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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of In a Green Shade, by Maurice Hewlett
+
+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: In a Green Shade
+       A Country Commentary
+
+Author: Maurice Hewlett
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2005 [EBook #15495]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN A GREEN SHADE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by S.R.Ellison, Audrey Longhurst, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+    In a Green Shade.
+
+  A Country Commentary.
+
+   By Maurice Hewlett.
+
+
+         London
+    G. Bell and Sons
+         1920
+
+
+
+  G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
+  YORK HOUSE, PORTUGAL STREET, LONDON, W.C. 2.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+All of these Essays, with two exceptions, have been published
+periodically. All, without exception, have been revised and corrected.
+My thanks for hospitality afforded to them _en route_ are due to the
+_Westminster Gazette_, _Daily News_, and _Daily Chronicle_; to the
+_New Statesman_; to the _Cornhill Magazine_, _Fortnightly Review_,
+_Anglo-French Review_, and _London Mercury_.
+
+    BROADCHALKE, _22 Jan. 1920._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                               PAGE
+  NOTE                            v
+  ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE          ix
+  CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY        1
+  A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT            6
+  DORIAN MODES                   11
+  CHURCH AND THE MAN             16
+  BESSY MOORE                    20
+  THE MAIDS                      31
+  POETRY AND THE MODE            35
+  POLYOLBION                     45
+  THE WELTER                     50
+  CATNACHERY                     54
+  LANDNAMA                       60
+  "WORKS AND DAYS"               64
+  THE ENGLISH HESIOD             72
+  FLOWER OF THE FIELD            83
+  UNDER THE HARVEST MOON         87
+  _LA PETITE PERSONNE_           91
+  A FOOL OF QUALITY              99
+  SHERIDAN AS MANIAC            105
+  A FOOTNOTE TO COLERIDGE       119
+  THE CRYSTAL VASE              132
+  _NOCTES AMBROSIANAE_           147
+  SKELETONS AT A FEAST          151
+  A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER      156
+  THE COMMEMORATION             164
+  THE QUAKER EIRENICON          168
+
+
+
+
+IN A GREEN SHADE
+
+ROUND ABOUT A PREFACE
+
+
+The title has become equivocal, since there are more green shades in
+employment now than were dreamed of by Andrew Marvell. Science is a
+great maker of homophones, without respect for the poets. There is,
+for instance, the demilune of lined buckram borne by the weak-eyed on
+their foreheads, the phylactery of the have-beens--I lay myself open
+to be believed a cripple, or to look an old fool. A vivacious reviewer
+in _Punch's_ "Booking Office," will have a vision of me as a babbling
+elder peering at society from below a green pent. However--I must
+risk it. It says exactly what I mean; and what I have written I have
+written.
+
+The point is that, having worked hard for a good many years, I can now
+consider my latter end under conditions favourable to leisurely and
+extended thought, sometimes in a garden made, if rightly made, in my
+own image, sometimes in a house which was built aforetime, in a day
+when men wrought for posterity as well as for themselves. In such
+seed-plots it is impossible that one's thoughts should not take colour
+as they rise. Whithersoever I look I see as much permanency as is good
+for any sojourner upon earth; I see embodied tradition, respect for
+Nature's laws, attention to beauty, subservience to use; all this
+within doors. Outside, the trees, the flowers are my calendar;
+the birds chime the hours; periodically the church-bell calls the
+travellers home. Between all these friendly monitors it is hard if
+one cannot keep the mean. If the passing-bell tempts me to moralise
+overmuch I may turn to the creatures, and learn to live for the
+moment. I should be slow to confess how much worldly wisdom I have
+won from what we choose to call the lower orders of creation, because
+nobody willingly betrays the whereabouts of his buried treasure, or
+the amount of it. Mr. Pepys, I remember, forgot both on a certain
+occasion, and had a devil of a time until he recovered his hoard. But
+my wealth was not made with hands, or not with my hands.
+
+My house is fortunately placed, too, in the village street, so that I
+am in touch with my neighbours and their daily concerns, which I make
+mine so far as they are pleased to allow it. I am aware of them all
+day long by half a hundred signs; I know the trot of their horses, the
+horns of their motor-cars--that shows that there are not too many of
+them--the voices of their children, the death-shrieks of their pigs,
+the barking of their dogs. Not a day passes but one or other is in,
+to have some paper signed, to air a grievance, or to ask advice. The
+vicar and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say,
+each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can
+expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the
+pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to
+other people. Nor--unless you are a fool--can you be strict with your
+categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping
+you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance
+in this village of five hundred souls. "I have now been in Italy two
+days," Goethe wrote, "and I think I know my Italians pretty well!"
+When he had been there two years he knew better.
+
+If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly,
+leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one's thoughts
+as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to
+those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes,
+either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned. I
+hope I have neither prejudice nor afterthought; I know that I have,
+as we say now, neither axe to grind nor log to roll. Politics! None.
+I want people to be happy; and whether Mr. George make them so, or the
+Trade Unions, whether Christ or Sir Conan Doyle, it's all one to me.
+I have my pet nostrums, of course. I believe in Poverty, Love, and
+England, and am convinced that only through the first will the other
+two thrive. I want men to be gentlemen and women to be modest. I want
+men to have work and women to have children. Any check on production,
+Trade-Union, war, or something else, will get no good words from me.
+As for war, after our late experience, I confess that I could be a Mr.
+Dick with it, but we are not apt in the country to dwell overmuch on
+war now it is over. We honour our beloved dead; those of us who have
+returned unbattered go now about our work with cooler, more critical
+eyes, but mostly with lips closed against our three or four years'
+experience. Khaki has disappeared; the war is over; let us forget
+it. If there is a people to be pitied, swarming and groping on this
+tormented earth, we say, it is the German people; but that seems an
+insufficient reason for hating them _in saecula saeculorum_. A German
+is a human being, and very likely Mr. Bottomley is one too, and not a
+big-head in a pantomime; such also may be Mrs. Partington's nephew and
+the editor of the _Morning Post_. There does not seem much difference
+between them, and we must be charitable.
+
+The sojourner in the green shade will find himself, as I have found
+myself, more interested in people (but not those people) than in
+books. We have too many books, as I discovered when I left London for
+good. I sold six tons, and again another six, when, after two years in
+West Sussex, I came home. Now I have collected about me the things I
+can't do without, the things of which I read at least portions every
+year, as well as a few which it is good to have handy in case of
+accidents. Book-collecting is a foppery, a pastime of youth, when
+spending money is as necessary as taking exercise, and you are better
+for an object in each case. But I find that I now read with motives
+other than those of old. I am now more interested in the author than
+in his book. That must mean that I am more interested in life than
+in art. I am reading at this moment Professor Child's edition of the
+Ballads, and though I am occasionally moved to tears by the beauty
+and tragic insight of things like _The Wife of Usher's Well_;
+_Clerk Saunders_, or _Lord Thomas and Fair Annie_, I am sure that
+considerations altogether unliterary move me more--such, for instance,
+as curiosity to know who composed, and for whom they composed, these
+lovely tales. I don't suppose that we shall ever know the name, or
+anything of the personality of any one poet of them. Those poets were
+as anonymous as our church-builders, and if they were content to be so
+we should be content to have it so. But one would be happy to know of
+what kind they were, and perhaps even happier (certainly I should) to
+realise their auditors. Did they write for men or women? That is one
+of my consuming quests. The staves of the _Iliad_ were for men: that
+seems certain. Those of the _Odyssey_ not so certainly. But take this
+from _May Collin_, and consider it.
+
+You know the story, how "She fell in love with a false priest, and
+rued it ever mair"? The priest followed her "butt and ben," and gave
+her no peace. They took horses and money and rode out together "Until
+they came to a rank river, Was raging like the sea." There the priest
+declared his purpose:
+
+  "Light off, light off now, May Collin,
+    It's here that you must dee;
+  Here I have drown'd seven kings' daughters,
+    The eighth now you must be."
+
+So her torture begins. He bids her cast off "her gown that's of the
+green," because it is too good to rot in the sea-stream; next her
+"coat that's of the black "; next her "stays that are well-laced";
+lastly her "sark that's of the holland"--all for the same reason. Then
+the girl speaks:
+
+  "Turn you about now, false Mess John,
+    To the green leaf of the tree;
+  It does not fit a mansworn man
+    A naked woman to see."
+
+The point is that he obeys her. She catches him round the body and
+flings him into the tide. _Women were listening to that tale_.
+
+If I am to deal with life it must be in my own way, for there's no
+escape from one's character. I may be a good poet or a bad one--that's
+not for me to say; but I am a poet of sorts. Now a poet does not
+observe like a novelist. He does not indeed necessarily observe at
+all until he feels the need of observation. Then he observes, and
+intensely. He does not analyse, he does not amass his facts; he
+concentrates. He wrings out quintessences; and when he has distilled
+his drops of pure spirit he brews his potion. Something of the kind
+happens to me now, whether verse or prose be the Muse of my devotion.
+A stray thought, a chance vision, moves me; presently the flame is
+hissing hot. Everything then at any time observed and stored in the
+memory which has relation to the fact is fused and in a swimming flux.
+Anon, as the Children of Israel said to Moses, "There came forth
+this calf." One cannot get any nearer, I believe; and while I do not
+pretend that I have said all there is to say about anything here, I
+shall maintain that I have said all that need be said about the things
+which I touch upon. In an essay, as in a poem, the half is greater
+than the whole, if it is the right half. If it is the wrong half, why,
+then the shorter it is the better.
+
+As most of these commentaries were written during the year which is
+mercifully over, it would not have been possible, even if it had been
+sought, to avoid current topics. Why should a writer shrink from being
+called a journalist? He need not cease to be writer. But if he wishes
+to be true to his original calling, to make his hope and election
+sure, he must always be careful to seek the universal in the
+particular; and that is where your idealist has such a pull, for he
+can see nothing else. And if he does that he need not be afraid that
+the conventions of Time and Space will be a hindrance to his book's
+path. He will be readable a century hence; he will be readable in the
+Antipodes; and that is as near infinity as any of us, short of Chaucer
+and Shakespeare, need trouble about. In the country one reads, not
+skims, the daily paper; and if one's comments are leisurely, perhaps
+they are all the better. At any rate one is not tempted to see the end
+of the world in a strike, or a second Bonaparte in Signor d'Annunzio.
+To me that poet seems rather a comic-opera brigand. I suspect him of
+a green velvet jacket with a two-inch tail. But if you regard him
+_sub specie eternitatis_, then I fear we must see in him all Italy
+in epitome. That was how Italy went to war--but you must live in the
+country to understand things like that, out of range of the tumult and
+the shouting.
+
+No more of Signor d'Annunzio here or elsewhere in these pages; but of
+ourselves and our needs somewhat. Nobody could have lived through last
+year without considering anxiously whither we are tending and with
+what pretence. As the occasion moved me I have said my say about those
+matters, and here the reader will have as much of it as I am ready
+just now to give him. This is perhaps some sort of an apology for
+what may be found hereafter of a hortatory kind. I may be charged with
+wanting to do people "good." Well, if trying to make them happy is
+trying to do them good, then I confess the charge. There is no doubt
+whatever that they are not happy now. They hate too many people, they
+pant and toil after the wrong things; they serve false gods and forget
+the true ones. That is what we think about it in the country; and I am
+of the country's opinion.
+
+We need, it seems to me, many things--religion, love, work,
+seriousness and so on; but what we need most of all, as I believe, is
+to wash our hands. For five years they have been groping and wrenching
+in the vitals of other people. They are foul and we are still drunk
+with the reek. In God's name, let us wash and then we can begin to
+build up the world again. We see the need of that out in the country,
+but so far as I can judge by what I read or have seen of London,
+there's no notion of it there.
+
+But there's not much about London in this book.
+
+
+
+
+CHANGE AND THE PEASANTRY
+
+
+A book which I shall never willingly be without, one of my minor
+classics, is _Idlehurst_. Published in 1898, its author John Halsham,
+it has a touch upon country things, the penetrating, pitiful and _tant
+soit peu_ condescending touch upon them of one who is both scholar and
+recluse, fastidious but discerning. He reads our earth, cloudscape,
+landscape, season, foison, man and beast of the field, with the same
+wistfulness which women who have known sorrow exhibit for children
+who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long
+interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found
+his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so
+degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war
+began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or
+1913 for that matter, but I happen to know that Sussex emptied itself
+of its young manhood, and voluntarily, because I went to live there
+for a while in 1915 and found the village of my choice bare of youth.
+But that was West Sussex, and John Halsham lives nearer London, in the
+forest region, as I judge, which is a part of the country overflowed
+and become suburban. I don't doubt but complete cockneyfication will
+be the ultimate fate of that country of deep loam and handsome women
+before many years are over. Going down to my village from London,
+I could not feel that I was in the country until I had passed
+Pulborough; and further east the same would hold good to Lewes.
+
+But when Mr Halsham in his bitterness cries out that "the town has
+overflowed the country," meaning the whole country, and that "we are
+cockney from sea to sea," he is being tragic at the cost of truth.
+Would he drag Wiltshire and all the pastoral West into his turmoil?
+You may go about any of the villages here, watch the daily doings of
+the inhabitants, and feel confident that, practically, there has been
+no substantial change since the Norman Conquest. The "feeling" of the
+scene is the same as it always was, the outlook of the people,
+their habit of mind, is the same. The one apparent difference is in
+religion, and that is not a difference of substance but of accident.
+We have forgotten the Madonna and the Saints, who were taken away
+from us by violence. We still go to church, but they are not there any
+more. They were expelled with a fork: one Cromwell but completed
+what another began. And now it is late in the day: they can never be
+brought back. "Vestigia nulla" is true of religion as of every other
+human affair. But it was not them we worshipped. Rather it was what
+they stood for--which endures.
+
+All this leads me away from John Halsham and _Idlehurst_. A good
+antidote to his extreme depression is to be found in another beautiful
+book which, if not a classic, will become one. I mean _A Shepherd's
+Life_, wherein Mr. Hudson reveals the very heart of pastoral Wilts.
+I went right through it only the other day, journeying from Sarum to
+Trowbridge on county business--Wishford, Wylye, Codford, Heytesbury,
+and so on to Melksham and Westbury--names which to us are symphonies.
+No change from the sempiternal round of country labour in those quiet
+hollows, though it is true that you saw soldiers in buff unloading
+railway trucks, and that the valley was lined with their wooden
+hutments. Soldiers, indeed, we have known ever since the Norman
+Conquest; but the country is bigger than they are, and they fall
+into its ways even as their huts fade into the shadows cast by its
+everlasting hills. Mr. Hudson, by the way, does not seem to have
+encountered a witch. We had one in this village a few years ago, and
+she may be here still, though I haven't come across her. She laid a
+malison on my chauffeur's potatoes--I had one once--and (as he told
+me) blighted the year's crop. He was digging in his garden when she, a
+dark-browed old woman with a beard, leaned over the gate and asked him
+for some kindling wood. He, a Swiss, who may not have understood her,
+waved her away, saying that he was busy. "You will get no good out of
+those taters," said she, and slippered away. That was five years ago.
+
+John Halsham is fond of describing himself as a Tory, and perhaps
+really is one of those almost extinct mammalia. I had thought
+Professor Saintsbury the only one left. He, I understand, thinks
+that the Reform Act of 1832 was a great mistake, and dislikes Horace
+Walpole's Letters because their writer was a Whig. Then there is Mrs.
+Partington's nephew, who muses perhaps without method, but certainly
+not without malice, in _Blackwood_ once a month. He is more Jingo than
+Tory. He has to bite somebody. I was amused the other day to consider
+his girding at Sir Alfred Mond, chiefly on the score that he had a
+German grandfather. It did not seem to have occurred to the man that
+the same terrific charge could be brought against a much more august
+Personage, and with much the same futility. Surely it is more to the
+purpose that he will have an English grandson, That is the worst of
+musing when you neglect method and surrender to malice.
+
+Toryism, which is a parasitic growth of mind, needs a relic to which
+it can cling, not a person. In the country the Church will not provide
+it, nor any longer the brewing interest. The air has been let into
+the one, and the water which they call mineral into the other. There
+remain the throne and the squirearchy, and of these the throne is
+much the stouter. For the throne is remote enough to be an object of
+veneration, separable from its occupant; but when the great house and
+the old acres are held, and not filled, by a new man, the villager,
+who sees more than he is supposed to see, is by no means concerned to
+uphold them. Most of the villages have been Radical; now they are all
+going "Labour." The elections, if there are to be some soon, will
+be very interesting, and I think surprising to Mr. George and his
+assortment of friends.
+
+However--another strike or two like that recent abortion on the
+railways will dish the Labour Party and Trade Unionism as well--at
+least in the country. Down here we are new to the movement, but have
+gone into it keenly, without losing our heads. Indeed, I think we are
+finding more in our heads than we suspected. We keep to our code; and
+when we find that other men don't, we begin to doubt of Unionism. One
+of the very best of our men said in my hearing at the time that if the
+railway strike were the kind of thing we were to expect, he, for one,
+would have no more to do with the Labourers' Union. As I have said
+once before, I think, responsibility (which the Union is giving us)
+deepens our men and quickens them too. The time is at hand when they
+will begin to feel their power. I have no fears. I have long known
+them to be the salt of the earth. If the quotation would not be from
+one of my own works, I would quote now.
+
+It is an old discussion, but all my travels have convinced me that a
+bad peasantry is the exception. Such exceptions there are, though I
+don't mean to give them. If Zola had not made himself ridiculous in
+the act, so ridiculous as to show himself negligible, he would stand
+as the greatest traducer of his adopted country that France has
+ever harboured. But he was a specialist in his particular line of
+disgustfulness, and saw in rural France what he took there with him.
+They say that the Bulgarian peasant is a savage brute, "they" being
+the Greeks, of course. I would not mind betting a crown that he is
+nothing of the sort.
+
+In manners, to be sure, peasantries differ remarkably. Here in the
+West, from Wilts to Cornwall, our rustics are sweet-mannered. They
+are instinctively gentlemen, if gentlehood consist, as I believe, in
+having regard for other people's feelings. But in the Danish parts
+of England, to be plain, manners are to seek. That means from
+Bedfordshire pretty well up to Carlisle. North-east of that again, in
+Northumberland, you have delightful manners.
+
+The Northumbrian peasant, like the Scottish, greets you as an equal,
+the Wiltshire man as a superior, yet neither loses dignity thereby.
+The Lancashire man treats you as his inferior, and is not himself
+advantaged, whether it be so or not.
+
+
+
+
+A HERMITAGE IN SIGHT
+
+
+I hope that I have secured for myself a haven, a yet more impenetrable
+shade than this, against the time when, having seen four generations
+of men, two behind and two beyond, I may consider in silence what is
+likely to be the end of it all. It is true that I am getting old, but
+I am not yet prepared for a lodge in the wilderness. My present house
+has a wall on the village street. The post-office is a matter of
+crossing the road; the church is at the bottom of a meadow. I like all
+that, because I like all my neighbours and the sound of their voices.
+At eleven o'clock in the morning I can hear the children let out from
+school, "as shrill as swifts in upper air." That, too, I like. But the
+time will come when silence is best, and, as I say, I believe that I
+have found the very place. I have had my eye upon it for years, and
+seldom a month passes but I am there. A small black dog and I once saw
+Oreads there, or said we did, and in print at that. This very year
+the farm to which it belongs came into the market, and was sold; the
+purchaser will treat with me. I have described it once, nay twice,
+and won't do it again. Enough to say that it is the butt end of a deep
+green combe in the Downs, that it is sheltered from every wind, faces
+the south, and is below an ancient road, now a grass track, and the
+remains of what is called a British village on the ordnance maps, a
+great ramparted square with half a dozen gateways and two mist-pools
+within its ambit. All about it lie the neolithic dead, of whose race,
+as Glaucus told Diomede, "I boast myself to be."
+
+We are all Iberians here, or so I love to believe, grounding
+myself upon the learned Dr. Beddoes--a swarthy people, dark-haired,
+grey-eyed, rather under than over the mean height. The aboriginal
+strain has proved itself stronger than the Frisian, and the Danish
+type does not appear at all. There are English names among us, of
+course, such as Gurd, which is Gurth as pronounced by a Norman; but it
+is understood that we are neolithic chiefly on the distaff side. The
+theory that each successive wave of invasion demolished the existing
+inhabitants is absurd. Not even the Germans do that; nor have the
+Turks succeeded in obliterating the Armenian nation. No--in turn our
+oncoming hordes, Celts, Romans, English, Danes, enslaved the men and
+married, or at least mated with, the women. And so we are descended,
+and (let me at this hour of victory be allowed to say) a marvellous
+people we are. For tenacity, patience, and obedience to the law--not
+of men, but of nature--I don't suppose there is another such people
+in the world. Those characteristics, for which neither Celt nor Roman,
+Teuton nor Dane, as we know them now, is remarkable, I set to the
+score of the neolithic race, whose physical features are equally
+enduring.
+
+When you get what seems like a clear case in either sex, you have a
+very handsome person.
+
+The most beautiful woman I ever saw in my days was scrubbing a kitchen
+floor on her knees, when I saw her first--not a hundred miles from
+here. Pure Iberian, so far as one can judge--olive skin, black hair,
+grey-green eyes. Otherwise--colouring apart--the Venus of Milo, no
+less. I don't say that she was very intelligent. I wonder if the Venus
+was. But she was obedient to the law of her being--that I do know; and
+it is a matter of faith with me that Aphrodite can have been no less
+so.
+
+Neither a quick-witted nor an imaginative race are we; but we have
+the roots of poetry in us, and the roots of other arts, for we have
+reverence for what is above and beyond us. Custom, too, we worship,
+and decency and order. We fight unwillingly, and are very slow to
+anger; but we never let go. Witness the last four dreadful years;
+witness Europe from Mons to Gallipoli. The British private, soldier
+or sailor, has been the backbone of the fight for freedom. But I am a
+long way from my valley in the Downs.
+
+I shall first of all sink a well, for one must have water, even if one
+is going to die. Then I shall make a mist-pool--that art is not lost
+yet--because as well as water to drink I like water to look upon.
+Lastly, I will build a hermitage of puddled chalk and straw, and
+thatch it with reeds, if I can get them. It will consist of a single
+room thirty feet long. It will have a gallery at each end, attained
+by a ladder. In each gallery shall be a bed, and the appurtenance
+thereof, one for use and one for a co-hermit or hermitess, if such
+there be. I leave that open. There must be a stoop, of course. Nothing
+enclosed. No flowers, by request. The sheep shall nibble to the very
+threshold. I don't forget that there is a fox-earth in the spinney
+attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as
+I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her
+haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were
+playing at catch-as-catch-can--with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No
+after-thoughts. I watched them for twenty minutes.
+
+If I grow anything there at all I shall confine my part of the
+business to planting, and let Nature do the rest. It may be
+absolutely necessary to keep the sheep off for a year or two, and the
+rabbits--but that is all. And what I do plant shall be deciduous, so
+that I may have the yearly miracle to expect. It is a mighty eater of
+time--and there won't be much of that left probably; yet a joy which
+no man who has ever begotten anything, baby or poem, can deny himself.
+
+If anybody wants to see what Nature can do in the way of a season's
+growth, I can tell him how to go to work. Let him plant on the bank
+of a running water a root of _Gunnera manicata_. Let him then wait ten
+years, observing these directions faithfully. Every fall, after the
+first frost--that frost which blackens his dahlias--let him cover
+the crown of his _Gunnera_ with one of its own leaves. Pile some
+stable-stuff over that, and then heap upon all the leaf-sweepings of
+that part of the garden. Growth starts in mid-April and proceeds by
+feet a week. Mine, which is about ten years old now, is thirty-five
+feet in circumference, nearly twelve feet high, has flowers
+two-feet-six in length, and in a hot summer has grown leaves seven
+feet across. You can go under one of them in a shower of rain and be
+as dry as in church. And all that done in five months. The plant is
+a rhubarb of sorts and comes from Chili. I should like to see it over
+there on the marge of some monstrous great river. In another order,
+the _Ipomoea_ (Morning Glory), which comes from East Africa, runs it
+close. I had one seed in Sussex which completely overflowed a garden
+wall, smothering everything upon it. A kind of Jack's beanstalk, and
+every morning starred with turquoise blue trumpet mouths of ravishing
+beauty, which were dead at noon. The poor thing was constrained to be
+a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is the prodigal's foster-mother.
+
+I have a plant whose seed is much more beautiful than its flower.
+By the way, I have two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has
+a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony,
+which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single
+white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large
+seed-pod, which burst a short time ago, and revealed blue-black seeds
+sheathed in coralline forms of the most absolute vermilion. You could
+see them fifty yards away. It seems to have no purpose in life but
+to pack the seeds--or perhaps, they are beacons for the birds. I took
+pains to be beforehand with the birds, having no desire to see Greek
+peonies in my neighbours' gardens. The seeds are safely bestowed,
+though their fate has not been Jonah's. There's a spinney of
+elder-trees in the combe of my hermitage, which, I am told, was
+planted entirely by magpies. And I suppose it was wood-pigeons who
+planted two ilex trees on the top of the Guinigi tower in Lucca; and
+some bird or other, once more, which is answerable for a fine
+fig-tree growing in the parapet of the bridge at Cordova, in no soil
+whatsoever. It was loaded with fruit when I saw it. But fig-trees are
+like poets; if you want them to sing you must torture their roots. The
+parallel wobbles, but will be understood.
+
+
+
+
+DORIAN MODES
+
+
+Being known in these parts for a friendly soul, and trusted, moreover,
+I have fallen into the position among the peasantry which the parson
+used to hold, and does still when he takes the trouble to qualify for
+it. If I can't always tell them what to do I may be able to put them
+in the way of the man who can. One learns how to make a dictionary of
+life as one gets on in it. Another use which they can have of me: I
+can tell them how to put their requests or demands. They have no sense
+whatever of a written language.
+
+I must not betray confidences, or I could relate some curious matters
+on this head. I know, for instance, a farmer who is worth a couple of
+hundred thousand at the least, and who can neither write nor read.
+He has learned somehow a cross between a scratch and a blot which is
+accepted as a signature to cheques--but no more than that. And there
+is no harm in saying that I often need an interpreter. I had a
+case the other night when a man I know brought in a friend for
+consultation--a youth of the round-headed, flaxen, Teutonic type,
+rather rare here, who came from a village still more remote from the
+world than this one. Not one word of his fluent and frequent speeches
+could I understand. It was largely a question of intonation I
+believe--but there it was.
+
+He had the wild, inspired look of a savage. He again could neither
+read nor write, though he must have been at school within the last
+ten or twelve years; but, as I think I have said elsewhere, it is not
+uncommon for boys to go through the school course and fail to pass
+the standards. There are here two families in particular, admirable
+workmen, who for two generations have left school without having
+acquired either writing or reading. One wonders deeply what kind of
+processes go on in the minds of these fine young men, steady workmen,
+as they are, good husbands, kind fathers, useful citizens oftener
+than not. What is their conception of God, of human destiny? How does
+Religion get at them? Or does it? Shall we ever know? Not if Mr. Hardy
+cannot tell us. No other poet of peasant origin has done so--neither
+Clare, nor Blomfield, nor even Burns. Mr. Hardy has told us something,
+and might have told us a good deal more if by the time he had learned
+his craft, he had not learned to be chiefly interested in himself.
+That is the way of poets.
+
+Then there's _The Shropshire Lad_, a fake perhaps, since its author
+was not a peasant, but a divine little book. _The Shropshire Lad_ is
+morbid, unless lads are so in Shropshire--in which case they, too, are
+morbid; but it is a golden book of whose beauty and felicity I never
+tire. Technically it is by far the most considerable thing since _In
+Memoriam_: "Loveliest of trees, the Cherry," makes me cry for sheer
+pleasure. But it is haunted by the fear of death and old age; it is
+afraid of love; it is sometimes cynical--none of which things are true
+of youth in Salop or Salonika. The young peasant is a fatalist to the
+core; but fatalists are not afraid of death. Youth is ephemeral and so
+is the young peasant. He is always happy when the sun is out.
+
+As for love, it is truly the hot-and-cold disease with him. He is
+himself his "own fever and pain," like the rest of us; but I think
+love is a physical passion, until marriage. After marriage it may grow
+into something very beautiful indeed, and the more beautiful for being
+incapable of bodily utterance. I have a pair often under my eye down
+here who are, I know, all in all to each other; yet their conversation
+is that of two old gossips. But at fortunate moments I may induce one
+of them to tell of the other, and then you find out. My _Village Wife_
+was no imagination of mine. She lives and suffers not so many miles
+from where I write. Indeed, you may say of our peasantry very much
+what French people will tell you of their marriage custom, that love
+at its best follows that ceremony. It is not bred by romance, but by
+intimacy. The romantic attachment flames up, and satiety quenches it.
+The other kind glows red-hot but rarely breaks into a flame. You may
+have which you choose: you are lucky indeed if you get both.
+
+To return, however, to dialect, intonation, as I say, has much to do
+with it. It is attractive, and in poetry can be very touching. I have
+had the advantage of hearing Barnes's poems read by a lady who has the
+accent perfectly. One does not know Barnes or Wessex who does not
+hear him read. That is true of all poetry, no doubt--but Barnes is
+uncommonly dull to read. As for words, we have enough of our own to
+support a small lexicon, which I used to possess, but have just been
+hunting, in vain. Perhaps after the pattern of the arrow, I shall find
+it again in the shelf of a friend. I remember that we call the roots
+of a tree the _mores_; that a dipper is a _spudgell_; that we say
+"_dout_ the candle" when we mean extinguish it. We say "to-year" as
+you say "to-morrow," and call the month of March "Lide." February used
+to be "Soul-grove," but I have never heard it called so. The pole of
+a scythe is the _snead_; the two handles are the _nibs_. They are
+fastened by rings called _quinnets_. Isaac Taylor says that the few
+remaining Celtic words we have in use (other than hill or river
+names) are words for obscure parts of tools. We have some queer
+intensives--"terriblish" or "tarblish" is one, and "ghastly," meaning
+ugly, is another. "A terrible ghastly sight" we say, meaning that a
+thing looks rather ugly.
