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Title: Lay Morals
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Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Contents:<br>
Lay Morals<br>
Chapter I<br>
Chapter II<br>
Chapter III<br>
Chapter IV<br>
Father Damien<br>
The Pentland Rising<br>
Chapter I - The Causes of the Revolt<br>
Chapter II - The Beginning<br>
Chapter III - The March of the Rebels<br>
Chapter IV - Rullion Green<br>
Chapter V - A Record of Blood<br>
The Day After To-morrow<br>
College Papers<br>
Chapter I - Edinburgh Students in
1824<br>
Chapter II - The Modern Student<br>
Chapter III - Debating Societies<br>
Criticisms<br>
Chapter I - Lord Lytton's “Fables
in Song”<br>
Chapter II - Salvini’s Macbeth<br>
Chapter III - Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s
Progress”<br>
Sketches<br>
The Satirist<br>
Nuits Blanches<br>
The Wreath of Immortelles<br>
Nurses<br>
A Character<br>
The Great North Road<br>
Chapter I - Nance at the “Green
Dragon”<br>
Chapter II - In which Mr. Archer
is Installed<br>
Chapter III - Jonathan Holdaway<br>
Chapter IV - Mingling Threads<br>
Chapter V - Life in the Castle<br>
Chapter IV - The Bad Half-Crown<br>
Chapter VII - The Bleaching-Green<br>
Chapter VIII - The Mail Guard<br>
The Young Chevalier<br>
Prologue: The Wine-Seller’s
Wife<br>
Chapter I - The Prince<br>
Heathercat<br>
Chapter I - Traqairs of Montroymont<br>
Chapter II - Francie<br>
Chapter III - The Hill-End of Drumlowe<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
LAY MORALS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly
and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only
broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes
from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning;
it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or
spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared
hearer. Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we
condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend
on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous
hints. No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has
in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally
incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom
comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation,
which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation
of events and circumstances.<br>
<br>
A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for
others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this
inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young,
must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already
retailed to them in their own youth. Every generation has to educate
another which it has brought upon the stage. People who readily
accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters
in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls
due. What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects
on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions?
Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended;
and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words
to say in his own defence. Where does he find them? and what are
they when found?<br>
<br>
As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases
out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad
things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain,
the desire of wealth and applause. Besides these, or what might
be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of
any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping,
and how to walk through a quadrille.<br>
<br>
But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.
It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive
it. As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil,
it is not the doctrine of Christ. What he taught (and in this
he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of
rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views,
but a view. What he showed us was an attitude of mind. Towards
the many considerations on which conduct is built, each man stands in
a certain relation. He takes life on a certain principle.
He has a compass in his spirit which points in a certain direction.
It is the attitude, the relation, the point of the compass, that is
the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details
are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by this,
and this only, can they be explained and applied. And thus, to
learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a historical
artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and, in the
technical phrase, create his character. A historian confronted
with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have
but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side,
and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment
and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human
nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from
point to point, from end to end. This is a degree of trouble which
will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror
of eternal fire can teach a business man to bend his imagination to
such athletic efforts. Yet without this, all is vain; until we
understand the whole, we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise
we have no more than broken images and scattered words; the meaning
remains buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is
a dead language in our ears.<br>
<br>
Take a few of Christ’s sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.<br>
<br>
‘Ye cannot,’ he says, ‘<i>serve God and Mammon</i>.’
Cannot? And our whole system is to teach us how we can!<br>
<br>
‘<i>The children of this world are wiser in their generation than
the children of light</i>.’ Are they? I had been led
to understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example,
prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy;
that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise ‘How
to make the best of both worlds.’ Of both worlds indeed!
Which am I to believe then - Christ or the author of repute?<br>
<br>
‘<i>Take no thought for the morrow</i>.’ Ask the Successful
Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that
this is not only a silly but an immoral position. All we believe,
all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands
condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns
the sentence as unwise and inhumane. We are not then of the ‘same
mind that was in Christ.’ We disagree with Christ.
Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.
Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and
finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise:
‘Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit
in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house
upon another.’<br>
<br>
It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’;
and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian
although it leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this
is a very gross delusion. Although truth is difficult to state,
it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet
it ere the phrase be done. The universe, in relation to what any
man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.
In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable,
an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable
mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we
can dimly study with these mortal eyes. But what any man can say
of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation to this little
and plain corner, which is no less visible to us than to him.
We are looking on the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow
the demonstration. The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher
becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly
perceive the aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument
is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel,
and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old street-lamp.
And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are
thinking of something else.<br>
<br>
But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,
and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the
same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective;
it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not
much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the
force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision
that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original,
that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.
You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree
with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun
is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship
is tested. We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent
parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
take them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the
moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose
of any system looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly
beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things outside.
Then only can you be certain that the words are not words of course,
nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you sure that if he be indicating
anything at all, it is a star and not a street-lamp; then only do you
touch the heart of the mystery, since it was for these that the author
wrote his book.<br>
<br>
Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds
a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then
he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out
a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions
to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle
of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ,
who stands at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world
and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude
- or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy - every
such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration;
he should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in
the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great armaments
and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding
by the eternal stars. But alas! at this juncture of the ages it
is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole fellowship
of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder and implicitly denies
the saying. Christians! the farce is impudently broad. Let
us stand up in the sight of heaven and confess. The ethics that
we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin. <i>Honesty is the best</i>
<i>policy</i>, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which
a wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but
I think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences;
I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole,
we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion;
and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow
after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method.
A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents,
nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness;
for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.<br>
<br>
Alas! what is a precept? It is at best an illustration; it is
case law at the best which can be learned by precept. The letter
is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot
be uttered, alone is true and helpful. This is trite to sickness;
but familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can
steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling words
begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions. If
you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing
too often, you no longer hear it. Our attention requires to be
surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing
from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty and
must be tried by not dissimilar means. The whole Bible has thus
lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has become mere words
of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit
like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are
strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as
you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.
And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit. It is
quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man
of us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:
that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.<br>
<br>
The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth. But let a man set himself to
mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble
and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the
progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long
ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.
Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated
forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language
much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the
trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look;
and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds
of time. Look now for your shadows. O man of formulae, is
this a place for you? Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?
Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for
the judgment of man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow,
the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously
tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes
new. Can you or your heart say more?<br>
<br>
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never truly was;
and you yourself are altered beyond recognition. Times and men
and circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed
of which no earthly hurricane affords an image. What was the best
yesterday, is it still the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?
Will your own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what
hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside us on their
unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
doing and suffering in another sphere of things?<br>
<br>
And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do
you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions?
For the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather
with matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, <i>Thou shalt
not covet</i>, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere
long. The Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of
years began to find these precepts insufficient; and made an addition
of no less than six hundred and fifty others! They hoped to make
a pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to life in
some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of
whist. The comparison is just, and condemns the design; for those
who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and you
and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the most
divine advantage. Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering
view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously leave
youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire
chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five
precepts?<br>
<br>
<i>Honour thy father and thy mother</i>. Yes, but does that mean
to obey? and if so, how long and how far? <i>Thou shall not kill</i>.
Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
by killing. <i>Thou shall not commit adultery</i>. But some
of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
the sanction of religion and law. <i>Thou shalt not bear false
witness</i>. How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?
<i>Thou shalt</i> <i>not steal</i>. Ah, that indeed! But
what is <i>to steal</i>?<br>
<br>
To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be
our guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the
word only that least minimum of meaning without which society would
fall in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish
mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves
to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman.
The approval or the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent
to a man who is both valorous and good. There is extreme discomfort,
but no shame, in the condemnation of the law. The law represents
that modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;
but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given
a rush for such considerations. The Japanese have a nobler and
more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are
born when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection
we all indifferently share throughout our lives:- but even to them,
no more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state
supersede the higher law of duty. Without hesitation and without
remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain
from doing right. But the accidental superior duty being thus
fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all
citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate
their just crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.<br>
<br>
The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience
or a thoughtful head. But to show you how one or the other may
trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by
this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out
of a young man’s life.<br>
<br>
He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty,
as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on
the search for higher thoughts of life. I should tell you at once
that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment. But he
got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and
this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities.
As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend
had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had
been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness,
comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his
father’s wealth.<br>
<br>
At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed
the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this
inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a
conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and
he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of
man- and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions,
and many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also
struck him. He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon
strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair
and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly
favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort
closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly
open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself.
There sat a youth beside him on the college benches, who had only one
shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay
at home to have it washed. It was my friend’s principle
to stay away as often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.
But there was something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow
who had to give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores
of others who had never an opportunity at all. <i>If one of these
could take his place</i>, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage
from his eyes. He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and
despised himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs
of Fortune. He could no longer see without confusion one of these
brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity. Had he
not filched that fellow’s birthright? At best was he not
coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what
justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing
but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more
even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations
a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought
as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind
justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend,
who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting
anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth;
although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence,
and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while
he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on his
boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself
from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle
equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.<br>
<br>
Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities
were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular
promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home
to die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind;
and how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no devotion
of soul and body, that could repay and justify these partialities.
A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see
no force in them whatever. ‘It was God’s will,’
said she. But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of
Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon;
and again, by God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem,
which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of
Pilate. He knew, moreover, that although the possibility of this
favour he was now enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance
was the act of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing
for rest and sunshine. And hence this allegation of God’s
providence did little to relieve his scruples. I promise you he
had a very troubled mind. And I would not laugh if I were you,
though while he was thus making mountains out of what you think molehills,
he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly practising many other
things that to you seem black as hell. Every man is his own judge
and mountain-guide through life. There is an old story of a mote
and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some consideration.
I should, if I were you, give some consideration to these scruples of
his, and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it is not
unlikely that there may be something under both. In the meantime
you must hear how my friend acted. Like many invalids, he supposed
that he would die. Now, should he die, he saw no means of repaying
this huge loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced
him for his sickness. In that case it would be lost money.
So he determined that the advance should be as small as possible; and,
so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room,
and grudged himself all but necessaries. But so soon as he began
to perceive a change for the better, he felt justified in spending more
freely, to speed and brighten his return to health, and trusted in the
future to lend a help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had
lent a help to him.<br>
<br>
I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and partial
in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little of his parents;
but I do say that here are some scruples which tormented my friend in
his youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the
midst of his enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in
justice, and point, in their confused way, to some more honourable honesty
within the reach of man. And at least, is not this an unusual
gloss upon the eighth commandment? And what sort of comfort, guidance,
or illumination did that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?
‘Thou shalt not steal.’ With all my heart! But
<i>am</i> I stealing?<br>
<br>
The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing
any transaction to an end. You can make no one understand that
his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact
it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil
to the world. We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from
seeing anything but sovereigns. If one man agrees to give another
so many shillings for so many hours’ work, and then wilfully gives
him a certain proportion of the price in bad money and only the remainder
in good, we can see with half an eye that this man is a thief.
But if the other spends a certain proportion of the hours in smoking
a pipe of tobacco, and a certain other proportion in looking at the
sky, or the clock, or trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his
own past adventures, and only the remainder in downright work such as
he is paid to do, is he, because the theft is one of time and not of
money, - is he any the less a thief? The one gave a bad shilling,
the other an imperfect hour; but both broke the bargain, and each is
a thief. In piecework, which is what most of us do, the case is
none the less plain for being even less material. If you forge
a bad knife, you have wasted some of mankind’s iron, and then,
with unrivalled cynicism, you pocket some of mankind’s money for
your trouble. Is there any man so blind who cannot see that this
is theft? Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have
been playing fast and loose with mankind’s resources against hunger;
there will be less bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread
somebody will die next winter: a grim consideration. And you must
not hope to shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your
less quantity of bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it
is none the less a theft for that. You took the farm against competitors;
there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility and be answerable
for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took it. By the act
you came under a tacit bargain with mankind to cultivate that farm with
your best endeavour; you were under no superintendence, you were on
parole; and you have broke your bargain, and to all who look closely,
and yourself among the rest if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.
Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work which
is not as good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect,
meagrely thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster
on parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart
and condemn you for a thief. Have you a salary? If you trifle
with your health, and so render yourself less capable for duty, and
still touch, and still greedily pocket the emolument - what are you
but a thief? Have you double accounts? do you by any time-honoured
juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain more from those who deal
with you than it you were bargaining and dealing face to face in front
of God? - What are you but a thief? Lastly, if you fill an office,
or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts, you think a delusion
and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary and go through
the sham manoeuvres of this office, or still book your profits and keep
on flooding the world with these injurious goods? - though you were
old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are you
but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere curiosities of
the intellect, in an age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly
cultivated that all business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs
of the trade, that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit. I would say less if I thought less.
But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only avow
that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my neighbours
of the same guilt.<br>
<br>
Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find
that in your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow
the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I
am well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.
But it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
Even before the lowest of all tribunals, - before a court of law, whose
business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand miles of
right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong that they
will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds
- even before a court of law, as we begin to see in these last days,
our easy view of following at each other’s tails, alike to good
and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished, and declared no
honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and simpletons who have
gone on through life with a quiet conscience may learn suddenly, from
the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade may be a custom of
the devil. You thought it was easy to be honest. Did you
think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful? Did you think
the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe? and you
could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no more concern
than it takes to go to church or to address a circular? And yet
all this time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer,
you would not have broken it for the world!<br>
<br>
The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use
in private judgment. If compression is what you want, you have
their whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed
with more significance, since the law is there spiritually and not materially
stated. And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the
sixth to the ninth, are rather legal than ethical. The police-court
is their proper home. A magistrate cannot tell whether you love
your neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you
have murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand
and testified to that which was not; and these things, for rough practical
tests, are as good as can be found. And perhaps, therefore, the
best condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,
‘neminem laedere’ and ‘suum cuique tribuere.’
But all this granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are inadequate
in the sphere of personal morality; that while they tell the magistrate
roughly when to punish, they can never direct an anxious sinner what
to do.<br>
<br>
Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct
proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces.
We grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something
above and beyond that we desire. Christ was in general a great
enemy to such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any
of these plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers
from the letter to the spirit. For morals are a personal affair;
in the war of righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the
six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment;
my magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions
absolute for the time and case. The moralist is not a judge of
appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my tribunal. He has to show
not the law, but that the law applies. Can he convince me? then
he gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving various counsels
to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.
Is he asked, for example, to divide a heritage? He refuses: and
the best advice that he will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth
commandment which figures so strangely among the rest. <i>Take
heed, and beware of</i> <i>covetousness</i>. If you complain that
this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.
For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven
by the voice of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that
perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we
find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our
experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers
within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings
to rekindle our astonishment. No length of habit can blunt our
first surprise. Of the world I have but little to say in this
connection; a few strokes shall suffice. We inhabit a dead ember
swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and
lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire
than was ever conceived by the theological imagination. Yet the
dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation
of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer
eves upon the lawn. Far off on all hands other dead embers, other
flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out
of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to
conceive the distance. Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though
they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home
compared with mankind on its bullet. Even to us who have known
no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.<br>
<br>
But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself.
He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and
renewing. Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits
and the freshness of his countenance. Hair grows on him like grass;
his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and
touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently
ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run,
to perform the strange and revolting round of physical functions.
The sight of a flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply;
yet he looks unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
bonfires of the universe. He comprehends, he designs, he tames
nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast
inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into federations
and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth
or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of
unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days. His sight,
which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest stars, which
is miraculous in every way and a thing defying explanation or belief,
is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and can be extinguished with a touch.
His heart, which all through life so indomitably, so athletically labours,
is but a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin. His whole body,
for all its savage energies, its leaping and its winged desires, may
yet be tamed and conquered by a draught of air or a sprinkling of cold
dew. What he calls death, which is the seeming arrest of everything,
and the ruin and hateful transformation of the visible body, lies in
wait for him outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
diseases from within. He is still learning to be a man when his
faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not yet understood
himself or his position before he inevitably dies. And yet this
mad, chimerical creature can take no thought of his last end, lives
as though he were eternal, plunges with his vulnerable body into the
shock of war, and daily affronts death with unconcern. He cannot
take a step without pain or pleasure. His life is a tissue of
sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more directly
from himself or his surroundings. He is conscious of himself as
a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves, chooses, and is satisfied;
conscious of his surroundings as it were of an inexhaustible purveyor,
the source of aspects, inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting
caresses. Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights and
agonies.<br>
<br>
Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root in
man. To him everything is important in the degree to which it
moves him. The telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding
from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the
message, and the paper on which it is finally brought to him at home,
are all equally facts, all equally exist for man. A word or a
thought can wound him as acutely as a knife of steel. If he thinks
he is loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be in
a distant land and short of necessary bread. Does he think he
is not loved? - he may have the woman at his beck, and there is not
a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if we are to make any
account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material
and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an individual
is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of mankind as
a race turn upon material conditions. The physical business of
each man’s body is transacted for him; like a sybarite, he has
attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he sweats, he digests
without an effort, or so much as a consenting volition; for the most
part he even eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were
between two thoughts. His life is centred among other and more
important considerations; touch him in his honour or his love, creatures
of the imagination which attach him to mankind or to an individual man
or woman; cross him in his piety which connects his soul with heaven;
and he turns from his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous
emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow
from the web of pains and pleasures.<br>
<br>
It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
powers tributary but independent. If I now behold one walking
in a garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting
his food with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing
himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand
delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path,
and all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the
dog-star, or the attributes of God - what am I to say, or how am I to
describe the thing I see? Is that truly a man, in the rigorous
meaning of the word? or is it not a man and something else? What,
then, are we to count the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously
compounded? It is a question much debated. Some read his
history in a certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive
digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown upon and
determined by the breath of God; and both schools of theorists will
scream like scalded children at a word of doubt. Yet either of
these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either may be
right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more
immediate point. What is the man? There is Something that
was before hunger and that remains behind after a meal. It may
or may not be engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it
changes, heightens, and sanctifies. Thus it is not engaged in
lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love,
where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age,
sickness, or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing
the sentiment. This something, which is the man, is a permanence
which abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and
now triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress
of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all. So, to the
man, his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult
of the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night. It is forgotten;
it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall
behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.<br>
<br>
Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that
generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides
of man. This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured
and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his
conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race.
His joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as <i>this</i> is
interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in
an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains
of the mind. He may lose all, and <i>this</i> not suffer; he may
lose what is materially a trifle, and <i>this</i> leap in his bosom
with a cruel pang. I do not speak of it to hardened theorists:
the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.<br>
<br>
‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and
more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as
it were, pull thee by the strings. What is that now in thy mind?
is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’
Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any
book. Here is a question worthy to be answered. What is
in thy mind? What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in
a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly? It is something beyond
the compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it
not of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
above all base considerations? This soul seems hardly touched
with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion,
or desire; we are only conscious - and that as though we read it in
the eyes of some one else - of a great and unqualified readiness.
A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of desire
and fear, for something else. And this something else? this something
which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the kingdoms of the
world and the immediate death of the body are alike indifferent and
beside the point, and which yet regards conduct - by what name are we
to call it? It may be the love of God; or it may be an inherited
(and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate
the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it
will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I intend
no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,
to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery
of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word
righteousness. What is right is that for which a man’s central
self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what
is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible
with the fixed design of righteousness.<br>
<br>
To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.
That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each
man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and
never, above all, imposed upon another. The conscience has, then,
a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the
most part illuminates none but its possessor. When many people
perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol;
and hence we have such words as <i>tree, star</i>, <i>love, honour</i>,
or <i>death</i>; hence also we have this word <i>right</i>, which, like
the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently, and
none can express succinctly otherwise. Yet even on the straitest
view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our own superior
thoughts. For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that
a man, through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware
of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost suspended,
at times it is renewed again with joy. As we said before, his
inner self or soul appears to him by successive revelations, and is
frequently obscured. It is from a study of these alternations
that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems right and
what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.<br>
<br>
All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression
as well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we must
accept. It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or beautiful
surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is the food of the
mind. All these are craved; all these should be craved; to none
of these in itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable
want, we recognise a demand of nature. Yet we know that these
natural demands may be superseded; for the demands which are common
to mankind make but a shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands
of the individual soul. Food is almost the first prerequisite;
and yet a high character will go without food to the ruin and death
of the body rather than gain it in a manner which the spirit disavows.
Pascal laid aside mathematics; Origen doctored his body with a knife;
every day some one is thus mortifying his dearest interests and desires,
and, in Christ’s words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.
This is to supersede the lesser and less harmonious affections by renunciation;
and though by this ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get
thither a whole and perfect man. But there is another way, to
supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul and all the faculties
and senses pursue a common route and share in one desire. Thus,
man is tormented by a very imperious physical desire; it spoils his
rest, it is not to be denied; the doctors will tell you, not I, how
it is a physical need, like the want of food or slumber. In the
satisfaction of this desire, as it first appears, the soul sparingly
takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets and disapproves the satisfaction.
But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is capable of love;
and for this random affection of the body there is substituted a steady
determination, a consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
adopts, and commands the other. The desire survives, strengthened,
perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in scope and character.
Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the man now lives
as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he remains approvingly
conscious of himself.<br>
<br>
Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul demands.
It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing tendencies
in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which
the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to a common
end. It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but great
and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like notes
in a harmonious chord. That were indeed a way of peace and pleasure,
that were indeed a heaven upon earth. It does not demand, however,
or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should starve
my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself;
or, in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned
to guide and enjoy with wisdom. The soul demands unity of purpose,
not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and
sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a perfect
man exulting in perfection. To conclude ascetically is to give
up, and not to solve, the problem. The ascetic and the creeping
hog, although they are at different poles, have equally failed in life.
The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back his seamen in
a cock-boat, and has lost the ship. I believe there are not many
sea-captains who would plume themselves on either result as a success.<br>
<br>
But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses
and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more
unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable
and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.
In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is
clear, strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that
we enjoy communion with our soul. At the worst, we are so fallen
and passive that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor
seizes upon men. Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a
stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness
becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and
soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in
the face. This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this
is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
judgment. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and <i>lose himself</i>?’<br>
<br>
It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its
fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious
education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp
ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till
we die. If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose,
we must say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that
soul’s dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would
have him think of them. If, from some conformity between us and
the pupil, or perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a
dialect and express such views, beyond question we shall touch in him
a spring; beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that
he himself has spoken in his better hours; beyond question he will cry,
‘I had forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had
forgot to use them! I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright,
and to that I will listen and conform.’ In short, say to
him anything that he has once thought, or been upon the point of thinking,
or show him any view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been
upon the point of clearly seeing; and you have done your part and may
leave him to complete the education for himself.<br>
<br>
Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want greatness;
and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly uttered is not
the dialect of my soul. It is a sort of postponement of life;
nothing quite is, but something different is to be; we are to keep our
eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to the grave. We are to
regulate our conduct not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future;
and to value acts as they will bring us money or good opinion; as they
will bring us, in one word, <i>profit</i>. We must be what is
called respectable, and offend no one by our carriage; it will not do
to make oneself conspicuous - who knows? even in virtue? says the Christian
parent! And we must be what is called prudent and make money;
not only because it is pleasant to have money, but because that also
is a part of respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
without decent possessions. Received in society! as if that were
the kingdom of heaven! There is dear Mr. So-and-so; - look at
him! - so much respected - so much looked up to - quite the Christian
merchant! And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible
after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make
money and be strictly decent. Besides these holy injunctions,
which form by far the greater part of a youth’s training in our
Christian homes, there are at least two other doctrines. We are
to live just now as well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
where we shall be good. We are to worry through the week in a
lay, disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a different
life on Sunday.<br>
<br>
The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all these
positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their own ground.
It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with physical squalls,
and fifty times torn between conflicting impulses, that we teach people
this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote
consequences instead of the immediate face of things. The very
desire to act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic
disbelief in ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps,
who knows? they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns
are in number, the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in
concert with a whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of
chances that we must be acting right. And again, how true it is
that we can never behave as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can
only aspire to different and more favourable circumstances, in order
to stand out and be ourselves wholly and rightly! And yet once
more, if in the hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend
to nod and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set apart
for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around you on the possibilities
of life.<br>
<br>
This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said for
these doctrines. Only, in the course of this chapter, the reader
and I have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at morals
on a certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of testing
the catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well as by others,
current doctrines could show any probable justification. If the
doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have condemned
the system. Our sight of the world is very narrow; the mind but
a pedestrian instrument; there’s nothing new under the sun, as
Solomon says, except the man himself; and though that changes the aspect
of everything else, yet he must see the same things as other people,
only from a different side.<br>
<br>
And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.<br>
<br>
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him, unthinkingly
to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries,
you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own
soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man.
It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and chattering
of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before
us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before heaven,
are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge
we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man’s
own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how
am I to look for loyalty to others? The most dull, the most imbecile,
at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense
of right. It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.
Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities. But although
all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell you ‘This
is wrong,’ be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador
of God - throw down the glove and answer ‘This is right.’
Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in some
dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully understood, you
are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for
some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand
forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with
your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the
guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.
