consider them?  I could imagine a man who, by
+living alone and at peace, came to regard the everyday world as not
+really existent, but a creation of his own fancy in unsound moments.  What
+lunatic ever dreamt of things less consonant with the calm reason than
+those which are thought and done every minute in every community of men
+called sane?  But I put aside this reflection as soon as may be; it
+perturbs me fruitlessly.  Then I listen to the sounds about my cottage,
+always soft, soothing, such as lead the mind to gentle thoughts.
+Sometimes I can hear nothing; not the rustle of a leaf, not the buzz of a
+fly, and then I think that utter silence is best of all.
+
+This morning I was awakened by a continuous sound which presently shaped
+itself to my ear as a multitudinous shrilling of bird voices.  I knew
+what it meant.  For the last few days I have seen the swallows gathering,
+now they were ranged upon my roof, perhaps in the last council before
+their setting forth upon the great journey.  I know better than to talk
+about animal instinct, and to wonder in a pitying way at its resemblance
+to reason.  I know that these birds show to us a life far more
+reasonable, and infinitely more beautiful, than that of the masses of
+mankind.  They talk with each other, and in their talk is neither malice
+nor folly.  Could one but interpret the converse in which they make their
+plans for the long and perilous flight--and then compare it with that of
+numberless respectable persons who even now are projecting their winter
+in the South!
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+
+Yesterday I passed by an elm avenue, leading to a beautiful old house.
+The road between the trees was covered in all its length and breadth with
+fallen leaves--a carpet of pale gold.  Further on, I came to a
+plantation, mostly of larches; it shone in the richest aureate hue, with
+here and there a splash of blood-red, which was a young beech in its
+moment of autumnal glory.
+
+I looked at an alder, laden with brown catkins, its blunt foliage stained
+with innumerable shades of lovely colour.  Near it was a horse-chestnut,
+with but a few leaves hanging on its branches, and those a deep orange.
+The limes, I see, are already bare.
+
+To-night the wind is loud, and rain dashes against my casement; to-morrow
+I shall awake to a sky of winter.
+
+
+
+
+WINTER
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Blasts from the Channel, with raining scud, and spume of mist breaking
+upon the hills, have kept me indoors all day.  Yet not for a moment have
+I been dull or idle, and now, by the latter end of a sea-coal fire, I
+feel such enjoyment of my ease and tranquillity that I must needs word it
+before going up to bed.
+
+Of course one ought to be able to breast weather such as this of to-day,
+and to find one's pleasure in the strife with it.  For the man sound in
+body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky
+has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more
+vigorously.  I remember the time when I would have set out with gusto for
+a tramp along the wind-swept and rain-beaten roads; nowadays, I should
+perhaps pay for the experiment with my life.  All the more do I prize the
+shelter of these good walls, the honest workmanship which makes my doors
+and windows proof against the assailing blast.  In all England, the land
+of comfort, there is no room more comfortable than this in which I sit.
+Comfortable in the good old sense of the word, giving solace to the mind
+no less than ease to the body.  And never does it look more homely, more
+a refuge and a sanctuary, than on winter nights.
+
+In my first winter here, I tried fires of wood, having had my hearth
+arranged for the purpose; but that was a mistake.  One cannot burn logs
+successfully in a small room; either the fire, being kept moderate, needs
+constant attention, or its triumphant blaze makes the room too hot.  A
+fire is a delightful thing, a companion and an inspiration.  If my room
+were kept warm by some wretched modern contrivance of water-pipes or
+heated air, would it be the same to me as that beautiful core of glowing
+fuel, which, if I sit and gaze into it, becomes a world of wonders?  Let
+science warm the heaven-forsaken inhabitants of flats and hotels as
+effectually and economically as it may; if the choice were forced upon
+me, I had rather sit, like an Italian, wrapped in my mantle, softly
+stirring with a key the silver-grey surface of the brasier's charcoal.
+They tell me we are burning all our coal, and with wicked wastefulness.  I
+am sorry for it, but I cannot on that account make cheerless perhaps the
+last winter of my life.  There may be waste on domestic hearths, but the
+wickedness is elsewhere--too blatant to call for indication.  Use common
+sense, by all means, in the construction of grates; that more than half
+the heat of the kindly coal should be blown up the chimney is desired by
+no one; but hold by the open fire as you hold by whatever else is best in
+England.  Because, in the course of nature, it will be some day a thing
+of the past (like most other things that are worth living for), is that a
+reason why it should not be enjoyed as long as possible?  Human beings
+may ere long take their nourishment in the form of pills; the prevision
+of that happy economy causes me no reproach when I sit down to a joint of
+meat.
+
+See how friendly together are the fire and the shaded lamp; both have
+their part alike in the illumining and warming of the room.  As the fire
+purrs and softly crackles, so does my lamp at intervals utter a little
+gurgling sound when the oil flows to the wick, and custom has made this a
+pleasure to me.  Another sound, blending with both, is the gentle ticking
+of the clock.  I could not endure one of those bustling little clocks
+which tick like a fever pulse, and are only fit for a stockbroker's
+office; mine hums very slowly, as though it savoured the minutes no less
+than I do; and when it strikes, the little voice is silver-sweet, telling
+me without sadness that another hour of life is reckoned, another of the
+priceless hours--
+
+   "Quae nobis pereunt et imputantur."
+
+After extinguishing the lamp, and when I have reached the door, I always
+turn to look back; my room is so cosily alluring in the light of the last
+gleeds, that I do not easily move away.  The warm glow is reflected on
+shining wood, on my chair, my writing-table, on the bookcases, and from
+the gilt title of some stately volume; it illumes this picture, it half
+disperses the gloom on that.  I could imagine that, as in a fairy tale,
+the books do but await my departure to begin talking among themselves.  A
+little tongue of flame shoots up from a dying ember; shadows shift upon
+the ceiling and the walls.  With a sigh of utter contentment, I go forth,
+and shut the door softly.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+I came home this afternoon just at twilight, and, feeling tired after my
+walk, a little cold too, I first crouched before the fire, then let
+myself drop lazily upon the hearthrug.  I had a book in my hand, and
+began to read it by the firelight.  Rising in a few minutes, I found the
+open page still legible by the pale glimmer of day.  This sudden change
+of illumination had an odd effect upon me; it was so unexpected, for I
+had forgotten that dark had not yet fallen.  And I saw in the queer
+little experience an intellectual symbol.  The book was verse.  Might not
+the warm rays from the fire exhibit the page as it appears to an
+imaginative and kindred mind, whilst that cold, dull light from the
+window showed it as it is beheld by eyes to which poetry has but a poor,
+literal meaning, or none at all?
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+It is a pleasant thing enough to be able to spend a little money without
+fear when the desire for some indulgence is strong upon one; but how much
+pleasanter the ability to give money away!  Greatly as I relish the
+comforts of my wonderful new life, no joy it has brought me equals that
+of coming in aid to another's necessity.  The man for ever pinched in
+circumstances can live only for himself.  It is all very well to talk
+about doing moral good; in practice, there is little scope or hope for
+anything of that kind in a state of material hardship.  To-day I have
+sent S--- a cheque for fifty pounds; it will come as a very boon of
+heaven, and assuredly blesseth him that gives as much as him that takes.
+A poor fifty pounds, which the wealthy fool throws away upon some idle or
+base fantasy, and never thinks of it; yet to S--- it will mean life and
+light.  And I, to whom this power of benefaction is such a new thing,
+sign the cheque with a hand trembling, so glad and proud I am.  In the
+days gone by, I have sometimes given money, but with trembling of another
+kind; it was as likely as not that I myself, some black foggy morning,
+might have to go begging for my own dire needs.  That is one of the
+bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.  Of my
+abundance--abundance to me, though starveling pittance in the view of
+everyday prosperity--I can give with happiest freedom; I feel myself a
+man, and no crouching slave with his back ever ready for the lash of
+circumstance.  There are those, I know, who thank the gods amiss, and
+most easily does this happen in the matter of wealth.  But oh, how good
+it is to desire little, and to have a little more than enough!
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+After two or three days of unseasonable and depressing warmth, with
+lowering but not rainy sky, I woke this morning to find the land covered
+with a dense mist.  There was no daybreak, and, till long after the due
+hour, no light save a pale, sad glimmer at the window; now, at mid-day, I
+begin dimly to descry gaunt shapes of trees, whilst a haunting drip, drip
+on the garden soil tells me that the vapour has begun to condense, and
+will pass in rain.  But for my fire, I should be in indifferent spirits
+on such a day as this; the flame sings and leaps, and its red beauty is
+reflected in the window-glass.  I cannot give my thoughts to reading; if
+I sat unoccupied, they would brood with melancholy fixedness on I know
+not what.  Better to betake myself to the old mechanic exercise of the
+pen, which cheats my sense of time wasted.