+
+Our demonstrative pronoun is _thic_, or more properly _dhic_; "dhic
+meaed" means "that meadow." _Suent_ means pleasant or proper--really
+both. It always has a sense of right consequence, of one thing
+following another as it ought. "Suently" would be "duly." But that
+now is common to the West, and will be heard from Land's End to
+Hengistbury Head, as well as in every one of Mr. Phillpotts' novels.
+
+Doubtless it is too late to protest--since I am upon words--against a
+current barbarism which is at least ten years old, and against which
+I have publicly cried out at least twenty times. For the twenty-first
+time, then, let me object to "wage" for "wages." _Is_ the wages of sin
+death, or _are_ they? Do you give a man an alms, or an alm?
+
+Shall we read--
+
+  Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
+  Nor the furious winter's _rage_,
+
+and so on? Go to. But I shall not so easily convert Trade Union
+orators, Members of Parliament, Mr. Sidney Webb, or the _Times_. To
+them a wages is a wage, and an alms an alm, a man's riches his rich,
+and his breeches his--at least I suppose so. I wish that we could call
+a man's speeches his speech, and find it was perfectly true. It is a
+terrible thought, "a terrible ghastly thought" indeed, that we have
+not so long ago chosen over seven hundred persons of both sexes, each
+of whom will conceive it his right to make a speech in Parliament
+every day. Think of it. It is fair to suppose that every one of them
+will make one speech every year, many of them, no doubt, one every
+week, some certainly every day. I am thankful that I wasn't a
+candidate, for I might have been successful. Then I should have been
+compelled to listen, and perhaps tempted to reply, to some or all of
+those speeches. "In the end thereof despondency and madness."
+
+
+
+
+CHURCH AND THE MAN
+
+
+At our Peace Celebration the other day that happened which in my
+recollection never happened before. The entire village was in the
+parish church, sang _Te Deum_, prayed prelatical prayers, and shared
+_Hymns Ancient and Modern_. The Congregational Minister, in a black
+gown, read the Lesson, the Vicar, in surplice and stole, preached. All
+that in a village where more than half the people are Nonconformists,
+and done upon the mere motion of that particular section of us.
+
+No experience since the War has touched me more; and I believe it is
+strongly symptomatic. Akin to it was the streaming of the people in
+London to Buckingham Palace, just when war was declared, and again on
+the day of the Armistice: both matters of pure instinct. For what do
+these things show except that we are children who, when we are moved,
+run to our mother to tell her all about it? What are we, when we are
+stripped to the soul, but one great family? A man told me once that he
+was present at a trial for murder where there were half a dozen in
+the dock, men and women, principals and accessories. The verdict was
+"Guilty," and the wretches stood up to receive the death-sentence.
+As they did so, by one common instinct, they all joined hands, and
+so remained until they were led away to the cells. A strangely moving
+scene.
+
+It is by no means a necessity of the simple alone to seek a common
+expression of their hope and calling. A similar stream is carrying the
+learned which at present runs parallel with our homelier brook, but
+will sooner or later mingle waters. Then there will be a flood wherein
+many tired swimmers will doubtless perish, but which may lead to the
+sea those who keep their heads. Signs of that are on all sides of
+us. "_What is the Kingdom of Heaven_?" asks Mr. Clutton-Brock, and
+succeeds at his best in telling us what it is not. As for anything
+more positive, he concludes very reasonably that it is a state of
+mind, and leaves us to infer that the ruck of humanity need the
+guidance of inspiration to induce it.
+
+It is not at all difficult for him to show that the Church lacks
+inspiration, or that there is something inherent in the essence of
+a Church destructive of it. What should have been equally easy would
+have been to point out that the Church's Founder as certainly had it.
+Nobody ever guided men more unfalteringly than He, and we need not
+doubt but that it was His instigation which turned the hearts of the
+village people to find a common focus for their thanksgiving. Mr.
+Clutton-Brock has felt the sting and owned to the need; he is in the
+stream, but is not a bold swimmer. I hope he may reach the sea.
+
+Why it is--assuming the inspiration of Christ--that men have
+nevertheless ceased to be guided by it, and have consequently lost
+touch with the Kingdom of Heaven, is explained by a more hardy plunger
+in the stream, the Hibbert Lecturer upon "_Christ, Saint Francis,
+and To-day_." With great learning, skill and courage he has used
+the documents of the Franciscan revival to illustrate what must have
+happened to the Christian well-spring. He shows that even in the
+lifetime of its founder the Franciscan fraternity crystallised under
+the insensible but enormous pressure of the world, the flesh and
+(doubtless) the devil. Saint Francis of Assisi, for instance,
+taught literal poverty--abstinence from money, goods and books. His
+Franciscans wouldn't have it. They asked for money and took it. Not
+always directly, but always somehow.
+
+"By God we owen forty pound for rent!" said Chaucer's Franciscan when
+pressed by the good wife to declare what ailed him; and he got his
+forty pound. Saint Francis told them to build churches like barns;
+they built them like cathedrals. He would have had men uninstructed
+in all but love; and they became the greatest schoolmen in Europe. The
+world, in fact, was too much with them. So also did Christ teach; and
+as the Franciscans modified their master's precepts, so did Saint Paul
+his.
+
+Twice, then, the world has been demonstrably wrong. Is it a
+possibility that Christ and St. Francis can be proved to have been
+right? To those who say, as Mr. Clutton-Brock does, that Christianity
+has failed, I should like to retort, "Let Christianity be tried."
+Poverty is of the essence of it, and luckily for us poverty is coming
+upon us, nation and individuals, whether we deserve it or not. When we
+are all really poor together--in heart as well as purse--we shall have
+the chance of a common religion, but not till then. Now, then, comes
+the question: Can the high in heart become poor in heart, or the
+high-minded humble themselves? If it is hard for the man rich in goods
+to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, is it not still harder for the man
+stored with knowledge? How are Mr. Clutton-Brock and the Hibbert
+Lecturer to become as little children? How will Mr. Wells manage it?
+He, too, is in the stream, splashing about and apparently enjoying
+himself. But you may call an invisible God an invisible king, if you
+please, and yet be no nearer the heart of the matter. A change of
+definitions will not do it. And what of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan
+Doyle? Are their outpourings symptomatic? I don't myself think so.
+They are concerned with a future life, whereas those who seek a common
+religion will take no account of life at all, past, present or to
+come, once they have found the Kingdom of Heaven. Those eloquent and
+(I trust) sincere gospellers are agog to dispel that sense of loss
+which besets us just now. It is not that we fear death so much, but
+that we miss the dead--and no wonder. Hence these prophets crying Lo
+here! and Lo there! That they have reassured many I know well, that
+they have baffled others I know also, for they have baffled me. My
+puzzle is that, with evidence of authenticity difficult to withstand,
+the things they can find to report are so trivial. The test of a
+revelation I take to be exactly the same as the test of a good poem.
+It doesn't much matter whether the thing revealed is new or not. Is it
+so revealed that we needs must believe it? Relevance is to the point,
+compatibility is to the point. But when Sir Oliver Lodge's medium puts
+whisky and cigars into the mouth of the dead, we don't laugh: it is
+too serious for that. We change the conversation.
+
+Steadfastness in mutability, that is the common need, a Rock of Ages.
+
+  Then 'gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
+  Of that same time when no more change shall be,
+  But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
+  Upon the pillars of Eternity,
+  That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
+  For all that moveth doth in change delight:
+  But thenceforth all shall rest eternally
+  With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
+  O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoth's sight.
+
+
+
+
+BESSY MOORE
+
+
+"My best wishes and respects to Mrs. Moore; she is beautiful. I may
+say so even to you, for I was never more struck with a countenance."
+That is Byron, writing to Tom Moore in 1812, when he had been married
+little more than a year--and Byron's opinion of woman's beauty
+is worth having. In the eight volumes of Tom's memoirs, worthily
+collected by his friend Lord John Russell, and in all the crowded
+stage of it, I see no figure shining in so sweet and clear a morning
+light as that of his little home-keeping wife, with her "wild, poetic
+face," her fancy which rings always truer than Tom's own, and her
+mother-love, which sorrow has to sound so deeply before she can leave
+the scene. Her appearances are fitful; she keeps to the hearth when
+the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House,
+which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself,
+which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of
+this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you
+find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at
+his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home
+again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under
+all the talk, through all the tinklings of pianos and guitars which
+declare Tom's whereabouts, if you listen you can hear the quiet burden
+of her heart-beats. I don't know what he would have done without her,
+nor what we should have to say to his literary remains if she were
+not in them to make them smell of lavender. Few men of letters, and no
+wits, can have left more behind, with less in them.
+
+There is a great deal less of Bessy in the memoirs than, say, of Lady
+Donegal, or of Rogers, or of Lord Lansdowne, but somehow or another
+she makes herself felt; and though her appearances in them are of
+Tom's contrivance, a personality is more surely expressed than in most
+of his more elaborate portraits. One gets to know her as indeed the
+"excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not
+so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself.
+A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches--one
+here, one there--put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for
+it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him
+after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing
+in them he would have relied upon to do it. I am sure that is so;
+nevertheless, with the exception of Tom himself, who, of course, holds
+the centre of the stage, she is more surely and sensibly there than
+any of his thousand characters, from the Prince Regent to the poet
+Bowles; more surely and fragrantly there. We are the better for her
+presence; and so is her Tom's memory, infinitely the better.
+
+It was a secret marriage and, except in the minds of a few good
+judges, an improvident.
+
+    "I breakfast with Lady Donegal on Monday," he writes to his
+    mother in May, 1811, "and dine to meet her at Rogers' on
+    Tuesday; and there is to be a person at both parties whom you
+    little dream of."
+
+This person was Bessy, to whom he had been married some two months
+on the day of writing, and of whom, when his family was notified, he
+found that it had nothing good to say. He complains of disappointment,
+of a "degree of coldness" in his father's comments; and neither is
+perhaps very wonderful. For Miss Bessy not only had nothing a year,
+but in the reckoning of the day, and in comparison with the young
+friend of Lord Moira and Lady Donegal, she herself was nothing.
+She was indeed a professional actress--Miss E. Dyke in the
+play-bills--whom Tom had first met in 1808 when the Kilkenny Theatre
+began a meteor-course. He had lent himself as an amateur to the
+enterprise, was David in _The Rivals_, Spado (with song) in _A Castle
+of Andalusia_. In 1809, for three weeks on end, he had been Peeping
+Tom of Coventry to the Lady Godiva of Miss E. Dyke. The rest is easy
+guessing, and so it is that Tom's parents were dismayed, and that
+there was a "degree of coldness." Lady Godiva, indeed!
+
+But Bessy was not long in showing herself as good as gold, or
+approving herself to some of Tom's best friends. Lady Donegal and her
+sharp-tongued sister, Mary Godfrey, both took to her. "Give our
+love, honest, downright love to Bessy," they write. Rogers called her
+Psyche, had the pair to stay with him, stayed with them in his turn,
+and gave Bessy handsome sums for the charities in which she abounded
+all her life. Rogers knew simplicity when he saw it, and had no
+vitriol on hand when she was in the way. I don't think Tom ever took
+her to Ireland with him, or that, consequently, she ever met his
+parents in the flesh; but no doubt that they accepted her, and
+esteemed her.
+
+Bit by bit she reveals herself in Tom's random diaries. As in the
+printing of a photograph the lights and darks come sparsely out, and
+unawares the delicate outline, so by a word here, a phrase elsewhere,
+we realise the presence of a sweet-natured, sound-minded girl, and
+more than that, of a girl with character. After a spell of Brompton
+lodgings Tom took her to Kegworth in Leicestershire, where he was to
+have the neighbourhood and countenance of his patron of the moment,
+Moira, the Regent's jackal, a solemn, empty-headed lord. Donington
+Hall and Bessy appear together in a letter to Mary Godfrey.
+
+    "... I took Bessy yesterday to Lord Moira's, and she was not
+    half so much struck with its grandeur as I expected. She said,
+    in coming out, 'I like Mr. Rogers's house ten times better.'"
+
+Tom feels it necessary to explain such remarkable taste. "She loves
+everything by association, and she was very happy in Rogers's
+house." I don't know whether Tom's simplicity or Bessy's is the more
+remarkable in all this. Tom's, I think.
+
+"Lady Loudoun and Lord Moira called upon us on their way to town and
+brought pine apples, etc." One sees them at it; and the very next
+letter he writes is dated "Donington Park." Tom fairly lets himself go
+over it.
+
+    "... I think it would have pleased you to see _my wife_ in one
+    of Lord Moira's carriages, with his servant riding after her,
+    and Lady Loudoun's crimson travelling-cloak round her to keep
+    her comfortable. It is a glorious triumph of good conduct on
+    both sides, and makes my heart happier and prouder than all
+    the best worldly connections could possibly have done. The
+    dear girl and I sometimes look at each other with astonishment
+    in our splendid room here, and she says she is quite sure it
+    must be all a dream."
+
+Marble halls, in fact; but let us see how it acted upon Bessy. Shortly
+after: "... I am just returned from a most delightful little tour with
+Rogers, poor Bessy being too ill and too fatigued with the ceremonies
+of the week to accompany us." That was to be the way of it for the
+rest of their lives together. She would never go to the great houses
+if she could by any means avoid it, but bore him no grudge for going
+without her, and was always open-armed for his return.
+
+Mayfield Cottage, Ashbourne, was their next harbourage; and here is a
+Wheatley picture of them on their way to a dinner-party.
+
+    "We dined out to-day at the Ackroyds', neighbours of ours ...
+    we found, in the middle of our walk, that we were near half an
+    hour too early, so we set to practising country-dances in the
+    middle of a retired green lane till the time was expired."
+
+Then he takes her to the Ashbourne ball, and for once leaves himself
+out of the letter.
+
+    "... You cannot imagine what a sensation Bessy excited at the
+    Ball the other night. She was prettily dressed, and certainly
+    looked very beautiful.... She was very much frightened, but
+    she got through it very well. She wore a turban that night to
+    please me, and she looks better in it than anything else; for
+    it strikes everybody almost that sees her, how like the form
+    and expression of her face are to Catalani's, and a turban is
+    the thing for that kind of character."
+
+Catalani, in Caverford's portrait, has the rapt eye of the Cumaean
+sibyl. One of Moore's fine friends, an admirer of Bessy's, speaks to
+him of her "wild, poetic face," and the Duchess of Sussex thought her
+like "Lady Heathcote in the days of her beauty." That is putting her
+very high, for, according to Cosway, Lady Heathcote was a lovely young
+woman indeed; but the "wild, poetic face" gets us as near as need be.
+
+In 1815 troubles began from which the poor girl was never to be free
+again. She lost one of her three little girls, Olivia Byron, for whom
+the poet had been sponsor. "... It was with difficulty I could get
+her away from her little dead baby," Moore tells his mother, "and then
+only under a promise that she should see it again last night...." In
+1817, while Moore was in Paris, pursuing his pleasures, another child,
+Barbara, had a fall, and he came home in August to find her "very ill
+indeed." On September 10th she is still ill, but if she should get a
+little better, "I mean to go for a day or two to Lord Lansdowne's
+to look at a house.... He has been searching his neighbourhood for a
+habitation for me, in a way very flattering indeed from such a man."
+But he did not go. September 20th, "It's all over, my dearest Mother!"
+
+"Poor Bessy," we read, "neither eats nor sleeps enough hardly to
+sustain life": nevertheless in the first week of October he is at
+Bowood. "I arrived here the day before yesterday, and found Rogers,
+Lord and Lady Kerry, etc." He saw Sloperton Cottage and stayed out
+his week. Bessy then had to see the cottage, and went--but not from
+Bowood. "Bessy, who went off the night before last to look at the
+cottage near Lord Lansdowne's, is returned this morning, after
+travelling both nights. Power went with her." In a month's time they
+were in possession, and Tom vastly set up by the near neighbourhood of
+his exalted friend. Not so, however, his Jenny Wren.
+
+    "... We are getting on here as quietly and comfortably as
+    possible, and the only thing I regret is the want of some near
+    and plain neighbours for Bessy to make an intimacy with, and
+    enjoy a little tea-drinking now and then, as she used to do
+    in Derbyshire. She contrives, however, to employ herself
+    very well without them; and her favourite task of cutting out
+    things for the poor people is here even in greater requisition
+    than we bargained for, as there never was such wretchedness in
+    any place where we have been; and the better class of people
+    (with but one or two exceptions) seem to consider their
+    contributions to the poor-rates as abundantly sufficient,
+    without making any further exertion towards the relief of the
+    poor wretches. It is a pity Bessy has not more means, for she
+    takes the true method of charity--that of going herself into
+    the cottages, and seeing what they are most in want of.
+
+    "Lady Lansdowne has been very kind indeed, and has a good deal
+    won me over (as you know, kindness _will_ do now and then).
+    After many exertions to get Bessy to go and dine there, I have
+    at last succeeded this week, in consequence of our being on
+    a visit to Bowles's, and her having the shelter of the poet's
+    old lady to protect her through the enterprise. She did not,
+    however, at all like it, and I shall not often put her to the
+    torture of it. In addition to her democratic pride--which I
+    cannot blame her for--which makes her prefer the company
+    of her equals to that of her superiors, she finds herself a
+    perfect stranger in the midst of people who are all intimate;
+    and this is a sort of dignified desolation which poor Bessy
+    is not at all ambitious of. Vanity gets over all these
+    difficulties; but pride is not so practicable."
+
+Vanity indeed did, though Tom had a pride of his own too. But he was
+soothed and not offended by pomp, whereas she was bored as well as
+irritated. It is obvious that her wits were valid enough. She could be
+happy with Rogers or the Bowleses, who could allow for simplicity, and
+delight in it--a talent denied to the good Lansdownes. As for Bowles,
+Tom is shrewd enough to remark upon "the mixture of talent and
+simplicity in him."
+
+    "His parsonage-house at Brenthill is beautifully situated;
+    but he has a good deal frittered away its beauty in grottos,
+    hermitages and Shenstonian inscriptions. When company is
+    coming he cries, 'Here, John, run with the crucifix and missal
+    to the hermitage, and set the fountain going.' His sheep-bells
+    are tuned in thirds and fifths."
+
+Such was Bowles, Bessy's best friend in Wilts.
+
+Bowood to Tom was centre of his scheme of things; he was always there
+on some pretext or other; or he would dine and sleep at Bowles's or at
+Lacock Abbey, or spend days in Bath, or a week in London. It is true
+that half his talent and more than half his fame were social: these
+things were the bread as well as the butter of life to him. But here
+is Bessy meantime:
+
+    "... Came home and found my dearest Bessy very tired after her
+    walk from church. She has been receiving the Sacrament,
+    and never did a purer heart.... In the note she wrote me to
+    Bowles's the day before, she said, 'I am sorry I am not to see
+    you before I go to church.'"
+
+Tom had sensibility, not a doubt of it; but it seems to me that she
+had something better.
+
+Here again, on the 16th October, "My dear Bessy planting some roots
+Miss Hughes has brought her, looking for a place to put a root of pink
+hepatica in, where (as she said) 'I might best see them in my walk.'"
+Yes, he had sensibility; but she had imagination. A little Tom was
+born a week after that. She took it badly, as she did most of her
+labours, and was in bed a month. On the 18th November she went out for
+the first time after the event--"the day delightful." She "went round
+to all her flower-beds to examine their state, for she has every
+little leaf in the garden by heart." Tom himself had been much moved
+by the birth of his first boy. He was called up at 11.30, sent for
+the midwife, was upset, walked about half the night, thanked God--"the
+maid, by the way, very near catching me on my knees." She might have
+caught Bessy on them every day, and no thought taken of so simple a
+thing. But Tom had sensibility.
+
+But a man who, eight years after marriage, can make his wife an April
+fool, and record it, is no bad husband, and it would be a trespass on
+his good fame to suggest it. He loved her dearly and could never have
+been unkind to her. Far from that, happy domestic pictures abound in
+his diaries. Here is one of a time when she had joined him in London,
+on her way to stay with her sister in Edinburgh. They went together to
+Hornsey, to see Barbara's grave. "At eight o'clock she and I sauntered
+up and down the Burlington Arcade, then went and bought some prawns
+and supped most snugly together." He takes the state-rooms costing L7
+apiece, for "his own pretty girl." Meantime he is preparing to shelter
+in France from civil process served upon him for the defalcations of
+his deputy in Bermuda.
+
+I need not follow the scenes through as they come. The essence of
+Bessy Moore is expressed in what I have written of the first flush of
+her married life. There was much more to come. Moore outlived all his
+children, and she, poor soul, outlived her rattling, melodious Tom,
+having known more sorrow than falls, luckily, to the lot of most
+mothers. The death of her last girl, Anastasia, is beautifully told by
+Tom; but a worse stroke than even that was the wild career of little
+Tom, the son, his illness, disgrace, and death in the French Foreign
+Legion. That indeed went near to breaking Bessy's heart. "Why do
+people sigh for children? They know not what sorrow will come with
+them." That is her own, and only recorded, outcry.
+
+In _The Loves of the Angels_, an erotic and perfervid poem, which
+fails, nevertheless, from want of concentration of the thought,
+Zeraph, the third angel, is Tom himself, and the daughter of man,
+Nama, with whom he consorts, is Bessy.
+
+  Humility, that low, sweet root,
+  From which all heavenly virtues shoot,
+  Was in the hearts of both--but most
+  In Nama's heart, by whom alone
+  Those charms for which a heaven was lost
+  Seemed all unvalued and unknown...
+
+Certainly she had humility; but he gives her other Christian virtues--
+
+  So true she felt it that to _hope_,
+  To _trust_ is happier than to know.
+
+But we may doubt if Tom knew what Bessy knew and excused. Sensibility
+will not dig very deep.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAIDS
+
+
+They tell me that a respectable and ancient profession, and one always
+honoured by literature, is dying out; and if that is true, then two
+more clauses of the tenth Commandment will lose their meaning. For
+a long time to come we shall go on grudging our neighbour his
+house--there's no doubt about that; but even as his ox and ass have
+ceased to enter into practical ethics because our average neighbour
+doesn't possess either, so we hear it is to be with his servant and
+his maid.
+
+They have had their day. There are no domestic servants at the
+registries; the cap and apron, than which no uniform ever more
+enhanced a fair maid or extenuated a plain one, will be found only in
+the war museum, as relics of ante-bellum practice; we shall sluice our
+own doorsteps in the early morning hours, receive our own letters from
+the postman, have our own conversations with the butcher's young man
+at the area gate; and in time, perhaps, learn how it may be possible
+to eat a dinner which we have ourselves cooked and served up. Better
+for us, all that, it may well be; but will it be better for our girls?
+I am sure it will not.
+
+Domestic service, I have said, is an employment which literature has
+always approved. From Gay to Hazlitt, from Swift to Dickens, there
+have been few writers of light touch upon life who have not had a kind
+eye for the housemaid. There's a passage somewhere in Stevenson for
+which I have spent an hour's vain hunting, which exactly hits the
+centre. The confidential relationship, the trim appearance, not
+without its suggestion of comic opera and the soubrette of the
+_Comedie Francaise_, the combined air of cheerfulness and respect
+which is demanded, mind you, on either side the bargain--all this is
+acutely and vivaciously observed in half a page by a writer who never
+missed a romantic opening in his days. The profession, indeed, has
+never lacked romance in real life. Strangeness has persistently
+followed beauty in and out of the kitchen. The number of old
+gentlemen who have married their cooks is really considerable.
+Younger gentlemen, whose god has been otherwhere, have married
+their housemaids. A Lord Viscount Townshend, who died in 1763 or
+thereabouts, did so in the nick of time, and left her fifty thousand
+pounds. Tom Coutts the banker, founder of the great house in the
+Strand, married his brother's nursemaid, and loved her faithfully for
+fifty years. She gave him three daughters who all married titles; but
+she was their ladyships' "dear Mamma" throughout; and Coutts himself
+saw to it that where he dined she dined also. There's nothing in caste
+in our country, given the essential solvent.
+
+A stranger story still is this one. Some fifteen years ago a barrister
+in fair practice died, and made by will a handsome provision for his
+"beloved wife." This wife, thereby first revealed to an interested
+acquaintance, had acted as his parlourmaid for many years, standing
+behind his chair at dinner, and bringing him his evening letters on a
+tray; and she had been so engaged on the day of his death. Nobody of
+his circle except, of course, her fellow-servants, knew that she stood
+in any other relationship to her so-called master. I consider her
+conduct admirable; nor do I think his necessarily blameworthy. Those
+two, depend upon it, understood each other, and had worked out a
+common line of least resistance. On the distaff side there is the
+tale of the two maiden ladies so admirably served by their butler
+that when, to their consternation, he gave warning, they held a
+heart-to-heart talk together, as the result of which one of them
+proposed in all the forms to the invaluable man, and was accepted. It
+is deplorable that a pursuit which opens vistas so rose-coloured as
+these should be allowed to lapse.
+
+A lady whom I knew well, and whose recent death I deplore, was cured
+of a bad attack of neuritis by being cut off all domestic assistance,
+except her cook's, and set to do her own housework. Therefore it is
+probable that we should all be the better for the same treatment;
+but, as I asked just now, will the girls be the better for it? The
+disengaged philosopher can only answer that question in one way. That
+feverish community-work which they have been doing through a four
+years' orgy of patriotism will have taught them very much of life and
+manners. It will have taught them, among other more desirable things,
+how to spend money, and how to keep a good many young men greatly
+entertained; but it will not, I fear, have taught them how to save
+money, how to make one man happy and comfortable, or how to bring up
+children in the fear of God.
+
+And if it has failed to teach those things it will have failed to fit
+them for this world, to say the least. It will not only have failed
+them, but it will have failed us with them. For the world needs at
+this moment a thousand things before it can be made tolerable again;
+and all of those can be summed up into one paramount need, which is
+for men and women who will observe faithfully the laws of their being.
+And what, pray, are the laws of their being? At the outside, three; in
+reality, two: to work, to love and to have children.
+
+At this hour neither men nor women will work. The strain is taken off,
+the bow relaxed. At the same time they must have money, that they may
+spend it; for as always happens in moments of reaction, the
+simplest way of expressing high spirits and a sense of ease is
+wild expenditure. So wages must be high, and because wages are high
+everything is dear. There are no houses, and there will be none; there
+can be no marriages, and there will be none; there will be no milk for
+children, so there will be no children. How long are such things to
+go on? Just so long as we disregard the laws of our being. We began to
+neglect them long before the war, and they must be learned again. We
+must learn first what they are, and next, how to keep them.
+
+Now the education of men is another text; but for women there can be
+little doubt but that the prime educationary in the laws of being is
+domestic service. You can be ribald about it. That is easy. But where
+else is a girl to learn how to keep house? And if she does not learn
+how to be a mother, as indeed she may, poor dear, she gets to know
+very much of what to do when she becomes one.
+
+So I hope to see a soberer generation of girls return to a profession
+which they have always adorned, for the schooling of which their
+husbands and children shall rise up and call them blessed.
+
+
+
+
+POETRY AND THE MODE
+
+
+A good friend of mine, poet and scholar, was recently approached by
+the President, or other kind of head of a Working Men's Association,
+for a paper. A party of them was to visit Oxford, where, after an
+inspection, there should be a feast, and after the feast, it was
+hoped, a paper from my friend--upon Addison. The occasion was not to
+be denied: I don't doubt that he was equal to it. I wish that I had
+heard him; I wish also that I had seen him; for he had determined on
+a happy way of illustrating and pointing his discourse. He had the
+notion of providing himself with a full-bottomed wig, a Ramillies; at
+the right moment he was to clothe the head of the President with
+it; and--Bless thee, Bottom, how art thou translated! In that woolly
+panoply, if one could not allow for _Cato_ and the balanced antitheses
+of the grand manner, or condone rhetoric infinitely remote from life
+past, present or to come--well, one would never understand Addison, or
+forgive him. This, for instance:--
+
+  CATO (_loq._): Thus am I doubly arm'd; my death and life,
+  My bane and antidote are both before me:
+  _This_ in a moment brings me to an end;
+  But _this_ informs me I shall never die.
+  The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
+  At the drawn dagger....
+
+Ten pages more sententious and leisurely comment; then:
+
+  Oh! (_dies_).
+
+There is much to be said for it, in a Ramillies wig. It is stately, it
+is dignified, it is perhaps noble. If, as I say, it is not very much
+like life, neither are you who enact it. But be sure that out of sight
+or remembrance of the wig such a tragedy were not to be endured.
+
+That is very well. The wig serves its turn, inspiring what without it
+would be intolerable. I am sure my friend had no trouble in accounting
+for Addison in full dress and his learned sock. Nor need he have had
+with Addison the urbane, Addison of the _Spectator_ condescending to
+Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb. There is in that, the very
+best gentlemanly humour our literature possesses, nothing inconsistent
+with the full-bottomed wig and an elbow-chair. But when the right
+honourable gentleman set himself to compose _Rosamond: an Opera_, and
+disported himself thus:
+
+  PAGE:
+  Behold on yonder rising ground
+  The bower, that wanders
+  In meanders
+  Ever bending,
+  Never ending,
+  Glades on glades,
+  Shades in shades,
+  Running an eternal round.
+
+  QUEEN:
+  In such an endless maze I rove,
+  Lost in the labyrinths of love,
+  My breast with hoarded vengeance burns,
+  While fear and rage
+  With hope engage,
+  And rule my wav'ring soul by turns--
+
+then I do not see how the wig can have been useful. I feel that
+Addison must have left it on the bedpost and tied up his bald pate
+in a tricky bandana after the fashion of Mr. Prior or Mr. Gay, one of
+whom, if I remember rightly, did not disdain to sit for his picture in
+that frolic guise. The wig, which adds age and ensures dignity, would
+have been out of place there; nor is it possible that _The Beggar's
+Opera_ owes anything to it. To explain the Addison of _Rosamond_
+or _The Drummer_, my friend would have had to shave the head of his
+victim and clap a nightcap upon it.
+
+The device was ingenious and happy. You yoke one art to serve another.