It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect
oneself and utter the voice of God. God, if there be any God,
speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts and
habits of each fresh generation and each new-coined spirit throw another
light upon the universe and contain another commentary on the printed
Bibles; every scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something
new, is a letter of God’s alphabet; and though there is a grave
responsibility for all who speak, is there none for those who unrighteously
keep silence and conform? Is not that also to conceal and cloak
God’s counsel? And how should we regard the man of science
who suppressed all facts that would not tally with the orthodoxy of
the hour?<br>
<br>
Wrong? You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round
the revolving shoulder of the world. Not truth, but truthfulness,
is the good of your endeavour. For when will men receive that
first part and prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things,
by the greatness of the universe, by the darkness and partiality of
man’s experience, by the inviolate secrecy of God, kept close
in His most open revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages
must be, wrong? Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong
to God. And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer,
every man of men, who wishes truly, must be right. He is right
to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and candour. That
let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a thought for contrary
opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him proclaim. Be not
afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed Dagon he
insults. For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering,
inept tradition which the people holds. These truths survive in
travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and confusion; and
what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in their dead jargon,
repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.<br>
<br>
So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call ‘rank
conformity’: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid
on men. And now of Profit. And this doctrine is perhaps
the more redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the
heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.
A man, by this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third,
or fiftieth turn. He chooses his end, and for that, with wily
turns and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.
There may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there
can spring no great moral zeal. To look thus obliquely upon life
is the very recipe for moral slumber. Our intention and endeavour
should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause, which
shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or twenty years,
but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but on the rightness
of that act. At every instant, at every step in life, the point
has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be gained
or lost. At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step
we must set down the foot and sound the trumpet. ‘This have
I done,’ we must say; ‘right or wrong, this have I done,
in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and God.’
The profit of every act should be this, that it was right for us to
do it. Any other profit than that, if it involved a kingdom or
the woman I love, ought, if I were God’s upright soldier, to leave
me untempted.<br>
<br>
It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made
directly and for its own sake. The whole man, mind and body, having
come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct. There are
two dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that
one thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing
any clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences.
The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought
very wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the
disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious
part of men inclining to think all things <i>rather</i> <i>wrong</i>,
the more jovial to suppose them <i>right enough for</i> <i>practical
purposes</i>. I will engage my head, they do not find that view
in their own hearts; they have taken it up in a dark despair; they are
but troubled sleepers talking in their sleep. The soul, or my
soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many points of right and
wrong, and often differs flatly with what is held out as the thought
of corporate humanity in the code of society or the code of law.
Am I to suppose myself a monster? I have only to read books, the
Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster no longer;
and instead I think the mass of people are merely speaking in their
sleep.<br>
<br>
It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school copy-books,
that honour is to be sought and not fame. I ask no other admission;
we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own conscience every
hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the far-off reverberation
of our footsteps. The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is what
concerns righteousness. Better disrespectable honour than dishonourable
fame. Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than dishonour
ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands. For the man
must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him
and taught him by the fortune of his life. You would not dishonour
yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,
for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person’s theory
in morals?<br>
<br>
So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate
the bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him,
how much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations!
To walk by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require,
not a man, but God. All that we know to guide us in this changing
labyrinth is our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a
few old precepts which commend themselves to that. The precepts
are vague when we endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled
than a wisp of string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change;
we must hold to what we know and walk by it. We must walk by faith,
indeed, and not by knowledge.<br>
<br>
You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently respectable:
you love him because you love him; that is love, and any other only
a derision and grimace. It should be the same with all our actions.
If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was never
torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent
of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life
to a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him
love one woman and be true to her till death. But we should not
conceive him as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against
each other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead
of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
sinister compromises and considerations. The one man might be
wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be
gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.<br>
<br>
The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly, respectable.
Does your soul ask profit? Does it ask money? Does it ask
the approval of the indifferent herd? I believe not. For
my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be
decent at all, but to be good.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER IV<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from
hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.
Now, for us, that is ultimate. It may be founded on some reasonable
process, but it is not a process which we can follow or comprehend.
And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except
in very lively and well-living natures; and between-whiles we must brush
along without it. Practice is a more intricate and desperate business
than the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid
judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right. As a
matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by the
world’s chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to consider
consequences and to keep an eye on profit. For the soul adopts
all affections and appetites without exception, and cares only to combine
them for some common purpose which shall interest all. Now, respect
for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and the desire
of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature of man;
and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current doctrines,
they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves
all the worthy parts of man. These, then, must also be suffered
to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little according
as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.<br>
<br>
Now, a man’s view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
society in which he lives. Other men and women are so much more
grossly and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions, that
they stand between him and all the rest; they are larger to his eye
than the sun, he hears them more plainly than thunder, with them, by
them, and for them, he must live and die. And hence the laws that
affect his intercourse with his fellow-men, although merely customary
and the creatures of a generation, are more clearly and continually
before his mind than those which bind him into the eternal system of
things, support him in his upright progress on this whirling ball, or
keep up the fire of his bodily life. And hence it is that money
stands in the first rank of considerations and so powerfully affects
the choice. For our society is built with money for mortar; money
is present in every joint of circumstance; it might be named the social
atmosphere, since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue
to live, and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect
one another. Money gives us food, shelter, and privacy; it permits
us to be clean in person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains
us books for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses of
others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the best in
life. If we love, it enables us to meet and live with the loved
one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we have scruples, it
gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any bright designs,
here is what will smooth the way to their accomplishment. Penury
is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to death.<br>
<br>
But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it. The
rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.
He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither
patience to read nor intelligence to see. The table may be loaded
and the appetite wanting; the purse may be full, and the heart empty.
He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth
around him, in a great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he
may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. Without an appetite,
without an aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and
hope, there, in his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting
shells than to be born a millionaire. Although neither is to be
despised, it is always better policy to learn an interest than to make
a thousand pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you
may feel no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable
and ever new. To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher,
an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one’s possessions in
the universe by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort
of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres. You had perhaps
two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you have two thousand
five hundred after it. That represents your gain in the one case.
But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier which concealed significance
and beauty. The blind man has learned to see. The prisoner
has opened up a window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects;
he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and
changing seasons, ships on the river, travellers on the road, and the
stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes have broken jail! And
again he who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up
riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter
poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in
the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but
be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which
is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight
and satisfaction. <i>Ecirctre et pas avoir</i> - to be, not to
possess - that is the problem of life. To be wealthy, a rich nature
is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick
and healthy blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich
in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of
others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still
a dear possession in absence or unkindness - these are the gifts of
fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing.
For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself?
If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he enlarges his estates.
If his nature be happy and valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if
it were his park and orchard.<br>
<br>
But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned. It
is not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is
the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.
And from this side, the question of money has a very different scope
and application. For no man can be honest who does not work.
Service for service. If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer
ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly you
who eat must do something in your turn. It is not enough to take
off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the admirable constitution
of society and your own convenient situation in its upper and more ornamental
stories. Neither is it enough to buy the loaf with a sixpence;
for then you are only changing the point of the inquiry; and you must
first have <i>bought the</i> <i>sixpence</i>. Service for service:
how have you bought your sixpences? A man of spirit desires certainty
in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity
between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that
he has not a lion’s share in profit and a drone’s in labour;
and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile
concern of mankind.<br>
<br>
Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so inappreciable
to external tests, that this is not only a matter for the private conscience,
but one which even there must be leniently and trustfully considered.
For remember how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and
how many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet and
joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of letters it
is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a living
book. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by
others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is
useless while he has a friend. The true services of life are inestimable
in money, and are never paid. Kind words and caresses, high and
wise thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering,
and all the charities of man’s existence, are neither bought nor
sold.<br>
<br>
Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a man’s
services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what he earns.
There at least there can be no ambiguity. St. Paul is fully and
freely entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and
freely entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true business
of each was not only something different, but something which remained
unpaid. A man cannot forget that he is not superintended, and
serves mankind on parole. He would like, when challenged by his
own conscience, to reply: ‘I have done so much work, and no less,
with my own hands and brain, and taken so much profit, and no more,
for my own personal delight.’ And though St. Paul, if he
had possessed a private fortune, would probably have scorned to waste
his time in making tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion none
can be more easily pardoned than that by which a man, already spiritually
useful to the world, should restrict the field of his chief usefulness
to perform services more apparent, and possess a livelihood that neither
stupidity nor malice could call in question. Like all sacrifices
to public opinion and mere external decency, this would certainly be
wrong; for the soul should rest contented with its own approval and
indissuadably pursue its own calling. Yet, so grave and delicate
is the question, that a man may well hesitate before he decides it for
himself; he may well fear that he sets too high a valuation on his own
endeavours after good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where
others than himself shall judge the service and proportion the wage.<br>
<br>
And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.
They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters
on parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For
I suppose that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war
and invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design
than to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the
reach of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and
defended with so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two
or three millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and
position. It is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered
during all these generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some
wellbeing, for themselves and their descendants; that if they supported
law and order, it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied
themselves in the present, they must have had some designs upon the
future. Now, a great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man’s
wisdom and mankind’s forbearance; it has not only been amassed
and handed down, it has been suffered to be amassed and handed down;
and surely in such a consideration as this, its possessor should find
only a new spur to activity and honour, that with all this power of
service he should not prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure
should return in benefits upon the race. If he had twenty, or
thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker’s, or if all Yorkshire
or all California were his to manage or to sell, he would still be morally
penniless, and have the world to begin like Whittington, until he had
found some way of serving mankind. His wage is physically in his
own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still be earned. He is
only steward on parole of what is called his fortune. He must
honourably perform his stewardship. He must estimate his own services
and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be one among
his functions. And while he will then be free to spend that salary,
great or little, on his own private pleasures, the rest of his fortune
he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his, because
he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his services have already
been paid; but year by year it is his to distribute, whether to help
individuals whose birthright and outfit have been swallowed up in his,
or to further public works and institutions.<br>
<br>
At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both
rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous
temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for
despicable toils. Are you surprised? It is even so.
And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches. ‘It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of God.’ I have heard this and
similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed from the path of
the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish.
One excellent clergyman told us that the ‘eye of a needle’
meant a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till
they were unloaded - which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
confounding the ‘kingdom of God’ with heaven, the future
paradise, to show that of course no rich person could expect to carry
his riches beyond the grave - which, of course, he could not and never
did. Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable
doctrine with relief. It was worth the while having come to church
that Sunday morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual,
meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative
school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he was a man after
God’s own heart.<br>
<br>
Alas! I fear not. And though this matter of a man’s services
is one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult
to restrain the mind from judging. Thus I shall be very easily
persuaded that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a
friend or two to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more
than persuaded at once. But it will be very hard to persuade me
that any one has earned an income of a hundred thousand. What
he is to his friends, he still would be if he were made penniless to-morrow;
for as to the courtiers of luxury and power, I will neither consider
them friends, nor indeed consider them at all. What he does for
mankind there are most likely hundreds who would do the same, as effectually
for the race and as pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction
of this monstrous wage. Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable
to conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his detention,
I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.<br>
<br>
At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that <i>what a man spends
upon himself, he shall have earned by services to the race</i>.
Thence flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little different
from that taught in the present day. I am addressing the middle
and the upper classes; those who have already been fostered and prepared
for life at some expense; those who have some choice before them, and
can pick professions; and above all, those who are what is called independent,
and need do nothing unless pushed by honour or ambition. In this
particular the poor are happy; among them, when a lad comes to his strength,
he must take the work that offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.
But in the richer classes the question is complicated by the number
of opportunities and a variety of considerations. Here, then,
this principle of ours comes in helpfully. The young man has to
seek, not a road to wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money,
but honest work. If he has some strong propensity, some calling
of nature, some over-weening interest in any special field of industry,
inquiry, or art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for
two reasons: the first external, because there he will render the best
services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature is
to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the consent
of his other faculties and appetites. If he has no such elective
taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any pursuit at all
he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and not the most highly
remunerated. We have here an external problem, not from or to
ourself, but flowing from the constitution of society; and we have our
own soul with its fixed design of righteousness. All that can
be done is to present the problem in proper terms, and leave it to the
soul of the individual. Now, the problem to the poor is one of
necessity: to earn wherewithal to live, they must find remunerative
labour. But the problem to the rich is one of honour: having the
wherewithal, they must find serviceable labour. Each has to earn
his daily bread: the one, because he has not yet got it to eat; the
other, who has already eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.<br>
<br>
Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts, whether
for the body or the mind. But the consideration of luxuries leads
us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second proposition
no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.<br>
<br>
At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit
and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference;
and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual
opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as
the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment,
because our fathers squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy,
but from brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire
the presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence.
And not only do we squander money from habit, but still more pitifully
waste it in ostentation. I can think of no more melancholy disgrace
for a creature who professes either reason or pleasure for his guide,
than to spend the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he
does not desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to
drive, or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.
Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy when
it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed in its
employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their twenty shillings
worth of profit out of every pound. Benjamin Franklin went through
life an altered man, because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle.
My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
bought a whistle when I did not want one. I find I regret this,
or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not only on personal but
on moral and philanthropical considerations. For, first, in a
world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students and food
and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are starved
in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel
to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no return
of genuine satisfaction. My philanthropy is wide enough in scope
to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least
one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so,
and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive
that I have robbed the poor. And, second, anything I buy or use
which I do not sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the
balance of supply and demand, and contributes to remove industrious
hands from the production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep
them busy upon ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the
flesh. That extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin
to boot, in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another
question for each man’s heart. He knows if he can enjoy
what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay,
it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing really belongs to
a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is connected with propriety;
and that only is the man’s which is proper to his wants and faculties.<br>
<br>
A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.
Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want. It remains
to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot,
in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present. He is
a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest
against the waste of luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot
enjoy them. It remains to be seen, by each man who would live
a true life to himself and not a merely specious life to society, how
many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely submits as to
a social propriety; and all these last he will immediately forswear.
Let him do this, and he will be surprised to find how little money it
requires to keep him in complete contentment and activity of mind and
senses. Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived
upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household must
ape the tastes and emulate the display of others. One is delicate
in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or
dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am
perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel
shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other
tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.
It may be cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will
spend my money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of
a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty. I shall not
wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight
in them. Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the
world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall
chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.
If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation!
There is a kind of idea abroad that a man must live up to his station,
that his house, his table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of
equivalence, and equally imposing to the world. If this is in
the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries. If it is not in
the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool. Throw aside
this fancy. See what you want, and spend upon that; distinguish
what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that. There
are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and
that not at all a high price. Are you sure you are one of these?
Are you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction
of a farthing? Are you sure you wish to keep a gig? Do you
care about where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a
cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house? Do you enjoy fine
clothes? It is not possible to answer these questions without
a trial; and there is nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man
who has not experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live
more cheaply than in his father’s house, has still his education
to begin. Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his
surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour;
that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes,
the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps
give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took,
betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission
to wealth.<br>
<br>
The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life.
The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and
prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most
part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living
for the outside, and an adventurer. But the man I mean lives wholly
to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys
what he wants for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at
what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money
or favour. You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true
Bohemian. And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he
may be, is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do
with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more useful
knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in some contentment;
and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his
shilling with a friend. The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian
in virtue of their birth. Do you know where beggars go?
Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their thousands,
but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the
widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.<br>
<br>
But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in
any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his
level in society, falls out of society altogether. I suppose the
young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds
his talents and instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit;
in a certain industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a
healthy and becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing
so, or doing so equally well, in any other industry within his reach.
Then that is his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born
to his father, but the one which is proper to his talents and instincts.
And suppose he does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?
Is your heart so dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the
love of a few? Do you think society loves you? Put it to
the proof. Decline in material expenditure, and you will find
they care no more for you than for the Khan of Tartary. You will
lose no friends. If you had any, you will keep them. Only
those who were friends to your coat and equipage will disappear; the
smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the kind hearts
will remain steadfastly kind. Are you so lost, are you so dead,
are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon solid
fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance
of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who
will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you
and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn
neither know nor care to know in a more human manner? Is it not
the principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere
with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration
of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded
gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their
nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger? I hope I would go
as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put
on my hat to do a pleasure to society. I may starve my appetites
and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall
take me as I choose to be, or go without me. Neither they nor
I will lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable
to associate.<br>
<br>
But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money
on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies
with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed
many thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life.
And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not
the best of company? But the principle was this: that which a
man has not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully
enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind’s treasure
which he holds as steward on parole. To mankind, then, it must
be made profitable; and how this should be done is, once more, a problem
which each man must solve for himself, and about which none has a right
to judge him. Yet there are a few considerations which are very
obvious and may here be stated. Mankind is not only the whole
in general, but every one in particular. Every man or woman is
one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her just brain, and
kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for
the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good acts and source
of blessings to the race. This money which you do not need, which,
in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only
in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.
Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
be helped the first. There at least there can be little imposture,
for you know their necessities of your own knowledge. And consider,
if all the world did as you did, and according to their means extended
help in the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying
want in times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with
a doubt and received with confusion. Would not this simple rule
make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?<br>
<br>
<br>
[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
FATHER DAMIEN<br>
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND<br>
DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
SYDNEY,<br>
<i>February 25</i>, 1890.<br>
<br>
<br>
Sir, - It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and
conversed; on my side, with interest. You may remember that you
have done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful.
But there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which
justly divide friends, far more acquaintances. Your letter to
the Reverend H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had
filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse
my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of
gratitude. You know enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation
to be aware that, a hundred years after the death of Damien, there will
appear a man charged with the painful office of the <i>devil’s
advocate</i>. After that noble brother of mine, and of all frail
clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall accuse, one defend
him. The circumstance is unusual that the devil’s advocate
should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect immediately rival,
and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly office ere the bones
are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall leave my readers free
to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring. If I have at all learned
the trade of using words to convey truth and to arouse emotion, you
have at last furnished me with a subject. For it is in the interest
of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every quarter of
the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that you and
your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours, to
the public eye.<br>
<br>
To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then
proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine
and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and
with more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has
pleased you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you
for ever.<br>
<br>
<br>
‘HONOLULU,<br>
<i>‘August</i> 2, 1889.<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Rev. H. B. GAGE.<br>
<br>
‘Dear Brother, - In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien,
I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant
newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.
The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted.
He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay
at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated
freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to
the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had no hand in
the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our
Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided.
He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of
which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.
Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting
eternal life. - Yours, etc.,<br>
<br>
‘C. M. HYDE.’ <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset
on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect. It may
offend others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold
to publish, gossip on your rivals. And this is perhaps the moment
when I may best explain to you the character of what you are to read:
I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility:
with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again;
with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to
plunge home. And if in aught that I shall say I should offend
others, your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with affection,
I can but offer them my regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the
consideration of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted
by anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain
with which they read your letter. It is not the hangman, but the
criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.<br>
<br>
You belong, sir, to a sect - I believe my sect, and that in which my
ancestors laboured - which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise,
an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries
came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody
faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm;
what troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;
and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.
This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their failure,
such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, and must here be
plainly dealt with. In the course of their evangelical calling,
they - or too many of them - grew rich. It may be news to you
that the houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets
of Honolulu. It will at least be news to you, that when I returned
your civil visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste,
and the comfort of your home. It would have been news certainly
to myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to
drag such matter into print. But you see, sir, how you degrade
better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are to
judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil’s advocate,
should understand your letter to have been penned in a house which could
raise, and that very justly, the envy and the comments of the passers-by.
I think (to employ a phrase of yours which I admire) it ‘should
be attributed’ to you that you have never visited the scene of
Damien’s life and death. If you had, and had recalled it,
and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps would have
been stayed.<br>
<br>
Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has
not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom. When
calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
and took root in the Eight Islands, a <i>quid pro quo</i> was to be
looked for. To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of
its adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity. I know I
am touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive. I know that others
of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be
called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded
your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble,
and the one human trait to be espied in that performance. You
were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should
have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered.
Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you
sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond parallel,
the rage, I am happy to repeat - it is the only compliment I shall pay
you - the rage was almost virtuous. But, sir, when we have failed,
and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped
in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain,
uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours
the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his
turn, and dies upon the field of honour - the battle cannot be retrieved
as your unhappy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle,
and lost for ever. One thing remained to you in your defeat -
some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.<br>
<br>
Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the
honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the
inert: that was what remained to you. We are not all expected
to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love
his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that.
But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example
from the fields of gallantry? When two gentlemen compete for the
favour of a lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and
(as will sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful rival’s
credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no
pretensions that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily
closed. Your Church and Damien’s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry
to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples. You having
(in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should
not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence; that when
you had been outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in
the midst of your wellbeing, in your pleasant room - and Damien, crowned
with glories and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under
the cliffs of Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last
man on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
and did.<br>
<br>
I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
sentences - I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
expression at the best. ‘He had no hand in the reforms,’
he was ‘a coarse, dirty man’; these were your own words;
and you may think it possible that I am come to support you with fresh
evidence. In a sense, it is even so. Damien has been too
much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features; so
drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to express
the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and silenced by generous
admiration, such as I partly envy for myself - such as you, if your
soul were enlightened, would envy on your bended knees. It is
the least defect of such a method of portraiture that it makes the path
easy for the devil’s advocate, and leaves for the misuse of the
slanderer a considerable field of truth. For the truth that is
suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. The
world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter
be the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a
wax abstraction. For, if that world at all remember you, on the
day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in virtue
of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.<br>
<br>
You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my inclement destiny
to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde. When
I visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.
But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation
with those who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory;
but others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with
no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge
I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
and sensitively understood - Kalawao, which you have never visited,
about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself;
for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into
that confession. ‘<i>Less than one-half</i> of the island,’
you say, ‘is devoted to the lepers.’ Molokai - ‘<i>Molokai
ahina</i>,’ the ‘grey,’ lofty, and most desolate island
- along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice into a sea
of unusual profundity. This range of cliff is, from east to west,
the true end and frontier of the island. Only in one spot there
projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater:
the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall. With this hint you will now be able to
pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much
of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less
than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth - or, say,
a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print you will be in a
position to share with us the issue of your calculations.<br>
<br>
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold.
You, who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your pleasant
parlour on Beretania Street. When I was pulled ashore there one
early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding farewell
(in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human life.
One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from joining
her. Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and
you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population
as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what
a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
the house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you found
every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable,
but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness
of the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place
to visit and a hell to dwell in. It is not the fear of possible
infection. That seems a little thing when compared with the pain,
the pity, and the disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the
atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he
breathes. I do not think I am a man more than usually timid; but
I never recall the days and nights I spent upon that island promontory
(eight days and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I
am somewhere else. I find in my diary that I speak of my stay
as a ‘grinding experience’: I have once jotted in the margin,
‘<i>Harrowing</i> is the word’; and when the <i>Mokolii</i>
bore me at last towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself,
with a new conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the
song -<br>
<br>
<br>
‘’Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.’<br>
<br>
<br>
And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home
excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries,
all indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different place
when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept that
first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence;
and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of
dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.<br>
<br>
You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses.
I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses.
But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression;
for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering
by which he stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called
upon to enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say
farewell, they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but
go for a time to their high calling, and can look forward as they go
to relief, to recreation, and to rest. But Damien shut-to with
his own hand the doors of his own sepulchre.<br>
<br>
I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.<br>
<br>
<i>A</i>. ‘Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully
remembered in the field of his labours and sufferings. “He
was a good man, but very officious,” says one. Another tells
me he had fallen (as other priests so easily do) into something of the
ways and habits of thought of a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise
the fact, and the good sense to laugh at’ [over] ‘it.
A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was a popular.’<br>
<br>
<i>B</i>. ‘After Ragsdale’s death’ [Ragsdale
was a famous Luna, or overseer, of the unruly settlement] ‘there
followed a brief term of office by Father Damien which served only to
publish the weakness of that noble man. He was rough in his ways,
and he had no control. Authority was relaxed; Damien’s life
was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.’<br>
<br>
<i>C</i>. ‘Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems
to have been a man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type:
shrewd, ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of
receiving and digesting a reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly
generous in the least thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready
to give his last shirt (although not without human grumbling) as he
had been to sacrifice his life; essentially indiscreet and officious,
which made him a troublesome colleague; domineering in all his ways,
which made him incurably unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute
of real authority, so that his boys laughed at him and he must carry
out his wishes by the means of bribes. He learned to have a mania
for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular
rivals: perhaps (if anything matter at all in the treatment of such
a disease) the worst thing that he did, and certainly the easiest.
The best and worst of the man appear very plainly in his dealings with
Mr. Chapman’s money; he had originally laid it out’ [intended
to lay it out] ‘entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even
so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully
and revised the list. The sad state of the boys’ home is
in part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly
ways and false ideas of hygiene. Brother officials used to call
it “Damien’s Chinatown.” “Well,”
they would say, “your China-town keeps growing.” And
he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors with
perfect obstinacy. So much I have gathered of truth about this
plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are
the traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom
and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here
on the spot can properly appreciate their greatness.’<br>
<br>
I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without correction;
thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness. They are
almost a list of the man’s faults, for it is rather these that
I was seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life,
I and the world were already sufficiently acquainted. I was besides
a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely
because Damien’s admirers and disciples were the least likely
to be critical. I know you will be more suspicious still; and
the facts set down above were one and all collected from the lips of
Protestants who had opposed the father in his life. Yet I am strangely
deceived, or they build up the image of a man, with all his weaknesses,
essentially heroic, and alive with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.<br>
<br>
Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of
Damien’s character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured
with and (in your own phrase) ‘knew the man’; - though I
question whether Damien would have said that he knew you. Take
it, and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact
we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary. There is
something wrong here; either with you or me. It is possible, for
instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao, had heard
of the affair of Mr. Chapman’s money, and were singly struck by
Damien’s intended wrong-doing. I was struck with that also,
and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the fact that
he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here tell you
that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him
late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the
father listened as usual with ‘perfect good-nature and perfect
obstinacy’; but at the last, when he was persuaded - ‘Yes,’
said he, ‘I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a service;
it would have been a theft.’ There are many (not Catholics
merely) who require their heroes and saints to be infallible; to these
the story will be painful; not to the true lovers, patrons, and servants
of mankind.<br>
<br>
And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those
who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to
find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to
forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone
introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous frame of
mind. That you may understand how dangerous, and into what a situation
it has already brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand
through the different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each
from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.<br>
<br>
Damien was <i>coarse.<br>
<br>
</i>It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers, who
had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father. But
you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with
the lights of culture? Or may I remind you that we have some reason
to doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter,
on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt
at all he was a ‘coarse, headstrong’ fisherman! Yet
even in our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.<br>
<br>
Damien was <i>dirty.<br>
<br>
</i>He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!