+
+I think of fogs in London, fogs of murky yellow or of sheer black, such
+as have often made all work impossible to me, and held me, a sort of
+dyspeptic owl, in moping and blinking idleness.  On such a day, I
+remember, I once found myself at an end both of coal and of lamp-oil,
+with no money to purchase either; all I could do was to go to bed,
+meaning to lie there till the sky once more became visible.  But a second
+day found the fog dense as ever.  I rose in darkness; I stood at the
+window of my garret, and saw that the street was illumined as at night,
+lamps and shop-fronts perfectly visible, with folk going about their
+business.  The fog, in fact, had risen, but still hung above the house-
+tops, impermeable by any heavenly beam.  My solitude being no longer
+endurable, I went out, and walked the town for hours.  When I returned,
+it was with a few coins which permitted me to buy warmth and light.  I
+had sold to a second-hand bookseller a volume which I prized, and was so
+much the poorer for the money in my pocket.
+
+Years after that, I recall another black morning.  As usual at such
+times, I was suffering from a bad cold.  After a sleepless night, I fell
+into a torpor, which held me unconscious for an hour or two.  Hideous
+cries aroused me; sitting up in the dark, I heard men going along the
+street, roaring news of a hanging that had just taken place.  "Execution
+of Mrs."--I forget the name of the murderess.  "Scene on the scaffold!"
+It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly
+got out its gibbet edition.  A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways
+covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I
+lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged--hanged.  I
+thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in
+that wilderness of houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent
+congregation of vapours."  Overcome with dread, I rose and bestirred
+myself.  Blinds drawn, lamp lit, and by a blazing fire, I tried to make
+believe that it was kindly night.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+Walking along the road after nightfall, I thought all at once of London
+streets, and, by a freak of mind, wished I were there.  I saw the shining
+of shop-fronts, the yellow glistening of a wet pavement, the hurrying
+people, the cabs, the omnibuses--and I wished I were amid it all.
+
+What did it mean, but that I wished I were young again?  Not seldom I
+have a sudden vision of a London street, perhaps the dreariest and
+ugliest, which for a moment gives me a feeling of home-sickness.  Often
+it is the High Street of Islington, which I have not seen for a quarter
+of a century, at least; no thoroughfare in all London less attractive to
+the imagination, one would say; but I see myself walking there--walking
+with the quick, light step of youth, and there, of course, is the charm.
+I see myself, after a long day of work and loneliness, setting forth from
+my lodging.  For the weather I care nothing; rain, wind, fog--what does
+it matter!  The fresh air fills my lungs; my blood circles rapidly; I
+feel my muscles, and have a pleasure in the hardness of the stone I tread
+upon.  Perhaps I have money in my pocket; I am going to the theatre, and,
+afterwards, I shall treat myself to supper--sausage and mashed potatoes,
+with a pint of foaming ale.  The gusto with which I look forward to each
+and every enjoyment!  At the pit-door, I shall roll and hustle amid the
+throng, and find it amusing.  Nothing tires me.  Late at night, I shall
+walk all the way back to Islington, most likely singing as I go.  Not
+because I am happy--nay, I am anything but that; but my age is something
+and twenty; I am strong and well.
+
+Put me in a London street this chill, damp night, and I should be lost in
+barren discomfort.  But in those old days, if I am not mistaken, I rather
+preferred the seasons of bad weather; I had, in fact, the true instinct
+of townsfolk, which finds pleasure in the triumph of artificial
+circumstance over natural conditions, delighting in a glare and tumult of
+busy life under hostile heavens which, elsewhere, would mean shivering
+ill-content.  The theatre, at such a time, is doubly warm and bright;
+every shop is a happy harbour of refuge--there, behind the counter, stand
+persons quite at their ease, ready to chat as they serve you; the supper
+bars make tempting display under their many gas-jets; the public houses
+are full of people who all have money to spend.  Then clangs out the
+piano-organ--and what could be cheerier!
+
+I have much ado to believe that I really felt so.  But then, if life had
+not somehow made itself tolerable to me, how should I have lived through
+those many years?  Human creatures have a marvellous power of adapting
+themselves to necessity.  Were I, even now, thrown back into squalid
+London, with no choice but to abide and work there--should I not abide
+and work?  Notwithstanding thoughts of the chemist's shop, I suppose I
+should.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+One of the shining moments of my day is that when, having returned a
+little weary from an afternoon walk, I exchange boots for slippers, out-
+of-doors coat for easy, familiar, shabby jacket, and, in my deep, soft-
+elbowed chair, await the tea-tray.  Perhaps it is while drinking tea that
+I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure.  In days gone by, I could but
+gulp down the refreshment, hurried, often harassed, by the thought of the
+work I had before me; often I was quite insensible of the aroma, the
+flavour, of what I drank.  Now, how delicious is the soft yet penetrating
+odour which floats into my study, with the appearance of the teapot!  What
+solace in the first cup, what deliberate sipping of that which follows!
+What a glow does it bring after a walk in chilly rain!  The while, I look
+around at my books and pictures, tasting the happiness of their tranquil
+possession.  I cast an eye towards my pipe; perhaps I prepare it, with
+seeming thoughtfulness, for the reception of tobacco.  And never, surely,
+is tobacco more soothing, more suggestive of humane thoughts, than when
+it comes just after tea--itself a bland inspirer.
+
+In nothing is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared
+than in the institution of this festival--almost one may call it so--of
+afternoon tea.  Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea has something in it
+of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work and worry, the beginning
+of restful, sociable evening.  The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes
+the mind to happy repose.  I care nothing for your five o'clock tea of
+modish drawing-rooms, idle and wearisome like all else in which that
+world has part; I speak of tea where one is at home in quite another than
+the worldly sense.  To admit mere strangers to your tea-table is
+profanation; on the other hand, English hospitality has here its
+kindliest aspect; never is friend more welcome than when he drops in for
+a cup of tea.  Where tea is really a meal, with nothing between it and
+nine o'clock supper, it is--again in the true sense--the _homeliest_ meal
+of the day.  Is it believable that the Chinese, in who knows how many
+centuries, have derived from tea a millionth part of the pleasure or the
+good which it has brought to England in the past one hundred years?
+
+I like to look at my housekeeper when she carries in the tray.  Her mien
+is festal, yet in her smile there is a certain gravity, as though she
+performed an office which honoured her.  She has dressed for the evening;
+that is to say, her clean and seemly attire of working hours is exchanged
+for garments suitable to fireside leisure; her cheeks are warm, for she
+has been making fragrant toast.  Quickly her eye glances about my room,
+but only to have the pleasure of noting that all is in order;
+inconceivable that anything serious should need doing at this hour of the
+day.  She brings the little table within the glow of the hearth, so that
+I can help myself without changing my easy position.  If she speaks, it
+will only be a pleasant word or two; should she have anything important
+to say, the moment will be _after_ tea, not before it; this she knows by
+instinct.  Perchance she may just stoop to sweep back a cinder which has
+fallen since, in my absence, she looked after the fire; it is done
+quickly and silently.  Then, still smiling, she withdraws, and I know
+that she is going to enjoy her own tea, her own toast, in the warm,
+comfortable, sweet-smelling kitchen.
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+One has heard much condemnation of the English kitchen.  Our typical cook
+is spoken of as a gross, unimaginative creature, capable only of roasting
+or seething.  Our table is said to be such as would weary or revolt any
+but gobbet-bolting carnivores.  We are told that our bread is the worst
+in Europe, an indigestible paste; that our vegetables are diet rather for
+the hungry animal than for discriminative man; that our warm beverages,
+called coffee and tea, are so carelessly or ignorantly brewed that they
+preserve no simple virtue of the drink as it is known in other lands.  To
+be sure, there is no lack of evidence to explain such censure.  The class
+which provides our servants is undeniably coarse and stupid, and its
+handiwork of every kind too often bears the native stamp.  For all that,
+English victuals are, in quality, the best in the world, and English
+cookery is the wholesomest and the most appetizing known to any temperate
+clime.
+
+As in so many other of our good points, we have achieved this thing
+unconsciously.  Your ordinary Englishwoman engaged in cooking probably
+has no other thought than to make the food masticable; but reflect on the
+results, when the thing is well done, and there appears a culinary
+principle.  Nothing could be simpler, yet nothing more right and
+reasonable.  The aim of English cooking is so to deal with the raw
+material of man's nourishment as to bring out, for the healthy palate,
+all its natural juices and savours.  And in this, when the cook has any
+measure of natural or acquired skill, we most notably succeed.  Our beef
+is veritably beef; at its best, such beef as can be eaten in no other
+country under the sun; our mutton is mutton in its purest essence--think
+of a shoulder of Southdown at the moment when the first jet of gravy
+starts under the carving knife!  Each of our vegetables yields its
+separate and characteristic sweetness.  It never occurs to us to disguise
+the genuine flavour of food; if such a process be necessary, then
+something is wrong with the food itself.  Some wiseacre scoffed at us as
+the people with only one sauce.  The fact is, we have as many sauces as
+we have kinds of meat; each, in the process of cookery, yields its native
+sap, and this is the best of all sauces conceivable.  Only English folk
+know what is meant by _gravy_; consequently, the English alone are
+competent to speak on the question of sauce.