+It can be extended in either direction, working backwards from the
+Ramillies, or forwards, as I propose to show. Skip for a moment
+the Restoration and the perruque, skip the cropped polls of the
+Roundheads; with this you are in full Charles I.
+
+  Go, lovely Rose!
+    Tell her that wastes her time and me,
+  That now she knows,
+    When I resemble her to thee,
+    How sweet and fair she seems to be.
+
+What vision of what singer does that evoke? What other than that of
+a young gallant in a lace collar, with lovelocks over his shoulders,
+pointed Vandyke fingers, possibly a peaked chin-beard? There is
+accomplishment enough, beauty enough, God knows; but there is
+impertinence too; it is _de haut en bas_--
+
+  Tell her that wastes her time and me!
+
+Lovelocks and pointed fingers all over it. It is witty, but does not
+bite. If you bite you are serious, if you bite you are in love; but
+that is elegant make-believe. He will take himself off next minute,
+and encountering a friend, hear himself rallied:
+
+  Quit, quit, for shame I This will not move,
+    This cannot take her;
+  If of herself she will not love,
+    Nothing can her make:
+    The D----l take her!
+
+Laughter and a shrug are the end of it. With the Carolines it was not
+music that was the food of love, but love that was a staple food
+of music. A man who lets his hair down over his shoulders may be as
+sentimental as you please, or as impudent. He cannot nourish both a
+passion and a head of hair. He won't have time.
+
+There, then, again, is a clear congruity established between your
+versifying and your clothes; they will both be in the mode, and the
+mode the same. One feels about the Cavalier fashion that it was
+not serious either one way or the other. It had not the Elizabethan
+swagger; it had not the Restoration cynicism; it had not the Augustan
+urbanity. Go back now to the Elizabethan, and avoiding Shakespeare as
+a law unto himself, which is the right of genius--for the sonnets
+have wit as well as passion (but a mordant wit), everything that real
+love-poetry must have, and much that no poetry but Shakespeare's could
+possibly survive--avoiding Shakespeare, I say, take two snatches in
+order. Take first--
+
+  Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white,
+    For all those rosy ornaments in thee,--
+  Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight,
+    Nor fair nor sweet--unless thou pity me!
+
+That first; and then this:
+
+  Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows
+    And when we meet at any time again,
+  Be it not seen in either of our brows
+    That we one jot of former love retain--
+
+and consider them for what they are: unapproachably beautiful,
+passionate, serious, on the edge of cynicism, but never over it. There
+you have the love of a young age of the world, when young men, hard
+hit, could be sharp-tongued, bitter, and often (though not in those
+two) too much in earnest not to be shameless. Agree with me, and see
+the men who sang and the women they sang of in preposterous stuffed
+and starched clothes which made them unapproachable except at the
+finger-tips, and yet burning so for each other that by words alone and
+the music in them they could rend all the buckram and whalebone and
+make such armour vain! You may see in Elizabethan dress a return
+to Art, as in Elizabethan poetry you see a return to Learning; but
+neither was designed to prevent a return to Nature; rather indeed to
+stimulate it. And so you come back to this:
+
+  Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
+  A chamber deaf of noise and blind of light,
+  A rosy garland and a weary head ...
+
+which is the perfectly-clothed utterance of an Elizabethan longing to
+be rid of his clothes.
+
+I don't propose to linger over the perruque. The Restoration was a
+time of carnival when, if the men were overdressed, the ladies were
+underdressed; and the perruque was a part of the masquerade. In such a
+figurehead you could be as licentious as you chose--and you were; you
+could only be serious in satire. The perruque accounts for Dryden and
+his learned pomp, for Rochester and Sedley, and for Congreve, who told
+Voltaire that he desired to be considered as a gentleman rather than
+poet, and was with a shrug accepted on that valuation: it accounts for
+Timotheus crying Revenge, and not meaning it, or anything else except
+display; it accounts for Pepys thinking _King Lear_ ridiculous. Let me
+go on rather to the day of the tie-wig, of Pope's Achilles and Diomede
+in powder; of Gray awaking the purple year; of Kitty beautiful and
+young, of Sir Plume and his clouded cane; of Mason and Horace Walpole.
+When ladies were painted, and their lovers in powder, poetry would be
+painted too. It would be either for the boudoir or the alcove. I don't
+call to mind a single genuine love-song in all that century among
+those who dressed _a la mode_. There were, however, some who did not
+so dress.
+
+Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave
+of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself,
+never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the
+poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before
+he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before
+Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was
+born; twelve years before he died, Burns. It is strange to contrast
+the _Elegy_ with _The Poplar Field:_
+
+  My fugitive years are all wasting away,
+  And I must ere long be as lowly as they,
+  With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
+  Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.
+
+Put beside that melodious jingle the ordered diction and ordered
+sentiment of one of the best-known and most elegant poems in our
+tongue. They were written within fifteen years of each other. Within
+the same space of time, or near about it, there came this spontaneous
+utterance of simplicity, tragedy and hopeless sorrow:
+
+  Young Jamie lo'ed me weel, and sought me for his bride;
+  But saving a croun he had naething else beside:
+  To make the croun a pund young Jamie gaed to sea;
+  And the croun and the pund they were baith for me.
+
+The authoress of that was born twenty-one years before Gray died. I
+speak, perhaps, only for myself when I say that reading that, or the
+like of that in Burns or in Blake, my heart becomes as water, and
+I feel that I would lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of
+Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to
+be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I
+were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the
+infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he
+scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain
+just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be
+conceded that there was some putting off of the tie-wig, the hoop and
+the red-heeled shoe about 1770.
+
+In the time of Reform, say from 1795 to 1830, you could do much as
+you pleased, and dress according to your fancy. You could smother your
+neck in a stock, wear a high-waisted swallow-tail coat, kerseymere
+continuations and silk stockings. So sat Southey for his portrait, and
+so did Rogers continually. Or you could wear a curly _toupe_ with Tom
+Moore and the Prince Regent, be as rough as a dalesman with Wordsworth
+or as sleek as a dissenting minister with Coleridge, an open-throated
+pirate with Byron, or a seraph with Shelley. If the rules lingered,
+they were relaxed. I think there were none. Individuality was in the
+air; schools were closing down. For the first time since the spacious
+days men sang as they pleased, and some sang as they felt and were,
+but with this difference added that you would no longer identify the
+age with the utterance. There were many survivals: most of Coleridge,
+all of Rogers, much of Byron, some of Wordsworth (_Laodamia_) is
+eighteenth century; and then, for the first time, you could archaicize
+or walk in Wardour Street--Macpherson had taught us that, and Bishop
+Percy. But all of Shelley and Keats, the best of Coleridge and
+Wordsworth belong to no age.
+
+  The pale stars are gone!
+  For the sun, their swift shepherd,
+  To their folds them compelling,
+  In the depths of the dawn,
+  Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array and they flee
+  Beyond his blue dwelling,
+  As fawns flee the leopard.
+  But where are ye?
+
+That is like nothing on earth: music and diction are stark new. And
+that was the way of it for a forty years of freedom.
+
+Then came a reaction. With Queen Victoria we all went to church again
+in our Sunday clothes. You cannot date Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth
+by the fashions; but you can date Tennyson assuredly. He belongs
+to the top-hat and the crinoline; to _Friends in Council_ and "nice
+feelings." True, there was nothing dressy about Tennyson himself. I
+doubt if he ever wore a top-hat. But is not _The Gardener's Daughter_
+in ringlets? Did not Aunt Elizabeth and Sister Lilia wear crinolines?
+And as for _Maud_--
+
+  Look, a horse at the door,
+    And little King Charley snarling:
+  Go back, my lord, across the moor,
+    You are not her darling.
+
+That settles it. "Little King Charley's" name would have been Gyp.
+I yield to no man in my admiration of _In Memoriam_; but when one
+compares it with _Adonais_ it is impossible not to allocate the one
+and salute the other as for all time and place:
+
+  When in the down I sink my head
+  Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath;
+  Sleep, Death's twin-brother, knows not Death,
+  Nor can I dream of thee as dead.
+
+And then:
+
+  He lives, he wakes--'tis Death is dead, not he;
+    Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young Dawn,
+  Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
+    The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.
+
+No: _In Memoriam_ is a beautiful poem, and technically a much better
+one than _Adonais_. But the spirit is different; narrower, more
+circumscribed; in a word, it dates, like the top-hat and the
+crinoline.
+
+In our day, clothes have lost touch with mankind, they cover the body
+but do not express the soul. With the vogue of the short coat, short
+skirt, slouch hat, and brown boots, style has gone out and ease come
+in; and with ease, it would seem, easy, not to say free-and-easy,
+manners. I speak not of the "nineties" when a young degenerate could
+lightly say,
+
+  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion,
+
+and be praised for it, but rather of the Georgians, of whom a golden
+lad, who happily lived long enough to do better, wrote thus of a lady
+of his love:
+
+  And I shall find some girl, perhaps,
+    And a better one than you,
+  With eyes as wise, but kindlier,
+    And lips as soft, but true.
+    And I daresay she will do.
+
+If that is not slouch-hat and brown boots, I don't know what to call
+it. For that golden lad I think _The Shropshire Lad_ must answer, who
+perhaps brought corduroys into the drawing-room. And if that is to be
+the way of it, we should do well to go back to Lovelace or Waller, and
+make believe with a difference. I shall find myself watching the sunny
+side of Bond Street for a revival--because while one does not ask for
+passion, or even object to the tart flavours of satiety, I feel that
+there is a standard somewhere, and a line to be drawn. Taste draws it.
+I trouble myself very little with the morals of the matter, yet must
+think manners very nearly half of the conduct of life. And the manners
+which are expressed in clothes are those which are instilled in art.
+They are symptomatic alike and correlated. There is nothing surprising
+about it, or even curious. It would be so, and it is so. If Milton
+had not on a prim white collar and a doctor's gown I misread _Paradise
+Lost_ and _Lycidas_ too.
+
+
+
+
+POLYOLBION
+
+
+How precisely does the Englishman love England? I remember saying some
+years ago that he was not patriotic in the ordinary sense, because
+though he loved the land, he had very little feeling for the political
+entity called England--whereas both will be loved by the true patriot.
+On recent consideration of the matter I am beginning to ask whether he
+does, after all, love the land itself, as the Irishman loves his, the
+Scot his, the Switzer his, and the Greek his. I must say that I doubt
+it. There is this, I think, to be noted of fervent patriots, that the
+object of their devotion will have had a distressful story. That is
+the case with the four nations just remarked upon. It has been the
+case with France ever since France was the passion of the French.
+
+Every man loves his home, for reasons not necessarily connected with
+the country which happens to hold it; every one of our soldiers of
+late longed to get back, by no means necessarily because he wanted to
+see England again. Did he really want to see it at all--I mean for its
+own sake apart from what it held of his? I know that he would have cut
+his tongue out sooner than have confessed it. That is his nature, and
+I can't help liking him for it--because it is a part of himself, and I
+like him better than any man in the world. But allowing for that queer
+shyness, how are we to test his love of our country? Is there a sure
+test? Well, I know of one, which to my mind is a certainty. Judged
+by that I must own that Atkins does not stand as a lover should, or
+would.
+
+My test is this. The lover of his countryside knows its physical
+features by heart, and to him they have personality. You will have
+observed the tendency of Londoners to guide you by the names of
+public-houses; you will have noticed their blank ignorance of points
+of the compass. To a great extent these defects characterise the Home
+Counties, and one might try to excuse them in various ways. In the
+North of England, and in Scotland throughout, you will be told to
+"go east," or "keep west" (as the Wordsworths were asked, were they
+"stepping westward?"), with a conviction that the direction will be
+sufficient for you as it plainly is for your guide. Now nobody can
+be said to know his countryside who does not know the airts; and
+the plain truth is that the Southern Englishman does not know his
+countryside at all. How, then, can he love it? But there's a stronger
+point than that.
+
+Nothing is more surprising than the indifference of Southerners to
+their rivers. Where, for instance, throughout its course do you ever
+hear the Thames spoken of as "Thames"--as if it was a person, which no
+doubt it is? In the North you talk of Lune and Leven, Esk and Eden:
+
+  Tweed said to Till,
+  What gars ye run so still?
+
+Scotland shows the same respect. Do you remember when Bailie Nicol
+Jarvie points out the Forth to Francis? "Yon's Forth," he said with
+great solemnity. That was well observed by Scott. In Italy--notably in
+Tuscany--a river is always spoken of without the definite article. It
+may be the case in Devonshire too; but it is never done here in South
+Wilts though we have five beautiful streams ministering to our county
+town. Indeed Wiltshire people are nearly as bad as the Cockneys, who
+always call their Thames "the river," which is as if a man might say
+"the railway."
+
+Beautiful how Burns personified his rivers! More, he individualised
+them. The same verb won't do. You have:
+
+  Where Cart rins rowin' to the sea,
+
+but
+
+  Where Doon rins wimplin' clear;
+
+And Dante says, or makes Francesca say,
+
+  Siede la terra dove nata fui
+  Sulla marina dove Po discende
+  Per aver pace co' seguaci sui.
+
+_Per aver pace_: a lovely phrase. And that brings me to Michael
+Drayton.
+
+That was a poet--author also of one lovely lyric--who treated our
+rivers after the fashion of his day, which ran to length and tedious
+excess. Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ is by pages too long; but
+that is nothing to Drayton's masterpiece. With the best dispositions
+in the world I have never been able to get right through the
+_Polyolbion_. His anthropomorphism is surprising, and a little of it
+only, amusing.
+
+Here is an example, wherein he desires to express the fact that an
+island called Portholme stands in the Ouse at Huntingdon.
+
+  Held on with this discourse, she--[that is, Ouse]--not so far hath run,
+  But that she is arrived at goodly Huntingdon
+  Where she no sooner views her darling and delight,
+  Proud Portholme, but becomes so ravished with the sight,
+  That she her limber arms lascivious doth throw
+  About the islet's waist, who being embraced so,
+  Her flowing bosom shows to the enamour'd Brook;
+
+and so on.
+
+That will be enough to show that one really might have too much of the
+kind of thing. In Drayton you very soon do; every page begins to
+crawl with demonstrative monsters, and there is soon a good deal
+more love-making than love. But you may read Drayton for all sorts of
+reasons and find some much better than others. He describes Britain
+league by league, and is said to have the accuracy of a roadbook. In
+thirty books, then, of perhaps 500 lines apiece, he conducts you
+from Land's End to Berwick-on-Tweed, naming every river and hill,
+dramatising, as it were, every convolution, contact and contour; and
+not forgetting history either. That means a mighty piece of work, of
+such a scope and purport that we may well grudge him the doing of it
+Charles Lamb, who loved a poet because he was bad, I believe, as a
+mother will love a crippled child, is more generous to Drayton than I
+can be. "That panegyrist of my native earth," he calls him, "who
+has gone over her soil, in his _Polyolbion_, with the fidelity of a
+herald, and the painful love of a son; who has not left a rivulet so
+narrow that it may be stept over, without honourable mention; and has
+animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams
+of old mythology." No more delightful task could be the lifework of a
+poet who loved his own land; but it could hardly be done again, nor, I
+dare say, ever be done again so well.
+
+To describe, however, the windings and circumfluences of rivers, the
+embraces of mountain and rain-cloud in language on the other side
+of amorousness may easily be inconvenient or ridiculous, and not
+impossibly both; but I shouldn't at all mind upholding in public
+disputation, say, at the Poetry Bookshop, that there was no other way
+than Drayton's of doing the thing at all. It was the mythopoetic way.
+For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are
+to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze,
+swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise,
+length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no
+other relation than a sex-relation, and in so describing the relations
+of every river in England, he very naturally becomes tedious. Satiety
+is the bane of the amorist, and of worse than he. Casanova had that
+in front of him when he set out to be immoral, _on ne peut plus_, in
+seven volumes octavo. There simply were not enough vices to go round.
+He ended, therefore, by being a dull as well as a dirty dog. "Take
+back your bonny Mrs. Behn," said Walter Scott's great-aunt to him
+after a short inspection, "and if you will take my advice, put her
+in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first
+novel." The nemesis of the pornographer: he can't avoid boring you to
+tears.
+
+
+
+
+THE WELTER
+
+
+Soused still to the ears in the lees of war, I win a rueful reminder
+from a stray volume of _Hours in a Library_. Was the world regenerated
+between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed
+and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in
+the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely
+settled? Charles Kingsley (of whom the moralist was writing) seems
+really to have believed it, and attributed the exulting affirmative
+to--the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal
+nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps
+any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral
+upheaval in the generations concerned. Let us suppose, then, that the
+British were seriously turned to domestic politics in 1855; let us
+admit that they are so turned to-day, and ask ourselves fairly whether
+we are now in a better way of reasonable living than history shows
+those poor devils to have been.
+
+If we are, it will not be the fault of the old agencies, in which
+Kingsley always believed. Church and State are adrift; organised
+Christianity has abdicated; the aristocracy no longer governs
+even itself; Parliament has died of a surfeit of its own rules.
+If fundamental reform is to come, it will be forced upon us by the
+working class, and (at the pinch) opposed tooth and nail by the
+privileged. But is it to come? Is the working class deploying for
+action? In all the miscellaneous scrapping which we watch to-day is
+there one strong man with a sense of direction? It doesn't look like
+it.
+
+Men, having learned to get what they lust after by strife, do not
+easily forget the lesson. Sporadic war, like a heath fire, breaks out
+daily in some part of the world; and society is as easily kindled,
+and as irrationally as nations. A Jew is put out of Hungary and an
+Archduke takes his place. The working men of Britain, having chosen a
+Parliament which they don't believe in, and didn't want, set to work,
+not to get rid of it, but to make any future Parliament impossible.
+The police do their best for the shoplifters; the engine-drivers,
+to help the police, prevent them from going home to bed. Sir Edward
+Carson, a staunch Unionist, makes union out of the question. The
+bakers, to improve the prospects of their trade, teach people to make
+their own bread. The colliers--well, the colliers do not yet seem to
+have found out that unless they provide people with coal, people won't
+provide them with many things they are in need of.
+
+This doesn't look much like solidarity, it must be owned; and yet I
+make bold to say that the one abiding good we have got out of the war
+is the discovery of the solidarity of man. Nationality (mother of war)
+has been killed since we have learned from the Germans how much
+alike we are at our worst, and best. Caste is mortally wounded. The
+land-girl and her ladyship admit their sisterhood; the staff officer
+and the batman understand each other in the light of common needs and
+their satisfaction. There's the seed; water it with the dew of common
+poverty and you may have one Britain instead of a round dozen, and a
+League of Men to succeed a stillborn League of Nations. Courage, then;
+_Eppur si muove!_
+
+Poverty is certainly coming, for Europe is on the edge of bankruptcy.
+With poverty will come freedom, and it can come in no other way.
+Nobody is free while he is serf to his own necessities, and the
+necessities of such a man as I am (to take the first instance that
+comes to hand) have grown to such a pitch that I am as rogue and
+peasant slave to them as ever Hamlet was to his. Gentleman born,
+quotha! Caste and self-indulgence go hand in hand. I must be a great
+man in the village, therefore live in the great house. Men must touch
+their hat-brims to me, therefore my hat (not I) must be worth their
+respect. A village girl must wait upon me, therefore (for my life)
+I must not wait upon her. That is where I have been ever since I was
+born, but now I am going to be poor and free. The time is at hand when
+I must give up my roomy old house in its seven-acre garden and live in
+the five-roomed cottage now occupied by my gardener. My hat must be
+as it may, since I shan't buy a new one. If a maid comes to work in my
+house she can only come in one capacity, which will equally involve
+my working in hers. She in the kitchen, I in the coalhole or potato
+patch, 'twill be all one. If she works it will be in our common
+interest; and for that I too shall work.
+
+If I, still harping on myself, go that way to freedom, shredding off
+what is tiresome, cumbrous and a hindrance, one is tempted to think we
+shall all--so life is in a concatenation--lose what is really vicious
+in our social coil; and if in our social then in our political coil.
+For if the essence of a sound private life is that a man should be
+himself, so a public life for its smooth working depends upon the same
+sincerity. Read my parable of the particular into society at large.
+If I am to live so, and gain, are not nations? Are we to hire a great
+navy, a great army, to secure us in things which we have seen to be
+tiresome, cumbrous and a hindrance? Are we to exact flag-dippings
+from nations to our flag? Are we to make washpots of the Maltese,
+Cypriotes, Hindoos, Egyptians, Hottentots, and who not? If we go
+bankrupt we shall not be able to do it, and if we are not able to do
+it we shall stand among people as Britons, not as a British Empire,
+over against French, Germans, Maltese, Cypriotes, standing as their
+needs involve, and for what worth their virtue can ensure. So men,
+being men, nations of men will become families of men:
+
+_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo._
+
+Two things therefore are clear: men are a family, and the family is to
+be poor. Almost as clear to me is the coming of the day when we shall
+slough the ragged skin of empire and become again a small, hardy,
+fishing and pastoral people. The profiteers will leave us, like
+rats and their parasites. We shall be able to feed ourselves by our
+industry. We shall be contented, and as happy as men with inordinate
+desires and subordinate capacities can ever hope to be. There is no
+reason to suppose that we need cease to be a nursery of heroes,
+that our old men will not see visions or our young men dream dreams.
+Neither vision nor dream will be the worse for having its bottom in
+truth.
+
+
+
+
+CATNACHERY
+
+
+Catnach was a dealer in ballads. His stock line was the murderer's
+confession, and his standard price half a crown. I don't know that
+there is a Catnach now, or a market for Catnachery, but people collect
+the old ones. You find them in county anthologies, with one of which
+"_The Kentish Garland_, Vol. II., edited by Julia H.L. de Voynes,
+Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons, 1882," I lately spent a pleasant
+morning in a friend's house. I should have liked Volume I., though it
+could not by any possibility have contained worse matter. That is my
+only consolation for missing it, because there are bad things and bad
+things, and if a thing of literature is bad enough, it may well be as
+entertaining as the best. I have long felt that there was a future for
+_Half-hours with the Worst Authors_. It might prove a goldmine to a
+resolute editor, and I hope I am not betraying a friend when I say
+that one of mine has laid the footings of such a collection as may
+some day add lustre to his name.[A] If I don't mistake, I can put him
+on to a thing or two now which he will be glad of.
+
+[Footnote A: He is here following Edward FitzGerald.]
+
+Every bad ballad has its archetype in a good one, and all ballads
+of whatsoever quality, can be pigeonholed under subjects, whether
+of content or of treatment. My first specimen from Kent could be
+classified as the Ballad Encomiastic, or, at will, as the Ballad of
+Plain Statement, in which latter case it would be considered as a
+ballad proper and derive itself _passim_ from Professor Child's
+book. In the former case you would have to go back to Homer for its
+original. It calls itself "An Epitaphe"--which it could not be--"uppon
+the death of the noble and famous Sir Thomas Scott of Scottshall, who
+dyed the 30 Dec. 1594," and begins thus:
+
+  Here lyes Sir Thomas Scott by name--
+  O happie Kempe that bore him!
+
+Kempe is his mother.
+
+  Sir Reynold with four knights of fame
+  Lyv'd lynealy before him.
+
+The poet chooses to treat of ladies by their surnames, for we go on:
+
+  His wieves were Baker, Heyman, Beere,
+  His love to them unfayned;
+  He lived nyne and fiftie yeare.
+  And seventeen soules he gayned.
+
+Seventeen children, in fact--but
+
+  His first wief bore them every one,
+  The world might not have myst her--
+
+A very obscure line, at first blush rather hard on Baker, and flatly
+contradicted by what follows:
+
+  She was a very paragone,
+  The Lady Buckhurst's syster.
+
+Nothing could be more succinct. Now for Beere:
+
+  His widow lives in sober sort,
+    No matron more discreeter;
+  She still reteines a good report,
+    And is a great housekeeper.
+
+Apart from his valiancy as a consort Sir Thomas seems to have done
+little in the world but be rich in it. The best that can be said of
+him by the epigraphist is contained in what follows:
+
+  He made his porter shut his gate
+    To sycophants and briebors,
+  And ope it wide to great estates,
+    And also to his neighbours.
+
+That does not recommend Sir Thomas to me. I suspect himself of
+sycophancy, if not of briebory, and it may well be that he shut out
+others of his kidney in order that he might have free play with the
+great estates. But that is not the poet's fault, who had to say what
+he could.
+
+My next example should be styled the Ballad of Extravagant Grief, and
+will be found at its highest in the Poetical Works of John Donne. I
+can find nothing greater than his--
+
+  Death can find nothing after her, to kill
+  Except the world itself, so great as she,
+
+in "A funerall elegie upon the death of George Sonds Esquire who was
+killed by his brother Mr. Freeman Sonds the 7 of August 1658." Freeman
+Sonds, a younger son, hit his brother George on the head with a
+cleaver as he lay in his bed, and thereafter dispatched him with a
+three-sided dagger. He then went in to his father and confessed his
+fault. "Then you had best kill me too," said the father; to whom the
+son, "Sir, I have done enough." He was hanged at Maidstone, full
+of penitence and edifying discourse. The elegy begins in Donne's
+circumstantial manner:
+
+  Reach me a handkerchief, another yet,
+  And yet another, for the last is wet.
+
+Nothing could be better; but he must needs outdo his usual outdoings,
+call for a bottle to hold his tears, finally require that--
+
+  The Muses should be summoned in by force
+  And spend their all upon the wounded corse--
+
+which presents a rather comic picture to the imaginative reader.
+
+The elegist, reserving blasphemy for his conclusion, now becomes
+foolish:
+
+  In thy expyring it was made appear
+  In bloody wounds the Trinity was here.
+
+_Where_ was the Trinity, you ask? In the wounds, naturally, which,
+made with a three-edged dagger, showed red triangles. But there were
+twelve wounds: therefore--
+
+  The gates thro' which thy fertil soul did mount
+  To blessed Aboad came to the full account
+  Of Twelve, or four times three; and three
+  Hath ever in it some great Mysterie.
+
+Obviously. Here is his peroration:
+
+  Great God, what can, what shall, man's frailtie thinke
+  When thy great goodness at this act did winke?
+  But thou art just, perhaps thou thoughtest it fit;
+  And Lord, unto thy judgment I submit.
+
+Any comment must fail upon the sublimity of that great "perhaps."
+
+Elkanah Settle might have written that, as he did undoubtedly another,
+"On the untimely death of Mrs. Annie Gray, who dyed of small pox":
+
+  Scarce have I dry'd my cheeks but griefs invite
+  Again my eyes to weep, my hand to write,
+  Which still return with greater force, being more
+  In weight and number than they were before.
+
+A touch of Crabbe there--but enough of innocent death, which was not
+in Catnach's line of business. He dealt in murder, from the convicted
+murderer's standpoint. For us the _locus classicus_ is the Thavies Inn
+Affair; but from the _Kentish Garland_ I gather "The Dying Soldier in
+Maidstone Gaol," a later flower, written and published no longer ago
+than 1857.
+
+The dying soldier was Dedea Redanies, so called, though probably his
+name should be spelt as it is rhymed, Redany. He was a Servian (not a
+Serbian) from Belgrade, engaged in the Second British-Swiss Legion, an
+armament of which I never heard before. Quartered at Shorncliffe, and
+goaded by jealousy, he stabbed his young woman, and her sister, on the
+cliffs above Dover, gave himself up, was tried and duly hanged. I
+hope that is a plain statement, but none which I could make could be
+plainer than Dedea's rhapsodist's:
+
+  Oh, list my friends to a foreign soldier
+    Whose name is Dedea Redanies--
+  My friends and kindred had no idea
+    That I should die on a foreign tree.
+  I loved a maiden, a pretty maiden,
+    In the town of Dover did she reside--
+  I sweetly kissed her and with her sister
+    I after killed and laid side by side.
+
+That is admirably said, but not at all advantaged by subsequent
+re-statement in something like fifteen verses. The colossal egotism
+of the notorious criminal, however, provides him with a conclusion
+oleaginous enough for a scaremonger of our own day, with a confusion
+of _summject_ and _ommject_ very much after his heart. "O God," he
+whines--
+
+  O God receive me, from pain relieve me,
+    Since I on earth can no comfort find--
+  To stand before thee, let me, in glory,
+    With poor Maria and sweet Caroline.
+
+I should like Sir Conan Doyle to treat of this modest proposal in a
+present lecture.
+
+
+
+
+LANDNAMA
+
+
+I have been reading in _Landnama Book_ the records of the settlement
+of Iceland and can now realise how lately in our history it is that
+the world has become small. At the beginning of the last century
+it was roughly of the size which it had been at the end of the last
+millennium. It then took seven days to sail from Norway to Iceland,
+and if it was foggy, or blew hard, you were likely not to hit it off
+at all, but to fetch up at Cape Wharf in Greenland. It was some
+such accident, in fact, which discovered Iceland to the Norwegians.
+Gardhere was on a voyage to the Isle of Man "to get in the inheritance
+of his wife's father," by methods no doubt as summary as efficacious.
+But "as he was sailing through Pentland frith a gale broke his
+moorings and he was driven west into the sea." He made land in
+Iceland, and presently went home with a good report of it. He may
+have been the actual first discoverer, but he had rival claimants, as
+Columbus did after him. There was Naddodh the Viking, driven ashore
+from the Faroes. He called the island Snowland because he saw little
+else. Nevertheless, says his historian, "he praised the land much."
+Such was the beginning of colonisation in Thule. It was accidental,
+and took place in A.D. 871.
+
+But those who intended to settle there had to devise a better way of
+reaching it than that of aiming at somewhere else and being caught in
+a storm. What should you do when you had no compass? One way, perhaps
+as good as any, was Floki Wilgerdsson's. "He made ready a great
+sacrifice and hallowed three ravens who were to tell him the way." It
+was a near thing though. The first raven flew back into the bows; the
+second went up into the air, but then came aboard again. "The third
+flew forth from the bows to the quarter where they found the land."