But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.<br>
<br>
Damien was <i>headstrong.<br>
<br>
</i>I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
and heart.<br>
<br>
Damien was <i>bigoted.<br>
<br>
</i>I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.
But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish
in a priest? Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity
of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.
For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character,
should have avoided him in life. But the point of interest in
Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about and made him
at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry,
his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened
him to be one of the world’s heroes and exemplars.<br>
<br>
Damien <i>was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders.<br>
<br>
</i>Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?
I have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation
on the ground that His sacrifice was voluntary. Does Dr. Hyde
think otherwise?<br>
<br>
Damien <i>did not stay at the settlement, etc.<br>
<br>
</i>It is true he was allowed many indulgences. Am I to understand
that you blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for
granting them? In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard
to issue from the house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you
will find yourself with few supporters.<br>
<br>
Damien <i>had no hand</i> <i>in the reforms, etc.<br>
<br>
</i>I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon
this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere
in the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than
when he passes from Damien’s ‘Chinatown’ at Kalawao
to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa. At this point, in my
desire to make all fair for you, I will break my rule and adduce Catholic
testimony. Here is a passage from my diary about my visit to the
Chinatown, from which you will see how it is (even now) regarded by
its own officials: ‘We went round all the dormitories, refectories,
etc. - dark and dingy enough, with a superficial cleanliness, which
he’ [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] ‘did not seek to defend.
“It is almost decent,” said he; “the sisters will
make that all right when we get them here.”’ And yet
I gathered it was already better since Damien was dead, and far better
than when he was there alone and had his own (not always excellent)
way. I have now come far enough to meet you on a common ground
of fact; and I tell you that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy,
all the reforms of the lazaretto, and even those which he most vigorously
opposed, are properly the work of Damien. They are the evidence
of his success; they are what his heroism provoked from the reluctant
and the careless. Many were before him in the field; Mr. Meyer,
for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little: there have
been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had more
devotion, than our saint. Before his day, even you will confess,
they had effected little. It was his part, by one striking act
of martyrdom, to direct all men’s eyes on that distressful country.
At a blow, and with the price of his life, he made the place illustrious
and public. And that, if you will consider largely, was the one
reform needful; pregnant of all that should succeed. It brought
money; it brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters;
it brought supervision, for public opinion and public interest landed
with the man at Kalawao. If ever any man brought reforms, and
died to bring them, it was he. There is not a clean cup or towel
in the Bishop-Home, but dirty Damien washed it.<br>
<br>
Damien <i>was not a pure man in his relations with</i> <i>women, etc.<br>
<br>
</i>How do you know that? Is this the nature of the conversation
in that house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?
- racy details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling
under the cliffs of Molokai?<br>
<br>
Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard
the rumour. When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for
my informants were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and
I heard plenty of complaints of Damien. Why was this never mentioned?
and how came it to you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?<br>
<br>
But I must not even seem to deceive you. This scandal, when I
read it in your letter, was not new to me. I had heard it once
before; and I must tell you how. There came to Samoa a man from
Honolulu; he, in a public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement
that Damien had ‘contracted the disease from having connection
with the female lepers’; and I find a joy in telling you how the
report was welcomed in a public-house. A man sprang to his feet;
I am not at liberty to give his name, but from what I heard I doubt
if you would care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street. ‘You
miserable little - ’ (here is a word I dare not print, it would
so shock your ears). ‘You miserable little - ,’ he
cried, ‘if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you
see you are a million times a lower - for daring to repeat it?’
I wish it could be told of you that when the report reached you in your
house, perhaps after family worship, you had found in your soul enough
holy anger to receive it with the same expressions; ay, even with that
one which I dare not print; it would not need to have been blotted away,
like Uncle Toby’s oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it
would have been counted to you for your brightest righteousness.
But you have deliberately chosen the part of the man from Honolulu,
and you have played it with improvements of your own. The man
from Honolulu - miserable, leering creature - communicated the tale
to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I
will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always at
his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been drinking - drinking,
we may charitably fancy, to excess. It was to your ‘Dear
Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,’ that you chose to communicate
the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom
forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were drunk when
it was done. Your ‘dear brother’ - a brother indeed
- made haste to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps)
to the religious papers; where, after many months, I found and read
and wondered at it; and whence I have now reproduced it for the wonder
of others. And you and your dear brother have, by this cycle of
operations, built up a contrast very edifying to examine in detail.
The man whom you would not care to have to dinner, on the one side;
on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and the Reverend H. B. Gage: the
Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.<br>
<br>
But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men;
and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.
I will suppose - and God forgive me for supposing it - that Damien faltered
and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the
horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease,
he, who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter
of his priestly oath - he, who was so much a better man than either
you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of daring - he too tasted
of our common frailty. ‘O, Iago, the pity of it!’
The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer.
And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H.
B. Gage!<br>
<br>
Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your
own heart? I will try yet once again to make it clearer.
You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant
brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate
of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance?
that you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed
the author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would
be to publish it in the religious press? Well, the man who tried
to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the
Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father
too, if God had given you grace to see it.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE PENTLAND RISING<br>
A PAGE OF HISTORY<br>
1666<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘A cloud of witnesses lyes here,<br>
Who for Christ’s interest did appear.’<br>
<i>Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green</i>.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,<br>
This tomb doth show for what some men did die.’<br>
<i>Monument, Greyfriars’ Churchyard, Edinburgh,<br>
</i>1661-1668. <a name="citation2a"></a><a href="#footnote2a">{2a}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies
which followed it. It is, as it were, the evening of the night
of persecution - a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as
the noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed.
This fact, of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it,
however, an additional interest.<br>
<br>
The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were ‘out of measure
increased,’ says Bishop Burnet, ‘by the new incumbents who
were put in the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally
very mean and despicable in all respects. They were the worst
preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of
them were openly vicious. They . . . were indeed the dreg and
refuse of the northern parts. Those of them who arose above contempt
or scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were as much hated
as the others were despised.’ <a name="citation2b"></a><a href="#footnote2b">{2b}</a>
It was little to be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk
refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
ministers in the fields. But this was not to be allowed, and their
persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the parishioners’
names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty shillings Scots to
the name of each absenter. In this way very large debts were incurred
by persons altogether unable to pay. Besides this, landlords were
fined for their tenants’ absences, tenants for their landlords’,
masters for their servants’, servants for their masters’,
even though they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance.
And as the curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common
soldier, it may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very
sufficient nor well proven.<br>
<br>
When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household
utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to
his wealth, were quartered on the offender. The coarse and drunken
privates filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children
to feed their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and
blasphemed the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced
them to destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree
which was consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home. For
all this attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling
landlord a certain sum of money per day - three shillings sterling,
according to <i>Naphtali</i>. And frequently they were forced
to pay quartering money for more men than were in reality ‘cessed
on them.’ At that time it was no strange thing to behold
a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who
were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other way,
were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from arrest and
imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. <a name="citation2c"></a><a href="#footnote2c">{2c}</a><br>
<br>
One example in particular we may cite:<br>
<br>
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately
for himself, a Nonconformist. First he was fined in four hundred
pounds Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and
ninety-three pounds Scots. He was next obliged to leave his house
and flee from place to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse.
His wife and children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants
were fined till they too were almost ruined. As a final stroke,
they drove away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them. <a name="citation2d"></a><a href="#footnote2d">{2d}</a>
Surely it was time that something were done to alleviate so much sorrow,
to overthrow such tyranny.<br>
<br>
About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself
Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt. He displayed
some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and stating
that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by their
southern brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter.
‘He was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that
was very often,’ said Bishop Burnet. ‘He was a learned
man, but had always been in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey
orders. He told me he had no regard to any law, but acted, as
he was commanded, in a military way.’ <a name="citation2e"></a><a href="#footnote2e">{2e}</a><br>
<br>
This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave
spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame
of insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who
perpetrated it with redoubled force.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNING<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
I love no warres,<br>
I love no jarres,<br>
Nor strife’s fire.<br>
May discord cease,<br>
Let’s live in peace:<br>
This I desire.<br>
<br>
If it must be<br>
Warre we must see<br>
(So fates conspire),<br>
May we not feel<br>
The force of steel:<br>
This I desire.<br>
<br>
T. JACKSON, 1651 <a name="citation3a"></a><a href="#footnote3a">{3a}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and demanded
the payment of his fines. On the old man’s refusing to pay,
they forced a large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh
his corn. The field was a certain distance out of the clachan,
and four persons, disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors
all night, met this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four
soldiers to work for the ruin of their friend. However, chided
to the bone by their night on the hills, and worn out by want of food,
they proceeded to the village inn to refresh themselves. Suddenly
some people rushed into the room where they were sitting, and told them
that the soldiers were about to roast the old man, naked, on his own
girdle. This was too much for them to stand, and they repaired
immediately to the scene of this gross outrage, and at first merely
requested that the captive should be released. On the refusal
of the two soldiers who were in the front room, high words were given
and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed forth from an adjoining
chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn swords. One of the
latter, John M’Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and shot the corporal
in the body. The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded,
to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturbed
that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long afterwards
a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.
The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
and the rebellion was commenced. <a name="citation3b"></a><a href="#footnote3b">{3b}</a><br>
<br>
And now we must turn to Sir James Turner’s memoirs of himself;
for, strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary
composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own adventures
just mentioned, a large number of essays and short biographies, and
a work on war, entitled <i>Pallas Armata</i>. The following are
some of the shorter pieces ‘Magick,’ ‘Friendship,’
‘Imprisonment,’ ‘Anger,’ ‘Revenge,’
‘Duells,’ ‘Cruelty,’ ‘A Defence of some
of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie - to wit - Bowing at the Name
of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and Good
Lord deliver us, Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Canonnicall
Coats,’ etc. From what we know of his character we should
expect ‘Anger’ and ‘Cruelty’ to be very full
and instructive. But what earthly right he had to meddle with
ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.<br>
<br>
Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning
Gray’s proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its
character, he paid no attention to it. On the evening of the 14th,
Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that
he had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant - a story rendered
singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James
instantly dispatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to
Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dalry, and commanded the thirteen
or fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to
his lodging for supplies.<br>
<br>
On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse
and 150 foot. Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with
a considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner’s
lodging. Though it was between eight and nine o’clock, that
worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to
the window.<br>
<br>
Neilson and some others cried, ‘You may have fair quarter.’<br>
<br>
‘I need no quarter,’ replied Sir James; ‘nor can I
be a prisoner, seeing there is no war declared.’ On being
told, however, that he must either be a prisoner or die, he came down,
and went into the street in his night-shirt. Here Gray showed
himself very desirous of killing him, but he was overruled by Corsack.
However, he was taken away a prisoner, Captain Gray mounting him on
his own horse, though, as Turner naively remarks, ‘there was good
reason for it, for he mounted himself on a farre better one of mine.’
A large coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all his
papers, were taken away by the rebels. They robbed Master Chalmers,
the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse, drank the King’s
health at the market cross, and then left Dumfries. <a name="citation3c"></a><a href="#footnote3c">{3c}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III - THE MARCH OF THE REBELS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,<br>
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;<br>
Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,<br>
Because with them we signed the Covenant.’<br>
<i>Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton</i>. <a name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a">{4a}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at
Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this ‘horrid rebellion.’
In the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided - much to the wrath of some
members; and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures
were most energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the
guards round the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced
to take the oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give
in their names. Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,
trembled - trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him
from his chariot on Magus Muir, - for he knew how he had sold his trust,
how he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts
be forged. But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was
unrelenting, unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise
of pardon, no inducement to submission. He said, ‘If you
submit not you must die,’ but never added, ‘If you submit
you may live!’ <a name="citation4b"></a><a href="#footnote4b">{4b}</a><br>
<br>
Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At Carsphairn
they were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion,
neglected to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James’s
money. Who he was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his
papers were evidently forgeries - that, and his final flight, appear
to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the King
or the Duke of York was heard to say, ‘That, if he might have
his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms.’
<a name="citation4c"></a><a href="#footnote4c">{4c}</a><br>
<br>
Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.<br>
<br>
Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at
the best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits
were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force.
In his description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric
severity, admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying
souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake,
or folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He appears,
notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his
cruel ‘phanaticks,’ as the following extract sufficiently
proves:<br>
<br>
‘Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard,
and order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached
by Mr. Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major M’Cullough invited
me to heare “that phanatick sermon” (for soe they merrilie
called it). They said that preaching might prove an effectual
meane to turne me, which they heartilie wished. I answered to
them that I was under guards, and that if they intended to heare that
sermon, it was probable I might likewise, for it was not like my guards
wold goe to church and leave me alone at my lodgeings. Bot to
what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a Turner.
Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I said, if I did not come
to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine me in fortie shillings
Scots, which was double the suome of what I had exacted from the phanatics.’
<a name="citation4d"></a><a href="#footnote4d">{4d}</a><br>
<br>
This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The
following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly,
if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and
how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement;
nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with impartiality all
the alleged facts to the reader:<br>
<br>
‘Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a
visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse
it. It fell Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one
of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard in my life. He
summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for
that was his language). “And if,” said he, “thou
wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for thee at all, for it
is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not fight for our cause
and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight for it. They
say,” said he, “that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming
with the King’s General against us, bot they shall be nothing
bot a threshing to us.” This grace did more fullie satisfie
me of the folly and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench
my thirst.’ <a name="citation4e"></a><a href="#footnote4e">{4e}</a><br>
<br>
Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in
some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command,
would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either
into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him
from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He was,
at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted
to behold their evolutions. ‘I found their horse did consist
of four hundreth and fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and upwards.
. . . The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and pistoll,
some onlie with suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe),
forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long.’
He admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how
they had attained to it in so short a time. <a name="citation4f"></a><a href="#footnote4f">{4f}</a><br>
<br>
At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great wapinshaw,
they were charged - awful picture of depravity! - with the theft of
a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while
the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a
rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues - that among a
thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be
one Achan in the camp? At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and
signed by the chief rebels. In it occurs the following:<br>
<br>
‘The just sense whereof ’ - the sufferings of the country
- ‘made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for
self-defence, than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities
of others, and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.’
<a name="citation4g"></a><a href="#footnote4g">{4g}</a><br>
<br>
The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph
at the head of this chapter seems to refer.<br>
<br>
A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate,
where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped.
But at twelve o’clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet,
of ‘Horse! horse!’ and ‘Mount the prisoner!’
resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from
their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march. The wind
howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.
Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees
in mire, onward they marched to destruction. One by one the weary
peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked
moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak.
One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every
shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed
to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right
and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor,
and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky
night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept
together - a miserable few - often halted to rest themselves, and to
allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they
went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies;
onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness - onward
to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.
It was calculated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous
night-march.<br>
<br>
Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from Edinburgh,
where they halted for the last time. <a name="citation4h"></a><a href="#footnote4h">{4h}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER IV - RULLION GREEN<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘From Covenanters with uplifted hands,<br>
From Remonstrators with associate bands,<br>
Good Lord, deliver us!’<br>
<i>Royalist Rhyme</i>, KIRKTON, p. 127.<br>
<br>
<br>
Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, and within
that distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they
discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in
a blood-stained winding-sheet. <a name="citation5a"></a><a href="#footnote5a">{5a}</a>
Many thought that this apparition was a portent of the deaths connected
with the Pentland Rising.<br>
<br>
On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left Colinton
and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset.
The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery
spur of the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow
band of flat marshy ground. On the highest of the two mounds -
that nearest the Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body -
was the greater part of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other
Barscob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace
and the weak, half-armed infantry. Their position was further
strengthened by the depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like
course of the Rullion Burn.<br>
<br>
The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich
plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled
trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance. To the
south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken;
the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its
gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness
in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth,
that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that peaceful
evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their defeat; and
when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head from the
blood-stained heather to strive with darkening eyeballs to behold that
landscape, over which, as over his life and his cause, the shadows of
night and of gloom were falling and thickening.<br>
<br>
It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was raised:
‘The enemy! Here come the enemy!’<br>
<br>
Unwilling to believe their own doom - for our insurgents still hoped
for success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on
at Colinton - they called out, ‘They are some of our own.’<br>
<br>
‘They are too blacke ‘ (<i>i.e</i>. numerous), ‘fie!
fie! for ground to draw up on,’ cried Wallace, fully realising
the want of space for his men, and proving that it was not till after
this time that his forces were finally arranged. <a name="citation5b"></a><a href="#footnote5b">{5b}</a><br>
<br>
First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent obliquely
across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels. An equal
number of Learmont’s men met them, and, after a struggle, drove
them back. The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all
pursuit, and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot to
occupy both the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side.<br>
<br>
Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the
hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then dispatched a
mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace’s outpost,
but they also were driven back. A third charge produced a still
more disastrous effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his
men by a reinforcement.<br>
<br>
These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General’s
ranks, for several of his men flung down their arms. Urged by
such fatal symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men,
and closed in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of
the insurgent army. In the increasing twilight the burning matches
of the firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to
the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant
breathing flame into the darkness.<br>
<br>
Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, ‘The
God of Jacob! The God of Jacob!’ and prayed with uplifted hands
for victory. <a name="citation5c"></a><a href="#footnote5c">{5c}</a><br>
<br>
But still the Royalist troops closed in.<br>
<br>
Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture
him with his own hands. Accordingly he charged forward, presenting
his pistols. Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell’s
buff coat and fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar
to his age, the Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered
bullet-proof by enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from
his pocket, charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this,
and supposing, it is likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls,
hid behind his servant, who was killed. <a name="citation5d"></a><a href="#footnote5d">{5d}</a><br>
<br>
Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped
in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor - tightening, closing, crushing
every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils.
The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though,
as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight
was the result.<br>
<br>
But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the
death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed themselves for the
peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay
bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they were
buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their
graves, and cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value
of their winding-sheets!<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>Inscription on stone at Rullion Green:<br>
<br>
<br>
</i>HERE<br>
AND NEAR TO<br>
THIS PLACE LYES THE<br>
REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK<br>
AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK<br>
MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND<br>
ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED<br>
PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE<br>
KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN<br>
INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE<br>
OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF<br>
REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS<br>
UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER<br>
1666. REV. 12. 11. ERECTED<br>
SEPT. 28 1738.<br>
<br>
<br>
<i>Back of stone:<br>
<br>
<br>
</i>A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,<br>
Who for Christ’s Interest did appear,<br>
For to restore true Liberty,<br>
O’erturnèd then by tyranny.<br>
And by proud Prelats who did Rage<br>
Against the Lord’s Own heritage.<br>
They sacrificed were for the laws<br>
Of Christ their king, his noble cause.<br>
These heroes fought with great renown;<br>
By falling got the Martyr’s crown. <a name="citation5e"></a><a href="#footnote5e">{5e}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER V - A RECORD OF BLOOD<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘They cut his hands ere he was dead,<br>
And after that struck of his head.<br>
His blood under the altar cries<br>
For vengeance on Christ’s enemies.’<br>
<i>Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont</i>. <a name="citation6a"></a><a href="#footnote6a">{6a}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow,
on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the
march of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With
colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered
Edinburgh. But his banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners
were marched within his ranks. The old man knew it all.
That martial and triumphant strain was the death-knell of his friends
and of their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were the tokens
of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were the miserable
remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the scaffold.
Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he lived longer he
would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he would have
seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than midnight
darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim to those bloody
persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the sea by many
a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was spared to him -
he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion
Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to is fathers. <a name="citation6b"></a><a href="#footnote6b">{6b}</a><br>
<br>
When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander
Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. Disliking
their occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it. All
the night through they kept up a continuous series of ‘alarms
and incursions,’ ‘cries of “Stand!” “Give
fire!”’ etc., which forced the prelate to flee to the Castle
in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was denied him at
home. <a name="citation6c"></a><a href="#footnote6c">{6c}</a>
Now, however, when all danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out in
his true colours, and scant was the justice likely to be shown to the
foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by. The prisoners
were lodged in Haddo’s Hole, a part of St. Giles’ Cathedral,
where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it spoken,
they were amply supplied with food. <a name="citation6d"></a><a href="#footnote6d">{6d}</a><br>
<br>
Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which
had been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the
miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no
opinion - certainly a suggestive circumstance - but Lord Lee declared
that this would not interfere with their legal trial, ‘so to bloody
executions they went.’ <a name="citation6e"></a><a href="#footnote6e">{6e}</a>
To the number of thirty they were condemned and executed; while two
of them, Hugh M’Kail, a young minister, and Neilson of Corsack,
were tortured with the boots.<br>
<br>
The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were
dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; ‘the
heads of Major M’Culloch and the two Gordons,’ it was resolved,
says Kirkton, ‘should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright;
the two Hamiltons and Strong’s head should be affixed at Hamilton,
and Captain Arnot’s sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh.
The armes of all the ten, because they hade with uplifted hands renewed
the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the people of that town to expiate
that crime, by placing these arms on the top of the prison.’ <a name="citation6f"></a><a href="#footnote6f">{6f}</a>
Among these was John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner’s
life at Dumfries; in return for which service Sir James attempted, though
without success, to get the poor man reprieved. One of the condemned
died of his wounds between the day of condemnation and the day of execution.
‘ None of them,’ says Kirkton, ‘would save their life
by taking the declaration and renouncing the Covenant, though it was
offered to them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much lamented
by the people, not only spectators, but those in the country.
When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they clasped each
other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death. When
Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian experiences,
and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John
iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But most of
all, when Mr. M’Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was
never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street,
or in all the numberless windows in the mercate place.’ <a name="citation6g"></a><a href="#footnote6g">{6g}</a><br>
<br>
The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:<br>
<br>
‘Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on
the world’s consolations. Farewell to all my friends, whose
company hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have done
with the light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal
life, everlasting love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory.
Praise to Him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever!
Bless the Lord, O my soul, that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the
blood of His Son, and healed all my diseases. Bless Him, O all
ye His angels that excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His
pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my soul!’ <a name="citation6h"></a><a href="#footnote6h">{6h}</a><br>
<br>
After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the
following words of touching eloquence: ‘And now I leave off to
speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which
shall never be broken off. Farewell father and mother, friends
and relations! Farewell the world and all delights! Farewell
meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and stars! - Welcome God and
Father! Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!
Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation! Welcome
glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!’ <a name="citation6i"></a><a href="#footnote6i">{6i}</a><br>
<br>
At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers
to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears.
Hideous refinement of revenge! Even the last words which drop
from the lips of a dying man - words surely the most sincere and the
most unbiassed which mortal mouth can utter - even these were looked
upon as poisoned and as poisonous. ‘Drown their last accents,’
was the cry, ‘lest they should lead the crowd to take their part,
or at the least to mourn their doom!’ <a name="citation6j"></a><a href="#footnote6j">{6j}</a>
But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would think -
unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and fiercely
jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and
the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the last they
heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river
of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels,
tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.<br>
<br>
Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the peasantry,
though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian, pursued, captured,
plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who fell in their way.
One strange story have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton
the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame which often
would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath, of some of those
poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it covered the
house of their murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare.<br>
<br>
Hear Daniel Defoe: <a name="citation6k"></a><a href="#footnote6k">{6k}</a><br>
<br>
‘If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who
can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God “That
oppression makes a wise man mad”? And therefore were there
no other original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising
of Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of
those times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated
to all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked
in a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God,
or the laws of the country.’<br>
<br>
Bear this remonstrance of Defoe’s in mind, and though it is the
fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn,
the noble band of Covenanters - though the bitter laugh at their old-world
religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling
silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through
all society - be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was
good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty,
for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two
hundred years ago.<br>
<br>
<br>
EDINBURGH, <i>28th November 1866</i>.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt
correctly; and rival historians expose each other’s blunders with
gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the
period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which
we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand
reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and
multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious
shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but
not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself
steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying
on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments;
so that what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a
flying island of Laputa. It is for this reason in particular that
we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would
not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing
supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our
individualist Jericho - but to the stealthy change that has come over
the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation. A little while
ago, and we were still for liberty; ‘crowd a few more thousands
on the bench of Government,’ we seemed to cry; ‘keep her
head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.’
This is over; <i>laisser faire</i> declines in favour; our legislation
grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties
and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book
in hand, to darken the face of England. It may be right or wrong,
we are not trying that; but one thing it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism
in action, and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it.<br>
<br>
Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new altars.
Like all other principles, she has been proved to be self-exclusive
in the long run. She has taken wages besides (like all other virtues)
and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were accustomed
to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were truly benefits
of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours’ poverty.