+
+To be sure, this culinary principle presupposes food of the finest
+quality.  If your beef and your mutton have flavours scarcely
+distinguishable, whilst both this and that might conceivably be veal, you
+will go to work in quite a different way; your object must then be to
+disguise, to counterfeit, to add an alien relish--in short, to do
+anything _except_ insist upon the natural quality of the viand.  Happily,
+the English have never been driven to these expedients.  Be it flesh,
+fowl, or fish, each comes to table so distinctly and eminently itself
+that by no possibility could it be confused with anything else.  Give
+your average cook a bit of cod, and tell her to dress it in her own way.
+The good creature will carefully boil it, and there an end of the matter;
+and by no exercise of art could she have so treated the fish as to make
+more manifest and enjoyable that special savour which heaven has bestowed
+upon cod.  Think of our array of joints; how royal is each in its own
+way, and how utterly unlike any of the others.  Picture a boiled leg of
+mutton.  It is mutton, yes, and mutton of the best; nature has bestowed
+upon man no sweeter morsel; but the same joint roasted is mutton too, and
+how divinely different!  The point is that these differences are natural;
+that, in eliciting them, we obey the eternal law of things, and no human
+caprice.  Your artificial relish is here not only needless, but
+offensive.
+
+In the case of veal, we demand "stuffing."  Yes, for veal is a somewhat
+insipid meat, and by experience we have discovered the best method of
+throwing into relief such inherent goodness as it has.  The stuffing does
+not disguise, nor seek to disguise; it accentuates.  Good veal
+stuffing--reflect!--is in itself a triumph of culinary instinct; so bland
+it is, and yet so powerful upon the gastric juices.
+
+Did I call veal insipid?  I must add that it is only so in comparison
+with English beef and mutton.  When I think of the "brown" on the edge of
+a really fine cut of veal--!
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+As so often when my thought has gone forth in praise of things English, I
+find myself tormented by an after-thought--the reflection that I have
+praised a time gone by.  Now, in this matter of English meat.  A
+newspaper tells me that English beef is non-existent; that the best meat
+bearing that name has merely been fed up in England for a short time
+before killing.  Well, well; we can only be thankful that the quality is
+still so good.  Real English mutton still exists, I suppose.  It would
+surprise me if any other country could produce the shoulder I had
+yesterday.
+
+Who knows?  Perhaps even our own cookery has seen its best days.  It is a
+lamentable fact that the multitude of English people nowadays never taste
+roasted meat; what they call by that name is baked in the oven--a totally
+different thing, though it may, I admit, be inferior only to the right
+roast.  Oh, the sirloin of old times, the sirloin which I can remember,
+thirty or forty years ago!  That was English, and no mistake, and all the
+history of civilization could show nothing on the table of mankind to
+equal it.  To clap that joint into a steamy oven would have been a crime
+unpardonable by gods and man.  Have I not with my own eyes seen it
+turning, turning on the spit?  The scent it diffused was in itself a cure
+for dyspepsia.
+
+It is very long since I tasted a slice of boiled beef; I have a suspicion
+that the thing is becoming rare.  In a household such as mine, the
+"round" is impracticable; of necessity it must be large, altogether too
+large for our requirements.  But what exquisite memories does my mind
+preserve!  The very colouring of a round, how rich it is, yet how
+delicate, and how subtly varied!  The odour is totally distinct from that
+of roast beef, and yet it is beef incontestable.  Hot, of course with
+carrots, it is a dish for a king; but cold it is nobler.  Oh, the thin
+broad slice, with just its fringe of consistent fat!
+
+We are sparing of condiments, but such as we use are the best that man
+has invented.  And we know _how_ to use them.  I have heard an impatient
+innovator scoff at the English law on the subject of mustard, and demand
+why, in the nature of things, mustard should not be eaten with mutton.
+The answer is very simple; this law has been made by the English
+palate--which is impeccable.  I maintain it is impeccable!  Your educated
+Englishman is an infallible guide in all that relates to the table.  "The
+man of superior intellect," said Tennyson--justifying his love of boiled
+beef and new potatoes--"knows what is good to eat"; and I would extend it
+to all civilized natives of our country.  We are content with nothing but
+the finest savours, the truest combinations; our wealth, and happy
+natural circumstances, have allowed us an education of the palate of
+which our natural aptitude was worthy.  Think, by the bye, of those new
+potatoes, just mentioned.  Our cook, when dressing them, puts into the
+saucepan a sprig of mint.  This is genius.  No otherwise could the
+flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately, emphasized.
+The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows only the young
+potato.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+There is to me an odd pathos in the literature of vegetarianism.  I
+remember the day when I read these periodicals and pamphlets with all the
+zest of hunger and poverty, vigorously seeking to persuade myself that
+flesh was an altogether superfluous, and even a repulsive, food.  If ever
+such things fall under my eyes nowadays, I am touched with a half
+humorous compassion for the people whose necessity, not their will,
+consents to this chemical view of diet.  There comes before me a vision
+of certain vegetarian restaurants, where, at a minim outlay, I have often
+enough made believe to satisfy my craving stomach; where I have swallowed
+"savoury cutlet," "vegetable steak," and I know not what windy
+insufficiencies tricked up under specious names.  One place do I recall
+where you had a complete dinner for sixpence--I dare not try to remember
+the items.  But well indeed do I see the faces of the guests--poor clerks
+and shopboys, bloodless girls and women of many sorts--all endeavouring
+to find a relish in lentil soup and haricot something-or-other.  It was a
+grotesquely heart-breaking sight.
+
+I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils and haricots--those
+pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those
+certificated aridities calling themselves human food!  An ounce of
+either, we are told, is equivalent to--how many pounds?--of the best rump-
+steak.  There are not many ounces of common sense in the brain of him who
+proves it, or of him who believes it.  In some countries, this stuff is
+eaten by choice; in England only dire need can compel to its consumption.
+Lentils and haricots are not merely insipid; frequent use of them causes
+something like nausea.  Preach and tabulate as you will, the English
+palate--which is the supreme judge--rejects this farinaceous makeshift.
+Even as it rejects vegetables without the natural concomitant of meat; as
+it rejects oatmeal-porridge and griddle-cakes for a mid-day meal; as it
+rejects lemonade and ginger-ale offered as substitutes for honest beer.
+
+What is the intellectual and moral state of that man who really believes
+that chemical analysis can be an equivalent for natural gusto?--I will
+get more nourishment out of an inch of right Cambridge sausage; aye, out
+of a couple of ounces of honest tripe; than can be yielded me by half a
+hundredweight of the best lentils ever grown.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+Talking of vegetables, can the inhabited globe offer anything to vie with
+the English potato justly steamed?  I do not say that it is always--or
+often--to be seen on our tables, for the steaming of a potato is one of
+the great achievements of culinary art; but, when it _is_ set before you,
+how flesh and spirit exult!  A modest palate will find more than simple
+comfort in your boiled potato of every day, as served in the decent
+household.  New or old, it is beyond challenge delectable.  Try to think
+that civilized nations exist to whom this food is unknown--nay, who speak
+of it, on hearsay, with contempt!  Such critics, little as they suspect
+it, never ate a potato in their lives.  What they have swallowed under
+that name was the vegetable with all its exquisite characteristics
+vulgarized or destroyed.  Picture the "ball of flour" (as old-fashioned
+housewives call it) lying in the dish, diffusing the softest, subtlest
+aroma, ready to crumble, all but to melt, as soon as it is touched;
+recall its gust and its after-gust, blending so consummately with that of
+the joint, hot or cold.  Then think of the same potato cooked in any
+other way, and what sadness will come upon you!
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+It angers me to pass a grocer's shop, and see in the window a display of
+foreign butter.  This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the
+prospects of England.  The deterioration of English butter is one of the
+worst signs of the moral state of our people.  Naturally, this article of
+food would at once betray a decline in the virtues of its maker; butter
+must be a subject of the dairyman's honest pride, or there is no hope of
+its goodness.  Begin to save your labour, to aim at dishonest profits, to
+feel disgust or contempt for your work--and the churn declares every one
+of these vices.  They must be very prevalent, for it is getting to be a
+rare thing to eat English butter which is even tolerable.  What!  England
+dependent for dairy-produce upon France, Denmark, America?  Had we but
+one true statesman--but one genuine leader of the people--the ears of
+English landowners and farmers would ring and tingle with this proof of
+their imbecility.