+It was then very cold. They saw a frith full of sea-ice--enough for
+Floki. He called the country Iceland, and the name has stuck. They
+stayed out the spring and summer, then sailed back to Norway, of
+divided minds concerning the adventure. "Floki spoke evil of the
+country; but Herolf told the best and the worst of it; and Thorolf
+said that butter dripped out of every blade of grass there." He was
+a poet and his figure clove to him. "Therefore he was called Butter
+Thorolf."
+
+The first real settlers were two sworn brethren, Ingolf and Leif. They
+went because they had made their own country too hot to hold them,
+having in fact slain men in heaps. This had been on a lady's account,
+Helga daughter of Erne. They had gone a-warring with Earl Atle's three
+sons, and been very friendly until they made a feast afterwards for
+the young men. At that feast one of the Earl's sons "made a vow to get
+Helga, Erne's daughter, to wife, and to own no other woman." The vow
+was not liked by anybody; and it was not, perhaps, the most delicate
+way of putting it. Leif in particular "turned red," having a mind
+to her himself. These things led to battle, and the Earl's son was
+killed. Then the sworn brethren thought they had best go to Iceland,
+and they did; but Leif took Helga with him. They left their country
+for their country's good, and for their own good, too.
+
+Having found your asylum, how did you choose the exact quarter
+in which to settle? The popular way was that adopted by the sworn
+brethren. "As soon as Ingolf saw land, he pitched his porch-pillars
+overboard to get an omen, saying as he did so, that he would settle
+where the pillars should come ashore." That was his plan. If it wasn't
+porch-pillars it was the pillars of your high seat. Either might be
+the nucleus of your house; both sets were sacred things, heirlooms,
+symbols of your worth. You never left them behind when you flitted.
+Another plan, and a good one, was to leave the site to Heaven.
+Thorolf, son of Ernolf Whaledriver, did that. He was a great
+sacrificer, and put his trust in Thor. He had Thor carven on his
+porch-pillars, and cast them overboard off Broadfrith, saying as
+he did so, "that Thor should go ashore where he wished Thorolf to
+settle." He vowed also to hallow the whole intake to Thor and call it
+after him. The porch-pillars went ashore upon a ness which is called
+Thorsness to this day, as the site of the shrine Thorolf built is
+still called Templestead. Thorolf was a very pious colonist. "He had
+so great faith in the mountain that stood upon the ness that he
+called it Holyfell;" and he gave out that no man should look upon it
+unwashed. It should be sanctuary also for man and beast, a hill of
+refuge. "It was the faith of Thorolf and all his kin that they should
+all die into this hill." I hope that they did so, but _Landnama Book_
+doesn't say.
+
+There were few, if any, Christians among these fine people. King Olaf
+and his masterful ways with the heathen were yet to come. And those
+who took on the new religion took it lightly. They cast it, like an
+outer garment, over shoulders still snug in the livery of Frey and
+Thor. It was not allowed to interfere with their customs, which were
+free, or their manners, which were hearty. Glum, son of Thorkel, son
+of Kettle Black, "took Christendom when he was old. He was wont thus
+to pray before the Cross, 'Good for ever to the old! Good for ever
+to the young.'" That seems to have been all his prayer, which was
+comprehensive enough. But there are older and more obstinate garments
+than religions. Illugi the Red and Holm-Starri "exchanged lands and
+wives with all their stock." But the plan miscarried, for Sigrid, who
+was Illugi's wife, "hanged herself in the Temple because she would not
+change husbands." The compliment was greater than Illugi deserved.
+
+With the world as large as it was in those spacious days there was
+room for strange things to happen. Here is the experience of Grim,
+son of Ingiald. "He used to row out to fish in the winter with his
+thralls, and his son used to be with him. When the boy began to grow
+cold they wrapt him in a sealskin bag and pulled it up to his neck.
+Grim pulled up a merman. And when he came up Grim said, 'Do thou tell
+us our life and how long we shall live, or else thou shalt never
+see thy home again.' 'It is of little worth to you to know this,' he
+answered,' though it is to the boy in the sealskin bag, for thou shalt
+be dead ere the spring come, but thy son shall take up his abode and
+take land in settlement where thy mare Skalm shall lie down under the
+pack.' They got no more words out of him. But later in the winter Grim
+died, and he is buried there." So much for Grim. His widow took her
+son forth to Broadfrith, and all that summer Skalm never lay down.
+Next year they were on Borgfrith, "and Skalm went on till they came
+off the heath south to Borgfrith, where two red sand-dunes were, and
+there she lay down under the pack below the outermost sand-well."
+There the son of Grim set up his rest. There will nevermore be room in
+the world for things like that, but it is pleasant to know of them,
+
+
+
+
+"WORKS AND DAYS"
+
+
+Some time or another, Apollo my helper, I would choose to write a new
+_Works and Days_ wherein the land-lore of our own Boeotia should be
+recorded and enshrined for a season. There should be less practice
+than Tusser gives you, less art than the _Georgics_, but rather more
+of each than Hesiod finds occasion for. Though it is long since I read
+the _Georgics_, I seem to remember that the poem was overloaded
+with spicy merchandise. You might die of it in aromatic pain. As for
+Tusser, certainly he is the complete Elizabethan farmer; sooner than
+leave anything out he will say it twice; sooner than say it twice, he
+will say it three times. Nevertheless he was a good farmer; as poet,
+his itch to be quaint and anxiety to find a rhyme combine to make him
+difficult. He writes like Old Moore:
+
+  Strong yoke for a hog, with a twitcher and rings,
+  With tar in a tarpot, for dangerous things;
+  A sheep-mark, a tar-kettle, little or mitch,
+  Two pottles of tar to a pottle of pitch.
+
+"Mitch" is a desperate rhyme, but nothing to Tusser. He gives you a
+league or more of that; all the same, I don't doubt he was a better
+farmer than Virgil. More of him anon.
+
+Hesiod also was a better farmer than Virgil, and a poet into the
+bargain, though the Mantuan had him there. He prefers terseness to
+eloquence, is on the dry side, and avoids ornament as if he was a
+Quaker. Such adjectives as he allows himself are Homer's, well-worn
+and familiar. The sea is _atrugetos_, Zeus _hypsibremetes_, the earth
+_polyboteire_, the hawk _tanysipteros_, and so on. They have no more
+effect upon you than the egg-and-dart mouldings on your cornices. His
+own tropes are more curious than beautiful, but I cannot deny
+their charm. The spring, with him, is always _gray_--[Greek: polion
+ear]--which is exact for the moment when the breaking leaf-buds are no
+more than a mist over the woodlands. You shall begin your harvesting--
+
+  When the House-carrier shuns the Pleiades,
+  And climbs the stalks to get a little ease.
+
+The House-carrier is the snail, of course; and he shuns the heat of
+the ground, not the Pleiades. Here again is a maxim deeply involved in
+language:
+
+  When 'tis a god's high feast let not your knife
+  Cut off the withered from the quick with life,
+  Upon the five-brancht stock--
+
+or, in other words, never cut your finger-nails on a holy day.
+
+Hesiod, by birth an AEolian, was by settlement a Boeotian. He lived and
+farmed his own land on the slopes of Helikon, under the governance of
+the lords of Thespiae, whoever they were. I have been to Thespiae, and
+certify that there are no lords there now. I saw little but fleas and
+dogs of incredible savagery, where once were the precinct and shrine
+of Eros with a famous statue of the god by Praxiteles. It is not far
+from the Valley of the Muses, where or whereabouts those fair ladies
+met with Hesiod, and, as we are told in the Theogony, plucked him a
+rod of olive, a thing of wonder,
+
+  And breath'd in me a voice divine and clear
+  To sing the things that shall be, are, and were.
+
+Also they told him to sing of the blessed gods,
+
+  But ever of themselves both first and last,
+
+and he obeyed them. When he won a tripod at Chalkis, in a singing
+contest, he dedicated it to his patronesses,
+
+  There where they first instilled clear song in me.
+
+So he was a grateful poet, which is very unusual.
+
+In _Works and Days_ he sang of what he knew best, the country round,
+and sang it as a poet should who was also a shrewd farmer and thrifty
+husbandman. It is full of the love of earth and of the ways of them
+who lie closest in her bosom; but it is full of the wisdom, too,
+which such men win from their mother, and are not at all unwilling to
+impart. There is a good deal of Polonius in Hesiod, who addresses his
+_Works and Days_ to his brother Perses, a bad lot. Perses in fact had
+diddled him out of his patrimony, or part of it, by bribing the
+judges at Thespiae; and the poet, who doesn't mince matters, loses
+no opportunity of telling him what he thinks of him. Indeed, one of
+Hesiod's reasons for instructing him in good farming was that thereby
+he might perhaps prevent him from spunging on his relations. So
+the injured bard got a sad, exalted pleasure out of his griefs, and
+something back, too, in his quiet way.
+
+After a glance at the golden and other past ages he gets to work with
+a charming passage:
+
+  Whenas the Pleiads, Atlas' daughters, rise
+  Begin your harvest; when they hide their eyes,
+  Then plow. For forty nights and forty days
+  They are shrouded; then, as the year rounds, they raise
+  Their shining heads what time unto the stone
+  You lay your sickle's edge--
+
+and that is your time for harvesting. But you must work hard; for the
+law of the plains, of the seaboard, and of the upland dales is the
+same:
+
+  You who Demeter's gifts will win good cheap
+  Strip you to plow and sow, and strip to reap--
+
+and if you in particular, Perses, will do that, perhaps you won't need
+to go begging at other men's houses as you have begged at Hesiod's.
+But he gives you warning that you will get no more out of him--than
+advice.
+
+The Pleiades, however, don't set till November, and before that there
+is October to be considered, the season of the rains. Get you into
+the woods in October and cut for your needs. And what might these
+be? Well, a mortar to pound your grain in, and a pestle to pound it
+withal; an axle for your wain, a beetle to break the clods. Then, for
+your plows, look out for a plow-tree of holm-oak: that is the best
+wood for them. Make two plows in case of accident, one all of a piece
+([Greek: autogyon]), one jointed and dowelled. The pole should be
+of laurel or elm; the share must be oak. The [Greek: gues] is the
+plow-tree, and it is not always easy to find one ready-made--but get
+one if you can.
+
+  Two oxen then, each one a nine year bull,
+  Whose strength is not yet spent, the best to pull,
+  Which will not fight i' the furrow, break the plow
+  And leave your work undone. To drive them now
+  Get a smart man of forty, fed to rights
+  With a four-quartered loaf of eight full bites:
+  That's one to work, and drive the furrow plim,
+  Too old to gape at mates, or mates at him.
+
+That precise loaf, with just that much bitage, is the staple in
+Boeotia to-day; but the [Greek: aizeos] of forty will not so readily
+be found. Elsewhere in his poem Hesiod recommends something more in
+accord with modern practice:
+
+  Your house, your ox, your woman you must have;
+  For she must drive the plow--not wife but slave.
+
+The terms are synonymous in Greece to-day.
+
+Plowing time is when you hear the crane in the clouds overhead. Be
+beforehand with your cattle.
+
+  When year by year high in the clouds the crane
+  Calls in the plow-time and the month of rain,
+  Take care to feed your oxen in the byre;
+  For easy 'tis to beg, but hard to hire.
+
+That is in Tusser's vein, and no doubt comes naturally to rustic
+aphorists. A man may plow in the spring, too; and if Zeus should
+happen to send rain on the third day, after the cuckoo's first call,
+"As much as hides an ox-hoof, and no more," he may do as well as the
+autumn-tiller. In any case don't forget your prayers when you begin
+plowing:
+
+  You who in hand first the plow-handles feel,
+  Or on the ox's flank lay the first weal,
+  Pray Chthonian Zeus and chaste Demeter bless
+  The grain you sow with heart and heaviness.
+
+Now for your vines. First, for the pruning, note this:
+
+  When, from the solstice sixty days being fled,
+  Arcturus leaves the holy Ocean's bed
+  And, shining, burns the twilight; when that shrill
+  Child of Pandion opens first her bill--
+  Before she twitters, prune your vines! 'Tis best.
+
+No reasons at all: simply "[Greek: os gar ameinon]." That is like
+Homer. The stars continue their signals. Vintage time is when Orion
+and Sirius are come to mid-heaven, and rosy-fingered Dawn sees
+Arcturus. Then--
+
+  Cut your grape clusters off and bring to hive;
+  Show ten days to the sun, ten nights; for five
+  Cover them up; the sixth day draw all off--
+
+That is the way of it, Perses, and much profit to you in my learning,
+you scamp.
+
+Scattered up and down these frosty but kindly old pages are scraps of
+wisdom on all kinds of subjects--for life is Hesiod's theme as well
+as agriculture. He will tell you under what star to go to sea, if
+sail you must; but better not seafare at all. However, if you will go,
+choose fifty days after the summer solstice. That is the right time,
+the only pretty swim-time. If you must venture out in the spring, let
+it be when you see leaves on the fig-tree top as large as the print of
+a crow's foot--but even so the thing is desperate.
+
+  For me, I praise it not, nor like at all--
+  'Tis a snatcht thing--mischief is bound to fall.
+
+Then there's marriage, certainly the greatest venture of all. Don't
+think of it until you are rising thirty, anyhow. And as for _her_:
+
+  Let her be four years woman, and no more;
+  In her fifth year take her, and shut the door
+  Till she is yours, enured to your good laws.
+  Take her from near at hand and give no cause
+  That neighbours find your wedding stuff for mirth:
+  Than a good wife no better thing on earth;
+  Than a bad one, what worse? Pot of desire,
+  That roasts her husband up without a fire!
+
+That would make her sixteen or thereabouts. Poor child! But neither
+Homer, nor Hesiod, nor any Greek I ever read had any mercy on women.
+Hesiod in more than one page lets you know what he thinks about them.
+It comes hardly from one who in the _Eoioe_(if those apostrophes are
+his) was to hymn the great women of history and myth; but there, I
+think, spoke the courtier Hesiod, and not the husbandman.
+
+Lastly come a mort of things which you must not do. Here are some--for
+some must be omitted from the decorous page:
+
+  Let not your twelve-year-old presume to sit
+  On things not to be moved. That's bad. His wit
+  Will never harden; nor let a twelve-month child.
+  Let no man wash in water that's defiled
+  By women washing in it. Bitter price
+  You pay for that in time. Burnt sacrifice
+  Mock not, lest Heaven be angry ... So do you
+  That men talk not against you. Talk's a brew
+  Mischievous, heady, easy raised, whose sting
+  Is ill to bear, and not by physicking
+  Voided. Talk never dies once set a-working--
+  Indeed, in talk a kind of god is lurking.
+
+I regret to record the manner of death of the mainly pleasant old
+country poet, still more the supposed cause of it--but it may not
+be true. The Oracle at Delphi, which it seems he consulted after his
+triumph at Chalkis, warned him that he would come by his end in the
+grove of Nemean Zeus. He took pains, therefore, to avoid Nemea in his
+travels, and chose to stay for a while at OEnoe in Lokris, "where,"
+says Mr. Evelyn-White, his editor in the _Loeb Library_, "he was
+entertained by Amphiphanes and Ganyktor, sons of Phegeus." But you
+never knew when the Oracle would have you, or where. OEnoe was also
+sacred to Nemean Zeus, "and the poet, suspected by his hosts of having
+seduced their sister, was murdered there. His body, cast into the sea,
+was brought to shore by dolphins, and buried at OEnoe; at a later
+date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for
+the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these
+poets--I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take
+it, it sounded to Alkaeus of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon his
+dust:
+
+  When, in the Lokrian grove dead Hesiod lay,
+  The Nymphs with water washt the stains away.
+  From their own well they fetcht it, and heapt high
+  The Mound. Then certain goatherds, being by,
+  Poured milk and yellow honey on the grave,
+  Minding the Muses' honey which he gave
+  Living, that old man stored with poesy.
+
+That, surely, bespeaks a happier end to Hesiod. It is an epitaph that
+any poet might desire.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENGLISH HESIOD
+
+
+Now for Tusser, whom I feel that I belittled in the last Essay in
+order to make a point for the Boeotian.
+
+"Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry United to as Many of Good
+Huswifery" was the sixth edition in twenty years of a book which that
+fact alone proves to have been a power in its day. It was indeed more
+lasting than that, for it had twenty editions between 1557, when
+it began with a modest "Hundreth Pointes," and 1692, when the
+black-letter quartos ended. Thomas Tusser, the author of it, was
+a gentleman-farmer and had the education of one. He began as a
+singing-boy at Wallingford, went next to St. Paul's, then to Eton,
+where Nicholas Udall gave him once fifty-three strokes, "for fault but
+small or none at all"; presently to Cambridge, where Trinity Hall had
+him at nurse. All that done, he settled as a farmer under the Lord
+Paget in Suffolk; and there it was that in 1557 he published his
+notable book. Taking the months _seriatim_, beginning, as he should,
+in September, he runs through the whole round of work with an
+exhaustiveness and accuracy which could hardly be bettered to-day.
+Given a holding of the sort he had, a man might do much worse than
+obey old Tusser from point to point.
+
+He wrote in verse, a verse which is not often much better than those
+rustic runes which still survive, wherein weather-lore and suchlike
+sometimes prompt and sometimes are prompted by a rhyme. The best of
+these semi-proverbial maxims are recalled by the best of Tusser. Take
+this of the autumn winds as an example:
+
+  The West, as a father, all goodness doth bring,
+  The East, a forbearer, no manner of thing;
+  The South, as unkind, draweth sickness too near,
+  The North, as a friend, maketh all again clear.
+
+But he can be more pointed than that and no less just--as when he is
+telling the maids how to wash linen:
+
+  "Go wash well," saith Summer, "with sun I shall dry."
+  "Go wring well," saith Winter, "with wind so shall I."
+
+He is never dull if he is never eloquent; he is always wise if he is
+seldom witty. Among the Elizabethan poets there will have been many of
+a lowlier quality, many who could not have reached the piety and sweet
+humour of "My friend if cause doth wrest thee," which, with its happy
+close of "And sit down, Robin, and rest thee," is the best known of
+all his rhymes. As a verbal acrobat I don't suppose any of them
+could approach him. His greatest feat in that kind was his "Brief
+Conclusion" in twelve lines, every word in every line of which began
+with T. Thus:
+
+  The thrifty that teacheth the thriving to thrive,
+  Teach timely to traverse the thing that thou 'trive,
+
+and so on. If _Peter Piper_ dates so early, Tusser beats it
+handsomely.
+
+For the rest, he writes doggerel, and has no other pretensions that I
+can see. All the Elizabethans did, Shakespeare among the best of
+them. And I don't know that Shakespeare's doggerel is much better
+than Tusser's doggerel. It is something that, swimming in such a brave
+company, he should keep his head above water; and something more that
+in one other point Tusser can vie with the foremost. His knack of
+christening his personages with _ad hoc_ names recalls Shakespeare's,
+which, with its Dick the Carter and Marian's nose, was of the same
+kind and degree. Here is an example, where he wishes to instil the
+value of hedge-mending. If you let your fences down, he says:
+
+  At noon, if it bloweth, at night if it shine,
+  Out trudgeth Hew Makeshift with hook and with line;
+  While Gillet his blowse is a milking thy cow,
+  Sir Hew is a rigging thy gate, or thy plow.
+
+Autolycus sang like that. Now take an allusive couplet addressed to
+the house-mistress, that she by all means see the lights out:
+
+  Fear candle in hay-loft, in barn, and in shed,
+  Fear Flea-smock and Mend-breech for burning their bed.
+
+Right Shakespearian direction: few words and to the mark. But Tusser
+is seldom up to that level, and never on it long.
+
+We may as well be clear about the kind of farmer Tusser was before we
+go any further. A farmer, indeed, he happens to have been; but he was
+also a husbandman. A farmer in his day was a man who paid a yearly
+rent for something, by no means necessarily land. To farm a thing was
+to pay a rent for it. You could farm the tithe, or the King's taxes;
+you could farm a landlord's rent-roll, a corporation's market-dues,
+the profits of a bridge or of a highway. The first farmers of land
+were the men who took over all the estates of a monastery, paying the
+holy men a sufficiency, and making what they could over and above.
+In Elizabeth's time the great landlords had taken a leaf out of the
+monks' book, and the farmer of land was becoming more common. There
+were yet, however, many husbandmen who were not farmers at all: yeomen
+of soccage tenure, and tenants by copy of court-roll. That class was
+probably the most numerous of all, and Tusser, though he objected to
+its common fields, or "champion land," as he calls it, had plenty to
+tell them. He must, I think, himself have been a copyholder in
+his day, so feelingly does he deal with the detriments of a
+champion-holding. The need, for example, of watching the beasts
+straying at will over the open fields!
+
+  Where champion wanteth a swineherd for hog
+  There many complaineth of naughty man's dog.
+  Where each his own keeper appoints without care,
+  There corn is destroyed ere men be aware
+
+And again more bitterly:
+
+  Some pester the commons with jades and with geese,
+  With hog without ring, and with sheep without fleece.
+  Some lose a day's labour with seeking their own,
+  Some meet with a booty they would not have known.
+  Great troubles and losses the champion sees,
+  And even in brawling, as wasps among bees:
+  As charity that way appeareth but small;
+  So less be their winnings, or nothing at all.
+
+The probabilities are that he was quite right; but so long as copyhold
+endured so long lasted the open fields.
+
+Tusser's holding, and that of every husbandman in England in his time,
+was self-sufficient. Not only did you eat your own mutton, make your
+own souse, your own beer, cheese, butter, wine, cordials, and physic;
+you built your own house, made your own roads, fenced your own lands,
+contrived your own plows, wains, wagons, wheelbarrows, and all manner
+of tools. But much more than that. You grew your own hemp, had your
+own ropewalk, twisted your own twine; you grew your flax and wove your
+linen; you tanned and dressed your own leather, cut and spun your own
+wool, made, no doubt, your own clothes. Indeed, you stood four-square
+to fate in Tusser's time; and in that particular, as well as in
+another which I must speak of next, you were much nearer to Hesiod's
+farmer than to ours. This precept of his upon the uses of your
+woodland recalls Hesiod directly:
+
+  Save elm, ash and crabtree for cart and for plow;
+  Save step for a stile of the crotch of the bough;
+  Save hazel for forks, save sallow for rake;
+  Save hulver and thorn, whereof flail to make.
+
+Hulver is holly. In the same section (April) he has a verse about
+stone-picking which will show his encyclopaedic grip of his matter:
+
+  Where stones be too many, annoying thy land,
+  Make servant come home with a stone in his hand:
+  By daily so doing, have plenty ye shall,
+  Both handsome for paving and good for a wall.
+
+He bought little or nothing, trafficked very much by barter, and had
+scarcely any need for money. His men and maids lived in the house, and
+if they were paid anything, he does not say so. I suppose they were
+paid something, those of them who were not apprentices, bound for a
+seven years' term. They stood to his wife and himself as children, had
+their keep, learned their business, married each other by and by,
+and probably set up for themselves with a pig and a cock and hen on
+a pightle of land of the master's. It was a family relationship well
+into the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole used to call his servants
+his family. With the privilege of parenthood went the power of the
+rod. There's no doubt about that: maid and man had it if it was
+earned. In his dairy instruction Tusser gives us a list of "ten
+topping guests unsent for," whose presence in the cheese will cause
+Cicely to rue it. There are:
+
+  Gehazi, Lot's wife, and Argus his eyes,
+  Tom Piper, poor Cobler, and Lazarus's thighs:
+  Rough Esau, with Maudlin, and gentles that scrawl,
+  With Bishop that burneth--ye thus know them all.
+
+Gehazi the leper is in cheese when it is white and dry; Lot's wife
+when it is too salt; Argus's eyes are obvious:
+
+  Tom Piper hath hoven and puffed up cheeks;
+
+poor Cobler is there when it is leathery; Esau betrays himself by
+hairs, Maudlin by weeping; and as for the "Bishop that burneth" the
+explanation is complicated. It seems that Cicely would run after the
+bishop for his blessing, and leave the milk on the fire to burn.[A]
+For all these ill-timed guests you are to baste Cicely, or "tug her
+a crash," or "make her seek creeks"; you "call her a slut," or "dress
+her down." But you encourage her at the end with this quatrain:
+
+  "If thou, so oft beaten,
+    Amendest by this,
+  I will no more threaten,
+    I promise thee, Cis."
+
+[Footnote A: A correspondent from Yorkshire gives me a better
+explanation. In that county burnt milk is still said to be "bishoped."
+The bishop's power of the keys is thought to be hinted.]
+
+Fizgig, too, which is his lively name for the kitchen knave, gets the
+holly-wand across his quarters when he deserves it; but Tusser seems
+to feel that discipline may be overdone. It may be waste of good stick
+and good pains, for:
+
+  As rod little mendeth where manners be spilt,
+  So naught will be naught, say and do what thou wilt;
+
+and he is careful to remind you in concluding his chapter of Huswifely
+Admonitions that you had always better smile than scold:
+
+  Much brawling with servant, what man can abide?
+  Pay home when thou fightest, but love not to chide.
+
+The whole matter of servants is amusing or rueful study nowadays,
+accordingly as one looks at servants. Their treatment under Tusser's
+handling brings the husbandman poet very near to Hesiod, in whose time
+servitude was not called by any other name. Tusser's huswife, warned
+by the matin cock, called up her maids and men at four in the summer,
+at five in the winter. She packed them off to bed at ten or nine at
+night, according to the season, and, it would appear, to bed in the
+dark. She made her own candles, and feared also a fire, which will
+account for that. There was no early tea for Mistress Tusser's maids,
+let me tell you:
+
+  Some slovens from sleeping no sooner get up
+  But hand is in aumbry and nose is in cup.
+
+Nothing of the kind with Mrs. Tusser. On the other hand, hard work all
+round: "Sluts' corner" to be ridded; sweeping, dusting, mop-twirling,
+
+  Let some to peel hemp, or else rushes to twine,
+  To spin or to card, to seething of brine;
+
+and as for the men:
+
+  Let some about cattle, some pastures to view,
+  Some malt to be grinding against ye do brew.
+
+And so to breakfast. The morning star was the signal for it; and a
+hasty meal was expected of you:
+
+  Call servants to breakfast, by day-star appear,
+  A snatch, and to work--fellows tarry not here.
+
+You had porridge and a scrap of meat, and if you laid hands on
+something sweeter, look out for Mrs. Tusser:
+
+  "What tack in a pudding?" saith greedy gut-wringer:
+  Give such ye wot what, ere a pudding he finger.
+
+And, summarily, of breakfast there is this to be understood, that it
+is a thing of grace, not of custom:
+
+  No breakfast of custom provide for to save,
+  But only for such as deserveth to have.
+
+Very near Hesiod indeed!
+
+For your dinner at noon you were more hospitably served. First of all,
+it was ready for you:
+
+  By noon see your dinner be ready and neat:
+  Let meat tarry servant not servant his meat.
+
+And you were to have enough--plain fare, but enough.
+
+  Give servants no dainties, but give them enow;
+  Too many chaps wagging do beggar the plow;
+
+but even here you would get according to your deserts. If you were
+lazy at your threshing, you would be given a "flap and a trap,"
+whatever those may be. And you were expected to eat the trencher bare:
+
+  Some gnaweth and leaveth, some crusts and some crumbs:
+  Eat such their own leavings, or gnaw their own thumbs.
+
+In the hot weather you had time for sleep allowed you:
+
+  From May to mid-August an hour or two
+  Let Patch sleep a snatch, howsoever ye do.
+  Though sleeping one hour refresheth his song
+  Yet trust not Hob Grouthead for sleeping too long.
+
+Then came afternoon work, and at last supper. Here the mistress might
+unbend somewhat; for, as Tusser puts it:
+
+  Whatever God sendeth, be merry withal.
+
+She had still, however, an eye for the servants:
+
+  No servant at table use sauc'ly to talk,
+  Lest tongue set at large out of measure do walk;
+  No lurching, no snatching, no striving at all,
+  Lest one go without, and another have all.
+
+And then a final word:
+
+  Declare after supper--take heed thereunto--
+  What work in the morning each servant shall do.
+
+And then--bed!
+
+There were feast days, of course: Christmas to Epiphany was one long
+feast; then Plow Monday, Shrovetide, Sheep-shearing, Wake-Day, Harvest
+Home, Seed-Cake--these as the times came round. But there was a weekly
+regale too, which was known as Twice-a-Week-Roast. On Sundays and
+Thursdays a hot joint was the custom at supper. Tusser is clear about
+the value and sanction at once:
+
+  Thus doing and keeping such custom and guise,
+  They call thee good huswife--they love thee likewise.
+
+Those days are past and done, with much to regret and much to be
+thankful for. You trained good servants that way--but did you make
+good men and women? Some think so, and I among them; but such training
+is two-edged, and while I feel sure that the girls and lads were
+the better for the discipline, I cannot believe that the masters and
+mistresses were. They nursed arrogance; out of them came the tyrants
+and gang-drivers of the eighteenth century, Act of Settlement, the
+Enclosure Acts, Speenhamland, rick-burning, machine-breaking, and the
+Bloody Assize of 1831. Well, now the reckoning has come, and Hodge
+will have Farmer Blackacre at his discretion.
+
+One or two variations from modern practice may be noted. The
+Elizabethan husbandman grew, I have said, his own flax and hemp; he
+grew his vines too, and Tusser bids him prune them in February. I, who
+grow mine, call that full early. He does not tell us when he gathered
+his grapes or (what I very much want to know) how he made his
+wine--whether with pure fermented grape-juice, which is the French
+way, or by adding water and sugar to the must, which is our present
+English fashion. Again, he used sheep's milk both for draught and for
+butter-making. I wish we had sheep's milk butter. No one who has had
+it in Greece would be without it at home if he could help it. You
+weaned the lambs at Philip and Jacob, he says, if you wanted any milk
+from the ewe. Lastly, he grew saffron, which he pared between the two
+St. Mary's days. To pare is to strip the soil with a breast-plow.
+The two St. Mary's days were July 22 and August 15, which would be a
+pretty good time to plant saffron.
+
+We also, in my country, date our operations by holy days, long after
+the holy men have ceased to be commemorated. Who knows St. Gregory's
+Day? It is March 12. Marrowfat peas go into the drill:
+
+  Sow runcivals timely, and all that is grey;
+  But sow not the white till St. Gregory's Day.