A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic phrase)
of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or shipowners may imply
for operatives, tenants, or seamen, and we not unnaturally begin to
turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny. Freedom,
to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the
free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of
yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed,
ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to
their mines and workshops by the lash of famine. So much, in other
men’s affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to
despair of virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament
begin to discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors.
The landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those who
do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner;
the professions look askance upon the retail traders and have even started
their co-operative stores to ruin them; and from out the smoke-wreaths
of Birmingham a finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation
of the landlord. Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn each other,
and yet not perceive the conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat
damnable. Thus, piece by piece, each acting against his neighbour,
each sawing away the branch on which some other interest is seated,
do we apply in detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive
that we are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large.
A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and
if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance
that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of
existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human
polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr.
Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement
of the political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undisturbed,
the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr. Hyndman were a man of
keen humour, which is far from my conception of his character, he might
rest from his troubling and look on: the walls of Jericho begin already
to crumble and dissolve. That great servile war, the Armageddon
of money and numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes
more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and
blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political tactics
and dead to political results.<br>
<br>
The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of
Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution
(if it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the state of Parliament
is not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the
future. Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed
of it. We may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of
Irish obstruction - a bitter trial, which it supports with notable good
humour. But the excuse is merely local; it cannot apply to similar
bodies in America and France; and what are we to say of these?
President Cleveland’s letter may serve as a picture of the one;
a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the
other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government
in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to
it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs
to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself
our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our
own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot
trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;
and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours,
pretty much at random, and say to these: ‘Be ye our conscience;
make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them
so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous
and happy, world without end. Amen.’ And who can look
twice at the British Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task?
I am not advancing this as an argument against Socialism: once again,
nothing is further from my mind. There are great truths in Socialism,
or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it
came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one should make
it welcome. But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion
of what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our new
polity will be designed and administered (to put it courteously) with
something short of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow,
in a human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely change
is human nature. The Anarchists think otherwise, from which it
is only plain that they have not carried to the study of history the
lamp of human sympathy.<br>
<br>
Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
headmarks must we look for in the life? We chafe a good deal at
that excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs
the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official.
The official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many
of us. I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable
in any other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember in
my dreams the eye-glass of a certain <i>attaché</i> at a certain
embassy - an eyeglass that was a standing indignity to all on whom it
looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican
postman in the city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among
working folk, and what my neighbours accepted at the postman’s
hands - nay, what I took from him myself - it is still distasteful to
recall. The bourgeois, residing in the upper parts of society,
has but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl; but about the
income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about a patent, or in the halls
of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally
sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty
of imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it tastes
to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs. In every
contact with authority, with their employer, with the police, with the
School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have
equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the
man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces
of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be appreciated. Well,
this golden age of which we are speaking will be the golden age of officials.
In all our concerns it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what
tact, with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine.
It is likely these gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will
therefore have their turn of being underneath, which does not always
sweeten men’s conditions. The laws they will have to administer
will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is
to regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament.
So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling
to the blood - servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the
slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office. And if the
Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall
have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as
a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable - the newspaper.
For the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition;
it stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the
abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken
its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on
private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.
State railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.<br>
<br>
But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime would
perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would
pass away. But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness,
there would be more contraventions. We see already new sins ringing
up like mustard - School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping
Act sins - none of which I would be thought to except against in particular,
but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard
master even in the beginning. If it go on to such heights as we
hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap,
ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out
of all proportion multiplied. Take the case of work alone.
Man is an idle animal. He is at least as intelligent as the ant;
but generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the ant’s
example. Of those who are found truly indefatigable in business,
some are misers; some are the practisers of delightful industries, like
gardening; some are students, artists, inventors, or discoverers, men
lured forward by successive hopes; and the rest are those who live by
games of skill or hazard - financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and
the like. But in unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity,
no man is continually sedulous. Once eliminate the fear of starvation,
once eliminate or bound the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty
of skulking and malingering. Society will then be something not
wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless,
demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter,
a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be purposeful and the
soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap,
with full granaries and long hours of leisure. But even then I
think the whip will be in the overseer’s hands, and not in vain.
For, when it comes to be a question of each man doing his own share
or the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will be forgotten.
To dock the skulker’s food is not enough; many will rather eat
haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their shoulder to the wheel
for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the whip will be
in the overseer’s hand; and his own sense of justice and the superintendence
of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only checks on its employment.
Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love,
nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector. It is admitted by
private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to
be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you
will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the sergeant can
no longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we shall
see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector.<br>
<br>
This for the unfortunate. But with the fortunate also, even those
whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well. It is
concluded that in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially
sound, the level of comfort will be high. It does not follow:
there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency,
as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all
besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may
sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy
instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should
respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by
the new conditions, the whole enterprise to be financially sound - a
vaulting supposition - and all the inhabitants to dwell together in
a golden mean of comfort: we have yet to ask ourselves if this be what
man desire, or if it be what man will even deign to accept for a continuance.
It is certain that man loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves
that only or that best. He is supposed to love comfort; it is
not a love, at least, that he is faithful to. He is supposed to
love happiness; it is my contention that he rather loves excitement.
Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man
than regular meals. He does not think so when he is hungry, but
he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the hypothesis of a
successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry. It would be always
after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos-eaters, it
was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important,
drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite of
living.<br>
<br>
That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor
in all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what he must
have is that which will seize and hold his attention. Regular
meals and weatherproof lodgings will not do this long. Play in
its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including
all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of
himself; but in the end he wearies for realities. Study or experiment,
to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of a life. These
are enviable natures; people shut in the house by sickness often bitterly
envy them; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes:
his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers,
pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot
continue to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them
on the breathing stage of life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of
hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles:
these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they
seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations.
When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry,
‘Catch me here again!’ and sure enough you catch them there
again - perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as <i>Robinson
Crusoe</i>; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for
all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection,
to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its
fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the
bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits
in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any
vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns. If the people
in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed,
but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his
views of the world brighter. If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the
publishers, should have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin, it
would not occur to him - at least for several hours - to ask if life
were worth living; and if such peril were a daily matter, he would ask
it never more; he would have other things to think about, he would be
living indeed - not lying in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably
dull. The aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown
- whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence - that is what
I conceive men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to exclude
from men’s existences. Of all forms of the aleatory, that
which most commonly attends our working men - the danger of misery from
want of work - is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the blood,
it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive;
and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching
them, it does truly season the men’s lives. Of those who
fail, I do not speak - despair should be sacred; but to those who even
modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest: a job found,
a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing
afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but from the
villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of life.
Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this new
state of life, they would also lose a certain something, which would
not be missed in the beginning, but would be missed progressively and
progressively lamented. Soon there would be a looking back: there
would be tales of the old world humming in young men’s ears, tales
of the tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant. And in
the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap - with its regular meals,
regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear
excluded - the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem
of epic breadth. This may seem a shallow observation; but the
springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface. Bread,
I believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes close
upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry for
circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants be such
as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures on which they
will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of intrigue and of sedition.<br>
<br>
In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.
I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know
one thing that bears on the economic question - I know the imperfection
of man’s faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count
some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic
errors, have said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and
condemned beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious
that they are right; they may be right also in predicting a period of
communal independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable.
But the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality,
just when we were told it was beginning. Communes will not be
all equal in extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population;
nor will the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It
will be the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit;
and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant
and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune;
it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures
worsted in the market. And all the more dangerous that the sovereign
power should be small. Great powers are slow to stir; national
affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular
consciousness; national losses are so unequally shared, that one part
of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a
cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised
and sensitive. When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the
commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation
will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in Dorchester
will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress; even the secretary,
who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered,
as a man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a
business difference between communes will take on much the same colour
as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly
to the arbitrament of blows. So that the establishment of the
communal system will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings
of economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate
a world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne
on Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they
follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will
go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad
literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the
victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At least
this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such
a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly
suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
COLLEGE PAPERS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the <i>Lapsus
Linguae</i>; <i>or, the College Tatler</i>; and on the 7th the first
number appeared. On Friday the 2nd of April ‘<i>Mr. Tatler</i>
became speechless.’ Its history was not all one success;
for the editor (who applies to himself the words of Iago, ‘I am
nothing if I am not critical’) overstepped the bounds of caution,
and found himself seriously embroiled with the powers that were.
There appeared in No. XVI. a most bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie,
in which he was compared to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself,
and very prettily censured for publishing only the first volume of a
class-book, and making all purchasers pay for both. Sir John Leslie
took up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the publisher, and threatened
him with an action, till he was forced to turn the hapless <i>Lapsus</i>
out of doors. The maltreated periodical found shelter in the shop
of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was duly issued from the new
office. No. XVII. beheld <i>Mr. Tatler’s</i> humiliation,
in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible assurances of respect
and admiration, he disclaims the article in question, and advertises
a new issue of No. XVI. with all objectionable matter omitted.
This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in a later advertisement, ‘a
new and improved edition.’ This was the only remarkable
adventure of <i>Mr. Tatler’s</i> brief existence; unless we consider
as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation of <i>Blackwood</i>,
and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on the impiety of the
same dull effusion. He laments the near approach of his end in
pathetic terms. ‘How shall we summon up sufficient courage,’
says he, ‘to look for the last time on our beloved little devil
and his inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able to pass
No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its attractions are over?
How shall we bid farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long
greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative
at the gate of <i>Alma Mater</i>?’ But alas! he had no choice:
<i>Mr. Tatler</i>, whose career, he says himself, had been successful,
passed peacefully away, and has ever since dumbly implored ‘the
bringing home of bell and burial.’<br>
<br>
<i>Alter et idem</i>. A very different affair was the <i>Lapsus</i>
<i>Linguae</i> from the <i>Edinburgh</i> <i>University Magazine</i>.
The two prospectuses alone, laid side by side, would indicate the march
of luxury and the repeal of the paper duty. The penny bi-weekly
broadside of session 1828-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus.
Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses, and University grievances
are the continual burthen of the song. But <i>Mr. Tatler</i> was
not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much
better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it then was.
The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in
the class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and ‘Carriage Entrance’ was posted above the main arch,
on what the writer pleases to call ‘coarse, unclassic boards.’
The benches of the ‘Speculative’ then, as now, were red;
but all other Societies (the ‘Dialectic’ is the only survivor)
met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said that ‘nothing
else could conveniently be made of them.’ However horrible
these dungeons may have been, it is certain that they were paid for,
and that far too heavily for the taste of session 1823-4, which found
enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted cheese at Ambrose’s,
or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull’s. Duelling
was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell to fisticuffs
in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat would be
the result. Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
were in every one’s mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted
Byron’s poetry and Scott’s novels, informed the ladies of
his belief in phrenology. In the present day he would dilate on
‘Red as a rose is she,’ and then mention that he attends
Old Greyfriars’, as a tacit claim to intellectual superiority.
I do not know that the advance is much.<br>
<br>
But <i>Mr. Tatler’s</i> best performances were three short papers
in which he hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the ‘<i>Divinity</i>,’
the ‘<i>Medical</i>,’ and the ‘<i>Law</i>’ of
session 1823-4. The fact that there was no notice of the <i>‘Arts’</i>
seems to suggest that they stood in the same intermediate position as
they do now - the epitome of student-kind. <i>Mr. Tatler’s</i>
satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown superannuated
in <i>all</i> its limbs. His descriptions may limp at some points,
but there are certain broad traits that apply equally well to session
1870-1. He shows us the <i>Divinity</i> of the period - tall,
pale, and slender - his collar greasy, and his coat bare about the seams
- ‘his white neckcloth serving four days, and regularly turned
the third’ - ‘the rim of his hat deficient in wool’
- and ‘a weighty volume of theology under his arm.’
He was the man to buy cheap ‘a snuff-box, or a dozen of pencils,
or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred quills,’ at any
of the public sale-rooms. He was noted for cheap purchases, and
for exceeding the legal tender in halfpence. He haunted ‘the
darkest and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery.’ He
was to be seen issuing from ‘aerial lodging-houses.’
Withal, says mine author, ‘there were many good points about him:
he paid his landlady’s bill, read his Bible, went twice to church
on Sunday, seldom swore, was not often tipsy, and bought the <i>Lapsus
Linguae</i>.’<br>
<br>
The <i>Medical</i>, again, ‘wore a white greatcoat, and consequently
talked loud’ - (there is something very delicious in that <i>consequently</i>).
He wore his hat on one side. He was active, volatile, and went
to the top of Arthur’s Seat on the Sunday forenoon. He was
as quiet in a debating society as he was loud in the streets.
He was reckless and imprudent: yesterday he insisted on your sharing
a bottle of claret with him (and claret was claret then, before the
cheap-and-nasty treaty), and to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a
penny to buy the last number of the <i>Lapsus.<br>
<br>
</i>The student of <i>Law</i>, again, was a learned man. ‘He
had turned over the leaves of Justinian’s <i>Institutes</i>, and
knew that they were written in Latin. He was well acquainted with
the title-page of Blackstone’s <i>Commentaries</i>, and <i>argal</i>
(as the gravedigger in <i>Hamlet</i> says) he was not a person to be
laughed at.’ He attended the Parliament House in the character
of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers.
He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic.
In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled. Even in
the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.
‘If a <i>Charlie</i> should find him rather noisy at an untimely
hour, and venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning
like a Daniel come to judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and
the divine precepts of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his
tongue. The magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him only
a couple of guineas.’<br>
<br>
Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine. Barclay,
Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Café,
the Rainbow, and Rutherford’s are to us. An hour’s
reading in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much
that is similar and so much that is different; the follies and amusements
are so like our own, and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so
changed, that one pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment.
The muddy quadrangle is thick with living students; but in our eyes
it swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats
of 1824. Two races meet: races alike and diverse. Two performances
are played before our eyes; but the change seems merely of impersonators,
of scenery, of costume. Plot and passion are the same. It
is the fall of the spun shilling whether seventy-one or twenty-four
has the best of it.<br>
<br>
In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of
the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail - whether
we or the readers of the <i>Lapsus</i> stand higher in the balance.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II - THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
We have now reached the difficult portion of our task. <i>Mr.
Tatler</i>, for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked
about the students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred
selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities,
let such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots
Law or the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the
dark quadrangle. We confess that this idea alarms us. We
enter a protest. We bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace.
We hope, moreover, that having thus made you secret to our misgivings,
you will excuse us if we be dull, and set that down to caution which
you might before have charged to the account of stupidity.<br>
<br>
The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions
which are the best salt of life. All the fine old professional
flavour in language has evaporated. Your very gravedigger has
forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the
Franchise over Ophelia’s grave, instead of more appropriately
discussing the duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency,
from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and
characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to
slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this,
we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join <i>Mr. Taller</i>
in his simple division of students into <i>Law, Divinity</i>, and <i>Medical</i>.
Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like
Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in <i>Love for Love</i>) they may stand
in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying: ‘Sister, Sister
- Sister everyway!’ A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
influence the followers of individual branches of study. The Divinity,
for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present
day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he
is fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox
bolus. Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it
is even a credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His
own authority. Others again (and this we think the worst method),
finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy
as a proof of independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that
they may hold the others without being laughed at.<br>
<br>
Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more distinction
between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed down through
a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more featureless
at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has descended
on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions
of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck
on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare’s theatre.
And in the midst of all this weary sameness, not the least common feature
is the gravity of every face. No more does the merry medical run
eagerly in the clear winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur’s
Seat, and hear the church bells begin and thicken and die away below
him among the gathered smoke of the city. He will not break Sunday
to so little purpose. He no longer finds pleasure in the mere
output of his surplus energy. He husbands his strength, and lays
out walks, and reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so that
he may get as much work and pleasure out of his body as he can, and
waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such flat enjoyment as
an excursion in the country.<br>
<br>
See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three
minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit
that, if we have not made it ‘an habitation of dragons,’
we have at least transformed it into ‘a court for owls.’
Solemnity broods heavily over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it,
you will find a dearth of merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment.
You might as well try<br>
<br>
<br>
‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death’<br>
<br>
<br>
as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.<br>
<br>
The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes, debating
the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books. A reserved
rivalry sunders them. Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,
others are already inhabitants of that land<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Where entity and quiddity,<br>
‘Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly -<br>
Where Truth in person does appear<br>
Like words congealed in northern air.’<br>
<br>
<br>
But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies - no pedantic
love of this subject or that lights up their eyes - science and learning
are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced
and which they solemnly pursue. ‘Labour’s pale priests,’
their lips seem incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition
of professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre
fingers. They walk like Saul among the asses.<br>
<br>
The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial
- a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices - strangely different
from the stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are
out of their element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains
of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young
men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty
retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes Street.
Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful obligation, which
they perform on every occasion in the same chill official manner, and
with the same commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater
than they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed
in a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course, for ourselves;
but we would as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with
these gloomy modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines,
even our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more
amusing!<br>
<br>
Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,
is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse seriousness,
a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have surprised the
simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see gravely
conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other.
Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of depravity;
and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression,
and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement.
These folk form a freemasonry of their own. An oath is the shibboleth
of their sinister fellowship. Once they hear a man swear, it is
wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful spirits take enlargement,
under the consciousness of brotherhood. There is no folly, no
pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as steady-going and
systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.<br>
<br>
Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful
to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet
in the ‘College Anthem’ have beguiled so many weary hours
and added a pleasant variety to the strain of close attention.
But even these are too evidently professional in their antics.
They go about cogitating puns and inventing tricks. It is their
vocation, Hal. They are the gratuitous jesters of the class-room;
and, like the clown when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often
sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by
the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh gambols for
the morrow.<br>
<br>
This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by
too many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one
pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced.
We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of <i>University
feeling</i> which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.
Academical interests are so few and far between - students, as students,
have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry - there is such an
entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college friendships,
that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.
Our system is full of anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he was a
shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory
for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let
there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this
shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
ourselves and the College bettered. Let it be a sufficient reason
for intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches.
Let the great A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes
Street, if he can say, ‘That fellow is a student.’
Once this could be brought about, we think you would find the whole
heart of the University beat faster. We think you would find a
fusion among the students, a growth of common feelings, an increasing
sympathy between class and class, whose influence (in such a heterogeneous
company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all branches of politics
and social progress. It would do more than this. If we could
find some method of making the University a real mother to her sons
- something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery
of somewhat shabby prizes - we should strike a death-blow at the constrained
and unnatural attitude of our Society. At present we are not a
united body, but a loose gathering of individuals, whose inherent attraction
is allowed to condense them into little knots and coteries. Our
last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition. There
was no party spirit - no unity of interests. A few, who were mischievously
inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file;
but even before they reached their destination the feeble inspiration
had died out in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned. Some
followed strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others
slunk back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors.
The same is visible in better things. As you send a man to an
English University that he may have his prejudices rubbed off, you might
send him to Edinburgh that he may have them ingrained - rendered indelible
- fostered by sympathy into living principles of his spirit. And
the reason of it is quite plain. From this absence of University
feeling it comes that a man’s friendships are always the direct
and immediate results of these very prejudices. A common weakness
is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a mutual vice is
the readiest introduction. The studious associate with the studious
alone - the dandies with the dandies. There is nothing to force
them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day more
wedded to their own original opinions and affections. They see
through the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments,
all real catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened
into one position - becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere,
that it shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air
that circulates in the general field of mankind.<br>
<br>
Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our present state.
Specialism in study is another. We doubt whether this has ever
been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much
worse now than it was. Formerly, when a man became a specialist,
it was out of affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand
devotion he left all the world of Science to follow his true love; and
he contrived to find that strange pedantic interest which inspired the
man who<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Settled <i>Hoti’s</i> business - let it be -<br>
Properly based <i>Oun</i> -<br>
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic <i>De</i>,<br>
Dead from the waist down.’<br>
<br>
<br>
Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the saving
clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity
and not of choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your
Jack-of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes
his choice, draws his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold
- John the Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall
not deny; but we hold that it is <i>not</i> the way to be healthy or
wise. The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one
‘punctual spot’ of knowledge. A rank unhealthy soil
breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself above others in
his one little branch - in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian
history - he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others.
Having all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in every
other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and intolerant bigot.
Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is a certain form of
dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this that we want
among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject until they
have seen and felt its merit - to act under a general interest in all
branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in one.<br>
<br>
In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are
apostles of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being,
as we should, true men and <i>loving</i> students. Of course both
of these could be corrected by the students themselves; but this is
nothing to the purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus
or the body of alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better
feeling and wider sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may
say something upon this head.<br>
<br>
One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be
when we grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on
restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with
every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse
and freedom. We please ourselves with thinking that it cannot
be so with us. We would fain hope that, as we have begun in one
way, we may end in another; and that when we are in fact the octogenarians
that we <i>seem</i> at present, there shall be no merrier men on earth.
It is pleasant to picture us, sunning ourselves in Princes Street of
a morning, or chirping over our evening cups, with all the merriment
that we wanted in youth.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III - DEBATING SOCIETIES<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment. You
do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the
same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the
performance little to be admired. As a general rule, the members
speak shamefully ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so
are the fines. The Ballot Question - oldest of dialectic nightmares
- is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and
Romans, too, are reserved as sort of <i>general-utility</i> men, to
do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many functions
as the famous waterfall scene at the ‘Princess’s,’
which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt
of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders.
There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively discussion.
Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members; and it
is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit shamefully
down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you begin to find your
level and value others rightly. Even then, even when failure has
damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be laughed
at in the deportment of your rivals.<br>
<br>
Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after eloquence.
They are of those who ‘pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope,’
and who, since they expect that ‘the deficiencies of last sentence
will be supplied by the next,’ have been recommended by Dr. Samuel
Johnson to ‘attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.’
They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing damps
them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch
forth into another with unabated vigour. They have all the manner
of an orator. From the tone of their voice, you would expect a
splendid period - and lo! a string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses,
eked out with stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the
art (learned from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by
dwelling on a single syllable - of striking a balance in a top-heavy
period by lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal,
they never cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted
all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused
to perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting
for some further inspiration, like Chaucer’s widow’s son
in the dung-hole, after<br>
<br>
<br>
‘His throat was kit unto the nekké bone,’<br>
<br>
<br>
in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,
and give him renewed and clearer utterance.<br>
<br>
These men may have something to say, if they could only say it - indeed
they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing
to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words,
that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect.
They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality
of delivery. They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting
applause, after a torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle,
harping on the same dull round of argument, and returning again and
again to the same remark with the same sprightliness, the same irritating
appearance of novelty.<br>
<br>
After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few
other varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,
whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who
votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an
air of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker,
who rises, emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever
attempting to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men
who ride pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family
have none, identify themselves with some well-known statesman, use his
opinions, and lend him their patronage on all occasions. This
is a dangerous plan, and serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference
than to adorn a speech.<br>
<br>
But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence
by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found
high enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures
us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets
we may never disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary
flush tempts us into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the
middle of one of Pope’s couplets, a white film gathering before
our eyes, and our kind friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace
by a feeble round of applause. <i>Amis lecteurs</i>, this is a
painful topic. It is possible that we too, we, the ‘potent,
grave, and reverend’ editor, may have suffered these things, and
drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure. Let us dwell
no longer on so delicate a subject.<br>
<br>
In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any student
to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives should
repay him an hundredfold for them all. The life of the debating
society is a handy antidote to the life of the classroom and quadrangle.
Nothing could be conceived more excellent as a weapon against many of
those <i>peccant</i> <i>humours</i> that we have been railing against
in the jeremiad of our last ‘College Paper’ - particularly
in the field of intellect. It is a sad sight to see our heather-scented
students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College with determined
views - <i>roués</i> in speculation - having gauged the vanity
of philosophy or learned to shun it as the middle-man of heresy - a
company of determined, deliberate opinionists, not to be moved by all
the sleights of logic. What have such men to do with study?
If their minds are made up irrevocably, why burn the ‘studious
lamp’ in search of further confirmation? Every set opinion
I hear a student deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard.
He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises,
should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing
to surrender untenable positions. He should keep himself teachable,
or cease the expensive farce of being taught. It is to further
this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies.
It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions
into living and impressionable soul that we insist on their utility.
If we could once prevail on our students to feel no shame in avowing
an uncertain attitude towards any subject, if we could teach them that
it was unnecessary for every lad to have his <i>opinionette</i> on every
topic, we should have gone a far way towards bracing the intellectual
tone of the coming race of thinkers; and this it is which debating societies
are so well fitted to perform.<br>
<br>
We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with
them. We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through,
and then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment. We
find men of talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely
different from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves.
But the best means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule
which some folk are most inclined to condemn - I mean the law of <i>obliged
speeches</i>. Your senior member commands; and you must take the
affirmative or the negative, just as suits his best convenience.
This tends to the most perfect liberality. It is no good hearing
the arguments of an opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them;
and even if you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious
search for weaknesses. This is proved, I fear, in every debate;
when you hear each speaker arguing out his own prepared <i>spécialité</i>
(he never intended speaking, of course, until some remarks of, etc.),
arguing out, I say, his own <i>coached-up</i> subject without the least
attention to what has gone before, as utterly at sea about the drift
of his adversary’s speech as Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste,
and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a few flippant
criticisms. Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled with the
side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for your own fame,
to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely, the case as it
stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up
in this idle digging of the vineyard! How many new difficulties
take form before your eyes? how many superannuated arguments cripple
finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced eclecticism!<br>
<br>
Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend also
to foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men.