+
+Nobody cares.  Who cares for anything but the show and bluster which are
+threatening our ruin?  English food, not long ago the best in the world,
+is falling off in quality, and even our national genius for cooking shows
+a decline; to anyone who knows England, these are facts significant
+enough.  Foolish persons have prated about "our insular cuisine,"
+demanding its reform on Continental models, and they have found too many
+like unto themselves who were ready to listen; the result will be, before
+long, that our excellence will be forgotten, and paltry methods be
+universally introduced, together with the indifferent viands to which
+they are suited.  Yet, if any generality at all be true, it is a plain
+fact that English diet and English virtue--in the largest sense of the
+word--are inseparably bound together.
+
+Our supremacy in this matter of the table came with little taking of
+thought; what we should now do is to reflect upon the things which used
+to be instinctive, perceive the reasons of our excellence, and set to
+work to re-establish it.  Of course the vilest cooking in the kingdom is
+found in London; is it not with the exorbitant growth of London that many
+an ill has spread over the land?  London is the antithesis of the
+domestic ideal; a social reformer would not even glance in that
+direction, but would turn all his zeal upon small towns and country
+districts, where blight may perhaps be arrested, and whence, some day, a
+reconstituted national life may act upon the great centre of corruption.
+I had far rather see England covered with schools of cookery than with
+schools of the ordinary kind; the issue would be infinitely more hopeful.
+Little girls should be taught cooking and baking more assiduously than
+they are taught to read.  But with ever in view the great English
+principle--that food is only cooked aright when it yields the utmost of
+its native and characteristic savour.  Let sauces be utterly
+forbidden--save the natural sauce made of gravy.  In the same way with
+sweets; keep in view the insurpassable English ideals of baked tarts (or
+pies, if so you call them), and boiled puddings; as they are the
+wholesomest, so are they the most delicious of sweet cakes yet invented;
+it is merely a question of having them well made and cooked.  Bread,
+again; we are getting used to bread of poor quality, and ill-made, but
+the English loaf at its best--such as you were once sure of getting in
+every village--is the faultless form of the staff of life.  Think of the
+glorious revolution that could be wrought in our troubled England if it
+could be ordained that no maid, of whatever rank, might become a wife
+unless she had proved her ability to make and bake a perfect loaf of
+bread.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+The good S--- writes me a kindly letter.  He is troubled by the thought
+of my loneliness.  That I should choose to live in such a place as this
+through the summer, he can understand; but surely I should do better to
+come to town for the winter?  How on earth do I spend the dark days and
+the long evenings?
+
+I chuckle over the good S---'s sympathy.  Dark days are few in happy
+Devon, and such as befall have never brought me a moment's tedium.  The
+long, wild winter of the north would try my spirits; but here, the season
+that follows autumn is merely one of rest, Nature's annual slumber.  And
+I share in the restful influence.  Often enough I pass an hour in mere
+drowsing by the fireside; frequently I let my book drop, satisfied to
+muse.  But more often than not the winter day is blest with sunshine--the
+soft beam which is Nature's smile in dreaming.  I go forth, and wander
+far.  It pleases me to note changes of landscape when the leaves have
+fallen; I see streams and ponds which during summer were hidden; my
+favourite lanes have an unfamiliar aspect, and I become better acquainted
+with them.  Then, there is a rare beauty in the structure of trees
+ungarmented; and if perchance snow or frost have silvered their tracery
+against the sober sky, it becomes a marvel which never tires.
+
+Day by day I look at the coral buds on the lime-tree.  Something of
+regret will mingle with my joy when they begin to break.
+
+In the middle years of my life--those years that were the worst of all--I
+used to dread the sound of a winter storm which woke me in the night.
+Wind and rain lashing the house filled me with miserable memories and
+apprehensions; I lay thinking of the savage struggle of man with man, and
+often saw before me no better fate than to be trampled down into the mud
+of life.  The wind's wail seemed to me the voice of a world in anguish;
+rain was the weeping of the feeble and the oppressed.  But nowadays I can
+lie and listen to a night-storm with no intolerable thoughts; at worst, I
+fall into a compassionate sadness as I remember those I loved and whom I
+shall see no more.  For myself, there is even comfort in the roaring
+dark; for I feel the strength of the good walls about me, and my safety
+from squalid peril such as pursued me through all my labouring life.
+"Blow, blow, thou winter wind!"  Thou canst not blow away the modest
+wealth which makes my security.  Nor can any "rain upon the roof" put my
+soul to question; for life has given me all I ever asked--infinitely more
+than I ever hoped--and in no corner of my mind does there lurk a coward
+fear of death.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+If some stranger from abroad asked me to point out to him the most
+noteworthy things in England, I should first of all consider his
+intellect.  Were he a man of everyday level, I might indicate for his
+wonder and admiration Greater London, the Black Country, South
+Lancashire, and other features of our civilization which, despite eager
+rivalry, still maintain our modern pre-eminence in the creation of
+ugliness.  If, on the other hand, he seemed a man of brains, it would be
+my pleasure to take him to one of those old villages, in the midlands or
+the west, which lie at some distance from a railway station, and in
+aspect are still untouched by the baser tendencies of the time.  Here, I
+would tell my traveller, he saw something which England alone can show.
+The simple beauty of the architecture, its perfect adaptation to the
+natural surroundings, the neatness of everything though without
+formality, the general cleanness and good repair, the grace of cottage
+gardens, that tranquillity and security which make a music in the mind of
+him who gazes--these are what a man must see and feel if he would
+appreciate the worth and the power of England.  The people which has made
+for itself such homes as these is distinguished, above all things, by its
+love of order; it has understood, as no other people, the truth that
+"order is heaven's first law."  With order it is natural to find
+stability, and the combination of these qualities, as seen in domestic
+life, results in that peculiarly English product, our name for
+which--though but a pale shadow of the thing itself--has been borrowed by
+other countries: comfort.
+
+Then Englishman's need of "comfort" is one of his best characteristics;
+the possibility that he may change in this respect, and become
+indifferent to his old ideal of physical and mental ease, is the gravest
+danger manifest in our day.  For "comfort," mind you, does not concern
+the body alone; the beauty and orderliness of an Englishman's home derive
+their value, nay, their very existence, from the spirit which directs his
+whole life.  Walk from the village to the noble's mansion.  It, too, is
+perfect of its kind; it has the dignity of age, its walls are beautiful,
+the gardens, the park about it are such as can be found only in England,
+lovely beyond compare; and all this represents the same moral
+characteristics as the English cottage, but with greater activities and
+responsibilities.  If the noble grow tired of his mansion, and, letting
+it to some crude owner of millions, go to live in hotels and hired
+villas; if the cottager sicken of his village roof, and transport himself
+to the sixth floor of a "block" in Shoreditch; one sees but too well that
+the one and the other have lost the old English sense of comfort, and, in
+losing it, have suffered degradation alike as men and as citizens.  It is
+not a question of exchanging one form of comfort for another; the
+instinct which made an Englishman has in these cases perished.  Perhaps
+it is perishing from among us altogether, killed by new social and
+political conditions; one who looks at villages of the new type, at the
+working-class quarters of towns, at the rising of "flats" among the
+dwellings of the wealthy, has little choice but to think so.  There may
+soon come a day when, though the word "comfort" continues to be used in
+many languages, the thing it signifies will be discoverable nowhere at
+all.
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+If the ingenious foreigner found himself in some village of manufacturing
+Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed.  Here something of the power
+of England might be revealed to him, but of England's worth, little
+enough.  Hard ugliness would everywhere assail his eyes; the visages and
+voices of the people would seem to him thoroughly akin to their
+surroundings.  Scarcely could one find, in any civilized nation, a more
+notable contrast than that between these two English villages and their
+inhabitants.