+
+I will undertake that half a dozen old hands round about my house
+follow out this rule in its entirety.
+
+
+
+
+FLOWER OF THE FIELD
+
+
+A county inquiry took me, one day last summer, deeply into the Plain,
+up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember.
+An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground
+that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping
+through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after
+shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was
+iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the
+flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun.
+I saw rest-harrow which has a root like whipcord, and the flat thistle
+which thrives in dust. The harebells floated no more, the discs of the
+scabious were shrivelled husks; ladies' bedstraw was straw indeed, but
+not for ladies' uses. Three miles away from anywhere we came upon a
+clump of dusty sycamores whose leaves were spotted and beginning to
+fall; beyond them was a squat row of flint and brick bungalows, the
+goal of our quest. There were three tenements, of which two were
+empty. In the third lives the shepherd who had called me up to
+consider his circumstances.
+
+There was thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and
+pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are
+conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared
+down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a
+figure of more than himself and his purpose; I saw him as Homer's
+people saw their eagles. Just as he hung aloft so hung the sun, intent
+upon the life of our cowering ball. Not elsewhere in England have I
+seen so shadeless a place, or one so unfitted for human intercourse,
+so lacking in the comfort, which human sensibilities need. We live in
+nature as hunted things, beasts of chase. Every eye is upon us in fear
+or dislike; but in our turn, cursed as well as blessed by imagination,
+we people the wild with dreadful shapes of menace. The heat, the cold,
+the wind and the rain work as much against us as for us. We endow them
+with minds like our own, but magnified by our dismay to be the minds
+of gods maleficent. Without shelter of our own provision we are
+comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies.
+Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In
+those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded,
+dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies
+I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in
+the air above us. The rooms were black with them, and their humming
+filled them up with noise.
+
+Here lived the shepherd, too heavily taxed as he thought for his
+hermitage; here lived his family of half a dozen swarthy and beautiful
+children; and here we discussed the state of affairs, since the
+shepherd was abroad, with his daughter, a flower of the field. She
+came out of this stivy tenement at the sound of our boiling radiator,
+and stood framed in the doorway, shading her eyes against the sun, a
+tall and graceful, very pretty girl, dressed in cool white which might
+have been fresh from its cardboard box, as she herself might have
+stepped from her typewriter and Government office at Whitehall.
+Gentle-voiced, quiet and self-possessed, she showed us the conditions
+of her lot. One living-room, two bedrooms, and a washhouse in a shed:
+three miles over the grass to shop, church, post-office, and doctor;
+half a mile to call up a neighbour in case of need. A rain-water tank,
+less than a quarter full of last winter's rain, must keep clean her
+house and her, and for drinking she was served by a galvanised tank in
+full sun, which she was lucky to get filled once a week.
+
+I tasted of it. The water was warm, flat, and not too clean. "Where
+does this come from?" "It is fetched in a barrel from over the hill."
+"Who brings it?" "The farmer--but he makes a fuss whenever we ask for
+it." "He must water the stock, surely?" "Oh yes, and the sheep, too,
+but--" A pregnant aposiopesis. I wondered if that tank could not be
+put in the shade; but it seemed that it could not. The water had to be
+drawn from the barrel, the barrel was on wheels; time was short, life
+was tough; and so--you see! We did justice to the shepherd.
+
+It is shocking that a man should live so, held of less account than
+the sheep which he rears; but it is admirable that this man should
+live as he does. The house, to call it so, was as clean as a dairy;
+the children were neat, washed and brushed; the girl was one for
+Herrick to have sung of. I wish that I could have seen the shepherd,
+though it may well be that his wife, if she is alive, would reveal
+more. Something told me that he was a widower, and that this fair
+young woman mothered his brood for him. What she had of the nest-lore
+can only have come from a shrewd mistress of it. I did not see a book
+in the place, nor a newspaper.
+
+Life out there, on such terms, is more solitary than in
+Northumberland, where the farms are isolated and self-sufficient,
+but all the hinds' dwellings are clustered, and society may be had.
+I don't believe you can set up for a successful hermit without a
+long education; and although a shepherd himself may be one by a stern
+schooling in solitude, you should not expect it of his daughter. Here
+was a girl made for social amenity, who would want to be danced
+with, flirted with, courted with flowers, sweets and other delicate
+observance. She deserved admiration both to receive and impart. It is
+useless to talk about nature; the love of that is both sophisticated
+and acquired. Nothing to her the great blue spaces of the Plain, the
+brooded mystery of Stonehenge, the companionship of her long-dead
+ancestry, dust in their barrows. No solace for her, after the burden
+of the day, in the large solemnity of evening out there, which to
+some of us would call a message almost vocal. To me, for instance, a
+summer's dusk, a moonrise on the Plain, are poems without words. Heard
+melodies are sweet, but those unheard--!
+
+For whom, then, had she adorned herself in white raiment, for whom
+dressed her dark hair? Not for us, that's certain. She had had no
+notice of our coming. That she should do such things for their own
+sake, _elegantia quadam prope divinum_, was original virtue in her.
+Solomon in all his glory had been no goodlier sight; and if she toiled
+or spun to achieve it, her state, I should say, is by so much the
+more gracious. And what the devil does she do with herself in the long
+winter nights, when you light the lamp at four and see nothing of the
+sun till eight the next morning--and she arrayed like a lily of the
+field? There's mending, but you have the afternoon for that; a letter
+to a brother in Canada; let us hope there's one to a sweetheart not so
+far away. And then--what? To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE HARVEST MOON
+
+
+She is at her full, and even as I write rising red and heavy in the
+south-west. All night long she will look down upon at least one corner
+of the earth satiate with the good things of life. I don't remember
+such a September as this has been for many years past. Misty,
+gossamered mornings, a day all blue and pale gold, bees in the
+ivy bloom, sprawling overblown flowers, red apples, purpling
+vine-clusters, clear evenings: then this smouldering moon to go to
+bed by! It is all like a great Veronese wall-picture, or the Masque
+in _The Tempest_--"Rich scarf to my proud earth!"--and summons from
+me more adjectives than I have needed this twelvemonth. It is indeed
+adjectival weather; for Nature is still adding, not discarding stores.
+The last act of the "maturing sun" is to ingerminate the flowers and
+fruit which will bless or tantalise us next year.
+
+Now is the time when maids get up at six and hunt for mushrooms in
+the dew; now the good wives of the village make wine of all sorts of
+unlikely fruits, blackberries, elderberries, peaches, pears, and, of
+all things in the world, parsnips. I have lately been given of this
+wine to taste. It is a cordial rather than a wine and on the good
+rather than the bad side. The addition of spices is admitted;
+nevertheless out of a particularly mawkish vegetable is made a
+palatable drink. "Out of the strong come forth sweetness." After it I
+shall be prepared to find a potable in the banana, which is favoured
+by many people, of whom I am not one. But I don't find it nastier than
+the parsnip, and it is evident that fermentation can work miracles.
+
+In such a year as this I, too, shall have a vintage. For the first
+time in my life I shall tread my own winepress, vat my own must,
+and (I hope) need no sugar for it. I don't know why it is, but I can
+conceive no more romantic rural adventure than that of growing and
+drinking your own wine. But there are yet many things to happen. The
+grapes must get ripe and the wasps be kept off; and then there are
+problems connected with vinification which I have not yet solved. The
+Marquis of Bute could tell me all about it, and I wish he would.
+He has made wine at Castle Coch these many years, and of the most
+excellent. Unfortunately I have not his acquaintance, so I invite
+advice, and shall be grateful for it. The chief of my perplexities are
+concerned with the beginning of fermentation and the end of it. For
+the first, should I use yeast? My neighbours here say, yes; the French
+tell me that I don't need it, the grapes having enough of their own.
+Pass that and consider the second point. Having started your ferment,
+how do you stop it?[A] Fermentation in Italy goes on in the barrel,
+after the liquor has left the vat. That gives you a peculiar prickly
+wine which the Italians call "Frizzante" and profess to like. Our word
+for it is "beastly."
+
+[Footnote A: Since that was written I have learned the answer. It
+stops itself--why, I don't know, unless by the grace of God.]
+
+My village gossips tell me that fermentation will stop of itself when
+I draw the wine off the lye; but the French practice certainly seems
+to be to burn sulphur matches in the vat and so kill the vinegar germs
+there latent. And then _platrage_? You sprinkle the must with plaster
+of Paris before fermentation begins. Is that done in England? It is
+not done in this part of England at least. Nor do I know why it
+is done in France. Probably before I have solved my problems by
+stomach-ache and other experiences of a biliary kind, prohibition
+will be in the air over here, wafted upon some newspaper breeze from
+America. There will be no difficulty in starting a fermentation out of
+that sweeping doctrine, that's for certain. I don't say that we need
+take prohibition seriously; but we think about it, naturally, and talk
+about it out here.
+
+If it were put to the local vote in this village, it would be lost.
+We have many total abstainers, yet one of them, I know, and several of
+them, I believe, would vote against it. Says the one I am sure of:
+"If I abstain from strong drink, as I do, it is my own doing; and if I
+were tempted to a fall and withstood it, that is to my credit. But if
+the law cuts me off it, and I am a criminal if I drink, it cuts me off
+a good part of my credit too--and I am against that." My friend has
+there put his finger upon a sharp little dilemma. If alcohol is a bad
+thing, then prohibition is a good thing. But if temperance is a good
+thing, then prohibition is a bad thing. You cannot be temperate in the
+use of alcohol if you have none. Nor is sobriety a virtue in you if
+you lock up the wine-cellar and throw the keys down the well. Very
+well; then will you do without alcohol or without temperance? There is
+the choice; and I have made mine.
+
+Besides, we are all for liberty down here, individualists to a man.
+Give us a loophole to avoid compulsion and we use it. One of the
+most frequently exercised of my magisterial functions is to certify
+conscientious objections to the Vaccination Act. I do it against the
+grain. A doctor told me the other day that he believed smallpox had
+reached the end of its tether, and was on the ebb. I am sure I hope
+so, lest there should be one day a bad outbreak among these liberty
+men. I must have signed away the chances of hundreds of children, who,
+by the way, are not of an age to consent. I never fail to point out
+the risk; but the Court awards it and the law allows it; so I sign.
+
+There is much to be said for Anarchy in the abstract, nothing at all
+in the concrete. Mr. Smillie, however, appears to favour it, raw,
+rough and ready. In that he is precocious, and, like the rathe
+primrose, will "forsaken die." He will rend the Labour party in twain
+from the top to the bottom, and will see the agricultural vote drop
+off his industrials just as it had begun to adhere to them. I know the
+peasantry. They will never strike for political ends, for though they
+are not quick to see the consequences of hypothetical actions, they
+do see that if you make Parliamentary government impossible you make a
+Labour majority not worth having.
+
+And another thing: Mr. Smillie and his friends may want a revolution,
+but Hodge and his most certainly do not. They want to earn their
+livelihood, pay their way, and dig their plots of ground. No more
+warfare for them. I dare say I shall be sorry for Mr. Smillie when
+the time comes; but I may have to be still more sorry for my country
+first. I can't help hoping, however, when it comes to the point that
+his feet will be a little colder than his head seems to be just now.
+
+
+
+
+_LA PETITE PERSONNE_
+
+
+No letter-writer's stage can at any time be called empty, because upon
+it you necessarily have at all times two persons at least: the mover
+of the figures and the audience, the puppeteer and the puppetee, the
+letter-writer and the letter-reader. The play presented is, therefore,
+a play within a play: like the _Mousetrap_ in _Hamlet_, like _Pyramus
+and Thisbe_ in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, like the romantic drama
+of _Gayferos and Melisandra_ which Don Quixote witnessed with a select
+company of acquaintance at an inn. The temperament of this presented
+spectator, himself or herself a person of the scene, is always
+reflected in the entertainment when the letter-writer is a sensitive
+artist. So Horace Walpole's comedy varies according as it goes before
+Sir Horace Mann in Florence or Lady Upper-Ossory at Ampthill; so, more
+delicately, does Madame de Sevigne's. There are blacker strokes in
+the dialogue when Bussy is to see the play; there is always idolatry
+implied, and sometimes anxiety, if the spoilt child of Provence is the
+audience. It is this _chere bonne_, this Madame de Grignan, nine times
+out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with
+her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess
+of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake,
+not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character
+after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with
+her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the
+effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. The
+sour-faced beauty would have none of him. But that is a rare case, one
+in which predilection betrayed her. Madame de Sevigne had a weakness
+for the Cardinal. It is very seldom that the lightest hand in the
+world fails her at a portrait. Her great successes are her thumb-nail
+sketches: she will be remembered by Picard in the hayfield so long
+as the world knows how to laugh. One of her best, because one of her
+tenderest, is the _petite personne_.
+
+The name is Charles de Sevigne's, but his mother takes it up after
+him, and makes better play with it. Charles writes from Les Rochers in
+December, 1675--Madame being really ill for once in her life with "a
+nice little rheumatism," and Charles her amanuensis--"in the room of
+la Plessis," that striving lady, too, was ill, or thought she was--"we
+have had lately a very pretty young party (_une petite personne fort
+jolie_) whose good looks don't at all remind us of that divinity. At
+her instigation we have started _Reversis_: now, instead of knaves,
+we talk about jacks." He adds a stroke too good to be lost, though his
+mother might have left it out. "To give you a notion of her age and
+quality, she has just confided to us that the day after Easter Eve was
+a Tuesday. She thought that over, then said, 'No--it was a Monday!'
+Then, judging by the look of us that that wouldn't do either,
+'Heavens, how stupid! Of course--it was a Friday!' That is the kind
+of party we are. If you wouldn't mind sending us word what day of the
+week you believe it to have been, you will save us a great deal of
+discomfort." The stage is the brisker for the coming in of this pretty
+_soubrette_.
+
+Madame de Sevigne, meantime, is in a discomfort of her own. It takes
+her some ten days to absorb the _petite personne_, but then she fixes
+her for ever. Nobody can wish to know more about a young party than
+this:
+
+    "_Christmas Day_ (1675).... I still have that nice child here.
+    She lives on the other side of the park; her mother is the
+    good-wife Marcile's daughter--but you won't remember her. The
+    mother lives at Rennes, but I shall keep her here. She plays
+    _trictrac, reversis;_ she is quite pretty, quite innocent, and
+    called Jeannette. She is no more trouble than Fidele."
+
+Quite pretty, quite innocent and called Jeannette! _Quid Plura?_ Need
+I say who Fidele was? Fidele is a shrewd touch of Madame's, put in,
+as I guess, to placate the hungry-eyed Goddess of Grignan; but it
+does clinch the portrait. All that one needs to know of the nature,
+parentage, and upbringing of a _petite personne_ is in these two
+letters.
+
+Immediately upon her entry the comedy begins, with Mademoiselle du
+Plessis in a leading part. "... La Plessis has a quartan fever. It is
+pretty to see her jealous fury when she comes here and finds the
+child with me. The fuss there is to have my stick or muff to hold! But
+enough of these nothings...."
+
+It was of nothings that the vexed days of Mlle. du Plessis must exist.
+An elderly virgin, evidently; stiff, gauche, full of _guinderie_, says
+Madame, "_et de l'esprit fichu_." Everybody made game of her at Les
+Rochers. As we shall see, the servants knew that very well. Charles is
+always witty at her expense. Madame de Grignan once slapped her.
+
+Meanwhile, here's another vignette, a Chardin picture--you will find
+nothing by Greuze of this _petite personne_. "... What do you think
+of the handy little lady we were telling you of, who couldn't make out
+what the day after Easter Eve was? She is a dear little rosebud of a
+thing who delights us."
+
+"'In six years to come she'll be twenty years old!' I wish you could
+see her in the mornings, eating a hunk of bread-and-butter as long as
+from here to Easter, or, after dinner, crunching up two green apples
+with brown bread...."
+
+But now the clowns come tumbling in, to turn over the poor du Plessis.
+"... Mlle. du Plessis will die of the _petite personne_. Being more
+than half dead of jealousy already, she is always at my people to find
+out how I treat her. Not one of them but has a pin ready. One says
+that I love her as much as I do you; another that I have her to sleep
+with me--which would assuredly be a notable sign of affection! They
+swear that I am taking her to Paris, that I kiss her, am mad about
+her; that the Abbe is giving her 10,000 _livres_; that if she had but
+20,000 _ecus_ I should marry her to my son. That is the sort of thing;
+and they carry it so far that we can't help laughing at it. The poor
+lady is ill with it all."
+
+To the same letter Charles adds his scene in the farce: "La Plessis
+said to Rahuel (he was the concierge) yesterday that she had been
+gratified at dinner to find that Madame had turned the child out of
+her seat and put herself in the place of honour. And Rahuel, in his
+Breton way: 'Nay, Miss, there's no wonder. 'Tis an honour to your
+years, naturally. Besides, the little girl is one of the house, as
+you might say. Madame looks on her almost as she might be Madame de
+Grignan's little sister.'"
+
+La Plessis, in fact, agonised, and the way was made for the great
+scene--so good a scene that I think it must have been bagged for
+the theatre. Labiche must surely have lifted it. It is Charles de
+Sevigne's masterpiece.
+
+    "The young party here, when she saw how my mother's pains
+    increased towards night, thought that the best thing she could
+    do for her was to cry--which she did. She is that sort, and
+    always the focus of jealousy for la Plessis, who tries to
+    recommend herself to my mother by hating her like the devil.
+    This is what happened yesterday. My mother was dozing quietly
+    in bed; the child, the Abbe and I were by the fire. In came La
+    Plessis. We warned her to come quietly, and she did, and was
+    half across the room when my mother coughed, and then asked
+    for her handkerchief to get rid of some phlegm. The child and
+    I jumped up to get it, but La Plessis was too quick for us,
+    rushed to the bed, and instead of putting the thing to my
+    mother's lips, caught hold of her nose with it, and pinched
+    it so hard that the poor dear cried out with the pain. She
+    couldn't help being sniffy with the old fuss who had hurt
+    her so--nor laughing at her afterwards. If you had seen this
+    little comedy you would have laughed too."
+
+I should like to know who wouldn't have laughed to tears, after it was
+over. The scene is priceless.
+
+But all the same, it is not Madame de Sevigne's _genre_. She is
+mistress of the chuckle, not of the _fou rire_; and La Plessis is not
+one of her best characters. The _petite personne_, however, is; and I
+must give a very pretty scene, quite in her own manner, where she is
+half laughing at the child and half in love with her too.
+
+    "The _petite personne_ is still here, and always delightful.
+    She has a sharp little wit of her own, too, as new as a young
+    chick's. We enjoy telling her things, for she knows nothing
+    at all, and it makes a kind of game to enlighten her on
+    all sides--with a word or two about the Universe, or about
+    Empires, or countries, or kings, or religions, or wars, or
+    Fate, or the map. There's a pretty jumble of facts to put
+    tidily away in a little head which has never seen a town, nor
+    even a river, and has never really supposed that the world
+    went any farther than the end of the park! But she is
+    delicious. I was telling her to-day about the taking of
+    Wismar; and she understands quite well that we are sorry about
+    it because the King of Sweden is our ally. See how wildly we
+    amuse ourselves."
+
+The last sentence is for the _chere bonne's_ benefit, who was very
+capable herself of being jealous of the _petite personne_. I fancy
+the touch about Fidele was put in with the same object. She had to be
+infinitely careful with the _chere bonne's_ black dogs.
+
+In another month the _petite personne_ is so far advanced that she
+can be secretary to her patroness, whose poor hand is too swollen to
+write. Elaborate perambulations introduce her to the _chere bonne_.
+"My son has gone to Vitre on some business or other. That is why I
+give his functions of secretary over to the little lady of whom I
+have often told you, and who begs you to be pleased to allow her, with
+great respect, to kiss your hands." That, I should think, was courtesy
+enough even for the pouting great lady of Provence. In a later letter
+she kisses Madame de Grignan's _left_ hand; so it is written--by
+herself, but to dictation. Thus the proper distances were kept by one
+as humane as Madame de Sevigne when she was dealing with her daughter
+on the other side of idolatry.
+
+But she herself and the child are on better terms than such discipline
+would imply. In February: "... My letters are so full of myself that
+it bores me to have them read over. You have too much taste not to be
+bored too. So I shall stop: even the child is laughing at me now." And
+then in March: "... My son has left us--we are quite alone, the child
+and I--reading, writing, and saying our prayers." A jolly little
+picture of still and gentle life. No Greuze there.
+
+The idyll ends in tears, but not just yet. Two days before she leaves
+Brittany, having "neither rhyme nor reason in my hands," she makes use
+of the _petite personne_ for the last time: "the most obliging child
+in the world. I don't know what I should have done without her. She
+reads me what I like--quite well; she writes as you see; she is fond
+of me; she is willing; she can talk about Madame de Grignan. In fact,
+you may love her on my assurance." And then the poor little dear puts
+in her little word for herself to propitiate this formidable Countess
+in Provence:
+
+"That would make me very happy, Madame, and I am sure that you must
+envy my joy to be with your mother. She has been pleased to make me
+write all that praise of myself, though I was rather ashamed to do it.
+But I am very unhappy that she is going away."
+
+Madame resumes the pen: "... The child, desired to converse with you
+..."--which one may or may not believe. If, as I feel sure, she was
+bidden to the task, I don't see how she could possibly have brought it
+off better than in those demure phrases. But is she not a dear little
+creature?
+
+Then came the dreadful day, the 24th of March, and Madame's coach and
+six horses carry her to Laval on her way to Paris. She stays there
+for the night and writes, of course, to her _chere bonne_: "... They
+carried off the _petite personne_ early this morning to save me the
+outcries of her grief. They were the sobs of a child, so natural that
+they moved me. I dare say she is dancing about now, but for two days
+she has been in floods, not having been able to learn restraint from
+me!" Madame, as we know, had abundantly the gift of tears, and was
+assuredly none the worse for it.
+
+In Paris, Corbinelli was secretary for a time; but she regretted the
+_petite personne_. "... I don't like a secretary who is cleverer than
+I am.... The child suited me much better."
+
+And there the happy little figurine, having danced her hour at Les
+Rochers, leaves the stage. Other _petites personnes_ there are--one
+the sister of _La Murinette Beaute_, who got on so well with M. de
+Rohan, and was a lady of Madame de Chaulnes', and presently married
+a respectable gentleman, a M. de le Bedoyere of Rennes. But these are
+too high levels for the granddaughter of the good-wife Marcile. That
+_petite personne_, moreover, was a rather sophisticated young lady.
+One would never have seen her, in the mornings, munching a hunk of
+bread-and-butter "as long as from here to Easter." No; Jeannette has
+fulfilled her part, providing a whiff of marjoram and cottage flowers
+for the castle chambers. She has read, written and said her prayers.
+She has the firm outline, the rosy cheeks, the simplicity of a Watteau
+peasant-girl--nothing of the Greuze languish, with its hint of a
+_cruche cassee_. She is as fresh as a March wind. Let us believe that
+she found a true man to relish her prettiness and sharp little wits.
+
+
+
+
+A FOOL OF QUALITY
+
+
+Tom Coryat, the "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted
+observer of Odcombe," having finally bored his neighbours in the
+country past bearing, was volleyed off upon a tempest of their yawns
+to London. Exactly when that was I can't find out, but I suppose it to
+have been in the region of 1605.
+
+In London he set up for a wit, was enrolled in "The Right Worshipful
+Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen," who met at "The Sign of the
+Mere-maide in Bread Streete"; had John Donne and Ben Jonson among his
+convives, and may well have seen Shakespeare and heard him talk, if
+he did talk. How he appeared himself we can only guess, but I conceive
+his position in the society to have been that of Polonius in the
+convocation of politic worms, as one, namely, where he was eaten
+rather than eating. That, if it was so, may have determined him to
+make a name for himself by what was his strongest part, namely, his
+feet.
+
+In 1608 he, the "Odcombian leg-stretcher," did indeed travel "for five
+months, mostly on foot, from his native place of Odcombe in Somerset,
+through France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia, Helvetia, some parts of High
+Germany, and the Netherlands, making in the whole 1975 miles." He
+started on the 14th May and was in London again on the 3rd October,
+and if indeed he did travel mostly on foot, I call it a very
+creditable performance. The result was a book more talked of than
+read. "Coryat's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' travels
+... newly digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in his county of
+Somerset, and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling
+members of this Kingdom." So runs the text of a Palladian title-page,
+surrounded by emblems of adventure which support a _vera effigies_ of
+Tom himself. He shows there as a beady-eyed bonhomme of thirty-five
+or so, with a Jacobean beard, and his hair brushed back and worn long,
+like that of our present-day young men.
+
+The book published, the Sireniacal Gentlemen took off their coats and
+took up their battledores. Their gibes and quirks are all printed in
+my edition, and are better reading than the book itself. Coryat was a
+cockscomb and scorned a straight sentence. A rule of his was: "Never
+use one adjective if three will do." So far as I know he was the first
+Englishman who travelled for the fun or the glory of the thing, unless
+Fynes Moryson anticipated him in those also, as he certainly did in
+travelling and writing about it. But I think it more probable that
+Moryson went abroad to improve his mind. I don't think Coryat had any
+notion of that. Foppery may have moved him, vanity perhaps; in any
+case there can be no comparison between them. Moryson is thorough,
+Coryat is not. Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was
+a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a
+euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that
+Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid--he called himself a friend of
+Ben Jonson's--and took the best of him. You will find him in _Love's
+Labour's Lost_ as well as in _All's Well_. For a foretaste of his
+quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which
+fills a page: "I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in
+the morning, the fourteenth of May 1608, and arrived at Calais ...
+about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the
+exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my
+tumultuous stomach...." There is more about it, but that will do.
+Shakespeare can never have missed such a man as that.
+
+Coryat's abiding sensation throughout his travels was astonishment,
+not at the things which he saw, but rather that he from Odcombe in
+Somerset should be seeing them. He can never get over it. Here am I,
+Odcombian Tom, face to face with Amiens Cathedral, with the tombs of
+the kings at Saint Denis, at Fountaine Beleau cheek by jowl with Henri
+IV., crossing in a litter the "stupendious" Mont Cenis, pacing the
+Duomo of Milan, disputing with a Turk in Lyons, with a Jew in Padua,
+to the detriment of their religions, "swimming" in a gondola on the
+Grand Canal: here I am, and now what about it? There is always an
+imported flavour of Odcombe about it. He brings it with him and
+sprinkles it like scent. He is careful at every stage of his journey
+to give you the mileage from his own door; his measure of a city's
+quality is its worth to him as a gift were Odcombe the alternative.
+Few cities indeed survive the test. Mantua stood a fair chance. "That
+most sweet Paradise, that _domicilium Venerum et Charitum_," did
+so ravish his senses and tickle his spirits, he says, that he would
+desire to live there and spend the remainder of his days "in some
+divine meditations among the sacred Muses," but for two things, "their
+grosse idolatry and superstitious ceremonies, which I detest, and the
+love of Odcombe in Somersetshire, which is so deare unto me that I
+preferre the very smoak thereof before the fire of all other places
+under the sunne." So much for Mantua; but Venice, before whose
+"incomparable and most decantated majestie" his pen faints--Venice
+beats Odcombe, or something very much like it. He decides that should
+"foure of the richest mannors of Somersetshire" have been offered
+him if he would have undertaken not to see Venice, he would have gone
+without the manors. Odcombe, you see, is not put in question here. He
+was afraid to risk it.
+
+When he came home he hung up his pair of shoes in the chancel of
+Odcombe Church, and they may be there to this day for all I know.
+
+The Sireniacal Gentlemen made great sport of him.
+
+  If any aske in verse what soar I at?
+  My Muse replies The praise of Coryat----
+
+so John Gyfford begins,
+
+  A work that will eternise thee till God come
+  And for thy sake the famous parish Odcombe----
+
+so George Sydenham ends. Ben Jonson is not represented at the revels,
+and Inigo Jones lets his high spirits run away with him beyond the
+bounds of modern printing. Donne is not at his best:
+
+  Lo, here's a man worthy indeed to travell
+  Fat Libian plaines, strangest China's gravell;
+  For Europe well hath seen him stirre his stumpes,
+  Turning his double shoes to simple pumpes.
+
+--the wit of which escapes me. Better is the conceit of
+
+  What had he done, had he e'er hugged th' ocean
+  With swimming Drake or famous Magelan,
+  And kiss'd that unturn'd cheeke of our old mother,
+  Since so our Europe's world he can discover?
+
+The "unturn'd cheeke of our old mother!" The New World should be
+pleased with that.
+
+In 1615 he made a much further flight, and was to be heard of at "the
+Court of the most Mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul," whence he wrote
+to, among other people, the High Seneschal of the "Right Worshipful
+Fraternity of Sireniacal Gentlemen that meet the first Friday of
+every month at the Signe of the Mere-maide in Bread-Streete." In this
+particular letter he greets by name Mr. John Donne, "the author of two
+most elegant Latine Bookes," Master Benjamin Jonson, the poet, at his
+chamber in the Blacke Friars, Mr. Samuel Purkas, and Mr. Inigo
+Jones, and signs himself "the Hierosolymitan--Syrian--Mesopotamian
+--Armenian--Median--Parthian--Persian--Indian--Leggestretcher
+of Odcomb in Somerset." The news he gives of "the most famigerated
+Region of all the East, the ample and large India," is various and
+occasionally incredible, but none the worse perhaps for that. You
+must allow the leg-stretcher to be something also of a leg-puller. The
+Great Mogul had elephant-fights twice a week, we learn. He might well
+do so if we could believe that he maintained three thousand of them
+"at an unmeasurable charge." Proceeding, nevertheless, to measure it,
+Coryat finds it works out at L10,000 a day, which is pretty good even
+for the Mogul. He also had a thousand wives, "whereof the chiefest
+(which is his Queene) is called Normal." I like her name. Coryat
+rode on an elephant, "determining one day (by God's leave) to have my
+picture expressed in my next book, sitting upon an elephant." But the
+voyage to the East was one too many for "the ingenious perambulator,"
+and he died of a flux at Surat in December, 1617. Certain English
+merchants offered him refreshments. "Sack, sack, is there any such
+thing as sack? I pray you give me some sack." They did; the dysentery
+was upon him at the time. Even as Sir John might have done did he, and
+was buried "under a little monument." _Sic exit Coryatus_, says his
+biographer.