This last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement
of our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we
devote a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a <i>clique</i>.
Friends propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society
degenerates into a sort of family party. You may confirm old acquaintances,
but you can rarely make new ones. You find yourself in the atmosphere
of your own daily intercourse. Now, this is an unfortunate circumstance,
which it seems to me might readily be rectified. Our Principal
has shown himself so friendly towards all College improvements that
I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised a certain suggestion,
which is not a new one with me, and which must often have been proposed
and canvassed heretofore - I mean, a real <i>University Debating Society</i>,
patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the Professors, to which
every one might gain ready admittance on sight of his matriculation
ticket, where it would be a favour and not a necessity to speak, and
where the obscure student might have another object for attendance besides
the mere desire to save his fines: to wit, the chance of drawing on
himself the favourable consideration of his teachers. This would
be merely following in the good tendency, which has been so noticeable
during all this session, to increase and multiply student societies
and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a matter of much difficulty.
The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the class-rooms at
first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the library, might
be the place of meeting. There would be no want of attendance
or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to speak
under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the other,
in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may do
the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might
end, perhaps, by rivalling the ‘Union’ at Cambridge or the
‘Union’ at Oxford.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER IV - THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society
by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius - that our climate
is essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords
of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability,
had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the
inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues. A
ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person’s
courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study
and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that
is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the acknowledged
index of social position.<br>
<br>
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering
after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind. To the
superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account
for his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the
hard labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could
have supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful <i>constitutional</i>
arm in arm with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory
of a vanished respectability called for some outward manifestation,
and the result was - an umbrella. A pious castaway might have
rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry
of church-bells; but Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and
his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving
to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.<br>
<br>
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very
foremost badge of modern civilisation - the Urim and Thummim of respectability.
Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the most natural manner.
Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were first introduced into this
country, what manner of men would use them, and what class would adhere
to the useless but ornamental cane. The first, without doubt,
would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their health, or
the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the second, it is equally
plain, would include the fop, the fool, and the Bobadil. Any one
acquainted with the growth of Society, and knowing out of what small
seeds of cause are produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions
of intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily welfare,
and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word, all those homely
and solid virtues implied in the term RESPECTABILITY. Not that
the umbrella’s costliness has nothing to do with its great influence.
Its possession, besides symbolising (as we have already indicated) the
change from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling in tents, implies a certain
comfortable provision of fortune. It is not every one that can
expose twenty-six shillings’ worth of property to so many chances
of loss and theft. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed,
that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned
umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise. They have a qualification
standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake in the common-weal
below their arm. One who bears with him an umbrella - such a complicated
structure of whalebone, of silk, and of cane, that it becomes a very
microcosm of modern industry - is necessarily a man of peace.
A half-crown cane may be applied to an offender’s head on a very
moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty shilling silk is a possession
too precious to be adventured in the shock of war.<br>
<br>
These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came to
their present high estate. But the true Umbrella-Philosopher meets
with far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.<br>
<br>
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual
who carries them: indeed, they are far more capable of betraying his
trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready made, and all
our power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during
the first three or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from
a whole shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser’s disposition.
An undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the practised Umbrella-Philosopher.
O you who lisp, and amble, and change the fashion of your countenances
- you who conceal all these, how little do you think that you left a
proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand - that even now, as you
shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in its ivory
handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from the exposed
gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the hidden
hypocrisy of the ‘<i>dickey</i>’! But alas! even the
umbrella is no certain criterion. The falsity and the folly of
the human race have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty;
and while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly
characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays
his real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen
directly opposite to the person’s disposition. A mendacious
umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally
shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his
religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham.
May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that
they go about the streets ‘with a lie in their right hand’?<br>
<br>
The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social scale
of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great bulk of their
subjects from having any at all, which was certainly a bad thing.
We should be sorry to believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool
- the idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have
originated in a nobody - and we have accordingly taken exceeding pains
to find out the reason of this harsh restriction. We think we
have succeeded; but, while admiring the principle at which he aimed,
and while cordially recognising in the Siamese potentate the only man
before ourselves who had taken a real grasp of the umbrella, we must
be allowed to point out how unphilosophically the great man acted in
this particular. His object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy
persons from bearing the sacred symbol of domestic virtues. We
cannot excuse his limiting these virtues to the circle of his court.
We must only remember that such was the feeling of the age in which
he lived. Liberalism had not yet raised the war-cry of the working
classes. But here was his mistake: it was a needless regulation.
Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect,
men, not by nature <i>umbrellarians</i>, have tried again and again
to become so by art, and yet have failed - have expended their patrimony
in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically
lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses,
given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for
the remainder of their lives. This is the most remarkable fact
that we have had occasion to notice; and yet we challenge the candid
reader to call it in question. Now, as there cannot be any <i>moral
selection</i> in a mere dead piece of furniture - as the umbrella cannot
be supposed to have an affinity for individual men equal and reciprocal
to that which men certainly feel toward individual umbrellas - we took
the trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to whether there was
any possible physical explanation of the phenomenon. He was unable
to supply a plausible theory, or even hypothesis; but we extract from
his letter the following interesting passage relative to the physical
peculiarities of umbrellas: ‘Not the least important, and by far
the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it displays
in affecting the atmospheric strata. There is no fact in meteorology
better established - indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists
are agreed - than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation
of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced,
and is soon deposited in the form of rain. No theory,’ my
friend continues, ‘competent to explain this hygrometric law has
been given (as far as I am aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait,
Buchan, or any other writer; nor do I pretend to supply the defect.
I venture, however, to throw out the conjecture that it will be ultimately
found to belong to the same class of natural laws as that agreeable
to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered surface
downwards.’<br>
<br>
But it is time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much longer
upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished
these few desultory remarks - slender contributions towards a subject
which has fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better
understood by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers
of to-day. If, however, we have awakened in any rational mind
an interest in the symbolism of umbrellas - in any generous heart a
more complete sympathy with the dumb companion of his daily walk - or
in any grasping spirit a pure notion of respectability strong enough
to make him expend his six-and-twenty shillings - we shall have deserved
well of the world, to say nothing of the many industrious persons employed
in the manufacture of the article.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER V - THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
‘How many Caesars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names,
have been rendered worthy of them? And how many are there, who
might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters
and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus’d into nothing?’
- <i>Tristram</i> <i>Shandy</i>, vol. I. chap xix.<br>
<br>
<br>
Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey merchant.
To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed
out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life -
who seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
of name into the abysses of social failure. Solomon possibly had
his eye on some such theory when he said that ‘a good name is
better than precious ointment’; and perhaps we may trace a similar
spirit in the compilers of the English Catechism, and the affectionate
interest with which they linger round the catechumen’s name at
the very threshold of their work. But, be these as they may, I
think no one can censure me for appending, in pursuance of the expressed
wish of his son, the Turkey merchant’s name to his system, and
pronouncing, without further preface, a short epitome of the ‘Shandean
Philosophy of Nomenclature.’<br>
<br>
To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt from the
very cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I
hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows;
and the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I
found a freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one
of my numerous <i>praenomina</i>. Look at the delight with which
two children find they have the same name. They are friends from
that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger than exchange
of nuts and sweetmeats. This feeling, I own, wears off in later
life. Our names lose their freshness and interest, become trite
and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is merely one of the sad
effects of those ‘shades of the prison-house’ which come
gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no
weapon against the philosophy of names.<br>
<br>
In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which
careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will
have been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible
power the whole course of your earthly fortunes. But the last
name, overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition
of success. Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited
nicknames; and if the <i>sobriquet</i> were applicable to the ancestor,
it is most likely applicable to the descendant also. You would
not expect to find Mr. M’Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M’Lumpha
excelling as a professor of dancing. Therefore, in what follows,
we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last.
And to begin with, look what a pull <i>Cromwell</i> had over <i>Pym</i>
- the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging,
and unheroic to a degree. Who would expect eloquence from <i>Pym</i>
- who would read poems by <i>Pym</i> - who would bow to the opinion
of <i>Pym</i>? He might have been a dentist, but he should never
have aspired to be a statesman. I can only wonder that he succeeded
as he did. Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon the roll of men who
have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the most unfavourable
appellations. But even these have suffered; and, had they been
more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and the other
have shared the laurels with Isaiah. In this matter we must not
forget that all our great poets have borne great names. Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley - what a constellation
of lordly words! Not a single common-place name among them - not
a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would
stop and look at on a door-plate. Now, imagine if <i>Pepys</i>
had tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot
would that word have made upon the list! The thing was impossible.
In the first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have
held him down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from
rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him altogether
from attempting verse. Next, the booksellers would refuse to publish,
and the world to read them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation.
And now, before I close this section, I must say one word as to <i>punnable</i>
names, names that stand alone, that have a significance and life apart
from him that bears them. These are the bitterest of all.
One friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life under the weight
of this misfortune; for it is an awful thing when a man’s name
is a joke, when he cannot be mentioned without exciting merriment, and
when even the intimation of his death bids fair to carry laughter into
many a home.<br>
<br>
So much for people who are badly named. Now for people who are
<i>too</i> well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized
into a false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under
the fame of some of the great ones of the past. A man, for instance,
called William Shakespeare could never dare to write plays. He
is thrown into too humbling an apposition with the author of <i>Hamlet</i>.
Its own name coming after is such an anti-climax. ‘The plays
of William Shakespeare’? says the reader - ‘O no!
The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,’ and he throws the
book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler,
who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never attempted
to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled upon the
tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is the case
of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I should
have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the last-named gentleman,
and confine his ambition to the sawdust. But Mr. Rossetti has
triumphed. He has even dared to translate from his mighty name-father;
and the voice of fame supports him in his boldness.<br>
<br>
Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter. A lifetime
of comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation.
So here, if it please you, we shall let it rest. Slight as these
notes have been, I would that the great founder of the system had been
alive to see them. How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive
eloquence would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of
praise and sympathy would not the editor have received before the month
was out! Alas, the thing was not to be. Walter Shandy died
and was duly buried, while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected
by his fellow-countrymen. But, reader, the day will come, I hope,
when a paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness,
all depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will
soberly and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not
rush blindfold to the christening. In these days there shall be
written a ‘Godfather’s Assistant,’ in shape of a dictionary
of names, with their concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall
be scattered broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of
every one eligible for godfathership, until such a thing as a vicious
or untoward appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CRITICISMS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - LORD LYTTON’S ‘FABLES IN SONG’<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form
most natural to his talent. In some ways, indeed, it may be held
inferior to <i>Chronicles</i> <i>and Characters</i>; we look in vain
for anything like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in <i>Irene</i>,
or for any such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared,
here and there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy
of its model, Hugo’s <i>Legend of the Ages</i>. But it becomes
evident, on the most hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a
step on the way towards the later. It seems as if the author had
been feeling about for his definite medium, and was already, in the
language of the child’s game, growing hot. There are many
pieces in <i>Chronicles</i> <i>and Characters</i> that might be detached
from their original setting, and embodied, as they stand, among the
<i>Fables in Song.<br>
<br>
</i>For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously.
In the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of
a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the
bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support
a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the
fancy at half a hint. Such is the great mass of the old stories
of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood.
But we should expect the fable, in company with other and more important
literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended
as time went on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original
type. That depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact
that it was fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this
description should become less common, as men learn to suspect some
serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical story of an ape touches
us quite differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin’s theory.
Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of
fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end
of some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined punishment,
the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as we have often
to assure tearful children on the like occasions, that they may dry
their eyes, for none of it was true.<br>
<br>
But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers
and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot
deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him
in his life. And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern
thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into
desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in
all points except that it is not altogether fabulous. And this
new form, such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still
presents the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also,
there is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea; and
as in any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the reader
through the intellect rather than through the feelings; so that, without
being very deeply moved or interested by the characters of the piece,
we should recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot revolves.
But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought humorous
situations. There will be now a logical nexus between the moral
expressed and the machinery employed to express it. The machinery,
in fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous.
We find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson embodied
in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New Testament,
and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the collocation of significant
facts in life, the reader being left to resolve for himself the vague,
troublesome, and not yet definitely moral sentiment which has been thus
created. And step by step with the development of this change,
yet another is developed: the moral tends to become more indeterminate
and large. It ceases to be possible to append it, in a tag, to
the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name below a caricature;
and the fable begins to take rank with all other forms of creative literature,
as something too ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, to
be resumed in any succinct formula without the loss of all that is deepest
and most suggestive in it.<br>
<br>
Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;
there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already
mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables
by the utmost possible leniency of construction. ‘Composure,’
‘Et Caetera,’ and several more, are merely similes poetically
elaborated. So, too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather
and grandchild: the child, having treasured away an icicle and forgotten
it for ten minutes, comes back to find it already nearly melted, and
no longer beautiful: at the same time, the grandfather has just remembered
and taken out a bundle of love-letters, which he too had stored away
in years gone by, and then long neglected; and, behold! the letters
are as faded and sorrowfully disappointing as the icicle. This
is merely a simile poetically worked out; and yet it is in such as these,
and some others, to be mentioned further on, that the author seems at
his best. Wherever he has really written after the old model,
there is something to be deprecated: in spite of all the spirit and
freshness, in spite of his happy assumption of that cheerful acceptation
of things as they are, which, rightly or wrongly, we come to attribute
to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a sense as of something a little
out of place. A form of literature so very innocent and primitive
looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton’s conscious and highly-coloured
style. It may be bad taste, but sometimes we should prefer a few
sentences of plain prose narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.
So that it is not among those fables that conform most nearly to the
old model, but one had nearly said among those that most widely differ
from it, that we find the most satisfactory examples of the author’s
manner.<br>
<br>
In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most
remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he
who raised the wind; or that of the grocer’s balance (‘Cogito
ergo sum’) who considered himself endowed with free-will, reason,
and an infallible practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police
made a descent upon the shop, and find the weights false and the scales
unequal; and the whole thing is broken up for old iron. Capital
fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are ‘Prometheus Unbound,’
the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-cork, and ‘Teleology,’
where a nettle justifies the ways of God to nettles while all goes well
with it, and, upon a change of luck, promptly changes its divinity.<br>
<br>
In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will, although,
even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is another
group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look in vain
for any such playful liberties with Nature. Thus we have ‘Conservation
of Force’; where a musician, thinking of a certain picture, improvises
in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes home inspired, and
writes a poem; and then a painter, under the influence of this poem,
paints another picture, thus lineally descended from the first.
This is fiction, but not what we have been used to call fable.
We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the
fabulist was wont to mock at his readers. And still more so is
this the case with others. ‘The Horse and the Fly’
states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic
and straightforward way. A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach
is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a
wife and family, are all killed. The horse continues to gallop
off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running over an only
child; and there is some little pathetic detail here introduced in the
telling, that makes the reader’s indignation very white-hot against
some one. It remains to be seen who that some one is to be: the
fly? Nay, but on closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated
by maternal instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs: is maternal
instinct, then, ‘sole author of these mischiefs all’?
‘Who’s in the Right?’ one of the best fables in the
book, is somewhat in the same vein. After a battle has been won,
a group of officers assemble inside a battery, and debate together who
should have the honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff,
the cavalry, the engineer who posted the battery in which they then
stand talking, are successively named: the sergeant, who pointed the
guns, sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close by,
the gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile of triumph,
since it was through his hand that the victorious blow had been dealt.
Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the gunner; the cannon-ball,
who actually goes forth on the dread mission, claims it over the cannon,
who remains idly behind; the powder reminds the cannon-ball that, but
for him, it would still be lying on the arsenal floor; and the match
caps the discussion; powder, cannon-ball, and cannon would be all equally
vain and ineffectual without fire. Just then there comes on a
shower of rain, which wets the powder and puts out the match, and completes
this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative conditions which
are as necessary for any effect, in their absence, as is the presence
of this great fraternity of positive conditions, not any one of which
can claim priority over any other. But the fable does not end
here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it should. It wanders
off into a discussion as to which is the truer greatness, that of the
vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain. And the speech
of the rain is charming:<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Lo, with my little drops I bless again<br>
And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!<br>
Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,<br>
But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.<br>
Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,<br>
And poppied corn, I bring.<br>
‘Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,<br>
My violets spring.<br>
Little by little my small drops have strength<br>
To deck with green delights the grateful earth.’<br>
<br>
<br>
And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,
but welcome for its own sake.<br>
<br>
Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the emotions.
There is, for instance, that of ‘The Two Travellers,’ which
is profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as well written
as some others. In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten,
saves his life out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in
his body; just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned
himself to death, had violently freed himself from Love at the cost
of all that was finest and fairest in his character. Very graceful
and sweet is the fable (if so it should be called) in which the author
sings the praises of that ‘kindly perspective,’ which lets
a wheat-stalk near the eye cover twenty leagues of distant country,
and makes the humble circle about a man’s hearth more to him than
all the possibilities of the external world. The companion fable
to this is also excellent. It tells us of a man who had, all his
life through, entertained a passion for certain blue hills on the far
horizon, and had promised himself to travel thither ere he died, and
become familiar with these distant friends. At last, in some political
trouble, he is banished to the very place of his dreams. He arrives
there overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there
sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places with
him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old home whence
he has come. Such a story might have been very cynically treated;
but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and
the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands
that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the
unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty
of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though
there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions,
this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent. There is much
that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful.
No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all
this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague.
It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future either
of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound personal
contentment of the writer. This is, I suppose, all we must look
for in the case. It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist
shall prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the
world does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly
learned something of its evil. It will depend much, of course,
upon our own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will
be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed
mockery. But where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness
along with the good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a
man cheerfully ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior
and smilingly attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it
will go hardly if we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit
to help us on our way. There is here no impertinent and lying
proclamation of peace - none of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do;
what we find here is a view of life that would be even grievous, were
it not enlivened with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed
by a stroke of pathos.<br>
<br>
It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this
book some of the intenser qualities of the author’s work; and
their absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter
fashion. The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow,
which forms the prelude to ‘The Thistle,’ is full of spirit
and of pleasant images. The speech of the forest in ‘Sans
Souci’ is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for nature of the
modern sort, and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us,
than anything in <i>Chronicles and Characters</i>. There are some
admirable felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill,
whose summit<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Did print<br>
The azure air with pines.’<br>
<br>
<br>
Moreover, I do not recollect in the author’s former work any symptom
of that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now
and again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches
the burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, ‘Thin,
sable veils, wherein a restless spark Yet trembled.’ But
the description is at its best when the subjects are unpleasant, or
even grisly. There are a few capital lines in this key on the
last spasm of the battle before alluded to. Surely nothing could
be better, in its own way, than the fish in ‘The Last Cruise of
the Arrogant,’ ‘the shadowy, side-faced, silent things,’
that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken steam-engine.
And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly enough, how the
water went down into the valleys, where it set itself gaily to saw wood,
and on into the plains, where it would soberly carry grain to town;
yet the real strength of the fable is when it dealt with the shut pool
in which certain unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among slugs and
snails, and in the company of an old toad. The sodden contentment
of the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is astonishing
how unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her horrible lover,
the maggot.<br>
<br>
And now for a last word, about the style. This is not easy to
criticise. It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and
a full sound; the lines are never lame, and the sense is carried forward
with an uninterrupted, impetuous rush. But it is not equal.
After passages of really admirable versification, the author falls back
upon a sort of loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of
Mr. Browning’s minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness,
and an easy acceptation of somewhat cheap finish. There is nothing
here of that compression which is the note of a really sovereign style.
It is unfair, perhaps, to set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton
side by side with one of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very
perfect poet; and yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture
of a dog, detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally
almost lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the
clear, simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has
given us of the ploughman’s collie. It is interesting, at
first, and then it becomes a little irritating; for when we think of
other passages so much more finished and adroit, we cannot help feeling,
that with a little more ardour after perfection of form, criticism would
have found nothing left for her to censure. A similar mark of
precipitate work is the number of adjectives tumultuously heaped together,
sometimes to help out the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect)
to help out the sound of the verses. I do not believe, for instance,
that Lord Lytton himself would defend the lines in which we are told
how Laocoön ‘Revealed to Roman crowds, now <i>Christian</i>
grown, That <i>Pagan</i> anguish which, in <i>Parian</i> stone, The
<i>Rhodian</i> artist,’ and so on. It is not only that this
is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in which it
is found; that such verses should not have appeared with the name of
a good versifier like Lord Lytton. We must take exception, also,
in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration. Alliteration is
so liable to be abused that we can scarcely be too sparing of it; and
yet it is a trick that seems to grow upon the author with years.
It is a pity to see fine verses, such as some in ‘Demos,’
absolutely spoiled by the recurrence of one wearisome consonant.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II - SALVINI’S MACBETH<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of <i>Macbeth</i>.
It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he chose to play
the Scottish usurper for the first time before Scotsmen; and the audience
were not insensible of the privilege. Few things, indeed, can
move a stronger interest than to see a great creation taking shape for
the first time. If it is not purely artistic, the sentiment is
surely human. And the thought that you are before all the world,
and have the start of so many others as eager as yourself, at least
keeps you in a more unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if
it does not enhance the delight with which you follow the performance
and see the actor ‘bend up each corporal agent’ to realise
a masterpiece of a few hours’ duration. With a player so
variable as Salvini, who trusts to the feelings of the moment for so
much detail, and who, night after night, does the same thing differently
but always well, it can never be safe to pass judgment after a single
hearing. And this is more particularly true of last week’s
<i>Macbeth</i>; for the whole third act was marred by a grievously humorous
misadventure. Several minutes too soon the ghost of Banquo joined
the party, and after having sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously
withdrawn. Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on
the stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so
little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward pause,
Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air. The arrival
of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made him nod
all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily topped
the whole. It may be imagined how lamely matters went throughout
these cross purposes.<br>
<br>
In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini’s Macbeth had
an emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place beside
the same artist’s Othello and Hamlet. It is the simplest
and most unsympathetic of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments
of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity.
Salvini sees nothing great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle,
and that courage which comes of strong and copious circulation.
The moral smallness of the man is insisted on from the first, in the
shudder of uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan embracing
Banquo. He may have some northern poetry of speech, but he has
not much logical understanding. In his dealings with the supernatural
powers he is like a savage with his fetich, trusting them beyond bounds
while all goes well, and whenever he is crossed, casting his belief
aside and calling ‘fate into the list.’ For his wife,
he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew for her fiery
spirit to command. The nature of his feeling towards her is rendered
with a most precise and delicate touch. He always yields to the
woman’s fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much
meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.
Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who
happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement. Love
has fallen out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship.
Only once - at the very moment when she is showing herself so little
a woman and so much a high-spirited man - only once is he very deeply
stirred towards her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible
transport of admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini’s
lips - ‘Bring forth men-children only!’<br>
<br>
The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.
Macbeth’s voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to
be forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman’s hands he seemed
to have blood in his utterance. Never for a moment, even in the
very article of the murder, does he possess his own soul. He is
a man on wires. From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous
cowardice. For, after all, it is not here, but in broad daylight,
with the exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at every
blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand, that this man’s
physical bravery can keep him up; he is an unwieldy ship, and needs
plenty of way on before he will steer.<br>
<br>
In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what
he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the ‘twenty
trenchèd gashes’ on Banquo’s head. Thus Macbeth
makes welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror
which are so soon to turn sour in him. As he runs out to embrace
these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to realise to his mind’s
eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he is dressing out the
phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination, playing the part of
justice, is to ‘commend to his own lips the ingredients of his
poisoned chalice.’ With the recollection of Hamlet and his
father’s spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which
that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy, it
was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two apparitions
and the two men haunted. But there are none to be found.
Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo’s spirit and
the ‘twenty trenchèd gashes.’ He is afraid
of he knows not what. He is abject, and again blustering.
In the end he so far forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of
what is before him, that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.
When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something really childish
in the way he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression
of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed.
And what is the upshot of the visitation? It is written in Shakespeare,
but should be read with the commentary of Salvini’s voice and
expression:- ‘O!<i> siam nell’ opra ancor fanciulli</i>’
- ‘We are yet but young in deed.’ Circle below
circle. He is looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth
of hell. There may still be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience
will be dead, and he may move untroubled in this element of blood.<br>
<br>
In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini’s
finest moment throughout the play. From the first he was admirably
made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked
Othello. From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can
see this character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase;
for the man before you is a type you know well already. He arrives
with Banquo on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture,
full of pride and the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after
the battle like a beast who has eaten his fill. But in the fifth
act there is a change. This is still the big, burly, fleshly,
handsome-looking Thane; here is still the same face which in the earlier
acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.
But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has
entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable
degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features.
He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full of horrors.
Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes
no complaint - he has ceased to notice it now; but the same smell is
in his nostrils. A contained fury and disgust possesses him.
He taunts the messenger and the doctor as people would taunt their mortal
enemies. And, indeed, as he knows right well, every one is his
enemy now, except his wife. About her he questions the doctor
with something like a last human anxiety; and, in tones of grisly mystery,
asks him if he can ‘minister to a mind diseased.’
When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered and falls
into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that he
displays. There had been two of them against God and man; and
now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he
had expected. And so her death is not only an affliction, but
one more disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness. The speech
that follows, given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge,
not so much for her as for himself. From that time forth there
is nothing human left in him, only ‘the fiend of Scotland,’
Macduff’s ‘hell-hound,’ whom, with a stern glee, we
see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf. He is inspired
and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and slaughter.
Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail; but when he hears
the Thane was not born of woman, all virtue goes out of him; and though
he speaks sounding words of defiance, the last combat is little better
than a suicide.<br>
<br>
The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a headlong
unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful; and within
these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that,
so far as concerns Salvini himself, a third great success seems indubitable.
Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than a very small
fraction of the boards; and though Banquo’s ghost will probably
be more seasonable in his future apparitions, there are some more inherent
difficulties in the piece. The company at large did not distinguish
themselves. Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff’d
the average ranter. The lady who filled the principal female part
has done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal for
what she tried last week. Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
scene is to make a memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded
in being wrong in art without being true to nature.<br>
<br>
And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which somewhat
interfered with the success of the performance. At the end of
the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall insensible
upon the stage. This is a change of questionable propriety from
a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it leaves
the stage for some moments empty of all business. To remedy this,
a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about
the prostrate king. A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe
by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity
of a Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed
their disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption
of Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from
pit to gallery with inextinguishable laughter. It is, I am told,
the Italian tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than
the observance. With the total disappearance of these damsels,
with a stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression
of those scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator
is left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice
as well, and we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable
work of dramatic art.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III - BAGSTER’S ‘PILGRIM’S PROGRESS’<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
I have here before me an edition of the <i>Pilgrim’s</i> <i>Progress</i>,
bound in green, without a date, and described as ‘illustrated
by nearly three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.’
On the outside it is lettered ‘Bagster’s Illustrated Edition,’
and after the author’s apology, facing the first page of the tale,
a folding pictorial ‘Plan of the Road’ is marked as ‘drawn
by the late Mr. T. Conder,’ and engraved by J. Basire. No
further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers had
judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant whether
or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand
that drew the plan. It seems, however, more than probable.
The literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots
in the devil’s garden, and carefully introduced the court-house
in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the cuts; and
in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition of the
gardens have a kindred and entirely English air. Whoever he was,
the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
best illustrator of Bunyan. They are not only good illustrations,
like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of
Bunyan. Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same
as his own. The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream,
as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan’s; and
text and pictures make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned
story. To do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say,
for the hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece which they
adorn.<br>
<br>
All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their creators;
and as the characters and incidents become more and more interesting
in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth, falls more
and more into neglect. An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves
round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came from the
chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall, and if
the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit,
the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of
allegories. The <i>Faëry</i> <i>Queen</i> was an allegory,
I am willing to believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable
verse. The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this
also Allegory, poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes
rudely thrust against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest;
with ‘his fingers in his ears, he ran on,’ straight for
his mark. He tells us himself, in the conclusion to the first
part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh; indeed, he feared nothing,
and said anything; and he was greatly served in this by a certain rustic
privilege of his style, which, like the talk of strong uneducated men,
when it does not impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity.
The mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal
favour. He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable
of moving mountains. And we have to remark in him, not the parts
where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative
invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity, and
his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their
creation. We can follow him step by step into the trap which he
lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant literality
of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in an inconsistency.
The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of the Delectable
Mountains are all actually performed, like stage-plays, before the pilgrims.
The son of Mr. Great-grace visibly ‘tumbles hills about with his
words.’ Adam the First has his condemnation written visibly
on his forehead, so that Faithful reads it. At the very instant
the net closes round the pilgrims, ‘the white robe falls from
the black man’s body.’ Despair ‘getteth him
a grievous crab-tree cudgel’; it was in ‘sunshiny weather’
that he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about the House Beautiful,
‘our country birds,’ only sing their little pious verses
‘at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.’
‘I often,’ says Piety, ‘go out to hear them; we also
ofttimes keep them tame on our house.’ The post between
Beulah and the Celestial City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in
country places. Madam Bubble, that ‘tall, comely dame, something
of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant attire, but old,’ ‘gives
you a smile at the end of each sentence’ - a real woman she; we
all know her. Christiana dying ‘gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring,’
for no possible reason in the allegory, merely because the touch was
human and affecting. Look at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways,
garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons;
his delight in any that ‘he found to be a man of his hands’;
his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when
he was down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above
all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: ‘I
thought I should have lost my man’ - ‘chicken-hearted’
- ‘at last he came in, and I will say that for my lord, he carried
it wonderful lovingly to him.’ This is no Independent minister;
this is a stout, honest, big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts,
twirling his long moustaches as he speaks. Last and most remarkable,
‘My sword,’ says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom
Great-heart delighted, ‘my sword I give to him that shall succeed
me in my pilgrimage, <i>and my courage and skill to him that can get
it</i>.’ And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox
than was ever dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that
‘all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’<br>
<br>
In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision and
the same energy of belief. The quality is equally and indifferently
displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the tenderness of the pathos,
the startling vigour and strangeness of the incidents, the natural strain
of the conversations, and the humanity and charm of the characters.
Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes, the delights of
Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon and my Lord Hate-good, Great-heart,
and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, all have been imagined with the same clearness,
all written of with equal gusto and precision, all created in the same
mixed element, of simplicity that is almost comical, and art that, for
its purpose, is faultless.<br>
<br>
It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his drawings.
He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil. He, too, will draw anything,
from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the courts of Heaven.
‘A Lamb for Supper’ is the name of one of his designs, ‘Their
Glorious Entry’ of another. He has the same disregard for
the ridiculous, and enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style,
so that we are pleased even when we laugh the most. He is literal
to the verge of folly. If dust is to be raised from the unswept
parlour, you may be sure it will ‘fly abundantly’ in the
picture. If Faithful is to lie ‘as dead’ before Moses,
dead he shall lie with a warrant - dead and stiff like granite; nay
(and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of the author),
it is with the identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells the
sinner. Good and bad people, whom we at once distinguish in the
text by their names, Hopeful, Honest, and Valiant-for-Truth, on the
one hand, as against By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man
on the other, are in these drawings as simply distinguished by their
costume. Good people, when not armed <i>cap-à-pie</i>,
wear a speckled tunic girt about the waist, and low hats, apparently
of straw. Bad people swagger in tail-coats and chimney-pots, a
few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in trousers, and for
all the world like guests at a garden-party. Worldly-Wiseman alone,
by some inexplicable quirk, stands before Christian in laced hat, embroidered
waistcoat, and trunk-hose. But above all examples of this artist’s
intrepidity, commend me to the print entitled ‘Christian Finds
it Deep.’ ‘A great darkness and horror,’ says
the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless deathbed
with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and conflicts
of his hero. How to represent this worthily the artist knew not;
and yet he was determined to represent it somehow. This was how
he did: Hopeful is still shown to his neck above the water of death;
but Christian has bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness
indicates his place.<br>
<br>
As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for
the most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and each
having a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event recorded,
you will soon become aware of two things: first, that the man can draw,
and, second, that he possesses the gift of an imagination. ‘Obstinate
reviles,’ says the legend; and you should see Obstinate reviling.
‘He warily retraces his steps’; and there is Christian,
posting through the plain, terror and speed in every muscle. ‘Mercy
yearns to go’ shows you a plain interior with packing going forward,
and, right in the middle, Mercy yearning to go - every line of the girl’s
figure yearning. In ‘The Chamber called Peace’ we
see a simple English room, bed with white curtains, window valance and
door, as may be found in many thousand unpretentious houses; but far
off, through the open window, we behold the sun uprising out of a great
plain, and Christian hails it with his hand:<br>
<br>
<br>
‘Where am I now! is this the love and care<br>
Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!<br>
Thus to provide! That I should be forgiven!<br>
And dwell already the next door to heaven!’<br>
<br>
<br>
A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the damsels
point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains: ‘The Prospect,’
so the cut is ticketed - and I shall be surprised, if on less than a
square inch of paper you can show me one so wide and fair. Down
a cross road on an English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon,
a hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing with her fair
enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in hand, half pauses. The cut
is perfect as a symbol; the giddy movement of the sorceress, the uncertain
poise of the man struck to the heart by a temptation, the contrast of
that even plain of life whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing
of the wanton - the artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely
read Bunyan, he had also thoughtfully lived. The Delectable Mountains
- I continue skimming the first part - are not on the whole happily
rendered. Once, and once only, the note is struck, when Christian
and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of green
shrubs - box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed
or pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky. A little further,
and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan’s insight into life,
the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he has set down the latter
end of such a number of the would-be good; where his allegory goes so
deep that, to people looking seriously on life, it cuts like satire.
The true significance of this invention lies, of course, far out of
the way of drawing; only one feature, the great tedium of the land,
the growing weariness in well-doing, may be somewhat represented in
a symbol. The pilgrims are near the end: ‘Two Miles Yet,’
says the legend. The road goes ploughing up and down over a rolling
heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms, are already sunk to the
knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone
with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as
of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them: two miles! it might
be hundreds. In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags,
in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the distant prospect
of the Celestial City more than regains his own. You will remember
when Christian and Hopeful ‘with desire fell sick.’
‘Effect of the Sunbeams’ is the artist’s title.
Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon
them over deep, subjacent woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking
shelter from the splendour - one prostrate on his face, one kneeling,
and with hands ecstatically lifted - yearn with passion after that immortal
city. Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores
of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith,
and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness,
walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more
thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist.
Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp - a family Bible at the
least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse
is to laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps
the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins - faces they
have none, they are too small for that - something in the way they swing
these monstrous volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed
from the text, some subtle differentiation from the cut that went before
and the cut that follows after - something, at least, speaks clearly
of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of
the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home. There
is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a
difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling
to Tyburn in the cart. Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and
trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the blot already mentioned
settles over and obliterates Christian. In two more cuts we behold
them drawing nearer to the other shore; and then, between two radiant
angels, one of whom points upward, we see them mounting in new weeds,
their former lendings left behind them on the inky river. More
angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and if no better, certainly no
worse, than it has been shown by others - a place, at least, infinitely
populous and glorious with light - a place that haunts solemnly the
hearts of children. And then this symbolic draughtsman once more
strikes into his proper vein. Three cuts conclude the first part.
In the first the gates close, black against the glory struggling from
within. The second shows us Ignorance - alas! poor Arminian! -
hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third
we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black already with the hue of
his eternal fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the world by
two angels of the anger of the Lord. ‘Carried to Another
Place,’ the artist enigmatically names his plate - a terrible
design.<br>
<br>
Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his pencil
grows more daring and incisive. He has many true inventions in
the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised.
It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another;
the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket
Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian by the Mouth
of Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him whispering blasphemies;
the daylight breaking through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains
and falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian’s further
progress along the causeway, between the two black pools, where, at
every yard or two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by
- loathsome white devilkins harbouring close under the bank to work
the springes, Christian himself pausing and pricking with his sword’s
point at the nearest noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising
on the farther side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset
the first of Christian’s journey, with the frog-like structure
of the skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs - crafty, slippery,
lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed
of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and
all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes. In another spirit that
Good-Conscience ‘to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,’
a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly shore,
realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness
of Bunyan’s words. It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak
in one’s lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is an austere, unearthly
friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the folds of his raiment are
not merely claustral, but have something of the horror of the pall.
Be not afraid, however; with the hand of that appearance Mr. Honest
will get safe across.<br>
<br>
Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays himself.
He loves to look at either side of a thing: as, for instance, when he
shows us both sides of the wall - ‘Grace Inextinguishable’
on the one side, with the devil vainly pouring buckets on the flame,
and ‘The Oil of Grace’ on the other, where the Holy Spirit,
vessel in hand, still secretly supplies the fire. He loves, also,
to show us the same event twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous
photographs at the interval of but a moment. So we have, first,
the whole troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant, and Great-heart to
the front, spear in hand and parleying; and next, the same cross-roads,
from a more distant view, the convoy now scattered and looking safely
and curiously on, and Valiant handing over for inspection his ‘right
Jerusalem blade.’ It is true that this designer has no great
care after consistency: Apollyon’s spear is laid by, his quiver
of darts will disappear, whenever they might hinder the designer’s
freedom; and the fiend’s tail is blobbed or forked at his good
pleasure. But this is not unsuitable to the illustration of the
fervent Bunyan, breathing hurry and momentary inspiration. He,
with his hot purpose, hunting sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget
the things that he has written yesterday. He shall first slay
Heedless in the Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking
in his sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted
Ground. And again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some
of the glory of the siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth,
who did not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that dangerous
corner by Deadman’s Lane. And, with all inconsistencies
and freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts: a power
of joining on one action or one humour to another; a power of following
out the moods, even of the dismal subterhuman fiends engendered by the
artist’s fancy; a power of sustained continuous realisation, step
by step, in nature’s order, that can tell a story, in all its
ins and outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and figuratively, like
the art of words.<br>
<br>
One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon - six cuts,
weird and fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout a pale
and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.
There is no better devil of the conventional order than our artist’s
Apollyon, with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and
terrifying expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the
first you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable
in suggestion. Cut the second, ‘The Fiend in Discourse,’
represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking his spear at
the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his tail writhing in the air, his
foot ready for a spring, while Christian stands back a little, timidly
defensive. The third illustrates these magnificent words: ‘Then
Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said,
I am void of fear in this matter: prepare thyself to die; for I swear
by my infernal den that thou shalt go no farther: here will I spill
thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast.’
In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames
out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while
across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by
his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice,
such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut,
to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion,
and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the
battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt
that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but ‘giving
back, as one that had received his mortal wound.’ The raised
head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing
relaxed in agony, all realise vividly these words of the text.
In the sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim is seen
kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden scene of contest and among
the shivers of the darts; while just at the margin the hinder quarters
and the tail of Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discounted.<br>
<br>
In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the text,
and that point is one rather of the difference of arts than the difference
of artists. Throughout his best and worst, in his highest and
most divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism,
the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses
the reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness
of a man’s affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall
find faithfully parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality
and the surprising freshness of the author’s fancy; there you
shall find him out-stripped in ready symbolism and the art of bringing
things essentially invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact
of essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book must
be read and not the prints examined.<br>
<br>
Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in any
other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which have,
to one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from childhood
up, and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant
Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town
along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright place itself,
seen as to a stave of music, shining afar off upon the hill-top, the
candle of the world.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
SKETCHES<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE SATIRIST<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight. He
was by habit and repute a satirist. If he did occasionally condemn
anything or anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto
escaped, it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody.
While I was with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook
my reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of
the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments.
Nothing escaped his blighting censure. At every sentence he overthrew
an idol, or lowered my estimation of a friend. I saw everything
with new eyes, and could only marvel at my former blindness. How
was it possible that I had not before observed A’s false hair,
B’s selfishness, or C’s boorish manners? I and my
companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple of gods among
a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear openly upon his
brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half expected that these
miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise their betters
and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the late of Paul
and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have prevailed upon
me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish virtue.
More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in our
gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing
than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in scorn.<br>
<br>
I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,
but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case. To
understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose yourself walking
down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of
a flask of vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces
and contortions of his victims; and at the same time you would fear
to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once
among the crowd, you would run a good chance yourself of baptism with
his biting liquor. Now my companion’s vitriol was inexhaustible.<br>
<br>
It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being
anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to
criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.<br>
<br>
After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go farther
and discover what is really true. He is content to find that things
are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do
not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend
they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession
of virtue altogether. He has learnt the first lesson, that no
man is wholly good; but he has not even suspected that there is another
equally true, to wit, that no man is wholly bad. Like the inmate
of a coloured star, he has eyes for one colour alone. He has a
keen scent after evil, but his nostrils are plugged against all good,
as people plugged their nostrils before going about the streets of the
plague-struck city.<br>
<br>
Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge
of good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow
fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house. This was my first
thought; but my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist
was wise, wise in his generation, like the unjust steward. He
does not want light, because the darkness is more pleasant. He
does not wish to see the good, because he is happier without it.
I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a state of divine
exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of
the fruit was still unfaded between their lips; and I recognise that
this must be the man’s habitual state. He has the forbidden
fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself a god as often
and as long as he likes. He has raised himself upon a glorious
pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of ambition; and
he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest, content in an
elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily attained. Yes,
certes, much more easily attained. He has not risen by climbing
himself, but by pushing others down. He has grown great in his
own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of
AEsop’s frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing
glass on everybody else. And I think altogether that his is a
better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most others.<br>
<br>
After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I have been comparing
myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the
comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical;
and I do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will
blame me very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
NUITS BLANCHES<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke
from his few hours’ slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his
brow, to lie awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among
the silent streets. These nights of pain and weariness are graven
on my mind; and so when the same thing happened to me again, everything
that I heard or saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.<br>
<br>
Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing
came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was
made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished
fire. It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the
roar and clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years,
the wild career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance
and passing swiftly below the window; yet always returning again from
the place whence first he came, as though, baffled by some higher power,
he had retraced his steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.<br>
<br>
As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling
of a carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed within
a few streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen.
This, too, was as a reminiscence.<br>
<br>
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of
the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there
a lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out
of bed and pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there
also, there were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted
oblongs were signs of those that waited like us for the morning.<br>
<br>
I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well
of the staircase. For what cause I know not, just as it used to
be in the old days that the feverish child might be the better served,
a peep of gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me. But where
I was, all was darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking
of the clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.<br>
<br>
The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on
the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all
night through, I waited and longed of old. It was my custom, as
the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, ‘When will the carts
come in?’ and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds
arose in the street that I have heard once more this morning.
The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts.
I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence they come,
or whither they go. But I know that, long ere dawn, and for hours
together, they stream continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking
of wheels and the same clink of horses’ feet. It was not
for nothing that they made the burthen of my wishes all night through.
They are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day;
and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked
seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of
miserable solitude. They have the freshness of the daylight life
about them. You can hear the carters cracking their whips and
crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even
a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the
darkness. There is now an end of mystery and fear. Like
the knocking at the door in <i>Macbeth</i>, <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a>
or the cry of the watchman in the <i>Tour de Nesle</i>, they show that
the horrible caesura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because
the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir
itself among the streets.<br>
<br>
In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious
knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had
dreamed myself all night.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
It is all very well to talk of death as ‘a pleasant potion of
immortality’, but the most of us, I suspect, are of ‘queasy
stomachs,’ and find it none of the sweetest. <a name="citation9a"></a><a href="#footnote9a">{9a}</a>
The graveyard may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that it
is a very ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however fair may be
the life to which it leads. And though Enoch and Elias went into
the temple through a gate which certainly may be called Beautiful, the
rest of us have to find our way to it through Ezekiel’s low-bowed
door and the vault full of creeping things and all manner of abominable
beasts. Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which
a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If
you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was in obedience
to this wise regulation that the other morning found me lighting my
pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars’, thoroughly sick of the
town, the country, and myself.<br>
<br>
Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade
in hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect
was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up
some snatch of sexton gossip, some ‘talk fit for a charnel,’
<a name="citation9b"></a><a href="#footnote9b">{9b}</a> something, in
fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner’s
law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan’s liquor,
and the very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are
so much wrapped up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing
such conversation: the talk of fish-mongers running usually on stockfish
and haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches
that positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I
was doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into the
region of generalities. Their profession was forgotten in their
electorship. Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of grave-digging.
‘Na, na,’ said the one, ‘ye’re a’ wrang.’
‘The English and Irish Churches,’ answered the other, in
a tone as if he had made the remark before, and it had been called in
question - ‘The English and Irish Churches have <i>impoverished</i>
the country.’<br>
<br>
‘Such are the results of education,’ thought I as I passed
beside them and came fairly among the tombs. Here, at least, there
were no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning’s leader,
to distract or offend me. The old shabby church showed, as usual,
its quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable,
still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago. A chill dank
mist lay over all. The Old Greyfriars’ churchyard was in
perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the associations
with no fear of vulgar interruption. On this stone the Covenant
was signed. In that vault, as the story goes, John Knox took hiding
in some Reformation broil. From that window Burke the murderer
looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps o’ nights
let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made grave. Certainly
he would have a selection here. The very walks have been carried
over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is uneven, because
(as I was once quaintly told) ‘when the wood rots it stands to
reason the soil should fall in,’ which, from the law of gravitation,
is certainly beyond denial. But it is round the boundary that
there are the finest tombs. The whole irregular space is, as it
were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death’s-heads
and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and
Latin mottoes - rich in them to such an extent that their proper space
has run over, and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns
and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.
These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses,
and every here and there a clothes-pole projects between two monuments
its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red. With a grim
irony they recall the banners in the Invalides, banners as appropriate
perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these others above
the dust of armies. Why they put things out to dry on that particular
morning it was hard to imagine. The grass was grey with drops
of rain, the headstones black with moisture. Yet, in despite of
weather and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and beyond
them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole
families were born and fed, and slept and died. At one a girl
sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from another
came the shrill tones of a scolding woman. Every here and there
was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside
upon the window-seat. But you do not grasp the full connection
between these houses of the dead and the living, the unnatural marriage
of stately sepulchres and squalid houses, till, lower down, where the
road has sunk far below the surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs
are scarcely on a level with its wall, you observe that a proprietor
has taken advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack against
its back. It startles you to see the red, modern pots peering
over the shoulder of the tomb.<br>
<br>
A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones
that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had
taught me to expect little from Greyfriars’ sextons, and I passed
him by in silence. A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof
eyed me curiously. A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened
on strange meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put
his finger to his nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon
my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through
the gratings into the shadow of vaults.<br>
<br>
Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the
other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten
with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of
degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress
is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious
friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell
glass over it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull
yellow among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant
than it is in modern cemeteries, where every second mound can boast
a similar coronal; and here, where it was the exception and not the
rule, I could even fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering
were the tears of those who laid it where it was. As the two women
came up to it, one of them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked
long and silently through the clouded shade, while the second stood
above her, gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling baby.
I was struck a great way off with something religious in the attitude
of these two unkempt and haggard women; and I drew near faster, but
still cautiously, to hear what they were saying. Surely on them
the spirit of death and decay had descended; I had no education to dread
here: should I not have a chance of seeing nature? Alas! a pawnbroker
could not have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what
the kneeling woman said to the woman upright - this and nothing more:
‘Eh, what extravagance!’<br>
<br>
O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed - wonderful, but wearisome
in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like numerals
than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions
written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare’s
theatre. Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest
ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability
among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs
and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers talk
politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost
of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.<br>
<br>
Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates
again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all
whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green
mounds and blackened headstones.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
NURSES<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
death. It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking
forth upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow blankets,
and with long lines of underclothing fluttering between the battered
posts. There were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by
one of ‘her children,’ and there were flowers in the window,
and a sickly canary withered into consumption in an ornamental cage.
The bed, with its checked coverlid, was in a closet. A great Bible
lay on the table; and her drawers were full of ‘scones,’
which it was her pleasure to give to young visitors such as I was then.<br>
<br>
You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and the
cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that died, were
all indications of the want that ate into her heart. I think I
know a little of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure as if I
had seen her, that she sat many an hour in silent tears, with the big
Bible open before her clouded eyes.<br>
<br>
If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that
had linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched
suddenly through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn
gradually off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike!
She had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance - repugnance
which no man can conquer - towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty
of the earlier stage. She had spent her best and happiest years
in tending, watching, and learning to love like a mother this child,
with which she has no connection and to which she has no tie.
Perhaps she refused some sweetheart (such things have been), or put
him off and off, until he lost heart and turned to some one else, all
for fear of leaving this creature that had wound itself about her heart.
And the end of it all - her month’s warning, and a present perhaps,
and the rest of the life to vain regret. Or, worse still, to see
the child gradually forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect
and neglect on the plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning
to treat her as a servant whom he had treated a few years before as
a mother. She sees the Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness
and love unutterable in her heart she had bought for him years ago out
of her slender savings, neglected for some newer gift of his father,
lying in dust in the lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and
the act applauded for its unfeeling charity. Little wonder if
she becomes hurt and angry, and attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her
old power back again. We are not all patient Grizzels, by good
fortune, but the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers of
our own.<br>
<br>
And so, in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very
likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil
of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the
children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she
gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late
charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short
visit. How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them
on her lonely bed! How unsatisfactory their realisation, when
the forgetful child, half wondering, checks with every word and action
the outpouring of her maternal love! How bitter and restless the
memories that they leave behind! And for the rest, what else has
she? - to watch them with eager eyes as they go to school, to sit in
church where she can see them every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed
in the street, or deliberately cut because the great man or the great
woman are with friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise the
old woman that loved them.<br>
<br>
When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!
Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark,
with the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit
upon the table.<br>
<br>
And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers - mothers in
everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that
they have remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household
servant. It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart,
and have no fireside or offspring of their own.<br>
<br>
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more nurses,
and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can be
more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings
of a woman’s heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need
them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then
to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them
is at an end. This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing
if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to
those who share their toil and have no part in their reward.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER V - A CHARACTER<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat.