+
+Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the
+hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim
+undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south.  But
+to understand how "comfort," and the virtues it implies, can exist amid
+such conditions, one must penetrate to the hearthside; the door must be
+shut, the curtain drawn; here "home" does not extend beyond the
+threshold.  After all, this grimy row of houses, ugliest that man ever
+conceived, is more representative of England to-day than the lovely
+village among the trees and meadows.  More than a hundred years ago,
+power passed from the south of England to the north.  The vigorous race
+on the other side of Trent only found its opportunity when the age of
+machinery began; its civilization, long delayed, differs in obvious
+respects from that of older England.  In Sussex or in Somerset, however
+dull and clownish the typical inhabitant, he plainly belongs to an
+ancient order of things, represents an immemorial subordination.  The
+rude man of the north is--by comparison--but just emerged from barbarism,
+and under any circumstances would show less smooth a front.  By great
+misfortune, he has fallen under the harshest lordship the modern world
+has known--that of scientific industrialism, and all his vigorous
+qualities are subdued to a scheme of life based upon the harsh, the ugly,
+the sordid.  His racial heritage, of course, marks him to the eye; even
+as ploughman or shepherd, he differs notably from him of the same calling
+in the weald or on the downs.  But the frank brutality of the man in all
+externals has been encouraged, rather than mitigated, by the course his
+civilization has taken, and hence it is that, unless one knows him well
+enough to respect him, he seems even yet stamped with the half-savagery
+of his folk as they were a century and a half ago.  His fierce shyness,
+his arrogant self-regard, are notes of a primitive state.  Naturally, he
+never learnt to house himself as did the Southerner, for climate, as well
+as social circumstance, was unfavourable to all the graces of life.  And
+now one can only watch the encroachment of his rule upon that old, that
+true England whose strength and virtue were so differently manifested.
+This fair broad land of the lovely villages signifies little save to the
+antiquary, the poet, the painter.  Vainly, indeed, should I show its
+beauty and its peace to the observant foreigner; he would but smile, and,
+with a glance at the traction-engine just coming along the road, indicate
+the direction of his thoughts.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+Nothing in all Homer pleases me more than the bedstead of Odysseus.  I
+have tried to turn the passage describing it into English verse, thus:--
+
+   Here in my garth a goodly olive grew;
+   Thick was the noble leafage of its prime,
+   And like a carven column rose the trunk.
+   This tree about I built my chamber walls,
+   Laying great stone on stone, and roofed them well,
+   And in the portal set a comely door,
+   Stout-hinged and tightly closing.  Then with axe
+   I lopped the leafy olive's branching head,
+   And hewed the bole to four-square shapeliness,
+   And smoothed it, craftsmanlike, and grooved and pierced,
+   Making the rooted timber, where it grew,
+   A corner of my couch.  Labouring on,
+   I fashioned all the bed-frame; which complete,
+   The wood I overlaid with shining gear
+   Of gold, of silver, and of ivory.
+   And last, between the endlong beams I stretched
+   Stout thongs of ox-hide, dipped in purple dye.
+
+   _Odyssey_, xxiii. 190-201.
+
+Did anyone ever imitate the admirable precedent?  Were I a young man, and
+an owner of land, assuredly I would do so.  Choose some goodly tree,
+straight-soaring; cut away head and branches; leave just the clean trunk
+and build your house about it in such manner that the top of the rooted
+timber rises a couple of feet above your bedroom floor.  The trunk need
+not be manifest in the lower part of the house, but I should prefer to
+have it so; I am a tree-worshipper; it should be as the visible presence
+of a household god.  And how could one more nobly symbolize the
+sacredness of Home?  There can be no home without the sense of
+permanence, and without home there is no civilization--as England will
+discover when the greater part of her population have become
+flat-inhabiting nomads.  In some ideal commonwealth, one can imagine the
+Odyssean bed a normal institution, every head of a household, cottager or
+lord (for the commonwealth must have its lords, go to!), lying down to
+rest, as did his fathers, in the Chamber of the Tree.  This, one fancies,
+were a somewhat more fitting nuptial chamber than the chance bedroom of a
+hotel.  Odysseus building his home is man performing a supreme act of
+piety; through all the ages that picture must retain its profound
+significance.  Note the tree he chose, the olive, sacred to Athena,
+emblem of peace.  When he and the wise goddess meet together to scheme
+destruction of the princes, they sit [Greek text].  Their talk is of
+bloodshed, true; but in punishment of those who have outraged the
+sanctity of the hearth, and to re-establish, after purification, domestic
+calm and security.  It is one of the dreary aspects of modern life that
+natural symbolism has all but perished.  We have no consecrated tree.  The
+oak once held a place in English hearts, but who now reveres it?--our
+trust is in gods of iron.  Money is made at Christmas out of holly and
+mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch
+were procurable?  One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted
+round of metal.  And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a
+coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to
+the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+I have been dull to-day, haunted by the thought of how much there is that
+I would fain know, and how little I can hope to learn.  The scope of
+knowledge has become so vast.  I put aside nearly all physical
+investigation; to me it is naught, or only, at moments, a matter of idle
+curiosity.  This would seem to be a considerable clearing of the field;
+but it leaves what is practically the infinite.  To run over a list of
+only my favourite subjects, those to which, all my life long, I have more
+or less applied myself, studies which hold in my mind the place of
+hobbies, is to open vistas of intellectual despair.  In an old note-book
+I jotted down such a list--"things I hope to know, and to know well."  I
+was then four and twenty.  Reading it with the eyes of fifty-four, I must
+needs laugh.  There appear such modest items as "The history of the
+Christian Church up to the Reformation"--"all Greek poetry"--"The field
+of Mediaeval Romance"--"German literature from Lessing to Heine"--"Dante!"
+Not one of these shall I ever "know, and know well"; not any one of them.
+Yet here I am buying books which lead me into endless paths of new
+temptation.  What have I to do with Egypt?  Yet I have been beguiled by
+Flinders Petrie and by Maspero.  How can I pretend to meddle with the
+ancient geography of Asia Minor?  Yet here have I bought Prof. Ramsay's
+astonishing book, and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a
+good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment,
+and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the
+intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.
+
+It all means, of course, that, owing to defective opportunity, owing,
+still more perhaps, to lack of method and persistence, a possibility that
+was in me has been wasted, lost.  My life has been merely tentative, a
+broken series of false starts and hopeless new beginnings.  If I allowed
+myself to indulge that mood, I could revolt against the ordinance which
+allows me no second chance.  _O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter
+annos_!  If I could but start again, with only the experience there
+gained!  I mean, make a new beginning of my intellectual life; nothing
+else, O heaven! nothing else.  Even amid poverty, I could do so much
+better; keeping before my eyes some definite, some not unattainable,
+good; sternly dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful.
+
+And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be for
+ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final
+years.  Who can say?  Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this
+state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling
+and erring which I so regret.
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+Why do I give so much of my time to the reading of history?  Is it in any
+sense profitable to me?  What new light can I hope for on the nature of
+man?  What new guidance for the direction of my own life through the few
+years that may remain to me?  But it is with no such purpose that I read
+these voluminous books; they gratify--or seem to gratify--a mere
+curiosity; and scarcely have I closed a volume, when the greater part of
+what I have read in it is forgotten.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should remember all!  Many a time I have said to
+myself that I would close the dreadful record of human life, lay it for
+ever aside, and try to forget it.  Somebody declares that history is a
+manifestation of the triumph of good over evil.  The good prevails now
+and then, no doubt, but how local and transitory is such triumph.  If
+historic tomes had a voice, it would sound as one long moan of anguish.
+Think steadfastly of the past, and one sees that only by defect of
+imaginative power can any man endure to dwell with it.  History is a
+nightmare of horrors; we relish it, because we love pictures, and because
+all that man has suffered is to man rich in interest.  But make real to
+yourself the vision of every blood-stained page--stand in the presence of
+the ravening conqueror, the savage tyrant--tread the stones of the
+dungeon and of the torture-room--feel the fire of the stake--hear the
+cries of that multitude which no man can number, the victims of calamity,
+of oppression, of fierce injustice in its myriad forms, in every land, in
+every age--and what joy have you of your historic reading?  One would
+need to be a devil to understand it thus, and yet to delight in it.
+
+Injustice--there is the loathed crime which curses the memory of the
+world.  The slave doomed by his lord's caprice to perish under
+tortures--one feels it a dreadful and intolerable thing; but it is merely
+the crude presentment of what has been done and endured a million times
+in every stage of civilization.  Oh, the last thoughts of those who have
+agonized unto death amid wrongs to which no man would give ear!  That
+appeal of innocence in anguish to the hard, mute heavens!  Were there
+only one such instance in all the chronicles of time, it should doom the
+past to abhorred oblivion.  Yet injustice, the basest, the most
+ferocious, is inextricable from warp and woof in the tissue of things
+gone by.  And if anyone soothes himself with the reflection that such
+outrages can happen no more, that mankind has passed beyond such hideous
+possibility, he is better acquainted with books than with human nature.