+
+No sooner was he dead than his fellow Sireniacks fell upon his
+reputation and tore it to shreds.
+
+  He was the imp, whilst he on earth surviv'd,
+  From whom this West-World's pastimes were deriv'd;
+  He was in city, country, field and court
+  The well of dry-trimm'd jests, the pump of sport.
+
+So writes the Water Poet. Another wag trounces his Crudities:
+
+  Tom Coriat, I have seen thy Crudities,
+  And methinks very strangely brewed it is,
+  With piece and patch together glued it is;
+  And now (like thee) ill-favour'd hued it is.
+  In many a line I see that lewd it is,
+  And therefore fit to be subdued it is--
+
+and much more to the same effect.
+
+Coryat's "natalitial place," as it happens, is very near to mine, and
+I find something to love in a man who can never forget it. He was
+a cockscomb, he was an ass; but he preferred the West of England
+to Italy. He called James I., our king, the "refulgent carbuncle of
+Christendom," and Prince Charles "the most glittering chrysolite of
+our English diademe" Both are hard sayings.
+
+
+
+
+SHERIDAN AS MANIAC
+
+
+All allowances made for the near alliance of great wits--"the lunatic,
+the lover, and the poet"--there comes a point where the vagaries of
+temperament overlap and are confounded, and where the historian, at
+least, must take a line. None of Sheridan's biographers, and he has
+had, as I think, more than his share, refer to an eclipse of his
+rational self which he undoubtedly suffered; probably because it
+was not made public until the other day. Yet there have always been
+indications of the truth, as when, on his death-bed, he told Lady
+Bessborough that his eyes would be looking at her through the
+coffin-lid. Being the woman she was, she probably believed him, or
+thought that she did. It is from her published letters that we may now
+understand what reason she had for believing him.
+
+These letters are contained in the correspondence of Lord Granville
+Leveson-Gower, who was our Ambassador in Paris on and off between 1824
+and 1841, a correspondence published in 1916, in two hefty volumes.
+The period covered is from 1781 to 1821, and the documents are mainly
+the letters to him of Lady Bessborough, which reveal a relation
+between the pair so curious that, to me, it is extraordinary that
+nobody should have called attention to them before. I can only account
+for that by considering that the letters, which are very long, and
+the volumes, which are very heavy, do not readily yield what store of
+sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville
+Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters
+of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and
+an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig.
+The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady
+Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and sensible niece.
+
+Meantime, there is no need to disguise the fact, since we have it in
+cold print, that the acquaintance of the couple, begun at Naples in
+1794 as a flirtation, developed rapidly, on the lady's side, into a
+love affair which was only ended by her death. In 1794, when it all
+began, Lady Bessborough was thirty-two, had been married for fourteen
+years, and had four children. Granville Gower was twenty, well born,
+rich, exceedingly good-looking, and with no excuse for not knowing all
+about it. In fact, he knew it perfectly, and was not afraid to allude
+to himself as Antinous. We hear more than enough of his fine blue eyes
+from Lady Bessborough--and perhaps he did too. She, in her turn, was
+to hear, poor soul, more than her own heart could bear. All that need
+be said about that is that, being the woman she was, it was to be
+expected. And exactly what sort of woman she was she herself puts upon
+record, in April, 1812, in the following words:--
+
+    "_Pour la rarete du fait et la bizarrerie des hommes_, I must
+    put down what I dare tell nobody--I should be so much ashamed
+    of it were it not so ridiculous. At this present April, 1812,
+    in my fifty-first year, I am courted, follow'd, flatter'd, and
+    made love to _en toutes les formes_, by four men--two of them
+    reckoned sensible, and one of the two whom I have known half
+    my life--Lord Holland, Ward, young M----n, and little M----y.
+    Sir J.C. wanted to marry me when I was fifteen; so from that
+    time to this--36 years, a
+    pretty long life--I have heard or spoke that language; and for
+    17 years of it lov'd almost to Idolatry the only man from whom
+    I could have wish'd to hear it, the man who has probably lov'd
+    me least of all those who have profess'd to do so--tho' once I
+    thought otherwise."
+
+Arrant sentimentalist, born and trained flirt, as this confession
+shows her to have been, it also shows that she lived to rue it. She
+rued more than that, for she was the mother of Lady Caroline Lamb; and
+if anything more need be said of her misfortunes, let it be added
+that she was sister to Georgiana of Devonshire. Nevertheless, it is
+impossible to read her letters with her wooden young lord without
+seeing that she had a good heart, if a very weak head. She loved much;
+and for those whom she loved--her sister, her children, Granville
+Gower--she was ready to dare all things, and fail in most. Of her
+husband there is nothing to tell, for she hardly names him, except to
+say that he has the gout. Not much is known of him, and nothing but
+good. Horace Walpole wrote of his marriage in 1780: "I know nothing to
+the prejudice of the young lady; but I should not have selected for so
+gentle and very amiable a man a sister of the empress of fashion, nor
+a daughter of the Goddess of Wisdom." The goddess of wisdom was her
+formidable and trenchant mother, Lady Spencer.
+
+But I don't intend to follow the vain stages of her sentimental
+pilgrimage in pursuit of Lord Granville Gower's heart, vain because
+apparently the young man had not such an organ at her disposal. It was
+not, perhaps, for nothing that they exchanged reflections upon _Les
+Liaisons Dangereuses_. A new Choderlos de Laclos would get a new
+sentimental novel out of the Granville Gower correspondence; or it
+may be taken as it stands for a recovered Richardson, quite as long
+as _Sir Charles Grandison_ and much more amusing--for the poor lady is
+often witty. The affair dragged on, with much scandal, much whispering
+about it and about, until 1809, when the hero of it married Lady
+Harriet Cavendish, his mistress's niece. J.W. Ward, one of her lovers,
+according to her, sharply sums it up in a letter to Mrs. Dugald
+Stewart: "Lord Granville Leveson is going to marry Lady Harriet
+Cavendish. Lady Bessborough resigns, I presume, in favour of her
+niece. I have not heard what are supposed to be the secret articles of
+the treaty, but it must be a curious document." It was in 1812, as I
+have said, that she wrote out the pathetic confession of what we must
+suppose to have been the truth.
+
+But I intended to write about Sheridan. This correspondence reveals
+him as the evil genius of Lady Bessborough's life; and perhaps, if all
+the truth were known, she may have been the evil genius of his, or one
+of them, anyhow. She had adventures with him behind her in 1794, when
+she began adventures anew; for they became intimate at Devonshire
+House, where, as the crony of Charles Fox, he was always at hand. The
+Duchess herself was one of his familiars. His initials for her, in
+letter-writing, were T.L., which a biographer pleasantly interprets as
+"True Love." The sisters, Countess and Duchess, shared in all good and
+evil things, and they seem to have shared Sheridan. His chosen initial
+for Lady Bessborough's address was "F," her second name being Frances.
+Mr. Sichel prints a letter from him to her, and guesses it to be
+of 1788. Extracts will suffice for the judicious: "I must bid 'oo
+good-night, for by the light passing to and fro near your room I
+hope you are going to bed and to sleep happily with a hundred little
+cherubs fanning their white wings over you in approbation of your
+goodness. Yours is the sweet, untroubled sleep of purity." It is to be
+feared that she could swallow this over-succulent stuff. A very little
+more will do for us: "And yet, and yet--Beware! Milton will tell
+you that even in Paradise serpents found their way to the ear of
+slumbering innocence. Then, to be sure, poor Eve had no watchful
+guardian to pace up and down beneath her windows.... And Adam, I
+suppose--was at Brooks's ... I shall be gone before your hazel eyes
+are open to-morrow...."
+
+Lady Duncannon, as she was then, lived in Cavendish Square. Sheridan's
+leaguer of the house is thus betrayed. He never again left either her
+or it alone for long, but beset them until his death. Bitterly enough
+she was to rue that dalliance with the vainest sentimentalist ever
+begotten in Ireland or fostered in England. His wife, as lovely as
+a Muse and with the voice of a seraph, was to die; he was to adore,
+pursue, and capture another; but he never let Lady Bessborough go, and
+the antics of his mortified vanity were to lead her as far into the
+mire as any woman could go without suffocation. Such experiences may
+be common enough; it is rare to have them so nakedly portrayed as they
+are in this lady's letters, and not easy to avoid the conclusion
+that she made use of them to pique her wooden Antinous into some more
+active kind of pose than that of allowing himself to be adored.
+
+Sheridan was forty-three and married to his second wife when Lady
+Bessborough fell in with Antinous at Naples; but it was not until the
+attachment of those two had become a notoriety that he began to make
+scenes about it. In 1798, when Granville Gower was in Berlin,
+Lady Bessborough writes to him that she had been at a concert at
+Sheridan's. "It was as pleasant as anything of the sort can be to me,
+as I sat by Fitzpatrick and Grey, who always amuse me. Sheridan
+says, when he found I did not come to town, he imagined that you
+had interdicted my coming till your return, and is always asking me
+whether what I am doing is allowed." That was March 12th; between that
+and the 17th she seems to have met Sheridan every day and nearly every
+night. "I must tell you, by the by ... that I am in great request this
+year.... I have had three _violent_ declarations of love--one from
+an old man, another from a very young one, and the third between the
+other two.... Pray come back. If you stay long in Prussia, Heaven
+knows what may happen."
+
+In August of the same year she writes again. "Sheridan call'd in the
+morning and found out that I was alone, and told me he would dine with
+me. I thought, of course, he was in joke, but, _point du tout_, he
+arriv'd at dinner, dined, and stayed the whole evening. He was very
+pleasant, but--it was not you, and the seeing anybody only increas'd
+my regrets, which I suppose were pretty visible, for every five
+minutes he kept saying: 'How I am wasting all my efforts to entertain
+you, while you are grieving that you cannot change me into _Lord
+Leveson_. You would not be so grim if he was beaming on you.' At
+length, as I thought he was preparing to pass the night as well as the
+evening with me, and as he began to make some fine speeches I did not
+quite approve of, I order'd my Chair, to get rid of him. This did
+not succeed, for as I had no place to go to, he follow'd me about to
+Anne's and Lady D----'s, where I knew I should not be let in, and home
+again. But, luckily, I got in time enough to order every one to be
+denied, and ran upstairs, while I heard him expostulating with the
+porter...." It does not appear, from this narrative, that the hunted
+fair was seriously annoyed at being hunted, and the implication of
+Lord Granville in the unpleasant business is patent. Next year she has
+asked her persecutor to help Antinous at his election, for his reply,
+beginning "Dear Traitress," is given here.
+
+After that, peace or silence, until 1802, when Sheridan changed his
+tactics.
+
+    "The opera was beautiful.... The Prince paid us two visits,
+    but our chief company were Hare, Grey, and Sheridan, the
+    latter persecuting me in every pause of the music and
+    telling me he knew such things of you, could give me such
+    incontrovertible proofs of your falsehood, and not only
+    falsehood but treachery to me, that if I had one grain of
+    pride or spirit left I should fly you. And guess what I
+    answered, you who call me jealous. I told him I had such
+    entire reliance on your faith, such confidence in your truth,
+    that I should doubt my own eyes if they witness'd against your
+    word. He pitied me, and said: 'How are the mighty fallen,' and
+    then went on telling me things without end to drive me mad."
+    That was in March. In August she writes, actually under siege:
+    "Here I am quite alone in C. Square ... no carriage to watch
+    for, no rap at the door ... and alas! no chance of hearing
+    your step upon the stair.... Whilst I was regretting all this,
+    suddenly, the knock did come, to my utter astonishment. I ran
+    to the stair, and in a moment heard Sheridan's voice. I do
+    not know why, but I took a horror of seeing him, and hurried
+    Sally down to say I was out. I heard him answer: 'Tell her I
+    call'd twice this morning, and want particularly to see her,
+    for I know she is at home.' Sally protested I was out, and S.
+    answered: 'Then I shall walk up and down before the door till
+    she comes in,' and there he is walking sure enough. It is
+    partly all the nonsense he talk'd all this year, and the
+    hating to see any one when I cannot see you, that makes me
+    dislike letting him in so much."
+
+He solemnly did sentry-go for nearly an hour, she goes on to say. In
+that hour he was in his fifty-first year, she in her fortieth.
+
+If she revealed these sorry doings to Antinous with the view of
+fanning embers, she did not succeed in drawing more than a languid
+protest from him. "As to Sheridan, in the morning I purposely staid
+in my room till the time of our setting out, and only saw him as I was
+getting into the carriage, so had nothing more to tell.... You say I
+am not angry enough. I am provok'd, vex'd, and asham'd. To feel more
+deeply I must care for the person who offends me...." I cannot myself
+read either vexation or shame in her reports. Provocation I can and do
+read--but it is not she who is provoked.
+
+In 1804, Antinous in Petersburg, there are new antics to record. "You
+will think I live at the play; I am just return'd from Drury Lane....
+Sheridan persists in coming every night to us. He says one word to my
+sister; then retires to the further corner of the box, where with
+arms across, deep and audible sighs, and sometimes _tears_! he remains
+without uttering and motionless, with his eyes fix'd on me in the most
+marked and distressing manner, during the whole time we stay. To-night
+he followed us in before the play begun, and remained as I tell you
+thro' the play and farce. As we were going I dropped my shawl
+and muff; he picked them up and with a look of ludicrous humility
+presented them to Mr. Hill to give me." And this was the author of
+_The School for Scandal_.
+
+Next year, being that of Trafalgar, and Sheridan's fifty-fourth, he
+began a course of persecution which definitely marks an access of
+dementia. The affair took an acute turn suddenly, and I don't intend
+to say more about it than that it took the form of anonymous and
+obscene letters, some of them addressed to Lady Bessborough's
+daughter, Caroline, then a child, some to herself, some to the
+children of the Duchess of Devonshire. The letters, which continued
+throughout the year, were signed with the names of friends--a Mr.
+Hill, J.W. Ward, and others. Some were sent out signed with her name.
+The editor of the correspondence says that "Lady Bessborough was
+subsequently convinced by evidence which appeared to her conclusive
+that Sheridan was the writer." There can be no doubt of that whatever,
+and as all the detail is in the published correspondence, little
+more need be said. The wooden Antinous, in Petersburg, for his sole
+comment, writes as follows: "I learn with sorrow that you are still
+subjected to vexations from anonymous letters, etc. I suppose that
+Sheridan is the author, though one would have imagined that, however
+depraved his morals, and however malignant might be his mind, he would
+have had _good taste_ enough not to have resorted to such a species of
+vengeance." And that was all the fire to be blown into Antinous. "Good
+taste" in the circumstances is comic.
+
+By the end of the season of the same year, however, Sheridan seems to
+have found out what he had done, and Lady Bessborough also sufficient
+self-respect to have helped him find it out. This is what happened on
+July 12th, at a ball. "I sat between Prince Adolphus and Mr. Hill at
+supper; Sheridan sat opposite, looking by turns so supplicating and
+so fiercely at me that everybody round observ'd it and question'd me
+about it. I could only say what was so, that he was very drunk. When
+I got up, he seiz'd my arm as I pass'd him, begging me to shake hands
+with him. I extricated myself from his grasp and pass'd on; he soon
+after follow'd and began loudly reproaching me for my _cruelty_, and
+asking why I would not shake hands. I was extremely distress'd, but at
+last told him his own sagacity might explain to him why I never would,
+and that his conduct to-night did not tend to alter my determination.
+I then hurried out of the room, and by way of completely avoiding him,
+cross'd a very formal circle of old ladies, and went and seated myself
+between Lady Euston and Lady Beverly. He had the impudence to follow
+me, and in face of the whole circle to enter into a loud explanation
+of his conduct, begging my pardon for all the offences he had ever
+committed against me, either on this night or in former times, and
+assuring me that he had never ceased loving, _respecting_ and adoring
+me, and that I was the only person he ever really loved...." "Think,"
+she says, "of the dismay of all the formal ladies." But the formal
+ladies, no doubt, had every reason to know their Devonshire House set;
+and if society in 1805 would allow Sheridan to be drunk and stay at a
+ball, it would prefer him maudlin drunk to drunk and disorderly. One
+is bound to add, too, that Lady Bessborough was a fool, though
+that, to be sure, is no excuse for Sheridan proving himself both old
+blackguard and old fool in one.
+
+Next year the Duchess died, and her sister's active persecution
+appears to have ceased. But Sheridan by no means let her alone. On the
+contrary, he had the assurance to send as intercessor no less a person
+than the Prince Regent. "The Prince sent so repeatedly to me, and has
+been throughout so kind and feeling that I thought it wrong to persist
+in refusing to see him, so to-day he came soon after two and stayed
+till six!... He gave me a very pretty emerald ring, which he begg'd me
+to wear, _to bind still stronger the tie of Brotherhood which he has
+always claim'd_. In the midst of all this he brought me a message from
+Sheridan." This, which she describes as a "well-timed Petition for
+Forgiveness," she had the prudence to wave aside. She said that she
+had no wish to injure him, and only asked him to keep out of her way,
+or, if they happened to meet, to cease to persecute her. And that was
+very well, or would have been so, if she had had any character at
+all, a quality which she unfortunately had not. In 1807, the following
+year, she goes out to spend the evening with her daughter, Lady
+Caroline, now married to William Lamb. "The entrance is, you know,
+very dark; to my dismay, I saw a ruffian-like looking man following
+me into the house. I hasten'd upstairs, but to my great dismay he also
+ascended and enter'd the room immediately after me. It was so dark
+I could not at first make out who he was. When I did, I was not the
+better pleas'd with his establishing himself and passing the whole
+evening with us; but much as I was displeased with him, I was still
+more so with myself for being unable to resist laughing and appearing
+entertained (he was so uncommonly clever), tho' I persevered in my
+determination of not speaking to him. I do not like his having got
+the entree there, and think him, even old as he is, a dangerous
+acquaintance for Caroline. Of course you perceive it was Sheridan."
+Considering that she suspected him of having written and sent grossly
+indecent letters to that girl of hers, one would have said that he was
+even more than a dangerous acquaintance. Light-mindedness here spills
+over into something rather worse. However, there he was, established,
+and it was no way to dispossess him to laugh at his jokes.
+
+I must now invite the reader to a farce, and, if he can forget that
+Sheridan was a grandfather and fifty-six, a very good farce it is. It
+is 1807, the 28th July. Lady Bessborough is staying with her daughter
+for her first confinement, and receives a message from Mrs. Sheridan,
+a rather wild young woman in her way, known to all Devonshire House as
+Hecca. She goes at midnight,
+
+    "... and was carried up to her bedroom, where we had not sat
+    long when a violent burst at the door announc'd the arrival
+    of Sheridan, not perfectly sober. The most ridiculous scene
+    ensued--that is, ridiculous it would have been if I had not
+    felt myself too indignant and disgusted to be entertain'd. He
+    began by asking my pardon, entreating my mercy and compassion,
+    saying that he was a wretch, and was even at that moment more
+    in love with _me_ than with any woman he had ever met with, on
+    which Hecca exclaimed: 'Not excepting me? Why, you always tell
+    me that I am the only woman you were ever in love with.'
+    'So you are, to be sure, my dear Hecca; you know _that_, of
+    course--you _know_ that I love you better than anything
+    on earth.' '_Except_ her!' 'Pish, pish, child! Do not talk
+    nonsense.' Then he began again at me, upbraiding me for my
+    cruelty, both for quarrelling with him and setting Hecca
+    against him. The first, I said, I did in my own defence, the
+    other was false, Hecca every now and then coming in with:
+    'Why, S----, I thought Lady B---- pursued you, and that you
+    reviled all her violence like a second Joseph? So you us'd
+    to tell me.' I cannot give you all the conversation, for it
+    lasted till near three in the morning.... Getting away was the
+    difficulty; he wanted to come down with me, and seiz'd my arm
+    with such violence once before Hecca, that I was obliged to
+    call her maid to help me, and at last only escaped by locking
+    him in."
+
+This sort of thing happened once more, in the same year, at Brocket.
+On this occasion Sheridan pursued his victim into the nursery, and
+threw himself on his knees. It gave Lady Bessborough an opportunity
+which even she could not fail to perceive--and she used it. "I
+interrupted the most animated professions by showing him the child and
+asking him if his grandchildren were as pretty as mine. He jump'd up,
+but with such fury in his looks that I was really frighten'd..." And
+that may very well be the end: _solvuntur tabulae risu_. Lord Granville
+Gower married in 1809, and the confidential correspondence died the
+death; but Sheridan lingered until 1816, and actually carried on his
+desperate pursuit within three days of the end. She visited him, and
+described what took place to Lord Broughton. He assured her, she said,
+that he should visit her after his death. She asked, "Why, having
+persecuted her all her life, would he now carry it into death?'
+'Because I am resolved you shall remember me.'"[A] The story of his
+telling her that his eyes would see her through the coffin-lid is well
+known, and may be apocryphal; but the melodrama is Sheridan all over.
+
+[Footnote A: Mr. Sichel, in his monumental book on Sheridan, doubts
+the lady's memory, one of his grounds of doubt being that Sheridan
+"would not have been likely to have thus behaved before his wife." But
+Mr. Sichel did not then know what Sheridan was capable of doing before
+his wife.]
+
+Curiosity rather than edification is served by the publication of such
+frank revelations as Lady Bessborough's, but that is a matter for her
+descendants, and was probably considered. What relates to Sheridan is
+quite another thing. On his death Byron hailed him with eloquent if
+extravagant praise; he was buried in Westminster Abbey; three long
+biographies have been written round him, not one of which has failed
+to do justice to his abilities, and not one pointed out the extent of
+his moral aberration. Mr. Sichel, the latest of them, says that "he
+had pursued his own path and spurned the little arts of those who
+twitted him with roguery." But if the Granville Gower correspondence
+is to be believed--and how can it not--he was either a very bad rogue
+or a madman. Sheridan, after all's said, made a great figure in
+his day, and must stand the racket of it, so to speak. Gossip about
+Harriet may be left to the idle; but Sheridan belongs to History.
+
+
+
+
+A FOOTNOTE TO COLERIDGE
+
+
+Coleridge is one of our great men who require many footnotes, for
+there are characteristics of his which need all the extenuation they
+can get. How comes it, for instance, that he could write, and not only
+write but publish, in the same decade, and sometimes in the same year,
+poetry which is of our very best, and some which for frozen inanity it
+would be hard to equal anywhere? How could a thinker of his power of
+brain cover leagues of letter-paper with windy nonsense and mawkish
+insincerity? And finally, of what quality was the talk of one whose
+social life was entirely monologue? To the first of these questions
+Wordsworth perhaps helps with an analogy, but not very far; for it is
+certain that Wordsworth's opinion of the importance of his own
+verses was inflexible, whereas Coleridge, having another medium of
+expression, was by no means so insistent upon publishing. Upon the
+second, it may be observed that when a philosopher is at the same time
+a poet, and therefore his own rhapsodist, it is probable that he will
+charm the understanding of many, but certain that he will bewitch
+his own. The certainty is clinched when the rhapsodist is without the
+humorous sense. It was the possession of that which enabled Charles
+Lamb, who loved him, to see him "Archangel, a little damaged," and
+even in one dreadful moment of his life to reprove him for a too
+oleaginous sympathy. Lamb, in fact, was always able to view his friend
+with clear eyes. In a letter to Manning, enclosing "all Coleridge's
+letters" to himself, he says that in them Manning will find "a good
+deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous
+display of it." No criticism could be sounder. But Coleridge never
+wavered from the belief that he was in no phase of his being an
+ordinary man. If his thoughts were not ordinary thoughts, his
+imaginings not ordinary imaginings, then his stomach-aches were not
+ordinary stomach-aches, but strokes of calamity so grievous as to
+demand from him copious commentary and appeals for more sympathy than
+is ordinarily given to ordinary men. And, strange to say, he received
+it. There was that in the "noticeable man with large grey eyes" which
+drew the love of his friends and the regard of acquaintance. His talk
+had the quality of his Ancient Mariner's; one could not choose
+but hear. The accounts which we have of that, however, are mainly
+sympathetic; it is not so certain how it affected hearers who were not
+predisposed.
+
+Lately a book has been published, or rather republished, which
+illustrates Coleridge's relations with a world outside his own. _A
+House of Letters_ (Jarrolds--N.D.), containing a selection of the
+memoirs and correspondence of Miss Mary Matilda Betham, includes a
+good many letters from Coleridge, and some few from Charles Lamb which
+have not so far been recorded elsewhere. Miss Betham, who was born
+in 1776, was a miniature painter by profession, and so far as can be
+judged by reproductions a good one. She was a poetess, too, and the
+compiler of a Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women. In 1797 she
+published a volume of _Elegies_, which in 1802 was sent to Coleridge
+by his friend Lady Boughton, and of which a short piece, "On a Cloud,"
+transported him. He addressed immediately a blank-verse exhortation
+"To Matilda Betham, from a Stranger," dated it Keswick, September 9th,
+1802, signed it "S.T.C.," and sent it off.
+
+  Matilda! I have heard a sweet tune play'd
+  On a sweet instrument--thy Poesie,
+
+it began; and went on to hope--
+
+  That our own Britain, our dear mother Isle,
+  May boast one Maid, a poetess indeed,
+  Great as th' impassioned Lesbian, in sweet song,
+  And O! of holier mind, and happier fate.
+
+That was what he called twining her vernal wreath around the brows of
+patriot Hope. He concluded with some cautionary lines whose epithets
+are irresistibly comic:
+
+  Be bold, meek Woman! but be wisely bold!
+  Fly, ostrich-like, firm land beneath thy feet.
+
+And for her ultimate reward--
+
+  What nobler meed, Matilda! canst thou win
+  Than tears of gladness in a Boughton's eyes,
+  And exultation even in strangers' hearts?
+
+It is a wonderful thing indeed that, having composed _The Ancient
+Mariner_ (1797), _Love_ (1799), _Christabel_ (1797-1800), and _Kubla
+Khan_ (1798), he should slip back into this eighteenth-century
+flatulence--but Coleridge could do such things and not turn a hair.
+
+Nevertheless, to a young poetess, a bad poem is still a poem, and
+means a reader. An acquaintance invited in such terms will thrive, and
+that of Miss Betham and the Stranger ripened into a friendship. She
+went to stay at Greta Hall, painted portraits of Mrs. Coleridge
+and Sara, and of some of the Southeys too. Through them she became
+acquainted with the Lambs, and if never one of their inner circle,
+was a familiar correspondent, and had relations with George Dyer, the
+Morgans, the Thelwalls, Montagues, Holcrofts and others. Altogether
+Lady Boughton's bow at a venture brought down a goodly quarry for Miss
+Betham, but many waters were to flow under the restless philosopher
+before he could swim into her ken again.
+
+It was in 1808, in fact, when he was living in London (at the
+_Courier_ office, 348, Strand), and in the midst of his second course
+of lectures, that the intercourse was renewed--or rather it is there
+that _A House of Letters_ enables us to pick it up. We find him then
+writing in this kind of strain to Matilda:--
+
+    "What joy would it not be to you, or to me, Miss Betham, to
+    meet a Milton in a future state, and with that reverence
+    due to a superior, pour forth our deep thanks for the noble
+    feelings he had aroused in us, for the impossibility of many
+    mean and vulgar feelings and objects which his writings had
+    secured us!"
+
+The Americans call that sort of thing poppycock, which seems a useful
+phrase. No doubt there was more of it, though it is precisely there,
+without subscription or signature, that the Editor of _A House of
+Letters_ thinks fit to conclude. He has much to learn of the duties of
+editorship, among other things, as we shall have to note before long,
+reasonable care in recording and printing his originals. Upon that
+letter, at any rate, _post_ if not _propter_, Miss Betham proposed to
+the philosopher that he should sit to her, and that, with some demur,
+he promised to do. An appointment was made to that end, and punctually
+broken. Then came this letter of excuse, which should have been
+worth many a miniature, being indeed a full-length portrait done by a
+master-hand:--
+
+    "Dear Miss Betham,--Not my will, but accident and necessity
+    made me a truant from my promise. I was to have left Merton,
+    in Surrey, at half-past eight on Tuesday morning with a Mr.
+    Hall, who would have driven me in his chaise to town by ten;
+    but having walked an unusual distance on the Monday, and
+    talked and exerted myself in spirits that have been long
+    unknown to me, on my return to my friend's house, being
+    thirsty, I drank at least a quart of lemonade; the consequence
+    was that all Tuesday morning, till indeed two o'clock in the
+    afternoon, I was in exceeding pain, and incapable of quitting
+    my room, or dismissing the hot flannels applied to my
+    body...."
+
+This was no ordinary philosopher; but the chapter is not yet full.
+
+He left Merton, he says, at five, walked stoutly on, was detained an
+hour and a half on Clapham Common, "in an act of mere humanity," and
+finally reached Vauxhall.
+
+    "At Vauxhall I took a boat for Somerset House: two mere
+    children were my Charons; however, though against tide, we
+    sailed safely to the landing-place, when, as I was getting
+    out, one of the little ones (God Bless him!) moved the boat.
+    On turning halfway round to reprove him, he moved it again,
+    and I fell back on the landing-place. By my exertions I should
+    have saved myself but for a large stone which
+    I struck against just under my crown and unfortunately in the
+    very same place which had been contused at Melton (_sic_) when
+    I fell backward after learning suddenly and most abruptly of
+    Captain Wordsworth's fate in the _Abergavenny_, a most dear
+    friend of mine. Since that time any great agitation has
+    occasioned a feeling of, as it were, a _shuttle_ moving from
+    that part of the back of my head horizontally to my forehead,
+    with some pain but more confusion."
+
+The unction of that blessing called down upon his persecutor is
+truly Coleridgian. "Melton" is the Editor's rendering of Malta, where
+Coleridge was when he heard of John Wordsworth's drowning in 1805. He
+had then kept his bed for a fortnight, or so he told Mrs. Coleridge.