So far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes,
you can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure
depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of
Hell for its own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching
an omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing
at my side as though he would cough his soul out; and turning round,
I saw him stopping under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round
him and his whole face convulsed. It seemed as if he could not
live long; and so the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as
I finished my cigar up and down the lighted streets.<br>
<br>
He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness. He
is dumb; but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps
I should say, his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into
the service of corruption. Look at him, and he will sign to you
with his bloated head, and when you go to him in answer to the sign,
thinking perhaps that the poor dumb man has lost his way, you will see
what he writes upon his slate. He haunts the doors of schools,
and shows such inscriptions as these to the innocent children that come
out. He hangs about picture-galleries, and makes the noblest pictures
the text for some silent homily of vice. His industry is a lesson
to ourselves. Is it not wonderful how he can triumph over his
infirmities and do such an amount of harm without a tongue? Wonderful
industry - strange, fruitless, pleasureless toil? Must not the
very devil feel a soft emotion to see his disinterested and laborious
service? Ah, but the devil knows better than this: he knows that
this man is penetrated with the love of evil and that all his pleasure
is shut up in wickedness: he recognises him, perhaps, as a fit type
for mankind of his satanic self, and watches over his effigy as we might
watch over a favourite likeness. As the business man comes to
love the toil, which he only looked upon at first as a ladder towards
other desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the dumb man has
felt the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of
sin. It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is hideous
and loathsome; for even vice has her Hörsel and her devotees, who
love her for her own sake.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - NANCE AT THE ‘GREEN DRAGON’<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Nance Holdaway was on her knees before the fire blowing the green wood
that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only now and then shot forth
a smothered flame; her knees already ached and her eyes smarted, for
she had been some while at this ungrateful task, but her mind was gone
far away to meet the coming stranger. Now she met him in the wood,
now at the castle gate, now in the kitchen by candle-light; each fresh
presentment eclipsed the one before; a form so elegant, manners so sedate,
a countenance so brave and comely, a voice so winning and resolute -
sure such a man was never seen! The thick-coming fancies poured
and brightened in her head like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.<br>
<br>
Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon the stair,
and as he entered the room she bent the closer to her work. He
glanced at the green fagots with a sneer, and looked askance at the
bed and the white sheets, at the strip of carpet laid, like an island,
on the great expanse of the stone floor, and at the broken glazing of
the casement clumsily repaired with paper.<br>
<br>
‘Leave that fire a-be,’ he cried. ‘What, have
I toiled all my life to turn innkeeper at the hind end? Leave
it a-be, I say.’<br>
<br>
‘La, uncle, it doesn’t burn a bit; it only smokes,’
said Nance, looking up from her position.<br>
<br>
‘You are come of decent people on both sides,’ returned
the old man. ‘Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-agate?
Get up, get on your hood, make yourself useful, and be off to the “Green
Dragon.”’<br>
<br>
‘I thought you was to go yourself,’ Nance faltered.<br>
<br>
‘So did I,’ quoth Jonathan; ‘but it appears I was
mistook.’<br>
<br>
The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began to hang
back. ‘I think I would rather not, dear uncle,’ she
said. ‘Night is at hand, and I think, dear, I would rather
not.’<br>
<br>
‘Now you look here,’ replied Jonathan, ‘I have my
lord’s orders, have I not? Little he gives me, but it’s
all my livelihood. And do you fancy, if I disobey my lord, I’m
likely to turn round for a lass like you? No, I’ve that
hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I wouldn’t walk a mile, not
for King George upon his bended knees.’ And he walked to
the window and looked down the steep scarp to where the river foamed
in the bottom of the dell.<br>
<br>
Nance stayed for no more bidding. In her own room, by the glimmer
of the twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on her Sunday mittens;
adjusted her black hood, and tied a dozen times its cherry ribbons;
and in less than ten minutes, with a fluttering heart and excellently
bright eyes, she passed forth under the arch and over the bridge, into
the thickening shadows of the groves. A well-marked wheel-track
conducted her. The wood, which upon both sides of the river dell
was a mere scrambling thicket of hazel, hawthorn, and holly, boasted
on the level of more considerable timber. Beeches came to a good
growth, with here and there an oak; and the track now passed under a
high arcade of branches, and now ran under the open sky in glades.
As the girl proceeded these glades became more frequent, the trees began
again to decline in size, and the wood to degenerate into furzy coverts.
Last of all there was a fringe of elders; and beyond that the track
came forth upon an open, rolling moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and
scanty bushes, and all golden brown with the winter, like a grouse.
Right over against the girl the last red embers of the sunset burned
under horizontal clouds; the night fell clear and still and frosty,
and the track in low and marshy passages began to crackle under foot
with ice.<br>
<br>
Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of the ‘Green
Dragon’ hove in sight, and running close beside them, very faint
in the dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the Great North Road. It
was the back of the post-house that was presented to Nance Holdaway;
and as she continued to draw near and the night to fall more completely,
she became aware of an unusual brightness and bustle. A post-chaise
stood in the yard, its lamps already lighted: light shone hospitably
in the windows and from the open door; moving lights and shadows testified
to the activity of servants bearing lanterns. The clank of pails,
the stamping of hoofs on the firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and,
last of all, the energetic hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her
ear. By the stir you would have thought the mail was at the door,
but it was still too early in the night. The down mail was not
due at the ‘Green Dragon’ for hard upon an hour; the up
mail from Scotland not before two in the black morning.<br>
<br>
Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled. Sam, the tall ostler,
was polishing a curb-chain wit sand; the lantern at his feet letting
up spouts of candle-light through the holes with which its conical roof
was peppered.<br>
<br>
‘Hey, miss,’ said he jocularly, ‘you won’t look
at me any more, now you have gentry at the castle.’<br>
<br>
Her cheeks burned with anger.<br>
<br>
‘That’s my lord’s chay,’ the man continued,
nodding at the chaise, ‘Lord Windermoor’s. Came all
in a fluster - dinner, bowl of punch, and put the horses to. For all
the world like a runaway match, my dear - bar the bride. He brought
Mr. Archer in the chay with him.’<br>
<br>
‘Is that Holdaway?’ cried the landlord from the lighted
entry, where he stood shading his eyes.<br>
<br>
‘Only me, sir,’ answered Nance.<br>
<br>
‘O, you, Miss Nance,’ he said. ‘Well, come in
quick, my pretty. My lord is waiting for your uncle.’<br>
<br>
And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot and lighted
by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a table finishing a bowl
of punch. One of these was stout, elderly, and irascible, with
a face like a full moon, well dyed with liquor, thick tremulous lips,
a short, purple hand, in which he brandished a long pipe, and an abrupt
and gobbling utterance. This was my Lord Windermoor. In
his companion Nance beheld a younger man, tall, quiet, grave, demurely
dressed, and wearing his own hair. Her glance but lighted on him,
and she flushed, for in that second she made sure that she had twice
betrayed herself - betrayed by the involuntary flash of her black eyes
her secret impatience to behold this new companion, and, what was far
worse, betrayed her disappointment in the realisation of her dreams.
He, meanwhile, as if unconscious, continued to regard her with unmoved
decorum.<br>
<br>
‘O, a man of wood,’ thought Nance.<br>
<br>
‘What - what?’ said his lordship. ‘Who is this?’<br>
<br>
‘If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway’s niece,’ replied
Nance, with a curtsey.<br>
<br>
‘Should have been here himself,’ observed his lordship.
‘Well, you tell Holdaway that I’m aground, not a stiver
- not a stiver. I’m running from the beagles - going abroad,
tell Holdaway. And he need look for no more wages: glad of ’em
myself, if I could get ’em. He can live in the castle if
he likes, or go to the devil. O, and here is Mr. Archer; and I
recommend him to take him in - a friend of mine - and Mr. Archer will
pay, as I wrote. And I regard that in the light of a precious
good thing for Holdaway, let me tell you, and a set-off against the
wages.’<br>
<br>
‘But O, my lord!’ cried Nance, ‘we live upon the wages,
and what are we to do without?’<br>
<br>
‘What am I to do? - what am I to do?’ replied Lord Windermoor
with some exasperation. ‘I have no wages. And there
is Mr. Archer. And if Holdaway doesn’t like it, he can go
to the devil, and you with him! - and you with him!’<br>
<br>
‘And yet, my lord,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘these good people
will have as keen a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps, since
they have done nothing to deserve it.’<br>
<br>
‘Deserve it?’ cried the peer. ‘What? What?
If a rascally highwayman comes up to me with a confounded pistol, do
you say that I’ve deserved it? How often am I to tell you,
sir, that I was cheated - that I was cheated?’<br>
<br>
‘You are happy in the belief,’ returned Mr. Archer gravely.<br>
<br>
‘Archer, you would be the death of me!’ exclaimed his lordship.
‘You know you’re drunk; you know it, sir; and yet you can’t
get up a spark of animation.’<br>
<br>
‘I have drunk fair, my lord,’ replied the younger man; ‘but
I own I am conscious of no exhilaration.’<br>
<br>
‘If you had as black a look-out as me, sir,’ cried the peer,
‘you would be very glad of a little innocent exhilaration, let
me tell you. I am glad of it - glad of it, and I only wish I was
drunker. For let me tell you it’s a cruel hard thing upon
a man of my time of life and my position, to be brought down to beggary
because the world is full of thieves and rascals - thieves and rascals.
What? For all I know, you may be a thief and a rascal yourself;
and I would fight you for a pinch of snuff - a pinch of snuff,’
exclaimed his lordship.<br>
<br>
Here Mr. Archer turned to Nance Holdaway with a pleasant smile, so full
of sweetness, kindness, and composure that, at one bound, her dreams
returned to her. ‘My good Miss Holdaway,’ said he,
‘if you are willing to show me the road, I am even eager to be
gone. As for his lordship and myself, compose yourself; there
is no fear; this is his lordship’s way.’<br>
<br>
‘What? what?’ cried his lordship. ‘My way?
Ish no such a thing, my way.’<br>
<br>
‘Come, my lord,’ cried Archer; ‘you and I very thoroughly
understand each other; and let me suggest, it is time that both of us
were gone. The mail will soon be due. Here, then, my lord,
I take my leave of you, with the most earnest assurance of my gratitude
for the past, and a sincere offer of any services I may be able to render
in the future.’<br>
<br>
‘Archer,’ exclaimed Lord Windermoor, ‘I love you like
a son. Le’ ’s have another bowl.’<br>
<br>
‘My lord, for both our sakes, you will excuse me,’ replied
Mr. Archer. ‘We both require caution; we must both, for
some while at least, avoid the chance of a pursuit.’<br>
<br>
‘Archer,’ quoth his lordship, ‘this is a rank ingratishood.
What? I’m to go firing away in the dark in the cold po’chaise,
and not so much as a game of écarté possible, unless I
stop and play with the postillion, the postillion; and the whole country
swarming with thieves and rascals and highwaymen.’<br>
<br>
‘I beg your lordship’s pardon,’ put in the landlord,
who now appeared in the doorway to announce the chaise, ‘but this
part of the North Road is known for safety. There has not been
a robbery, to call a robbery, this five years’ time. Further
south, of course, it’s nearer London, and another story,’
he added.<br>
<br>
‘Well, then, if that’s so,’ concluded my lord, ‘le’
’s have t’other bowl and a pack of cards.’<br>
<br>
‘My lord, you forget,’ said Archer, ‘I might still
gain; but it is hardly possible for me to lose.’<br>
<br>
‘Think I’m a sharper?’ inquired the peer. ‘Gen’leman’s
parole’s all I ask.’<br>
<br>
But Mr. Archer was proof against these blandishments, and said farewell
gravely enough to Lord Windermoor, shaking his hand and at the same
time bowing very low. ‘You will never know,’ says
he, ‘the service you have done me.’ And with that,
and before my lord had finally taken up his meaning, he had slipped
about the table, touched Nance lightly but imperiously on the arm, and
left the room. In face of the outbreak of his lordship’s
lamentations she made haste to follow the truant.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II - IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The chaise had been driven round to the front door; the courtyard lay
all deserted, and only lit by a lantern set upon a window-sill.
Through this Nance rapidly led the way, and began to ascend the swellings
of the moor with a heart that somewhat fluttered in her bosom.
She was not afraid, but in the course of these last passages with Lord
Windermoor Mr. Archer had ascended to that pedestal on which her fancy
waited to instal him. The reality, she felt, excelled her dreams,
and this cold night walk was the first romantic incident in her experience.<br>
<br>
It was the rule in these days to see gentlemen unsteady after dinner,
yet Nance was both surprised and amused when her companion, who had
spoken so soberly, began to stumble and waver by her side with the most
airy divagations. Sometimes he would get so close to her that
she must edge away; and at others lurch clear out of the track and plough
among deep heather. His courtesy and gravity meanwhile remained
unaltered. He asked her how far they had to go; whether the way
lay all upon the moorland, and when he learned they had to pass a wood
expressed his pleasure. ‘For,’ said he, ‘I am
passionately fond of trees. Trees and fair lawns, if you consider
of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature, as palaces and fine approaches
- ’ And here he stumbled into a patch of slough and nearly
fell. The girl had hard work not to laugh, but at heart she was
lost in admiration for one who talked so elegantly.<br>
<br>
They had got to about a quarter of a mile from the ‘Green Dragon,’
and were near the summit of the rise, when a sudden rush of wheels arrested
them. Turning and looking back, they saw the post-house, now much
declined in brightness; and speeding away northward the two tremulous
bright dots of my Lord Windermoor’s chaise-lamps. Mr. Archer
followed these yellow and unsteady stars until they dwindled into points
and disappeared.<br>
<br>
‘There goes my only friend,’ he said. ‘Death
has cut off those that loved me, and change of fortune estranged my
flatterers; and but for you, poor bankrupt, my life is as lonely as
this moor.’<br>
<br>
The tone of his voice affected both of them. They stood there
on the side of the moor, and became thrillingly conscious of the void
waste of the night, without a feature for the eye, and except for the
fainting whisper of the carriage-wheels without a murmur for the ear.
And instantly, like a mockery, there broke out, very far away, but clear
and jolly, the note of the mail-guard’s horn. ‘Over
the hills’ was his air. It rose to the two watchers on the
moor with the most cheerful sentiment of human company and travel, and
at the same time in and around the ‘Green Dragon’ it woke
up a great bustle of lights running to and fro and clattering hoofs.
Presently after, out of the darkness to southward, the mail grew near
with a growing rumble. Its lamps were very large and bright, and
threw their radiance forward in overlapping cones; the four cantering
horses swarmed and steamed; the body of the coach followed like a great
shadow; and this lit picture slid with a sort of ineffectual swiftness
over the black field of night, and was eclipsed by the buildings of
the ‘Green Dragon.’<br>
<br>
Mr. Archer turned abruptly and resumed his former walk; only that he
was now more steady, kept better alongside his young conductor, and
had fallen into a silence broken by sighs. Nance waxed very pitiful
over his fate, contrasting an imaginary past of courts and great society,
and perhaps the King himself, with the tumbledown ruin in a wood to
which she was now conducting him.<br>
<br>
‘You must try, sir, to keep your spirits up,’ said she.
‘To be sure this is a great change for one like you; but who knows
the future?’<br>
<br>
Mr. Archer turned towards her in the darkness, and she could clearly
perceive that he smiled upon her very kindly. ‘There spoke
a sweet nature,’ said he, ‘and I must thank you for these
words. But I would not have you fancy that I regret the past for
any happiness found in it, or that I fear the simplicity and hardship
of the country. I am a man that has been much tossed about in
life; now up, now down; and do you think that I shall not be able to
support what you support - you who are kind, and therefore know how
to feel pain; who are beautiful, and therefore hope; who are young,
and therefore (or am I the more mistaken?) discontented?’<br>
<br>
‘Nay, sir, not that, at least,’ said Nance; ‘not discontented.
If I were to be discontented, how should I look those that have real
sorrows in the face? I have faults enough, but not that fault;
and I have my merits too, for I have a good opinion of myself.
But for beauty, I am not so simple but that I can tell a banter from
a compliment.’<br>
<br>
‘Nay, nay,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘I had half forgotten;
grief is selfish, and I was thinking of myself and not of you, or I
had never blurted out so bold a piece of praise. ’Tis the
best proof of my sincerity. But come, now, I would lay a wager
you are no coward?’<br>
<br>
‘Indeed, sir, I am not more afraid than another,’ said Nance.
‘None of my blood are given to fear.’<br>
<br>
‘And you are honest?’ he returned.<br>
<br>
‘I will answer for that,’ said she.<br>
<br>
‘Well, then, to be brave, to be honest, to be kind, and to be
contented, since you say you are so - is not that to fill up a great
part of virtue?’<br>
<br>
‘I fear you are but a flatterer,’ said Nance, but she did
not say it clearly, for what with bewilderment and satisfaction, her
heart was quite oppressed.<br>
<br>
There could be no harm, certainly, in these grave compliments; but yet
they charmed and frightened her, and to find favour, for reasons however
obscure, in the eyes of this elegant, serious, and most unfortunate
young gentleman, was a giddy elevation, was almost an apotheosis, for
a country maid.<br>
<br>
But she was to be no more exercised; for Mr. Archer, disclaiming any
thought of flattery, turned off to other subjects, and held her all
through the wood in conversation, addressing her with an air of perfect
sincerity, and listening to her answers with every mark of interest.
Had open flattery continued, Nance would have soon found refuge in good
sense; but the more subtle lure she could not suspect, much less avoid.
It was the first time she had ever taken part in a conversation illuminated
by any ideas. All was then true that she had heard and dreamed
of gentlemen; they were a race apart, like deities knowing good and
evil. And then there burst upon her soul a divine thought, hope’s
glorious sunrise: since she could understand, since it seemed that she
too, even she, could interest this sorrowful Apollo, might she not learn?
or was she not learning? Would not her soul awake and put forth
wings? Was she not, in fact, an enchanted princess, waiting but
a touch to become royal? She saw herself transformed, radiantly
attired, but in the most exquisite taste: her face grown longer and
more refined; her tint etherealised; and she heard herself with delighted
wonder talking like a book.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile they had arrived at where the track comes out above the river
dell, and saw in front of them the castle, faintly shadowed on the night,
covering with its broken battlements a bold projection of the bank,
and showing at the extreme end, where were the habitable tower and wing,
some crevices of candle-light. Hence she called loudly upon her
uncle, and he was seen to issue, lantern in hand, from the tower door,
and, where the ruins did not intervene, to pick his way over the swarded
courtyard, avoiding treacherous cellars and winding among blocks of
fallen masonry. The arch of the great gate was still entire, flanked
by two tottering bastions, and it was here that Jonathan met them, standing
at the edge of the bridge, bent somewhat forward, and blinking at them
through the glow of his own lantern. Mr. Archer greeted him with
civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance. He guided
the newcomer across the court-yard, looking sharply and quickly in his
face, and grumbling all the time about the cold, and the discomfort
and dilapidation of the castle. He was sure he hoped that Mr.
Archer would like it; but in truth he could not think what brought him
there. Doubtless he had a good reason - this with a look of cunning
scrutiny - but, indeed, the place was quite unfit for any person of
repute; he himself was eaten up with the rheumatics. It was the
most rheumaticky place in England, and some fine day the whole habitable
part (to call it habitable) would fetch away bodily and go down the
slope into the river. He had seen the cracks widening; there was
a plaguy issue in the bank below; he thought a spring was mining it;
it might be to-morrow, it might be next day; but they were all sure
of a come-down sooner or later. ‘And that is a poor death,’
said he, ‘for any one, let alone a gentleman, to have a whole
old ruin dumped upon his belly. Have a care to your left there;
these cellar vaults have all broke down, and the grass and hemlock hide
’em. Well, sir, here is welcome to you, such as it is, and
wishing you well away.’<br>
<br>
And with that Jonathan ushered his guest through the tower door, and
down three steps on the left hand into the kitchen or common room of
the castle. It was a huge, low room, as large as a meadow, occupying
the whole width of the habitable wing, with six barred windows looking
on the court, and two into the river valley. A dresser, a table,
and a few chairs stood dotted here and there upon the uneven flags.
Under the great chimney a good fire burned in an iron fire-basket; a
high old settee, rudely carved with figures and Gothic lettering, flanked
it on either side; there was a hinge table and a stone bench in the
chimney corner, and above the arch hung guns, axes, lanterns, and great
sheaves of rusty keys.<br>
<br>
Jonathan looked about him, holding up the lantern, and shrugged his
shoulders, with a pitying grimace. ‘Here it is,’ he
said. ‘See the damp on the floor, look at the moss; where
there’s moss you may be sure that it’s rheumaticky.
Try and get near that fire for to warm yourself; it’ll blow the
coat off your back. And with a young gentleman with a face like
yours, as pale as a tallow-candle, I’d be afeard of a churchyard
cough and a galloping decline,’ says Jonathan, naming the maladies
with gloomy gusto, ‘or the cold might strike and turn your blood,’
he added.<br>
<br>
Mr. Archer fairly laughed. ‘My good Mr. Holdaway,’
said he, ‘I was born with that same tallow-candle face, and the
only fear that you inspire me with is the fear that I intrude unwelcomely
upon your private hours. But I think I can promise you that I
am very little troublesome, and I am inclined to hope that the terms
which I can offer may still pay you the derangement.’<br>
<br>
‘Yes, the terms,’ said Jonathan, ‘I was thinking of
that. As you say, they are very small,’ and he shook his
head.<br>
<br>
‘Unhappily, I can afford no more,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘But this we have arranged already,’ he added with a certain
stiffness; ‘and as I am aware that Miss Holdaway has matter to
communicate, I will, if you permit, retire at once. To-night I
must bivouac; to-morrow my trunk is to follow from the “Dragon.”
So if you will show me to my room I shall wish you a good slumber and
a better awakening.’<br>
<br>
Jonathan silently gave the lantern to Nance, and she, turning and curtseying
in the doorway, proceeded to conduct their guest up the broad winding
staircase of the tower. He followed with a very brooding face.<br>
<br>
‘Alas!’ cried Nance, as she entered the room, ‘your
fire black out,’ and, setting down the lantern, she clapped upon
her knees before the chimney and began to rearrange the charred and
still smouldering remains. Mr. Archer looked about the gaunt apartment
with a sort of shudder. The great height, the bare stone, the
shattered windows, the aspect of the uncurtained bed, with one of its
four fluted columns broken short, all struck a chill upon his fancy.
From this dismal survey his eyes returned to Nance crouching before
the fire, the candle in one hand and artfully puffing at the embers;
the flames as they broke forth played upon the soft outline of her cheek
- she was alive and young, coloured with the bright hues of life, and
a woman. He looked upon her, softening; and then sat down and
continued to admire the picture.<br>
<br>
‘There, sir,’ said she, getting upon her feet, ‘your
fire is doing bravely now. Good-night.’<br>
<br>
He rose and held out his hand. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘you
are my only friend in these parts, and you must shake hands.’<br>
<br>
She brushed her hand upon her skirt and offered it, blushing.<br>
<br>
‘God bless you, my dear,’ said he.<br>
<br>
And then, when he was alone, he opened one of the windows, and stared
down into the dark valley. A gentle wimpling of the river among
stones ascended to his ear; the trees upon the other bank stood very
black against the sky; farther away an owl was hooting. It was
dreary and cold, and as he turned back to the hearth and the fine glow
of fire, ‘Heavens!’ said he to himself, ‘what an unfortunate
destiny is mine!’<br>
<br>
He went to bed, but sleep only visited his pillow in uneasy snatches.
Outbreaks of loud speech came up the staircase; he heard the old stones
of the castle crack in the frosty night with sharp reverberations, and
the bed complained under his tossings. Lastly, far on into the
morning, he awakened from a doze to hear, very far off, in the extreme
and breathless quiet, a wailing flourish on the horn. The down
mail was drawing near to the ‘Green Dragon.’ He sat
up in bed; the sound was tragical by distance, and the modulation appealed
to his ear like human speech. It seemed to call upon him with
a dreary insistence - to call him far away, to address him personally,
and to have a meaning that he failed to seize. It was thus, at
least, in this nodding castle, in a cold, miry woodland, and so far
from men and society, that the traffic on the Great North Road spoke
to him in the intervals of slumber.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III - JONATHAN HOLDAWAY<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Nance descended the tower stair, pausing at every step. She was
in no hurry to confront her uncle with bad news, and she must dwell
a little longer on the rich note of Mr. Archer’s voice, the charm
of his kind words, and the beauty of his manner and person. But,
once at the stair-foot, she threw aside the spell and recovered her
sensible and workaday self.<br>
<br>
Jonathan was seated in the middle of the settle, a mug of ale beside
him, in the attitude of one prepared for trouble; but he did not speak,
and suffered her to fetch her supper and eat of it, with a very excellent
appetite, in silence. When she had done, she, too, drew a tankard
of home-brewed, and came and planted herself in front of him upon the
settle.<br>
<br>
‘Well?’ said Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘My lord has run away,’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
‘What?’ cried the old man.<br>
<br>
‘Abroad,’ she continued; ‘run away from creditors.
He said he had not a stiver, but he was drunk enough. He said
you might live on in the castle, and Mr. Archer would pay you; but you
was to look for no more wages, since he would be glad of them himself.’<br>
<br>
Jonathan’s face contracted; the flush of a black, bilious anger
mounted to the roots of his hair; he gave an inarticulate cry, leapt
upon his feet, and began rapidly pacing the stone floor. At first
he kept his hands behind his back in a tight knot; then he began to
gesticulate as he turned.<br>
<br>
‘This man - this lord,’ he shouted, ‘who is he?
He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, and I with a dirty straw.
He rolled in his coach when he was a baby. I have dug and toiled
and laboured since I was that high - that high.’ And he
shouted again. ‘I’m bent and broke, and full of pains.
D’ ye think I don’t know the taste of sweat? Many’s
the gallon I’ve drunk of it - ay, in the midwinter, toiling like
a slave. All through, what has my life been? Bend, bend,
bend my old creaking back till it would ache like breaking; wade about
in the foul mire, never a dry stitch; empty belly, sore hands, hat off
to my Lord Redface; kicks and ha’pence; and now, here, at the
hind end, when I’m worn to my poor bones, a kick and done with
it.’ He walked a little while in silence, and then, extending
his hand, ‘Now you, Nance Holdaway,’ says he, ‘you
come of my blood, and you’re a good girl. When that man
was a boy, I used to carry his gun for him. I carried the gun
all day on my two feet, and many a stitch I had, and chewed a bullet
for. He rode upon a horse, with feathers in his hat; but it was
him that had the shots and took the game home. Did I complain?