+
+It were wiser to spend my hours with the books which bring no aftertaste
+of bitterness--with the great poets whom I love, with the thinkers, with
+the gentle writers of pages that soothe and tranquillize.  Many a volume
+regards me from the shelf as though reproachfully; shall I never again
+take it in my hands?  Yet the words are golden, and I would fain treasure
+them all in my heart's memory.  Perhaps the last fault of which I shall
+cure myself is that habit of mind which urges me to seek knowledge.  Was
+I not yesterday on the point of ordering a huge work of erudition, which
+I should certainly never have read through, and which would only have
+served to waste precious days?  It is the Puritan in my blood, I suppose,
+which forbids me to recognise frankly that all I have now to do is to
+_enjoy_.  This is wisdom.  The time for acquisition has gone by.  I am
+not foolish enough to set myself learning a new language; why should I
+try to store my memory with useless knowledge of the past?
+
+Come, once more before I die I will read _Don Quixote_.
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+Somebody has been making a speech, reported at a couple of columns'
+length in the paper.  As I glance down the waste of print, one word
+catches my eye again and again.  It's all about "science"--and therefore
+doesn't concern me.
+
+I wonder whether there are many men who have the same feeling with regard
+to "science" as I have?  It is something more than a prejudice; often it
+takes the form of a dread, almost a terror.  Even those branches of
+science which are concerned with things that interest me--which deal with
+plants and animals and the heaven of stars--even these I cannot
+contemplate without uneasiness, a spiritual disaffection; new
+discoveries, new theories, however they engage my intelligence, soon
+weary me, and in some way depress.  When it comes to other kinds of
+science--the sciences blatant and ubiquitous--the science by which men
+become millionaires--I am possessed with an angry hostility, a resentful
+apprehension.  This was born in me, no doubt; I cannot trace it to
+circumstances of my life, or to any particular moment of my mental
+growth.  My boyish delight in Carlyle doubtless nourished the temper, but
+did not Carlyle so delight me because of what was already in my mind?  I
+remember, as a lad, looking at complicated machinery with a shrinking
+uneasiness which, of course, I did not understand; I remember the sort of
+disturbed contemptuousness with which, in my time of "examinations," I
+dismissed "science papers."  It is intelligible enough to me, now, that
+unformed fear: the ground of my antipathy has grown clear enough.  I hate
+and fear "science" because of my conviction that, for long to come if not
+for ever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind.  I see it
+destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the
+world; I see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization; I see
+it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts; I see it bringing a
+time of vast conflicts, which will pale into insignificance "the thousand
+wars of old," and, as likely as not, will whelm all the laborious
+advances of mankind in blood-drenched chaos.
+
+Yet to rail against it is as idle as to quarrel with any other force of
+nature.  For myself, I can hold apart, and see as little as possible of
+the thing I deem accursed.  But I think of some who are dear to me, whose
+life will be lived in the hard and fierce new age.  The roaring "Jubilee"
+of last summer was for me an occasion of sadness; it meant that so much
+was over and gone--so much of good and noble, the like of which the world
+will not see again, and that a new time of which only the perils are
+clearly visible, is rushing upon us.  Oh, the generous hopes and
+aspirations of forty years ago!  Science, then, was seen as the
+deliverer; only a few could prophesy its tyranny, could foresee that it
+would revive old evils and trample on the promises of its beginning.  This
+is the course of things; we must accept it.  But it is some comfort to me
+that I--poor little mortal--have had no part in bringing the tyrant to
+his throne.
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+The Christmas bells drew me forth this morning.  With but half-formed
+purpose, I walked through soft, hazy sunshine towards the city, and came
+into the Cathedral Close, and, after lingering awhile, heard the first
+notes of the organ, and so entered.  I believe it is more than thirty
+years since I was in an English church on Christmas Day.  The old time
+and the old faces lived again for me; I saw myself on the far side of the
+abyss of years--that self which is not myself at all, though I mark
+points of kindred between the beings of then and now.  He who in that
+other world sat to hear the Christmas gospel, either heeded it not at
+all--rapt in his own visions--or listened only as one in whose blood was
+heresy.  He loved the notes of the organ, but, even in his childish mind,
+distinguished clearly between the music and its local motive.  More than
+that, he could separate the melody of word and of thought from their
+dogmatic significance, enjoying the one whilst wholly rejecting the
+other.  "On earth peace, good-will to men"--already that line was among
+the treasures of his intellect, but only, no doubt, because of its
+rhythm, its sonority.  Life, to him, was a half-conscious striving for
+the harmonic in thought and speech--and through what a tumult of
+unmelodious circumstance was he beginning to fight his way!
+
+To-day, I listen with no heretical promptings.  The music, whether of
+organ or of word, is more to me than ever; the literal meaning causes me
+no restiveness.  I felt only glad that I had yielded to the summons of
+the Christmas bells.  I sat among a congregation of shadows, not in the
+great cathedral, but in a little parish church far from here.  When I
+came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread
+on the moist earth; my dream expected a wind-swept canopy of cold grey,
+and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow.  It is a piety to turn
+awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose
+Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude?  I would not now, if I might,
+be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices,
+and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember.  When I was
+scarce old enough to understand, I heard read by the fireside the
+Christmas stanzas of "In Memoriam."  To-night I have taken down the
+volume, and the voice of so long ago has read to me once again--read as
+no other ever did, that voice which taught me to know poetry, the voice
+which never spoke to me but of good and noble things.  Would I have those
+accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at
+another time?  Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+Is it true that the English are deeply branded with the vice of
+hypocrisy?  The accusation, of course, dates from the time of the Round-
+heads; before that, nothing in the national character could have
+suggested it.  The England of Chaucer, the England of Shakespeare,
+assuredly was not hypocrite.  The change wrought by Puritanism introduced
+into the life of the people that new element which ever since, more or
+less notably, has suggested to the observer a habit of double-dealing in
+morality and religion.  The scorn of the Cavalier is easily understood;
+it created a traditional Cromwell, who, till Carlyle arose, figured
+before the world as our arch-dissembler.  With the decline of genuine
+Puritanism came that peculiarly English manifestation of piety and virtue
+which is represented by Mr. Pecksniff--a being so utterly different from
+Tartufe, and perhaps impossible to be understood save by Englishmen
+themselves.  But it is in our own time that the familiar reproach has
+been persistently levelled at us.  It often sounds upon the lips of our
+emancipated youth; it is stereotyped for daily impression in the offices
+of Continental newspapers.  And for the reason one has not far to look.
+When Napoleon called us a "nation of shop-keepers," we were nothing of
+the kind; since his day we have become so, in the strictest sense of the
+word; and consider the spectacle of a flourishing tradesman, anything but
+scrupulous in his methods of business, who loses no opportunity of
+bidding all mankind to regard him as a religious and moral exemplar.  This
+is the actual show of things with us; this is the England seen by our
+bitterest censors.  There is an excuse for those who charge us with
+"hypocrisy."
+
+But the word is ill-chosen, and indicates a misconception.  The
+characteristic of your true hypocrite is the assumption of a virtue which
+not only he has not, but which he is incapable of possessing, and in
+which he does not believe.  The hypocrite may have, most likely has, (for
+he is a man of brains,) a conscious rule of life, but it is never that of
+the person to whom his hypocrisy is directed.  Tartufe incarnates him
+once for all.  Tartufe is by conviction an atheist and a sensualist; he
+despises all who regard life from the contrasted point of view.  But
+among Englishmen such an attitude of mind has always been extremely rare;
+to presume it in our typical money-maker who has edifying sentiments on
+his lips is to fall into a grotesque error of judgment.  No doubt that
+error is committed by the ordinary foreign journalist, a man who knows
+less than little of English civilization.  More enlightened critics, if
+they use the word at all, do so carelessly; when speaking with more
+precision, they call the English "pharisaic"--and come nearer the truth.
+
+Our vice is self-righteousness.  We are essentially an Old Testament
+people; Christianity has never entered into our soul we see ourselves as
+the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration can attain unto
+humility.  In this there is nothing hypocritic.  The blatant upstart who
+builds a church, lays out his money in that way not merely to win social
+consideration; in his curious little soul he believes (so far as he can
+believe anything) that what he has done is pleasing to God and beneficial
+to mankind.  He may have lied and cheated for every sovereign he
+possesses; he may have polluted his life with uncleanness; he may have
+perpetrated many kinds of cruelty and baseness--but all these things has
+he done against his conscience, and, as soon as the opportunity comes, he
+will make atonement for them in the way suggested by such faith as he
+has, the way approved by public opinion.  His religion, strictly defined,
+is _an ineradicable belief in his own religiousness_.  As an Englishman,
+he holds as birthright the true Piety, the true Morals.  That he has
+"gone wrong" is, alas, undeniable, but never--even when leering most
+satirically--did he deny his creed.  When, at public dinners and
+elsewhere, he tuned his voice to the note of edification, this man did
+not utter the lie of the hypocrite he _meant every word he said_.
+Uttering high sentiments, he spoke, not as an individual, but as an
+Englishman, and most thoroughly did he believe that all who heard him
+owed in their hearts allegiance to the same faith.  He is, if you like, a
+Pharisee--but do not misunderstand; his Pharisaism has nothing personal.