+
+Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th
+May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss
+Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not. "I
+knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for
+the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters
+of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in
+all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright
+brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as
+we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high
+in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not
+have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the
+most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable
+one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand
+to one that you must have finished it from memory." He was right. When
+his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds,
+and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland. "Coleridge has arrived
+at last, about half as big as the house," Southey writes to his
+brother on that day. There he cogitated and there began _The Friend_,
+and there the separation from his wife was finally made.
+
+After the separation, very characteristically, he was less separated
+from Mrs. Coleridge than he had been for many years. In 1810 he was
+still in the Lakes, in the summer of which year his wife gives news of
+him to the poetess. "Coleridge has been with me for some time past,
+in good health, spirits and humour, but the _Friend_ for some
+unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent.
+This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but
+I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in
+my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance,
+knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to
+hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." Then comes a
+sidelight on the Wordsworths. "Coleridge sends you his best thanks for
+the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried
+over to Grasmere, for _there_ it would soon be _soiled_, for the
+Wordsworths are woeful destroyers of good books, as our poor library
+will witness."
+
+But all this was too good to last, and as everybody knows, it did not.
+In October Coleridge left the Lakes with the Montagues, and almost
+immediately after that the rupture with the Wordsworths occurred,
+which involved also the family at Keswick. Southey's letter to Miss
+Betham giving her an account of the affair has been published by
+Mr. Dykes Campbell, and is misplaced in _A House of Letters_. The
+unfortunate philosopher set up his rest with the Morgans, friends of
+the Lambs, at Hammersmith; and there he was in February, 1811, when
+Miss Betham conceived her project of getting him as a lion at the
+party of her friend Lady Jerningham.
+
+Lady Jerningham, blue mother of a bluer daughter (Lady Bedingfield)
+and sister-in-law of the "Charming Man" of Walpole's and the Misses
+Berry's acquaintance, was a friend of Miss Betham's of old standing.
+Several letters of hers are in _A House of Letters_, but many more
+of her daughter's. Whether it was her ladyship's or Miss Betham's
+proposal there's no telling now; but Miss Betham, at any rate, did
+not feel equal to the job, and called in Charles and Mary Lamb to help
+her. Mary, in the first instance, sounded the philosopher, and with
+success. I quote from Mr. Lucas's edition of the Lamb letters, as
+the editor of Miss Betham's misreads and misprints his original.
+"Coleridge," she writes, "has given me a very cheerful promise that he
+will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint.
+He offered to write to you, but I found it was to be done _to-morrow_,
+and as I am pretty well acquainted with his to-morrows, I thought good
+to let you know his determination to-day. He is in town to-day, but
+as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better
+perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for
+you as well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days'
+previous notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as
+you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention all these
+betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as I
+do, it is a thing you have set your heart on."
+
+Charles was next brought in. Mr. Lucas gives his letter (I. 429) to
+John Morgan, which says, "There--don't read any further, because the
+letter is not intended for you, but for Coleridge, who might perhaps
+not have opened it directed to him _suo nomine_. It is to invite C.,
+to Lady Jerningham's on Sunday."
+
+Finally, Coleridge went to the party, and apparently in company,
+though it is not clear in whose company. This is what Lady Jerningham
+thought about it:--
+
+    "My dear Miss Betham,--I have been pleased with your friends,
+    tho' (which is not singular) they sometimes fly higher than my
+    imagination can follow. I think the author ought to mix
+    more, I will not say with Fools, but with People of Common
+    Comprehension. His own intellect would be as bright, and
+    what emanated from it more clear. This is perhaps a very
+    impertinent Remark for me to venture at making, but your
+    indulgence invited sincerity."
+
+That letter, I think, whose capitals are particularly graphic, throws
+the whole party up in a dry light. One can see the rhapsodist talking
+interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own
+spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few
+impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all
+the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the
+reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well
+on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He
+reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man,
+with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always
+affix very precise ideas to the words he used!" Then we have
+Byron, who wrote for effect, and whose aim was scorn. "Coleridge is
+lecturing. 'Many an old fool,' said Hannibal to some such lecturer,
+'but such as this, never.'" Tom Moore, who met Coleridge at
+Monkhouse's famous poets' dinner-party, goes no further than to allow
+that "Coleridge told some tolerable things:" but what Tom wanted was
+anecdote. Directly Coleridge began upon theory Moore was bored. He
+shuts him down with a "This is absurd." Rogers was present at that
+party, but we don't know what he thought about it. He admits that
+Coleridge was a marvellous talker, however. "One morning when Hookham
+Frere also breakfasted with me, Coleridge talked for three hours
+without intermission about poetry, and so admirably that I wish every
+word he uttered had been written down." But it was not always so
+well. He says elsewhere that he and Wordsworth once called upon him.
+Coleridge "talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which
+Wordsworth listened with profound attention, every now and then
+nodding his head. On quitting the lodging, I said to Wordsworth,
+'Well, for my own part, I could not make head or tail of Coleridge's
+oration; pray, did you understand it?' 'Not one syllable of it,' was
+Wordsworth's reply."
+
+Keats' account is capital. He met the Sage between Highgate and
+Hampstead, he says, and "walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner
+pace, for near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached
+a thousand things. Let me see if I can give you
+a list--nightingales--poetry--on poetical
+sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of
+dreams--nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single
+and double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the
+difference explained between will and volition--so say
+_metaphysicians_ from a _want of smoking the second
+consciousness_--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey believes
+in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good
+morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he
+moved away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so."
+
+Charles Lamb's is even better. On his way to the city he met
+Coleridge, and "in spite of my assuring him that time was precious, he
+drew me within the door of an unoccupied garden by the roadside, and
+there, sheltered from observation by a hedge of evergreens, he took me
+by the button of my coat, and closing his eyes, commenced an eloquent
+discourse, waving his right hand gently, as the musical words flowed
+in an unbroken stream from his lips. I listened entranced; but the
+striking of a church-clock recalled me to a sense of duty." Charles
+cut himself free with a pen-knife, he says, and went off to his
+office. "Five hours afterwards, in passing the garden on my way home,
+I heard Coleridge's voice, and on looking in, there he was, with
+closed eyes--the button in his fingers--his right hand gracefully
+waving." A good story, at least. This was no company for Lady
+Jerningham, who demanded clarity, and probably had a good deal to do.
+
+Lastly, we have Coleridge's own confession to Miss Betham that
+"Bacchus ever sleek and young," as at this time Lamb called him,
+"pouring down," he went on to say, "goblet after goblet," must
+have outdone his usual outdoings. Here is the best he can say for
+himself:--
+
+    "True history will be my sufficient apology. After my return
+    from Lady J.'s on Monday night, or rather morning, I awoke
+    from my short sleep unusually indisposed, and was at last
+    forced to call up the good daughter of the house at an early
+    hour to get me hot water and procure me medicine. I could not
+    leave my bed till past six Monday evening, when I crawled
+    out in order to see Charles Lamb, and to afford him such
+    poor comfort as my society might perhaps do in the present
+    dejection of his spirits and loneliness."
+
+There is much more to the same effect; and surely it is not often that
+a philosopher, or even a poet, will treat his post-prandial dumps (to
+call them so) as a stroke of adverse fortune. Coleridge takes it as
+an act of God. "This, my dear Miss Betham, waiving all connexion of
+sentences, is the history of my breach of engagement, of its cause,
+and of the occasion of that cause." There is much of Mr. Micawber
+here.
+
+And here, so far as _A House of Letters_ can help us, Coleridge's
+correspondence with Matilda Betham ends. It may well have been the end
+indeed. From that date onwards the wreck of the thinker and poet slid
+swiftly down the slope appointed, until he came up, after many bumps,
+in the hospitable Highgate backwater where he was to end his days.
+It was a wonderful London which within the same twenty years could
+harbour three men, like Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, in whom the
+incondite spirit which we call genius dwelt so near the surface
+of conscious being, and had such freedom to range. With Blake and
+Shelley, however, once over the threshold, it was untrammelled--and
+with Blake at least entirely innocuous to society, except to one
+drunken soldier who richly deserved what he got. But with Coleridge,
+throughout his career, one sees it struggling like a fly glued in
+treacle, pausing often to cleanse its wings. The fly, you adjudge,
+walked into the treacle. But Coleridge always thought that it was the
+treacle which had walked over him.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRYSTAL VASE
+
+
+I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly
+in life, thank goodness, nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been
+objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly
+did--but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the
+novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events;
+events--well, that means that there were collisions. They may have
+been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and
+there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of
+cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to
+be interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it
+is not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most.
+No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which
+we care about, and as mental process is always going on, and the state
+of the soul is never the same for two moments together, there is ample
+material for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish,
+which might indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the _Annual
+Register_. Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will
+read anybody else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives
+in a cage, cut off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable
+of knowing what is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest,
+and because we burn for the assurance we may get by evidence of
+homogeneity procurable from any human source. Man is a creature of
+social instinct condemned by his nature to be solitary. Creatures in
+all outward respects similar to himself are awhirl about him. They
+cannot help him, nor he them; he cannot even be sure, for all he may
+assume it, that they share his hope and calling.
+
+    Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
+      And see a myriad souls adrift,
+    Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
+      Shuddering across the void: "The truth!
+    Succour! The truth!" None can reply.
+
+That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy,
+tragedy, farce. The things that happen to us are not our life. They
+are imposed upon life, they come and go. But life is a secret process.
+We only see the accretions.
+
+The novel which I dreamed of writing has recently been done, or rather
+begun, by Miss Dorothy Richardson. She betters the example of Jane
+Austen by telling us much more about what seems to be infinitely less,
+but is not so in reality. She dips into the well whereof Miss Austen
+skims the surface. She has essayed to report the mental process of a
+young woman's lifetime from moment to moment. In the course of four,
+if not five, volumes nothing has happened yet but the death of a
+mother and the marriage of a sister or so. She may write forty, and I
+shall be ready for the forty-first. Mental process, the states of
+the soul, emotional reaction--these as they are moved in us by other
+people are Miss Richardson's subject-matter, and according as these
+are handled is the interest we can devote to her novels. These
+fleeting things are Miss Richardson's game, and they are the things
+which interest us most in ourselves, and the things which we desire to
+know most about in our neighbours.
+
+But, of course, it won't do. Miss Richardson does not, and cannot,
+tell us all. A novel is a piece of art which does not so much report
+life as transmute it. She takes up what she needs for her purpose, and
+that may not be our purpose. And so it is with poetry--we don't go to
+that for the facts, but for the essence of fact. The poet who told us
+all about himself at some particular pass would write a bad poem, for
+it is his affair to transfigure rather than transmute, to move us by
+beauty at least as much as by truth. What we look for so wistfully
+in each other is the raw material of poetry. We can make the finished
+article for ourselves, given enough matter; and indeed the poetry
+which is imagined in contemplation is apt to be much finer than that
+which has passed through the claws of prosody and syntax. The fact,
+to be short with it, is that literature has an eye upon the consumer.
+Whether it is marketable or not, it is intended for the public. Now
+no man will undress in public with design. It may be a pity, but so
+it is. Undesignedly, I don't say. It would be possible, I think,
+by analysis, to track the successive waves of mental process in _In
+Memoriam_. Again, _The Angel in the House_ brought Patmore as near to
+self-explication as a poet can go. Shakespeare's Sonnets offer a more
+doubtful field of experiment.
+
+What then? Shall we go to the letter-writers--to Madame de Sevigne, to
+Gray, to Walpole and Cowper, Byron and Lamb? A letter-writer implies
+a letter-reader, and just that inadequacy of spoken communication
+will smother up our written words. Madame de Sevigne must placate her
+high-sniffing daughter, Gray must please himself; Walpole must at any
+cost be lively, Cowper must be urbane to Lady Hesketh or deprecate
+the judgment of the Reverend Mr. Newton. Byron was always before the
+looking-glass as he wrote; and as for Charles Lamb, do not suppose
+that he did anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin
+thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree
+with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be
+merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic
+turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it
+in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation--on account of my
+dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that
+but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched thing to
+confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I can utter can be
+taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature."
+So I find him in his letters, swayed rather by his fancies than his
+states of soul, until indeed that soul of his was wrung by agony of
+mind and disease of body. Revelation, then, like gouts of blood,
+did issue, but of that I do not now write. No man is sane at such a
+crisis.
+
+_Parva componere magnis_, there is a letter contained in _The Early
+Diary of Frances Burney_(ed. Mrs. A.R. Ellis, 1889), more completely
+apocalyptic than anything else of the kind accessible to me. Its
+writer was Maria Allen, daughter of Dr. Burney's second wife,
+therefore half-sister to the charming Burney girls. She was a young
+lady who could let herself go, in act as well as on paper, and withal,
+as Fanny judged her, "flighty, ridiculous, uncommon, lively, comical,
+entertaining, frank, and undisguised"--or because of it--she
+did contrive to unfold her panting and abounding young self more
+thoroughly than the many times more expert. You have her here in the
+pangs of a love-affair, of how long standing I don't know, but now
+evidently in a bad state of miss-fire. It was to end in elopement,
+post-chaise, clandestine marriage, in right eighteenth-century. Here
+it is in an earlier state, all mortification, pouting and hunching of
+the shoulder. I reproduce it with Maria's punctuation, which shows it
+to have proceeded, as no doubt she did herself, in gasps:
+
+    "I was at the Assembly, forced to go entirely against my own
+    Inclination. But I always have sacrificed my own Inclinations
+    to the will of other people--could not resist the pressing
+    Importunity of--Bet Dickens--to go--tho' it proved Horribly
+    stupid. I drank tea at the--told old Turner--I was determined
+    not to dance--he would not believe me--a wager ensued--half
+    a crown provided I followed my own Inclinations--agreed--Mr.
+    Audley asked me. I refused--sat still--yet followed my own
+    Inclinations. But four couple began--Martin (c'etait Lui)
+    was there--yet stupid--n'importe--quite Indifferent--on both
+    sides--Who had I--to converse with the whole Evening--not
+    a female friend--none there--not an acquaintance--All
+    Dancing--who then--I've forgot--n'importe--I broke my
+    earring--how--heaven knows--foolishly enough--one can't always
+    keep on the Mask of Wisdom--well n'importe I danced a Minuet a
+    quatre the latter end of the Eve--with a stupid Wretch--need
+    I name him--They danced cotillions almost the whole Night--two
+    sets--yet I did not join them--Miss Jenny Hawkins danced--with
+    who--can't you guess--well--n'importe------"
+
+There is more, but my pen is out of breath. Nobody but Mr. Jingle ever
+wrote like that; and in so far as Maria Allen may be said to have had
+a soul, there in its little spasms is the soul of Maria Allen, with
+all the _malentendus_ of the ballroom and all the surgings of a
+love-affair at cross-purposes thrown in.
+
+As for Fanny Burney's early diary, its careful and admirable editor
+claims that you have in it "the only published, perhaps the only
+existing record of the life of an English girl, written of herself in
+the eighteenth century." I believe that to be true. It is a record,
+and a faithful and very charming record of the externals of such a
+life. As such it is, to me, at least, a valuable thing. If it does
+not unfold the amiable, brisk, and happy Fanny herself, there are two
+simple reasons why it could not. First, she was writing her journal
+for the entertainment of old Mr. Crisp of Chessington, the "Daddy
+Crisp" of her best pages; secondly, it is not at all likely that she
+knew of anything to unfold. Nor, for that matter, was Fanny herself of
+the kind that can unfold to another person. Yet there is a charm all
+over the book, which some may place here, some there, but which
+all will confess. For me it is not so much that Fanny herself is a
+charming girl, and a girl of shrewd observation, of a pointed pen, and
+an admirable gift of mimicry. She has all that, and more--she has a
+good heart. Her sister Susan is as good as she, and there are many of
+Susan's letters. But the real charm of the book, I think, is in the
+series of faithful pictures it contains of the everyday round of an
+everyday family. Dutch pictures all--passers-by, a knock at the front
+door, callers--Mr. Young, "in light blue embroidered with silver,
+a bag and sword, and walking in the rain"; a jaunt to Greenwich, a
+concert at home--the Agujari in one of her humours; a masquerade--a
+very private one, at the house of Mr. Laluze.... Hetty had for three
+months thought of nothing else ... she went as a Savoyard with a
+hurdy-gurdy fastened round her waist. Nothing could look more simple,
+innocent and pretty. "My dress was a close pink Persian vest
+covered with a gauze in loose pleats...." What else? Oh, a visit to
+Teignmouth--Maria Allen now Mrs. Ruston; another to Worcester; quiet
+days at King's Lynn, where "I have just finished _Henry and Frances_
+... the greatest part of the last volume is wrote by Henry, and on
+the gravest of grave subjects, and that which is most dreadful to our
+thoughts, Eternal Misery...." Terrific novel: but need I go on? There
+may be some to whom a description of the nothings of our life will be
+as flat as the nothings themselves--but I am not of that party. The
+things themselves interest me, and I confess the charm. It is the
+charm of innocence and freshness, a morning dew upon the words.
+
+The Burneys, however, can do no more for us than shed that auroral
+dew. They cannot reassure us of our normal humanity, since they needed
+reassurance themselves.
+
+Where, then, shall we turn? So far as I am aware, to two only, except
+for two others whom I leave out of account. Rousseau is one, for it is
+long since I read him, but my recollection is that the _Confessions_
+is a kind of novel, pre-meditated, selective, done with great art.
+Marie Bashkirtseff is another. I have not read her at all. Of the two
+who remain I leave Pepys also out of account, because, though it may
+be good for us to read Pepys, it is better to have read him and be
+through with it. There, under the grace of God, go a many besides
+Pepys, and among them every boy who has ever befouled a wall with a
+stump of pencil. We are left then with one whom it is ill to name
+in the same fill of the inkpot, "Wordsworth's exquisite sister," as
+Keats, who saw her once, at once knew her to be.
+
+In Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, you may have the delight of daily
+_intercourse--famigliarmente discorrendo_--with one of the purest
+and noblest souls ever housed in flesh; to that you may add the
+reassurance to be got from word and implication beyond doubt. She
+tells us much, but implies more. We may see deeply into ourselves, but
+she sees deeply into a deeper self than most of us can discern. It is
+not only that, knowing her, we are grounded in the rudiments of honour
+and lovely living; it is to learn that human life can be so lived, and
+to conclude that of that at least is the Kingdom of Heaven.
+
+These journals are for fragments only of the years which they cover,
+and as such exist for Jan.-May, 1798 (Alfoxden); May-Dec, 1800,
+Oct.-Dec, 1801, Jan.-July, 1802: all these at Grasmere. They have been
+printed by Professor Knight, and I have the assurance of Mr. Gordon
+Wordsworth that what little has been omitted is unimportant. Nothing
+is unimportant to me, and I wish the whole had been given us; but
+what we have is enough whereby to trace the development of her
+extraordinary mind and of her power of self-expression. The latter,
+undoubtedly, grew out of emotion, which gradually culminated until the
+day of William Wordsworth's marriage. There it broke, and with it, as
+if by a determination of the will, there the revelation ceased. A new
+life began with the coming of Mary Wordsworth to Dove Cottage, a life
+of which Dorothy records the surface only.
+
+The Alfoxden fragment (20 Jan.-22 May, 1798), written when she
+was twenty-seven, is chiefly notable for its power of interpreting
+landscape. That was a power which Wordsworth himself possessed in
+a high degree. There can be no doubt, I think, that they egged each
+other on, but I myself should find it hard to say which was egger-on
+and which the egged. This is the first sentence of it:
+
+    "20 Jan.--The green paths down the hillsides are channels for
+    streams. The young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water
+    running between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together
+    on the slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more
+    populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams."
+
+Here is one of a few days later:
+
+    "23rd.--Bright sunshine; went out at 3 o'cl. The sea perfectly
+    calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and
+    tongues or points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The
+    sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound
+    of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which
+    we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to
+    the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the
+    singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which
+    lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful
+    beds of smoke. The turf fading into the mountain road."
+
+She handles words, phrases, like notes or chords of music, and never
+gets her landscape by direct description. One more picture and I must
+leave it:
+
+    "26.-- ... Walked to the top of a high hill to see a
+    fortification. Again sat down to feed upon the prospect; a
+    magnificent scene, _curiously_ spread out for even minute
+    inspection though so extensive that the mind is afraid to
+    calculate its bounds...."
+
+Coleridge was with them most days, or they with him. Here is a curious
+point to note. Dorothy records:
+
+    "March 7th.--William and I drank tea at Coleridge's. Observed
+    nothing particularly interesting.... One only leaf upon the
+    top of a tree--the sole remaining leaf--danced round and round
+    like a rag blown by the wind."
+
+And Coleridge has in _Christabel_:
+
+  The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
+  That dances as often as dance it can,
+  Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
+  On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
+
+William, Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Hamburg at the end of that
+year, but in 1800 the brother and sister were in Grasmere; and the
+journal which opens with May 14, at once betrays the great passion of
+Dorothy's life:
+
+    "William and John set off into Yorkshire after dinner at
+    half-past two o'clock, cold pork in their pockets. I left them
+    at the turning of the Low-Wood bay under the trees. My heart
+    was so full I could hardly speak to W., when I gave him a
+    farewell kiss. I sate a long time upon a stone at the margin
+    of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier.
+    The lake looked to me, I know not why, dull and melancholy,
+    and the weltering on the shore seemed a heavy sound.... I
+    resolved to write a journal of the time till W. and J. return,
+    and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel
+    with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it
+    when he comes again...."
+
+"Because I will not quarrel with myself!" She is full of such
+illuminations. Here is another:
+
+    "Sunday, June 1st.--After tea went to Ambleside round the
+    lakes. A very fine warm evening. Upon the side of Loughrigg
+    _my heart dissolved in what I saw_."
+
+Now here is her account of a country funeral which she reads into, or
+out of, the countryside:
+
+    "Wednesday, 3rd Sept.-- ... a funeral at John Dawson's.... I
+    was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin
+    lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children.
+    When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining, and
+    the prospect looked as divinely beautiful as I ever saw it.
+    It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, _and yet more
+    allied to human life_. I thought she was going to a quiet
+    spot, and I could not help weeping very much...."
+
+The italics are mine. William was pleased to call her weeping "nervous
+blubbering."
+
+And then we come to 1802, the great last year of a twin life; the
+last year of the five in which those two had lived as one soul and
+one heart. They were at Dove Cottage, on something under L150 a year.
+Poems were thronging thick about them; they were living intensely.
+John was alive. Mary Hutchinson was at Sockburn. Coleridge was still
+Coleridge, not the bemused and futile mystic he was to become. As for
+Dorothy, she lives a thing enskied, floating from ecstasy to ecstasy.
+It is the third of March, and William is to go to London. "Before we
+had quite finished breakfast Calvert's man brought the horses for
+Wm. We had a deal to do, pens to make, poems to be put in order for
+writing, to settle for the press, pack up.... Since he left me at
+half-past eleven (it is now two) I have been putting the drawers in
+order, laid by his clothes, which he had thrown here and there and
+everywhere, filed two months' newspapers, and got my dinner, two
+boiled eggs and two apple tarts.... The robins are singing sweetly.
+Now for my walk. I _will_ be busy. I _will_ look well, and be well
+when he comes back to me. O the Darling! Here is one of his bitter
+apples, I can hardly find it in my heart to throw it into the
+fire.... I walked round the two lakes, crossed the stepping-stones at
+Rydalefoot. Sate down where we always sit. I was full of thought of my
+darling. Blessings on him." Where else in our literature will you find
+mood so tender, so intimately, so delicately related?
+
+A week later, and William returned. With him, it seems, her
+descriptive powers. "Monday morning--a soft rain and mist. We walked
+to Rydale for letters, The Vale looked very beautiful in excessive
+simplicity, yet at the same time, uncommon obscurity. The church stood
+alone, mountains behind. The meadows looked calm and rich, bordering
+on the still lake. Nothing else to be seen but lake and island."
+Exquisite landscape. For its like we must go to Japan. Here is
+another. An interior. It is the 23rd of March, "about ten o'clock, a
+quiet night. The fire flickers, and the watch ticks. I hear nothing
+save the breathing of my beloved as he now and then pushes his book
+forward, and turns over a leaf...." No more, but the peace of it is
+profound, the art incomparable.
+
+In April, between the 5th and 12th, William went into Yorkshire upon
+an errand which she knew and dreaded. Her trouble makes the words
+throb.
+
+    "Monday, 12th.... The ground covered with snow. Walked to T.
+    Wilkinson's and sent for letters. The woman brought me one
+    from William and Mary. It was a sharp windy night. Thomas
+    Wilkinson came with me to Barton and questioned me like a
+    catechiser all the way. Every question was like the snapping
+    of a little thread about my heart. I was so full of thought of
+    my half-read letter and other things. I was glad when he left
+    me. Then I had time to look at the moon while I was thinking
+    of my own thoughts. The moon travelled through the clouds,
+    tinging them yellow as she passed along, with two stars near
+    her, one larger than the other.... At this time William, as
+    I found the next day, was riding by himself between Middleham
+    and Barnard Castle."
+
+I don't know where else to find the vague torment of thought, its way
+of enhancing colour and form in nature, more intensely observed. Next
+day: "When I returned _William_ was come. _The surprise shot through
+me._" This woman was not so much poet as crystal vase. You can see the
+thought cloud and take shape.
+
+The twin life was resumed for yet a little while. In the same month
+came her descriptions of the daffodils in Gowbarrow Park, and of the
+scene by Brothers Water, which prove to anybody in need of proof
+that she was William's well-spring of poesy. Not that the journal is
+necessarily involved. No need to suppose that he even read it. But
+that she could make him see, and be moved by, what she had seen is
+proved by this: "17th.-- ... I saw a robin chasing a scarlet butterfly
+this morning"; and "Sunday, 18th.-- ... William wrote the poem on _The
+Robin and the Butterfly_." No, beautiful beyond praise as the journals
+are, it is certain that she was more beautiful than they. And what a
+discerning, illuminative eye she had! "As I lay down on the grass, I
+observed the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the
+sheep, owing to their situation respecting the sun, which made them
+look beautiful, but with something of strangeness, like animals of
+another kind, as if belonging to a more splendid world...." What a
+woman to go a-gipsying through the world with!
+
+Then comes the end.... "Thursday, 8th July.-- In the afternoon, after
+we had talked a little, William fell asleep. I read _The Winter's
+Tale_; then I went to bed but did not sleep. The swallows stole in and
+out of their nest, and sat there, _whiles_ quite still; _whiles_ they
+sung low for two minutes or more at a time, just like a muffled robin.
+William was looking at _The Pedlar_ when I got up. He arranged it,
+and after tea I wrote it out--280 lines.... The moon was behind....
+We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and
+dull, but our own vale was very solemn--the shape of Helm Crag was
+quite distinct though black. We walked backwards and forwards on the
+White Moss path; there was a sky like white brightness on the lake....
+O beautiful place! Dear Mary, William. The hour is come.... I must
+prepare to go. The swallows, I must leave them, the wall, the garden,
+the roses, all. Dear creatures, they sang last night after I was in
+bed; seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to
+rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell."
+
+Next day she set out with William to meet her secret dread, knowing
+that life in Rydale could never be the same again. Wordsworth married
+Mary Hutchinson on the 4th October, 1802. The secret is no secret now,
+for Dorothy was a crystal vase.
+
+
+
+
+_NOCTES AMBROSIANAE_
+
+Weather has sent me indoors, chance to an old book. I have been
+reading _Noctes Ambrosianae_ again. Bad buffoonery as much of it is and
+full to the throttle of the warm-watery optimism induced by whisky,
+yet as fighting literature it is incalculably better than its modern
+substitute in _Blackwood_. The sniper who monthly tries to pinch out
+his adversaries there--Mrs. Partington's nephew, in fact--wants the
+one quality which will make that kind of thing intolerable--that is,
+high spirits. The Black Hussars of Maga both had them, and drank
+them, frequently neat. I judge that the Nephew has to be more careful.
+Eupepsy is not revealed in his writing; but Christopher North and his
+co-mates must have had the stomachs of ostriches. The guzzling and
+swilling which were the staple of the _Noctes_ were remarked upon at
+the time as incredible as well as disgusting; but it is to be presumed
+that they wouldn't have been there if, to the majority at least, they
+had not been a counsel of perfection. "I wasn't as drunk as I should
+have liked to be, your Worship, but I was drunk."
+
+As well as that, most people thought it exceedingly funny. Dickens
+and his readers thought it funny too. Christmas would not have been
+Christmas unless somebody got beastly drunk. We have moved on since
+then, and carried the Nephew with us, _multum gementem_. One can see
+him kicking violently under the arm of the _Zeitgeist_ as he is borne
+down the ringing grooves of change. Now, therefore, he is tart in his
+musings, chastises rather with fleas than with scorpions.
+
+When the _Noctes_ can stand away from Politics and Literature--for the
+two were always involved in those days, so that unless you approved a
+man's party you couldn't allow that he wrote tolerable verse--they can
+wile away a winter evening very pleasantly. Christopher North had an
+eye for character, a sense of humour, and knew and loved the country.
+He was country bred. He is at his best when he combines his loves,
+as he does in the person of the Shepherd. Keep the Shepherd off (_a_)
+girls, (_b_) nursing mothers, (_c_) the Sabbath, (_d_) eating, (_e_)
+drinking, (_f_) his own poetry, and he is good reading. Knowing and
+loving Ettrick Forest as I do, I need no better guide to it than
+North's Shepherd. Having fished all its waters from Loch Skene
+downwards, I should ask no better company, evenings, at Tibbie
+Shields' or the Tushielaw Inn. Edward FitzGerald could have made a
+good book out of the _Noctes_, cutting it down to one volume out of
+four. As it is mainly, it will stand or fall by its high spirits. The
+really funny character in it is Gurney, the shorthand writer, who is
+kept in a cupboard, and at the end of the last uproarious chapter,
+when the coast is cleared of the horseplaying protagonists, "comes out
+like a mouse, and begins to nibble cheese." That is imagination.