+That would be quite another kind of man; existing, to be sure, in
+England, but not as a national type.  No; he is a Pharisee in the minor
+degree with regard to those of his countrymen who differ from him in
+dogma; he is Pharisee absolute with regard to the foreigner.  And there
+he stands, representing an Empire.
+
+The word hypocrisy is perhaps most of all applied to our behaviour in
+matters of sexual morality, and here with specially flagrant misuse.
+Multitudes of Englishmen have thrown aside the national religious dogma,
+but very few indeed have abandoned the conviction that the rules of
+morality publicly upheld in England are the best known in the world.  Any
+one interested in doing so can but too easily demonstrate that English
+social life is no purer than that of most other countries.  Scandals of
+peculiar grossness, at no long intervals, give rich opportunity to the
+scoffer.  The streets of our great towns nightly present an exhibition
+the like of which cannot be seen elsewhere in the world.  Despite all
+this, your average Englishman takes for granted his country's moral
+superiority, and loses no chance of proclaiming it at the expense of
+other peoples.  To call him hypocrite, is simply not to know the man.  He
+may, for his own part, be gross-minded and lax of life; that has nothing
+to do with the matter; _he believes in virtue_.  Tell him that English
+morality is mere lip-service, and he will blaze with as honest anger as
+man ever felt.  He is a monument of self-righteousness, again not
+personal but national.
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+I make use of the present tense, but am I speaking truly of present
+England?  Such powerful agencies of change have been at work during the
+last thirty years; and it is difficult, nay impossible, to ascertain in
+what degree they have affected the national character, thus far.  One
+notes the obvious: decline of conventional religion, free discussion of
+the old moral standards; therewith, a growth of materialism which favours
+every anarchic tendency.  Is it to be feared that self-righteousness may
+be degenerating into the darker vice of true hypocrisy?  For the English
+to lose belief in themselves--not merely in their potential goodness, but
+in their pre-eminence as examples and agents of good--would mean as
+hopeless a national corruption as any recorded in history.  To doubt
+their genuine worship, in the past, of a very high (though not, of
+course, the highest) ethical ideal, is impossible for any one born and
+bred in England; no less impossible to deny that those who are rightly
+deemed "best" among us, the men and women of gentle or humble birth who
+are not infected by the evils of the new spirit, still lead, in a very
+true sense, "honest, sober, and godly" lives.  Such folk, one knows, were
+never in a majority, but of old they had a power which made them
+veritable representatives of the English _ethos_.  If they thought highly
+of themselves, why, the fact justified them; if they spoke, at times, as
+Pharisees, it was a fault of temper which carried with it no grave
+condemnation.  Hypocrisy was, of all forms of baseness, that which they
+most abhorred.  So is it still with their descendants.  Whether these
+continue to speak among us with authority, no man can certainly say.  If
+their power is lost, and those who talk of English hypocrisy no longer
+use the word amiss, we shall soon know it.
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+It is time that we gave a second thought to Puritanism.  In the heyday of
+release from forms which had lost their meaning, it was natural to look
+back on that period of our history with eyes that saw in it nothing but
+fanatical excess; we approved the picturesque phrase which showed the
+English mind going into prison and having the key turned upon it.  Now,
+when the peril of emancipation becomes as manifest as was the hardship of
+restraint, we shall do well to remember all the good that lay in that
+stern Puritan discipline, how it renewed the spiritual vitality of our
+race, and made for the civic freedom which is our highest national
+privilege.  An age of intellectual glory is wont to be paid for in the
+general decline of that which follows.  Imagine England under Stuart
+rule, with no faith but the Protestantism of the Tudor.  Imagine (not to
+think of worse) English literature represented by Cowley, and the name of
+Milton unknown.  The Puritan came as the physician; he brought his tonic
+at the moment when lassitude and supineness would naturally have followed
+upon a supreme display of racial vitality.  Regret, if you will, that
+England turned for her religion to the books of Israel; this suddenly
+revealed sympathy of our race with a fierce Oriental theocracy is perhaps
+not difficult to explain, but one cannot help wishing that its piety had
+taken another form; later, there had to come the "exodus from
+Houndsditch," with how much conflict and misery!  Such, however, was the
+price of the soul's health; we must accept the fact, and be content to
+see its better meaning.  Health, of course, in speaking of mankind, is
+always a relative term.  From the point of view of a conceivable
+civilization, Puritan England was lamentably ailing; but we must always
+ask, not how much better off a people might be, but how much worse.  Of
+all theological systems, the most convincing is Manicheism, which, of
+course, under another name, was held by the Puritans themselves.  What we
+call Restoration morality--the morality, that is to say, of a king and
+court--might well have become that of the nation at large under a Stuart
+dynasty safe from religious revolution.
+
+The political services of Puritanism were inestimable; they will be more
+feelingly remembered when England has once more to face the danger of
+political tyranny.  I am thinking now of its effects upon social life.  To
+it we owe the characteristic which, in some other countries, is expressed
+by the term English prudery, the accusation implied being part of the
+general charge of hypocrisy.  It is said by observers among ourselves
+that the prudish habit of mind is dying out, and this is looked upon as a
+satisfactory thing, as a sign of healthy emancipation.  If by prude be
+meant a secretly vicious person who affects an excessive decorum, by all
+means let the prude disappear, even at the cost of some shamelessness.
+If, on the other hand, a prude is one who, living a decent life,
+cultivates, either by bent or principle, a somewhat extreme delicacy of
+thought and speech with regard to elementary facts of human nature, then
+I say that this is most emphatically a fault in the right direction, and
+I have no desire to see its prevalence diminish.  On the whole, it is the
+latter meaning which certain foreigners have in mind when they speak of
+English prudery--at all events, as exhibited by women; it being, not so
+much an imputation on chastity, as a charge of conceited foolishness.  An
+English woman who typifies the _begueule_ may be spotless as snow; but
+she is presumed to have snow's other quality, and at the same time to be
+a thoroughly absurd and intolerable creature.  Well, here is the point of
+difference.  Fastidiousness of speech is not a direct outcome of
+Puritanism, as our literature sufficiently proves; it is a refinement of
+civilization following upon absorption into the national life of all the
+best things which Puritanism had to teach.  We who know English women by
+the experience of a lifetime are well aware that their careful choice of
+language betokens, far more often than not, a corresponding delicacy of
+mind.  Landor saw it as a ridiculous trait that English people were so
+mealy-mouthed in speaking of their bodies; De Quincey, taking him to task
+for this remark, declared it a proof of blunted sensibility due to long
+residence in Italy; and, whether the particular explanation held good or
+not, as regards the question at issue, De Quincey was perfectly right.  It
+is very good to be mealy-mouthed with respect to everything that reminds
+us of the animal in man.  Verbal delicacy in itself will not prove an
+advanced civilization, but civilization, as it advances, assuredly tends
+that way.
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+All through the morning, the air was held in an ominous stillness.
+Sitting over my books, I seemed to feel the silence; when I turned my
+look to the window, I saw nothing but the broad, grey sky, a featureless
+expanse, cold, melancholy.  Later, just as I was bestirring myself to go
+out for an afternoon walk, something white fell softly across my vision.
+A few minutes more, and all was hidden with a descending veil of silent
+snow.
+
+It is a disappointment.  Yesterday I half believed that the winter drew
+to its end; the breath of the hills was soft; spaces of limpid azure
+shone amid slow-drifting clouds, and seemed the promise of spring.  Idle
+by the fireside, in the gathering dusk, I began to long for the days of
+light and warmth.  My fancy wandered, leading me far and wide in a dream
+of summer England. . . .
+
+This is the valley of the Blythe.  The stream ripples and glances over
+its brown bed warmed with sunbeams; by its bank the green flags wave and
+rustle, and, all about, the meadows shine in pure gold of buttercups.  The
+hawthorn hedges are a mass of gleaming blossom, which scents the breeze.
+There above rises the heath, yellow-mantled with gorse, and beyond, if I
+walk for an hour or two, I shall come out upon the sandy cliffs of
+Suffolk, and look over the northern sea. . . .
+
+I am in Wensleydale, climbing from the rocky river that leaps amid broad
+pastures up to the rolling moor.  Up and up, till my feet brush through
+heather, and the grouse whirrs away before me.  Under a glowing sky of
+summer, this air of the uplands has still a life which spurs to movement,
+which makes the heart bound.  The dale is hidden; I see only the brown
+and purple wilderness, cutting against the blue with great round
+shoulders, and, far away to the west, an horizon of sombre heights. . . .
+
+I ramble through a village in Gloucestershire, a village which seems
+forsaken in this drowsy warmth of the afternoon.  The houses of grey
+stone are old and beautiful, telling of a time when Englishmen knew how
+to build whether for rich or poor; the gardens glow with flowers, and the
+air is delicately sweet.  At the village end, I come into a lane, which
+winds upwards between grassy slopes, to turf and bracken and woods of
+noble beech.  Here I am upon a spur of the Cotswolds, and before me
+spreads the wide vale of Evesham, with its ripening crops, its fruiting
+orchards, watered by sacred Avon.  Beyond, softly blue, the hills of
+Malvern.  On the branch hard by warbles a little bird, glad in his leafy
+solitude.  A rabbit jumps through the fern.  There sounds the laugh of a
+woodpecker from the copse in yonder hollow. . . .
+
+In the falling of a summer night, I walk by Ullswater.  The sky is still
+warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the
+dark mountain line.  Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel-
+grey between its dim colourless shores.  In the profound stillness, the
+trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves
+only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary.  I
+feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of
+the land I love seems to beat in the silent night gathering around me;
+amid things eternal, I touch the familiar and the kindly earth.  Moving,
+I step softly, as though my footfall were an irreverence.  A turn in the
+road, and there is wafted to me a faint perfume, that of meadow-sweet.
+Then I see a light glimmering in the farmhouse window--a little ray
+against the blackness of the great hillside, below which the water
+sleeps. . . .
+
+A pathway leads me by the winding of the river Ouse.  Far on every side
+stretches a homely landscape, tilth and pasture, hedgerow and clustered
+trees, to where the sky rests upon the gentle hills.  Slow, silent, the
+river lapses between its daisied banks, its grey-green osier beds.  Yonder
+is the little town of St. Neots.  In all England no simpler bit of rural
+scenery; in all the world nothing of its kind more beautiful.  Cattle are
+lowing amid the rich meadows.  Here one may loiter and dream in utter
+restfulness, whilst the great white clouds mirror themselves in the water
+as they pass above. . . .
+
+I am walking upon the South Downs.  In the valleys, the sun lies hot, but
+here sings a breeze which freshens the forehead and fills the heart with
+gladness.  My foot upon the short, soft turf has an unwearied lightness;
+I feel capable of walking on and on, even to that farthest horizon where
+the white cloud casts its floating shadow.  Below me, but far off, is the
+summer sea, still, silent, its ever-changing blue and green dimmed at the
+long limit with luminous noontide mist.  Inland spreads the undulant
+vastness of the sheep-spotted downs, beyond them the tillage and the
+woods of Sussex weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in
+deeper tint.  Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow,
+lies an old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see
+the low church-tower, and the little graveyard about it.  Meanwhile, high
+in the heaven, a lark is singing.  It descends; it drops to its nest, and
+I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of
+England. . . .
+
+It is all but dark.  For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing by
+a glow of firelight reflected on to my desk; it seemed to me the sun of
+summer.  Snow is still falling.  I see its ghostly glimmer against the
+vanishing sky.  To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden, and perchance
+for several days.  But when it melts, when it melts, it will leave the
+snowdrop.  The crocus, too, is waiting, down there under the white mantle
+which warms the earth.
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+Time is money--says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people.  Turn
+it round about, and you get a precious truth--money is time.  I think of
+it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a
+glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study.  Suppose I were so poor
+that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different the whole day
+would be!  Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the
+material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune?  Money is
+time.  With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would
+not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable
+bondsman.  Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little
+of it for this sort of purchase.  He who has overmuch is wont to be as
+badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough.
+What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase,
+time?  And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away
+with the other.
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+
+The dark days are drawing to an end.  Soon it will be spring once more; I
+shall go out into the fields, and shake away these thoughts of
+discouragement and fear which have lately too much haunted my fireside.
+For me, it is a virtue to be self-centred; I am much better employed,
+from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction,
+than when I begin to worry about the world.  The world frightens me, and
+a frightened man is no good for anything.  I know only one way in which I
+could have played a meritorious part as an active citizen--by becoming a
+schoolmaster in some little country town, and teaching half a dozen
+teachable boys to love study for its own sake.  That I could have done, I
+daresay.  Yet, no; for I must have had as a young man the same mind that
+I have in age, devoid of idle ambitions, undisturbed by unattainable
+ideals.  Living as I do now, I deserve better of my country than at any
+time in my working life; better, I suspect, than most of those who are
+praised for busy patriotism.
+
+Not that I regard my life as an example for any one else; all I say is,
+that it is good for me, and in so far an advantage to the world.  To live
+in quiet content is surely a piece of good citizenship.  If you can do
+more, do it, and God-speed!  I know myself for an exception.  And I ever
+find it a good antidote to gloomy thoughts to bring before my imagination
+the lives of men, utterly unlike me in their minds and circumstances, who
+give themselves with glad and hopeful energy to the plain duties that lie
+before them.  However one's heart may fail in thinking of the folly and
+baseness which make so great a part of to-day's world, remember how many
+bright souls are living courageously, seeing the good wherever it may be
+discovered, undismayed by portents, doing what they have to do with all
+their strength.  In every land there are such, no few of them, a great
+brotherhood, without distinction of race or faith; for they, indeed,
+constitute the race of man, rightly designated, and their faith is one,
+the cult of reason and of justice.  Whether the future is to them or to
+the talking anthropoid, no one can say.  But they live and labour,
+guarding the fire of sacred hope.
+
+In my own country, dare I think that they are fewer than of old?  Some I
+have known; they give me assurance of the many, near and far.  Hearts of
+noble strain, intrepid, generous; the clear head, the keen eye; a spirit
+equal alike to good fortune and to ill.  I see the true-born son of
+England, his vigour and his virtues yet unimpaired.  In his blood is the
+instinct of honour, the scorn of meanness; he cannot suffer his word to
+be doubted, and his hand will give away all he has rather than profit by
+a plebeian parsimony.  He is frugal only of needless speech.  A friend
+staunch to the death; tender with a grave sweetness to those who claim
+his love; passionate, beneath stoic seeming, for the causes he holds
+sacred.  A hater of confusion and of idle noise, his place is not where
+the mob presses; he makes no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful
+promise of what he will do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel
+of wisdom overborne, he will hold apart, content with plain work that
+lies nearest to his hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in
+destruction.  He was ever hopeful, and deems it a crime to despair of his
+country.  "Non, si male nunc, et olim sic erit."  Fallen on whatever evil
+days and evil tongues, he remembers that Englishman of old, who, under
+every menace, bore right onwards; and like him, if so it must be, can
+make it his duty and his service to stand and wait.
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+
+Impatient for the light of spring, I have slept lately with my blind
+drawn up, so that at waking, I have the sky in view.  This morning, I
+awoke just before sunrise.  The air was still; a faint flush of rose to
+westward told me that the east made fair promise.  I could see no cloud,
+and there before me, dropping to the horizon, glistened the horned moon.
+
+The promise held good.  After breakfast, I could not sit down by the
+fireside; indeed, a fire was scarce necessary; the sun drew me forth, and
+I walked all the morning about the moist lanes, delighting myself with
+the scent of earth.
+
+On my way home, I saw the first celandine.
+
+So, once more, the year has come full circle.  And how quickly; alas, how
+quickly!  Can it be a whole twelvemonth since the last spring?  Because I
+am so content with life, must life slip away, as though it grudged me my
+happiness?  Time was when a year drew its slow length of toil and anxiety
+and ever frustrate waiting.  Further away, the year of childhood seemed
+endless.  It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly.  When
+every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long
+with gathering of experience; the week gone by is already far in
+retrospect of things learnt, and that to come, especially if it foretell
+some joy, lingers in remoteness.  Past mid-life, one learns little and
+expects little.  To-day is like unto yesterday, and to that which shall
+be the morrow.  Only torment of mind or body serves to delay the
+indistinguishable hours.  Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to a
+moment.
+
+I could wish for many another year; yet, if I knew that not one more
+awaited me, I should not grumble.  When I was ill at ease in the world,
+it would have been hard to die; I had lived to no purpose, that I could
+discover; the end would have seemed abrupt and meaningless.  Now, my life
+is rounded; it began with the natural irreflective happiness of
+childhood, it will close in the reasoned tranquillity of the mature mind.
+How many a time, after long labour on some piece of writing, brought at
+length to its conclusion, have I laid down the pen with a sigh of
+thankfulness; the work was full of faults, but I had wrought sincerely,
+had done what time and circumstance and my own nature permitted.  Even so
+may it be with me in my last hour.  May I look back on life as a long
+task duly completed--a piece of biography; faulty enough, but good as I
+could make it--and, with no thought but one of contentment, welcome the
+repose to follow when I have breathed the word "Finis."
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY
+RYECROFT***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 1463.txt or 1463.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/6/1463
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+