+
+The real Ettrick Shepherd was better than the _Noctes_ can make him.
+Lockhart gives a delightful account of his first visit to Walter Scott
+in Castle Street--his first visit, mind you. He is shown into the
+drawing-room and finds Mrs. Scott, disposed, _a la_ Madame Recamier,
+on a sofa. His acuteness comes to the aid of his bewilderment, and he
+is quick to extend himself in similar fashion upon the opposite sofa.
+In the dining-room he was much more at his ease. Before the end of the
+meal he had his host as "Wattie" and his hostess as "Charlotte." Next
+day he wrote to Scott to ask what he might have said, and to offer
+apologies if needful.
+
+A remark put into his mouth by North, that he could "ban" Burns for
+having forestalled him with the line--
+
+  The summer to Nature, my Willie to me!
+
+set me wondering wherein consists the true lyrical magic. In that line
+of Burns's, clearly, it lies in the harmony of lyric thought and lyric
+lilt. In--
+
+  Come away, come away, Death,
+
+it is in the lilt alone. One thing only about it is sure, and that is
+that the diction must be conversational. There will be tears in the
+voice, but the voice must be that of the homely earth, never of the
+stage, never of the pulpit If you agree with that, you will have to
+cut out practically all the poets from Dryden to Cowper, Gray and
+Collins among them; for Gray has a learned sock, and hardly allows
+familiarity when he is elegising Horace Walpole's cat. But Shakespeare
+proves it, Ben Jonson proves it, and all the good poets from
+Wordsworth. Burns had the vernacular to help him, and for the most
+part a model to steer by. All Lowland Scots, lads and lassies, wail,
+and occasionally howl, in his songs. The first two lines of that one
+envied by Hogg run:
+
+  Here awa, there awa, wandering Willie,
+  Here awa, there awa, haud awa hame!
+
+and of these the second is traditional, altered only in one word.
+Burns writes "haud awa hame" instead of repeating "here awa"--and
+improves it. Shakespeare used the King's English, but never shirked a
+racy idiom. Here is a good instance from the Sonnets, and from one of
+the greatest of them, "Farewell, thou art too dear."
+
+  Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter--
+  In sleep a king; but waking _no such matter_.
+
+You might call that a slang phrase and be right.
+
+There are other cases, and many; some where he goes all lengths, and
+one at least where he goes beyond them. But to leave Shakespeare, for
+a perfect example of passion married to common speech, commend me to--
+
+  Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,
+    Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
+  But I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart
+    That thus so clearly I myself can free.
+
+Intense feeling, intense music, a lovely thing: a poem.
+
+
+
+
+SKELETONS AT A FEAST
+
+
+The other day the village was celebrating the birthday of its
+Labourers' Union in a manner which used to be reserved for the coming
+of age of the Squire's son, or for the Harvest Festival, in which the
+farmer might give thanks for the harvest, and the peasant, perhaps,
+for having been allowed to assist in winning it. I take a sort of
+pride in recording a staidness in the observance which I believe to be
+peculiar to the countryside in which I live. There was a service,
+with a sermon, in church, all persuasions uniting; then a dinner with
+speeches; then sports and dancing on the grass. Every stave of the
+Pastoral was announced and punctuated by the village band. "God save
+the King" closed all down at nine o'clock.
+
+It was sober merry-making after our manner, yet one could feel the
+undercurrent of a triumph not difficult to understand. Not a man there
+but knew, or had heard his father tell, of how things used to be. Ten
+years ago those men were earning sixteen shillings a week for twelve
+hours a day; fifteen years ago they were earning twelve shillings;
+thirty years ago they were earning nine shillings; a hundred years
+ago they were on the rates, herded about in conscript gangs under the
+hectorings of an overseer. Now--and it has seemed to come all in a
+moment--the humblest of them earn their 36_s._ 6_d._; the head men
+their 40_s._; their hours are down to fifty for the week, with a
+half-holiday on Saturday; delegates of their kind sit at a board in
+Trowbridge face to face and of equal worth with delegates of their
+employers. All matters affecting their status, housing, terms of
+employment can be brought before the board; and beside that, and
+behind it, like a buttress, there is a Union, whose name recalls that
+other grim fortress to which alone in times bygone they had to look
+when old age was upon them. This new Union has been in existence here
+little more than a twelvemonth, but they know now that it has spread
+all over England.
+
+They know more than that. They know that this plexus of organisations
+is not only social, but political; they feel that the estate of the
+realm which they stand for may soon become, and must before long
+become, the predominant estate. They feel the rising tide already
+lifting them off their feet. The elders are sobered by the flood; but
+the young ones taste the salt water sprayed off the crest of the wave
+and look at each other, laugh and cheer. If they rejoice they have
+good reason, knowing what they know; and if I rejoice with them, I
+think that I have good reason too. This time seven years ago I sang
+at length of Hodge and his plow; and looking back and forth over his
+blood-stained, sweat-stained and tear-stained history, I seemed to see
+what was coming to him as the crown of his thousand years of toil.
+
+  I look and see the end of it,
+  How fair the well-lov'd land appears;
+  I see September's misty heat
+  Laid like a swooning on the corn;
+  I see the reaping of the wheat,
+  I hear afar the hunter's horn,
+  I see the cattle at the ford,
+  The panting sheep beneath the thorn!
+  The burden of the years is scor'd,
+  The reckoning made, Hodge walks alone,
+  Content, contenting, his own lord,
+  Master of what his pain has won.
+
+And so indeed it is. The peasant now has his foot on the degrees of
+the throne, and has only to step up, he and his mates of the mine, the
+forge, the foundry and the railroad--to step up and lay hand to the
+orb and sceptre.
+
+
+If I had misgivings, and if those, when imparted to, were shared by an
+old friend of mine who still gives me six hours a day of his strength
+and skill when the weather and his rheumatics can hit it off together,
+I may say at once that though they were renewed in me by the late
+threat of the railwaymen arrogantly hurled at the only Government in
+my recollection which has made arrogance in asking almost a necessary
+stage in negotiation, they had been present for a long time--beyond
+Mr. Smillie's wild proposals of direct action, beyond the Yorkshire
+miners and the flooded coalfields; back to the day when electricians
+refused to light the Albert Hall, and Merchant Seamen refused passage
+to some politician or another because they didn't like his politics.
+One and each of those direct and unsteady actions made me shiver for
+the men with their feet on the throne's degrees. And now a Railway
+Strike, which has injured every one and will throw back the railwaymen
+and their Labour Party for many a year! If these things are done in
+the green wood, I asked my friend, what will be done in the dry?
+
+He couldn't answer me but by asking in his turn questions which
+were but a variation of my own. He said: "Our people don't seem to
+understand anything but 'each man for himself.' The miners hold up
+the country for higher wages, and the country has to pay them; the
+railwaymen do the same, and the country must find double fares and
+high freight. They hit their own class hardest of all, because dear
+coal and high tariffs touch everybody. And they don't even help
+themselves, because directly wages are raised, up goes the price of
+everything. Now what I want you to tell me is how are they going to
+stop all that when they are the Government? For it will have to stop."
+
+He is right: it will have to stop; but I don't see how the Labour
+Party is going to stop it. So far as I can make out, the Labour Party,
+as a responsible, political body, has no control whatsoever over the
+trade unions; and the trade unions, as such, none over their members.
+How, then, is one to look forward with comfort to the establishment
+of a Labour Government? It will take a readier speech than even Mr.
+Webb's, a more confident than even Mr. Smillie's to illuminate this
+smoke-blurred scene whereon we make out every trade union preying upon
+Mr. George's vitals (which are, unfortunately, for the moment our
+own vitals), and with a success so disastrously easy as to make any
+prospects of a return to sane, honest, dignified or just government
+almost hopeless! Mr. George is destroying himself hand over fist, and
+the sooner the better; but one does not want to see England go down
+with him. I am all for anarchy myself when once it is thoroughly
+grasped by everybody that anarchy means minding your own business.
+But we are far from that as yet. Anarchy at present means minding, and
+grudging, other people's business. Such anarchy is not government, but
+plundering with both hands.
+
+My point, however, is that, if we are to have a Labour Government,
+it must be a Government of a nation, and not a class-affair. When the
+Duke said that the King's Government must be carried on, he meant the
+Government of King George or King William. Our present Prime Minister
+means the Government of Mr. George, which is a very different affair.
+In its way of simple egotism it is precisely the meaning of the trade
+unions, and can be shortlier put as "After me the deluge." And that
+won't do. We want neither autocracy nor anarchy; and just now the one
+involves the other.
+
+
+
+
+A COMMENTARY UPON BUTLER
+
+
+Mr. Festing Jones has written a large book about his friend, and
+written it very well.[A] It is candid, and it is sincere; the work
+of a lover at once of Butler and of truth; it neither extenuates the
+faults nor magnifies the virtues of its subject so far as the author
+could perceive them; and it makes it possible to understand why Butler
+was so underrated in his lifetime, though not at once why he was so
+overrated after his death. That remains a problem which cannot be
+resolved by saying that his friends trumpeted him into it, or that
+posthumous readers enjoyed seeing him belabour his betters, which his
+contemporaries had not. It is true that _The Way of All Flesh_ did not
+appear until he was dead, and also true that _The Way of All Flesh_
+is a witty and malicious novel, whose malice and wit Mr. Shaw had
+prepared London to admire. Perhaps it is true, once more, that we are
+more scornful of the old orthodoxy than our fathers were, and less
+careful whose feelings are hurt. But I must confess that I should not
+have expected any age to be so complacent about caricaturing one's
+father and mother as our own was. However, for those who admire that
+sort of thing--and there must be many--I doubt if they will find
+it better done anywhere, with more gusto or more point. Dickens is
+believed to have put his father into _David Copperfield_, not, I
+think, his mother. But one can love Mr. Micawber, and Dickens would
+not have so drawn him without love. We are led to Butler's favourite
+distinction between _gnosis_ and _agape_. There's no doubt about the
+_gnosis_ that went to the making of Theobald and Christina. But where
+was _agape_?
+
+[Footnote A: _Samuel Butler, Author of "Erewhon"_ (1835-1902): _a
+Memoir_. By Henry Festing Jones. Two Vols. Macmillan, 1919.]
+
+Butler was in many respects a fortunate man, and should have been
+a happy one. He had a good education, good health, a sufficiency of
+means. Even when his embarrassments were at their heaviest he could
+always afford to do as he pleased. He could draw a little, play a
+little, write more than a little; he loved travel, and covered all
+Southern Europe in his time; he had good friends, a good mistress, a
+faithful servant; he had a strong sense of humour, feared nobody, had
+a hundred interests. Why, then, did he think himself a failure? Why
+was the sense of it to cloud much of his writing, and much of Mr.
+Jones's biography?
+
+He had his drawbacks--who has not? He did not get on with his father,
+criticised his mother; his sisters scraped the edges of his nerves; a
+man to whom he was extremely generous betrayed him. The like of these
+things must happen to mortal men. Butler knew that as well as any one.
+But his books were not read; the great men whom he attacked ignored
+him. He thought himself to be something, they treated him as nothing,
+and the public followed them. He knew all about it, and Mr. Jones
+knows all about it. He had unseated the secure with _Erewhon_,
+outraged the orthodox with _Fairhaven_, flouted the biologists,
+himself being no biologist, plunged into Homeric criticism without
+archaeology, swum against the current in Shakespearianism, enjoyed
+himself immensely, playing _l'enfant terrible_, and treading on
+every corn he could find--and then he was angry because the sufferers
+pretended that they had no corns. How could he expect it both ways?
+If he was serious, why did he write as if he was not? And if he had
+tender feelings himself--as he obviously had--why should he expect
+all the people he attacked with his pinpricks to have none? It was not
+reasonable.
+
+The answer to these questions is to be found in some little weaknesses
+of his which Mr. Jones's biography, all unconsciously, reveals.
+Butler, it is clear, was morbidly vain. Many writers are so, but few
+let their vanity take them so far. Learn from Mr. Jones. In 1879 he
+and Butler met Edward Lear in an inn at Varese. He told them a little
+tale about a tipsy man from Manchester--rather a good little tale. "I
+do not remember that Edward Lear told us anything else particularly
+amusing, but then neither did we tell him anything particularly
+amusing. Butler was seldom at his best with a celebrated man. He
+was not successful himself, and had a sub-aggressive feeling that
+a celebrated man probably did not deserve his celebrity; if he did
+deserve it, let him prove it." There is no getting away from that
+symptom, which is as unreasonable as it is perverse. Celebrated men
+are not usually so anxious to "prove" their celebrity as all that
+comes to. It is bad enough to be "celebrated." It was hard lines on
+old Lear to sulk with him because he would not show off. If he had
+wanted to do that he would not have gone to Varese. But that is
+mortified vanity. The same thing happened when he met Mr. Birrell at
+dinner in 1900. Then it was the celebrity who took pains to save
+his host and hostess from a frosty dinner party. The same thing is
+recalled of meetings with Sir George Trevelyan and Lord Morley earlier
+in the book. It is all pretty stupid; but when a man is ridden by a
+vanity like that there can be no healthy pleasure to be got out of
+writing for its own sake. You must have your public flat on its back
+before your vanity will be soothed.
+
+Another failing of Butler's, shared, I am sorry to say, by Mr. Jones,
+was a love of little jokes and an inability to see when and where they
+could be worked off, or perhaps I ought to say when they were worked
+out. A great many of them were pinpricks rather than jokes; he only
+made them "to annoy." Well, they did, and they do, annoy--not because
+they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes. "If it is thought
+desirable to have an article on the _Odyssey_, I have abundant, most
+aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus"--so
+he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it. Here is
+another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire: "There will be no
+comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements--I mean
+we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of suicide, nor cheap
+and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been laid."
+
+All that can be said for that is that it is vivacious, and that it has
+helped Mr. Shaw, who has certainly bettered the instruction. There
+are others which are a good deal more annoying than that. Jokes about
+infanticide and Jesus Christ defeat themselves, and always will. They
+are on a level with jokes about death or one's mother; they recoil
+and smite the smiter on the nose. I confess that I find the joke
+about Charles Lamb irritating. Butler said that he could not read
+Lamb because Canon Ainger went to tea with his (Butler's) sisters. His
+gibes at Dante are as bad--in fact they are worse, aggravated by the
+fact that, having never read (he assures us) a word of him, he puts
+him down as one of the seven humbugs of Christendom. He would not read
+Dante because he had liked Virgil, nor Virgil because Tennyson liked
+him. "We are not amused," as Queen Victoria said of another little
+joke.
+
+The correspondence with Miss Savage, again, does not reveal a pleasant
+personality. Indeed, the discomfort one gets from it is at times
+painful. Mr. Jones says that she bored Butler, and I don't wonder at
+it. The wonder would rather be that she did not set his teeth on
+edge if it were not that he was nearly as bad as she was. It is not
+a matter of facetiousness--I dare say he never tired of that; and
+perhaps the thinness of the jokes--little misreadings of hymns, things
+about the Mammon of Righteousness, and so on--in a kind of way added
+to the fun of them. It is their subject matter which offends. They
+commonly turn upon the health of the respective parents and the
+chances of an attack carrying them off. _Queste cose_, as the hero
+said of the suicide, _non si fanno_. But I suppose that if you could
+put your mother's death-bed into a novel, you could do almost anything
+in that kind.
+
+I am myself singularly moved, with Coventry Patmore, to love the
+lovely who are not beloved--but not the unlovely. Those little jokes,
+and many others, are by no means lovely, and if Butler repeated them
+as often as Mr. Jones does, it is not surprising that he was avoided
+by many who missed or dreaded the point. His lecture on the _Humour
+of Homer_ made Mr. Garnett unhappy and Miss Jane Harrison cross, Mr.
+Jones says. I don't doubt it. It is very cheap humour indeed, and no
+more Homer's than mine is. It is entirely Butler's humour about
+Homer, a very different thing. Its impudence did not mitigate
+the aggravation, but made it more acute. If he had picked out a
+fairy-tale, rather than two glorious poems--_Little Red Riding Hood_,
+_The Three Bears_, _Rumpelstiltskin_, for example--he could have been
+as facetious as he pleased. But that would not suit him. There would
+have been no darts to fling. Butler was a _banderillero_. All right;
+but then don't complain that the Miss Harrisons, Darwins, and others
+shake off your darts and go about their business, which, oddly enough,
+is not to gore and trample the _banderillero_; don't be huffed because
+you are held for a _gamin_. Butler wanted it both ways.
+
+The conclusion is irresistible that Butler's controversial books were
+not primarily written to discover truth, but because he was vain
+and wished at once to be sensational and annoying. He resented the
+greatness of the great, or the celebrity of the celebrated; his vanity
+was wounded. He sought, then, for "most aggravating and impudent
+matter" to wound them in turn who had vicariously wounded him. He
+"learned" them to be toads, or celebrities, or tried to. But his love
+of little jokes betrayed him. He, a sort of minnow, thought to trouble
+the pool where the great fish were oaring at ease by flirting the
+surface with his tail. It seemed to him that he was throwing up a fine
+volume of water; but the great fish held their way unconscious in the
+deep. Chiefly, therefore, he failed with all his cleverness. Brain he
+had, logic he had; the heart was a-wanting and the intention faltered.
+_Gnosis_ again and _agape_!
+
+Brain he had, logic he had; but brain must follow upon emotional
+intention if it is to create; and logic must follow upon sound
+premisses if it is to convince. Now if his prime intention was to
+annoy, or, if you granted him his premisses, Butler would never miss
+the mark. But is that intention worthy of more than it earned? I don't
+think so. And can you grant him his premisses? I don't think that you
+can. He argued _a priori_, apparently always. I am not a biologist,
+nor was he, but if I know enough of scientific method to be sure that
+biologists cannot argue that way, so undoubtedly did he. What should
+Darwin, who had spent years in patient accumulation of fact, have
+to say to him? In Homeric criticism--_a priori_ again. He had an
+instinct--he owns it was no more--that the _Odyssey_ was written by a
+woman. Then he studied the _Odyssey_ to prove that it was. Perhaps
+a woman did write it, and perhaps it will one day be proved. The
+_Odyssey_, as Butler used it, will never prove it. So also with the
+Sicilian origin of the poem. He got his idea, and went to Trapani
+to fit it in. It does not seem to have occurred to him that all the
+things he found there are to be found also in the Ionian Islands and
+might be found in half a hundred other places in a sea pullulating
+with islands or a coast-line cut about like a jigsaw puzzle. But it
+won't do, of course. No one knew that better than he.
+
+Mr. Jones says that "Butler's judgments were arrived at by thinking
+the matter out for himself." I don't know what judgments he means: in
+the context he is talking about "other writers." Among such he would
+not, perhaps, include Dante, Virgil or Charles Lamb. If he includes
+Homer and Shakespeare there would be a good deal to say. I don't
+believe he had thought about the authorship of the _Odyssey_ at all
+until he had assumed what he afterwards spent his time and pains in
+supporting. As to Shakespeare's age when he wrote his Sonnets, I don't
+myself find that the Sonnets support him. Those which he quotes in
+particular show that W.H. was a youth, but not that the author was.
+But there, again, he was arguing _a priori_. He desired to prove what
+he set out to prove, and the scholars disregarded him. Mr. Bridges, in
+a letter which Mr. Jones has the candour to quote, puts the matter as
+neatly as may be. "I am very sorry indeed that you have been so clever
+as to make up so good (or bad) a story: but I willingly recognise that
+no one has brought the matter into so clear a light as you have done.
+You are always perspicuous, and nothing but good can come of such
+conscientious work as yours. Still, you must remember that you proved
+Darwin to be an arch-impostor; and there was no fault in your logic.
+It is not the logic that fails in this book." No. It was not the
+logic.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMMEMORATION
+
+
+Eleven o'clock in the morning found the village at its field and
+household affairs, with birds abroad and dogs at home assisting
+in various ways. The plovers wove black and white webs over the
+water-meadows, gulls were like drifting snow behind the plow. In a
+cottage garden the dog, high on his haunches at the length of his
+chain, cocked his ears towards the huswife in the wash-house, hoping
+against hope for a miracle. Luxuriously full, the cat slept on the
+window-ledge. Meantime a roadman was cleaning a gutter, a thatcher
+pegged down his yelm; a milkmaid, driving up the street in a float,
+stopped, threw the reins over the pony's quarters, and jumped down,
+very trim in her overall and breeches. The church clock struck eleven.
+
+She turned, as if shot, and stood facing the church whose flag
+streamed to the south. The roadman straightened himself and leaned
+upon his mattock; the huswife shut the back door, and the dog crept
+into his barrel. The schoolyard, accustomed at that hour to flood
+suddenly with noise, remained empty. But the milkmaid's horse drew
+to the hedge for a bite, the birds on the hillside settled about the
+halted plow, and the cat slept on.
+
+We are what we are, all of us. Beasts and birds are not sentimental.
+Things to them stand for things, not for thoughts about things. I have
+seen young rabbits play cross-touch about the stiffened form of
+an unfortunate brother. I have seen a barnyard cock flap and crow,
+standing upon the dead body of one of his wives. Directly a creature
+is dead it ceases to be a creature at all to those which once hailed
+it fellow. It becomes part of the landscape in which it lies; and
+with certain beasts which we are accustomed to call obscene it becomes
+something to eat. But dogs which have lived long with us are not like
+that. I knew two dogs which lived in a house together and shared the
+same loose-box at night. One night one of them in fidgeting, bit upon
+an artery and bled to death. Never again would the survivor enter that
+sleeping place. Dogs have learned from us that things may stand for
+thoughts.
+
+Anything that persuades the British people to spend two minutes a
+year in thought is a good thing; for thinking is not congenial to us.
+Feeling is; and feeling may perhaps be described as thinking about
+thinking. We feel still, as we felt at the time, the wholesale,
+hapless, heroic and entirely monstrous sacrifice of our young men; but
+it is out of the question to suppose that we thought about them--or,
+for that matter, that any nation in the world did; for if we had
+thought as we felt the scythe would have stopt in mid-swathe and Death
+been robbed of a crowning victory! But we did not think; and we
+were not thinking just now when we stood still in the midst of our
+interrupted affairs. The act sufficed us. It was a sacrament. An act,
+that is, a thing, stood for a thought about a thing--namely heroic,
+hapless death. Of such sacraments, maybe, is the kingdom of this
+world, but not, I am persuaded, the Kingdom of Heaven; and assuredly
+not of such, nor of any amount of it, will be a League of Nations
+which is anything more than a name.
+
+The thought, or the feeling, of those two minutes here in the village,
+or in the city eight miles away, where in full market the same
+opportunity was taken, was concerned in all human probability, with
+the hapless dead rather than with means to preserve the living from
+hapless and unnecessary death; and yet, so curiously are we wrought
+out of emotion, sensibility and habit, some good besides piety may
+come out of a memorial Eleventh of November. Pitying, recording,
+respecting the dead or perhaps the bereaved, it may presently become
+a fixed idea with us that avoidable death is taboo. It may be borne
+in upon us on the next occasion when stung pride, outraged feeling or
+panic fear is sweeping like a plague over our land, that nothing
+but sorrow and loss was gained by the Four Years War. That is just
+possible, but no more than that, we being what we are. Yet, unless we
+learn to think rather of life than of death, there is no other way. As
+in religion, faith comes before works, and you must fall in love with
+God if you are to believe in Him, so it is in politics. Emotional
+conviction must precede action. And the conviction to be established
+is that war is a crime and in some nations, a vice.
+
+In the Middle Ages a great and ever-present fear of death coincided
+with an extraordinary neglect of life. Whole companies, whole classes
+of men thought of little but death; yet they killed each other for a
+look or a thought; in war whole cities were put to the sword and fire,
+as the Black Prince put Limoges. _Timor mortis conturbat me!_ So men
+shuddered and wailed, but took not the smallest trouble to keep
+each other alive. The Black Death swept off at least a third of the
+population of Europe; yet after it things went on exactly as before.
+If nations had then possessed the technical skill which they have
+to-day, it is quite on the cards that France in the Hundred Years or
+Germany in the Thirty Years War, would have been emptied of its folk.
+The will thereto was not wanting, that's certain.
+
+Well, we are a little better than that. Sanitation has at last become
+a fixed idea. And there is another thing. We no longer consider a man
+as magnified by his office, but rather that the office is magnified in
+that a man is serving it. In the old days the splendour of an army on
+the march was reflected upon the men composing it, and glorified
+every one of them. Now it is the other way. We are apt to see the
+army glorious because it is composed of men. Lord Kitchener's host,
+perhaps, has taught us that. We are getting on, then, if we are
+beginning to take manhood seriously.
+
+It is something at least, and so much to the good, that we have
+imagined a new sacrament, and found it in the attitude, if not in the
+act of thought. "Who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is
+answered," said a wise man; and if that is true, the King may save
+his people yet. But to enable him to do it we must pray for the living
+rather than the dead, and pray for Good Will among them. For that is
+what we want.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUAKER EIRENICON
+
+
+In our late scramble to spend our own, or secure some other body's,
+money, a message of beauty, distinction and serene confidence in its
+own truth, has been overlooked by this distracted world. There is
+little wonder. As well might a blackbird flute on Margate Sands on a
+Bank Holiday as this Quaker message, "To all men," breathe love and
+goodwill among them just now. The effect has been much the same: to
+those who heeded it matter for tears that such heavenly balm should be
+within our hearing but out of our grasp; to the ravenous and the rabid
+a mere foolishness.
+
+To my mind nothing so admirable has been put forward by any Church
+calling itself Christian throughout five years' horror and delirium.
+I must not expect the _Morning Boast_ or _Long Bow_ to agree with it,
+but I am inclined to ask my fellow citizens if they have not yet had
+enough of these evangelists of war and ill-will towards men. If they
+have, here is an alternative for them to try.
+
+"We appeal to all men," say the Quakers to the world, "to recognise
+the great spiritual force of love which is found in all, and which
+makes us one common brotherhood." It is a hard saying, as things are
+now; and yet, if it is true, that 'tis love that makes the world go
+round, it is certain by this time that 'tis hate that makes it stop.
+What stops trade? English hate Germans, Germans hate English; masters
+grudge men, men masters. What holds up Ireland? Protestants hate
+Catholics, Catholics Protestants; each hates England and England hates
+both. The infernal brew of 1914 has poisoned the tissues of humanity;
+proud flesh, sour blood, keep us all in a sick ferment. What will save
+us? Who will show us any good?
+
+One thing only, say the Quakers. Listen. "Through the dark cloud of
+selfishness and materialism shines the eternal light of Christ in man.
+It can never perish.... The profound need of our time is to realise
+the everlasting truth of the common Fatherhood of God--the Spirit of
+Love--and the oneness of the human race." I wondered on Christmas Day,
+when children were carolling "Peace on earth and mercy mild," for how
+many hundred years men had been hearing that, how many of them had
+said that they believed it, and how many had acted as if they did
+believe it. I wondered if the editors of _Long Bow_ and the _Morning
+Boast_ had heard them, and what effect the words would have upon
+their next articles about the deportation of aliens, or the value of
+machine-guns as strike-breakers.
+
+"We have used the words of Christ, but we have not acted upon them.
+We have called ourselves by His name but we have not lived in His
+spirit." Those words should form part of any General Confession to
+be used in church, since the words used there now have lost their
+meaning. They are entirely true; since Christ died we have never acted
+upon His words, or attempted for six years at a time "to live in His
+spirit." How does one do it? The Quakers go on to tell us. "The Divine
+Seed is in all men. As men realise its presence, and follow the light
+of Christ in their hearts, they enter upon the right way of life, and
+receive power to overcome evil by good. Thus will be built the City of
+God."
+
+While it is plain, then, how the City of God will be rebuilt on earth,
+it ought to be equally so how it will not be built. Lately another
+Message has been advertised in the Press, which does not promise any
+help. It has been proposed[A] to publish certain private letters of
+the German ex-Emperor which, we learn, incriminate him still more
+deeply in the original sin of the war. Here no doubt is "a scoop," as
+they call it, for somebody; but with "scoops," I suppose, the City of
+God has little to do.
+
+[Footnote A: It was done too.]
+
+And apart from the supposition that the man is about to be tried for
+his offences against society at large--in which case it is a
+flouting of justice to publish evidence against him in a newspaper
+beforehand--apart from all that, how in God's name is His city to be
+rebuilt by raking in waste-heaps for more hate-stuff? The wretched man
+is beaten, abdicated, exiled, sick, probably out of his mind, if
+he ever had one. Is it an English habit to revile the fallen and
+impotent? It has not been so hitherto, and the newspaper which
+proposes to enrich itself by making most of us ashamed of our
+nationality is doing us a bad service and, I hope, itself a worse.
+
+But while such things go on, far from the City of God being rebuilt,
+the ruins of it will sink deeper into the morass, until we all go
+down to the devil together. And if we are to be as the Evangelists
+of Ill-Will desire us, the sooner that happens the better. As an
+alternative to this disgusting but deserved consummation I call
+attention to the Quaker Eirenicon.
+
+I love and respect the Quakers as Christians after the doctrine of
+Christ. I have known many, and never a bad one among them, never one
+that was not sound at heart and sweet in nature. As well as their
+social quality there is to be considered their political. I don't
+hesitate to say that their Corporation holds in its grasp the
+salvation of the world through their Master and mine. I go further,
+and don't hesitate to say that had the Quaker religion been this
+country's, not only should we not have made war, but Germany would not
+have provoked it. Had Europe at large been Quaker, war would have been
+eliminated long ago from the catalogue of national crimes; for to a
+Quaker war is what cannibalism is to all men, and love, apparently
+to some men, an unthinkable offence against the sanctity of the
+body. That body, they say, is a possible tabernacle for the Spirit of
+Christ. If you believe that, all the rest follows. If you do not, you
+will continue to read the _Morning Boast_.
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
+  WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED
+  LONDON AND BECCLES
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note.
+
+The following words were originally printed with an oe ligature,
+regrettably not provided in the ASCII character set:
+
+Boeotia, Boeotian, Ipomoea, Eoioe, OEnoe, OEno.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In a Green Shade, by Maurice Hewlett
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