Not I. I knew my station. What did I ask, but just the chance
to live and die honest? Nance Holdaway, don’t let them deny
it to me - don’t let them do it. I’ve been as poor
as Job, and as honest as the day, but now, my girl, you mark these words
of mine, I’m getting tired of it.’<br>
<br>
‘I wouldn’t say such words, at least,’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
‘You wouldn’t?’ said the old man grimly. ‘Well,
and did I when I was your age? Wait till your back’s broke
and your hands tremble, and your eyes fail, and you’re weary of
the battle and ask no more but to lie down in your bed and give the
ghost up like an honest man; and then let there up and come some insolent,
ungodly fellow - ah! if I had him in these hands! “Where’s
my money that you gambled?” I should say. “Where’s
my money that you drank and diced?” “Thief!”
is what I would say; “Thief!”’ he roared, ‘“Thief”’<br>
<br>
‘Mr. Archer will hear you if you don’t take care,’
said Nance, ‘and I would be ashamed, for one, that he should hear
a brave, old, honest, hard-working man like Jonathan Holdaway talk nonsense
like a boy.’<br>
<br>
‘D’ ye think I mind for Mr. Archer?’ he cried shrilly,
with a clack of laughter; and then he came close up to her, stooped
down with his two palms upon his knees, and looked her in the eyes,
with a strange hard expression, something like a smile. ‘Do
I mind for God, my girl?’ he said; ‘that’s what it’s
come to be now, do I mind for God?’<br>
<br>
‘Uncle Jonathan,’ she said, getting up and taking him by
the arm; ‘you sit down again, where you were sitting. There,
sit still; I’ll have no more of this; you’ll do yourself
a mischief. Come, take a drink of this good ale, and I’ll
warm a tankard for you. La, we’ll pull through, you’ll
see. I’m young, as you say, and it’s my turn to carry
the bundle; and don’t you worry your bile, or we’ll have
sickness, too, as well as sorrow.’<br>
<br>
‘D’ ye think that I’d forgotten you?’ said Jonathan,
with something like a groan; and thereupon his teeth clicked to, and
he sat silent with the tankard in his hand and staring straight before
him.<br>
<br>
‘Why,’ says Nance, setting on the ale to mull, ‘men
are always children, they say, however old; and if ever I heard a thing
like this, to set to and make yourself sick, just when the money’s
failing. Keep a good heart up; you haven’t kept a good heart
these seventy years, nigh hand, to break down about a pound or two.
Here’s this Mr. Archer come to lodge, that you disliked so much.
Well, now you see it was a clear Providence. Come, let’s
think upon our mercies. And here is the ale mulling lovely; smell
of it; I’ll take a drop myself, it smells so sweet. And,
Uncle Jonathan, you let me say one word. You’ve lost more
than money before now; you lost my aunt, and bore it like a man.
Bear this.’<br>
<br>
His face once more contracted; his fist doubled, and shot forth into
the air, and trembled. ‘Let them look out!’ he shouted.
‘Here, I warn all men; I’ve done with this foul kennel of
knaves. Let them look out!’<br>
<br>
‘Hush, hush! for pity’s sake,’ cried Nance.<br>
<br>
And then all of a sudden he dropped his face into his hands, and broke
out with a great hiccoughing dry sob that was horrible to hear.
‘O,’ he cried, ‘my God, if my son hadn’t left
me, if my Dick was here!’ and the sobs shook him; Nance sitting
still and watching him, with distress. ‘O, if he were here
to help his father!’ he went on again. ‘If I had a
son like other fathers, he would save me now, when all is breaking down;
O, he would save me! Ay, but where is he? Raking taverns,
a thief perhaps. My curse be on him!’ he added, rising again
into wrath.<br>
<br>
‘Hush!’ cried Nance, springing to her feet: ‘your
boy, your dead wife’s boy - Aunt Susan’s baby that she loved
- would you curse him? O, God forbid!’<br>
<br>
The energy of her address surprised him from his mood. He looked
upon her, tearless and confused. ‘Let me go to my bed,’
he said at last, and he rose, and, shaking as with ague, but quite silent,
lighted his candle, and left the kitchen.<br>
<br>
Poor Nance! the pleasant current of her dreams was all diverted.
She beheld a golden city, where she aspired to dwell; she had spoken
with a deity, and had told herself that she might rise to be his equal;
and now the earthly ligaments that bound her down had been tightened.
She was like a tree looking skyward, her roots were in the ground.
It seemed to her a thing so coarse, so rustic, to be thus concerned
about a loss in money; when Mr. Archer, fallen from the sky-level of
counts and nobles, faced his changed destiny with so immovable a courage.
To weary of honesty; that, at least, no one could do, but even to name
it was already a disgrace; and she beheld in fancy her uncle, and the
young lad, all laced and feathered, hand upon hip, bestriding his small
horse. The opposition seemed to perpetuate itself from generation
to generation; one side still doomed to the clumsy and the servile,
the other born to beauty.<br>
<br>
She thought of the golden zones in which gentlemen were bred, and figured
with so excellent a grace; zones in which wisdom and smooth words, white
linen and slim hands, were the mark of the desired inhabitants; where
low temptations were unknown, and honesty no virtue, but a thing as
natural as breathing.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER IV - MINGLING THREADS<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
It was nearly seven before Mr. Archer left his apartment. On the
landing he found another door beside his own opening on a roofless corridor,
and presently he was walking on the top of the ruins. On one hand
he could look down a good depth into the green court-yard; on the other
his eye roved along the downward course of the river, the wet woods
all smoking, the shadows long and blue, the mists golden and rosy in
the sun, here and there the water flashing across an obstacle.
His heart expanded and softened to a grateful melancholy, and with his
eye fixed upon the distance, and no thought of present danger, he continued
to stroll along the elevated and treacherous promenade.<br>
<br>
A terror-stricken cry rose to him from the courtyard. He looked
down, and saw in a glimpse Nance standing below with hands clasped in
horror and his own foot trembling on the margin of a gulf. He
recoiled and leant against a pillar, quaking from head to foot, and
covering his face with his hands; and Nance had time to run round by
the stair and rejoin him where he stood before he had changed a line
of his position.<br>
<br>
‘Ah!’ he cried, and clutched her wrist; ‘don’t
leave me. The place rocks; I have no head for altitudes.’<br>
<br>
‘Sit down against that pillar,’ said Nance. ‘Don’t
you be afraid; I won’t leave you, and don’t look up or down:
look straight at me. How white you are!’<br>
<br>
‘The gulf,’ he said, and closed his eyes again and shuddered.<br>
<br>
‘Why,’ said Nance, ‘what a poor climber you must be!
That was where my cousin Dick used to get out of the castle after Uncle
Jonathan had shut the gate. I’ve been down there myself
with him helping me. I wouldn’t try with you,’ she
said, and laughed merrily.<br>
<br>
The sound of her laughter was sincere and musical, and perhaps its beauty
barbed the offence to Mr. Archer. The blood came into his face
with a quick jet, and then left it paler than before. ‘It
is a physical weakness,’ he said harshly, ‘and very droll,
no doubt, but one that I can conquer on necessity. See, I am still
shaking. Well, I advance to the battlements and look down.
Show me your cousin’s path.’<br>
<br>
‘He would go sure-foot along that little ledge,’ said Nance,
pointing as she spoke; ‘then out through the breach and down by
yonder buttress. It is easier coming back, of course, because
you see where you are going. From the buttress foot a sheep-walk
goes along the scarp - see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass.
And now, sir,’ she added, with a touch of womanly pity, ‘I
would come away from here if I were you, for indeed you are not fit.’<br>
<br>
Sure enough Mr. Archer’s pallor and agitation had continued to
increase; his cheeks were deathly, his clenched fingers trembled pitifully.
‘The weakness is physical,’ he sighed, and had nearly fallen.
Nance led him from the spot, and he was no sooner back in the tower-stair,
than he fell heavily against the wall and put his arm across his eyes.
A cup of brandy had to be brought him before he could descend to breakfast;
and the perfection of Nance’s dream was for the first time troubled.<br>
<br>
Jonathan was waiting for them at table, with yellow, blood-shot eyes
and a peculiar dusky complexion. He hardly waited till they found
their seats, before, raising one hand, and stooping with his mouth above
his plate, he put up a prayer for a blessing on the food and a spirit
of gratitude in the eaters, and thereupon, and without more civility,
fell to. But it was notable that he was no less speedily satisfied
than he had been greedy to begin. He pushed his plate away and
drummed upon the table.<br>
<br>
‘These are silly prayers,’ said he, ‘that they teach
us. Eat and be thankful, that’s no such wonder. Speak
to me of starving - there’s the touch. You’re a man,
they tell me, Mr. Archer, that has met with some reverses?’<br>
<br>
‘I have met with many,’ replied Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘Ha!’ said Jonathan. ‘None reckons but the last.
Now, see; I tried to make this girl here understand me.’<br>
<br>
‘Uncle,’ said Nance, ‘what should Mr. Archer care
for your concerns? He hath troubles of his own, and came to be
at peace, I think.’<br>
<br>
‘I tried to make her understand me,’ repeated Jonathan doggedly;
‘and now I’ll try you. Do you think this world is
fair?’<br>
<br>
‘Fair and false!’ quoth Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
The old man laughed immoderately. ‘Good,’ said he,
‘very good, but what I mean is this: do you know what it is to
get up early and go to bed late, and never take so much as a holiday
but four: and one of these your own marriage day, and the other three
the funerals of folk you loved, and all that, to have a quiet old age
in shelter, and bread for your old belly, and a bed to lay your crazy
bones upon, with a clear conscience?’<br>
<br>
‘Sir,’ said Mr. Archer, with an inclination of his head,
‘you portray a very brave existence.’<br>
<br>
‘Well,’ continued Jonathan, ‘and in the end thieves
deceive you, thieves rob and rook you, thieves turn you out in your
old age and send you begging. What have you got for all your honesty?
A fine return! You that might have stole scores of pounds, there
you are out in the rain with your rheumatics!’<br>
<br>
Mr. Archer had forgotten to eat; with his hand upon his chin he was
studying the old man’s countenance. ‘And you conclude?’
he asked.<br>
<br>
‘Conclude!’ cried Jonathan. ‘I conclude I’ll
be upsides with them.’<br>
<br>
‘Ay,’ said the other, ‘we are all tempted to revenge.’<br>
<br>
‘You have lost money?’ asked Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘A great estate,’ said Archer quietly.<br>
<br>
‘See now!’ says Jonathan, ‘and where is it?’<br>
<br>
‘Nay, I sometimes think that every one has had his share of it
but me,’ was the reply. ‘All England hath paid his
taxes with my patrimony: I was a sheep that left my wool on every briar.’<br>
<br>
‘And you sit down under that?’ cried the old man.
‘Come now, Mr. Archer, you and me belong to different stations;
and I know mine - no man better - but since we have both been rooked,
and are both sore with it, why, here’s my hand with a very good
heart, and I ask for yours, and no offence, I hope.’<br>
<br>
‘There is surely no offence, my friend,’ returned Mr. Archer,
as they shook hands across the table; ‘for, believe me, my sympathies
are quite acquired to you. This life is an arena where we fight
with beasts; and, indeed,’ he added, sighing, ‘I sometimes
marvel why we go down to it unarmed.’<br>
<br>
In the meanwhile a creaking of ungreased axles had been heard descending
through the wood; and presently after, the door opened, and the tall
ostler entered the kitchen carrying one end of Mr. Archer’s trunk.
The other was carried by an aged beggar man of that district, known
and welcome for some twenty miles about under the name of ‘Old
Cumberland.’ Each was soon perched upon a settle, with a
cup of ale; and the ostler, who valued himself upon his affability,
began to entertain the company, still with half an eye on Nance, to
whom in gallant terms he expressly dedicated every sip of ale.
First he told of the trouble they had to get his Lordship started in
the chaise; and how he had dropped a rouleau of gold on the threshold,
and the passage and doorstep had been strewn with guinea-pieces.
At this old Jonathan looked at Mr. Archer. Next the visitor turned
to news of a more thrilling character: how the down mail had been stopped
again near Grantham by three men on horseback - a white and two bays;
how they had handkerchiefs on their faces; how Tom the guard’s
blunderbuss missed fire, but he swore he had winged one of them with
a pistol; and how they had got clean away with seventy pounds in money,
some valuable papers, and a watch or two.<br>
<br>
‘Brave! brave!’ cried Jonathan in ecstasy. ‘Seventy
pounds! O, it’s brave!’<br>
<br>
‘Well, I don’t see the great bravery,’ observed the
ostler, misapprehending him. ‘Three men, and you may call
that three to one. I’ll call it brave when some one stops
the mail single-handed; that’s a risk.’<br>
<br>
‘And why should they hesitate?’ inquired Mr. Archer.
‘The poor souls who are fallen to such a way of life, pray what
have they to lose? If they get the money, well; but if a ball
should put them from their troubles, why, so better.’<br>
<br>
‘Well, sir,’ said the ostler, ‘I believe you’ll
find they won’t agree with you. They count on a good fling,
you see; or who would risk it? - And here’s my best respects to
you, Miss Nance.’<br>
<br>
‘And I forgot the part of cowardice,’ resumed Mr. Archer.
‘All men fear.’<br>
<br>
‘O, surely not!’ cried Nance.<br>
<br>
‘All men,’ reiterated Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘Ay, that’s a true word,’ observed Old Cumberland,
‘and a thief, anyway, for it’s a coward’s trade.’<br>
<br>
‘But these fellows, now,’ said Jonathan, with a curious,
appealing manner - ‘these fellows with their seventy pounds!
Perhaps, Mr. Archer, they were no true thieves after all, but just people
who had been robbed and tried to get their own again. What was
that you said, about all England and the taxes? One takes, another
gives; why, that’s almost fair. If I’ve been rooked
and robbed, and the coat taken off my back, I call it almost fair to
take another’s.’<br>
<br>
‘Ask Old Cumberland,’ observed the ostler; ‘you ask
Old Cumberland, Miss Nance!’ and he bestowed a wink upon his favoured
fair one.<br>
<br>
‘Why that?’ asked Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘He had his coat taken - ay, and his shirt too,’ returned
the ostler.<br>
<br>
‘Is that so?’ cried Jonathan eagerly. ‘Was you
robbed too?’<br>
<br>
‘That was I,’ replied Cumberland, ‘with a warrant!
I was a well-to-do man when I was young.’<br>
<br>
‘Ay! See that!’ says Jonathan. ‘And you
don’t long for a revenge?’<br>
<br>
‘Eh! Not me!’ answered the beggar. ‘It’s
too long ago. But if you’ll give me another mug of your
good ale, my pretty lady, I won’t say no to that.’<br>
<br>
‘And shalt have! And shalt have!’ cried Jonathan.
‘Or brandy even, if you like it better.’<br>
<br>
And as Cumberland did like it better, and the ostler chimed in, the
party pledged each other in a dram of brandy before separating.<br>
<br>
As for Nance, she slipped forth into the ruins, partly to avoid the
ostler’s gallantries, partly to lament over the defects of Mr.
Archer. Plainly, he was no hero. She pitied him; she began
to feel a protecting interest mingle with and almost supersede her admiration,
and was at the same time disappointed and yet drawn to him. She
was, indeed, conscious of such unshaken fortitude in her own heart,
that she was almost tempted by an occasion to be bold for two.
She saw herself, in a brave attitude, shielding her imperfect hero from
the world; and she saw, like a piece of heaven, his gratitude for her
protection.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER V - LIFE IN THE CASTLE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
From that day forth the life of these three persons in the ruin ran
very smoothly. Mr. Archer now sat by the fire with a book, and
now passed whole days abroad, returning late, dead weary. His
manner was a mask; but it was half transparent; through the even tenor
of his gravity and courtesy profound revolutions of feeling were betrayed,
seasons of numb despair, of restlessness, of aching temper. For
days he would say nothing beyond his usual courtesies and solemn compliments;
and then, all of a sudden, some fine evening beside the kitchen fire,
he would fall into a vein of elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting
events, the secrets of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous
discovery of crime, the visitations of the dead. Nance and her
uncle would sit till the small hours with eyes wide open: Jonathan applauding
the unexpected incidents with many a slap of his big hand; Nance, perhaps,
more pleased with the narrator’s eloquence and wise reflections;
and then, again, days would follow of abstraction, of listless humming,
of frequent apologies and long hours of silence. Once only, and
then after a week of unrelieved melancholy, he went over to the ‘Green
Dragon,’ spent the afternoon with the landlord and a bowl of punch,
and returned as on the first night, devious in step but courteous and
unperturbed of speech.<br>
<br>
If he seemed more natural and more at his ease it was when he found
Nance alone; and, laying by some of his reserve, talked before her rather
than to her of his destiny, character and hopes. To Nance these
interviews were but a doubtful privilege. At times he would seem
to take a pleasure in her presence, to consult her gravely, to hear
and to discuss her counsels; at times even, but these were rare and
brief, he would talk of herself, praise the qualities that she possessed,
touch indulgently on her defects, and lend her books to read and even
examine her upon her reading; but far more often he would fall into
a half unconsciousness, put her a question and then answer it himself,
drop into the veiled tone of voice of one soliloquising, and leave her
at last as though he had forgotten her existence. It was odd,
too, that in all this random converse, not a fact of his past life,
and scarce a name, should ever cross his lips. A profound reserve
kept watch upon his most unguarded moments. He spoke continually
of himself, indeed, but still in enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism.<br>
<br>
The base of Nance’s feelings for Mr. Archer was admiration as
for a superior being; and with this, his treatment, consciously or not,
accorded happily. When he forgot her, she took the blame upon
herself. His formal politeness was so exquisite that this essential
brutality stood excused. His compliments, besides, were always
grave and rational; he would offer reason for his praise, convict her
of merit, and thus disarm suspicion. Nay, and the very hours when
he forgot and remembered her alternately could by the ardent fallacies
of youth be read in the light of an attention. She might be far
from his confidence; but still she was nearer it than any one.
He might ignore her presence, but yet he sought it.<br>
<br>
Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of superiority.
Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate man, who recoiled from
a worm, who grew giddy on the castle wall, who bore so helplessly the
weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a head and shoulders taller
in cheerful and sterling courage. She could walk head in air along
the most precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor
the harshness of life’s web, but was thrust cheerfully, if need
were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any crawling horror.
Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage, as already it had mined and
subverted Mr. Archer’s palace. Well, she faced it with a
bright countenance and a busy hand. She had got some washing,
some rough seamstress work from the ‘Green Dragon,’ and
from another neighbour ten miles away across the moor. At this
she cheerfully laboured, and from that height she could afford to pity
the useless talents and poor attitude of Mr. Archer. It did not
change her admiration, but it made it bearable. He was above her
in all ways; but she was above him in one. She kept it to herself,
and hugged it. When, like all young creatures, she made long stories
to justify, to nourish, and to forecast the course of her affection,
it was this private superiority that made all rosy, that cut the knot,
and that, at last, in some great situation, fetched to her knees the
dazzling but imperfect hero. With this pretty exercise she beguiled
the hours of labour, and consoled herself for Mr. Archer’s bearing.<br>
<br>
Pity was her weapon and her weakness. To accept the loved one’s
faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain, and
this pity it was which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one element
of true emotion to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.<br>
<br>
Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the ‘Green Dragon’
and brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer. He, upon seeing
it, winced like a man under the knife: pain, shame, sorrow, and the
most trenchant edge of mortification cut into his heart and wrung the
steady composure of his face.<br>
<br>
‘Dear heart! have you bad news?’ she cried.<br>
<br>
But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when, later
on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the threshold, as
if with words prepared beforehand. ‘There are some pains,’
said he, ‘too acute for consolation, or I would bring them to
my kind consoler. Let the memory of that letter, if you please,
be buried.’ And then as she continued to gaze at him, being,
in spite of herself, pained by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully sincere
in word and manner: ‘Let it be enough,’ he added haughtily,
‘that if this matter wring my heart, it doth not touch my conscience.
I am a man, I would have you to know, who suffers undeservedly.’<br>
<br>
He had never spoken so directly: never with so convincing an emotion;
and her heart thrilled for him. She could have taken his pains
and died of them with joy.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile she was left without support. Jonathan now swore by
his lodger, and lived for him. He was a fine talker. He
knew the finest sight of stories; he was a man and a gentleman, take
him for all in all, and a perfect credit to Old England. Such
were the old man’s declared sentiments, and sure enough he clung
to Mr. Archer’s side, hung upon his utterance when he spoke, and
watched him with unwearing interest when he was silent. And yet
his feeling was not clear; in the partial wreck of his mind, which was
leaning to decay, some after-thought was strongly present. As
he gazed in Mr. Archer’s face a sudden brightness would kindle
in his rheumy eyes, his eye-brows would lift as with a sudden thought,
his mouth would open as though to speak, and close again on silence.
Once or twice he even called Mr. Archer mysteriously forth into the
dark courtyard, took him by the button, and laid a demonstrative finger
on his chest; but there his ideas or his courage failed him; he would
shufflingly excuse himself and return to his position by the fire without
a word of explanation. ‘The good man was growing old,’
said Mr. Archer with a suspicion of a shrug. But the good man
had his idea, and even when he was alone the name of Mr. Archer fell
from his lips continually in the course of mumbled and gesticulative
conversation.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER VI - THE BAD HALF-CROWN<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
However early Nance arose, and she was no sluggard, the old man, who
had begun to outlive the earthly habit of slumber, would usually have
been up long before, the fire would be burning brightly, and she would
see him wandering among the ruins, lantern in hand, and talking assiduously
to himself. One day, however, after he had returned late from
the market town, she found that she had stolen a march upon that indefatigable
early riser. The kitchen was all blackness. She crossed
the castle-yard to the wood-cellar, her steps printing the thick hoarfrost.
A scathing breeze blew out of the north-east and slowly carried a regiment
of black and tattered clouds over the face of heaven, which was already
kindled with the wild light of morning, but where she walked, in shelter
of the ruins, the flame of her candle burned steady. The extreme
cold smote upon her conscience. She could not bear to think this
bitter business fell usually to the lot of one so old as Jonathan, and
made desperate resolutions to be earlier in the future.<br>
<br>
The fire was a good blaze before he entered, limping dismally into the
kitchen. ‘Nance,’ said he, ‘I be all knotted
up with the rheumatics; will you rub me a bit?’ She came
and rubbed him where and how he bade her. ‘This is a cruel
thing that old age should be rheumaticky,’ said he. ‘When
I was young I stood my turn of the teethache like a man! for why? because
it couldn’t last for ever; but these rheumatics come to live and
die with you. Your aunt was took before the time came; never had
an ache to mention. Now I lie all night in my single bed and the
blood never warms in me; this knee of mine it seems like lighted up
with rheumatics; it seems as though you could see to sew by it; and
all the strings of my old body ache, as if devils was pulling ’em.
Thank you kindly; that’s someways easier now, but an old man,
my dear, has little to look for; it’s pain, pain, pain to the
end of the business, and I’ll never be rightly warm again till
I get under the sod,’ he said, and looked down at her with a face
so aged and weary that she had nearly wept.<br>
<br>
‘I lay awake all night,’ he continued; ‘I do so mostly,
and a long walk kills me. Eh, deary me, to think that life should
run to such a puddle! And I remember long syne when I was strong,
and the blood all hot and good about me, and I loved to run, too - deary
me, to run! Well, that’s all by. You’d better
pray to be took early, Nance, and not live on till you get to be like
me, and are robbed in your grey old age, your cold, shivering, dark
old age, that’s like a winter’s morning’; and he bitterly
shuddered, spreading his hands before the fire.<br>
<br>
‘Come now,’ said Nance, ‘the more you say the less
you’ll like it, Uncle Jonathan; but if I were you I would be proud
for to have lived all your days honest and beloved, and come near the
end with your good name: isn’t that a fine thing to be proud of?
Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle burning.
Well, now, I thought that was like life: a man’s good conscience
is the flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with
that still burning, why, take it how you will, the man’s a hero
- even if he was low-born like you and me.’<br>
<br>
‘Did Mr. Archer tell you that?’ asked Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘No, dear,’ said she, ‘that’s my own thought
about it. He told me of the race. But see, now,’ she
continued, putting on the porridge, ‘you say old age is a hard
season, but so is youth. You’re half out of the battle,
I would say; you loved my aunt and got her, and buried her, and some
of these days soon you’ll go to meet her; and take her my love
and tell her I tried to take good care of you; for so I do, Uncle Jonathan.’<br>
<br>
Jonathan struck with his fist upon the settle. ‘D’
ye think I want to die, ye vixen?’ he shouted. ‘I
want to live ten hundred years.’<br>
<br>
This was a mystery beyond Nance’s penetration, and she stared
in wonder as she made the porridge.<br>
<br>
‘I want to live,’ he continued, ‘I want to live and
to grow rich. I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells
and see the ring, I do. Is this a life that I lived? I want
to be a rake, d’ ye understand? I want to know what things
are like. I don’t want to die like a blind kitten, and me
seventy-six.’<br>
<br>
‘O fie!’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an irreverent
schoolboy. Upon that aged face it seemed a blasphemy. Then
he took out of his bosom a long leather purse, and emptying its contents
on the settle, began to count and recount the pieces, ringing and examining
each, and suddenly he leapt like a young man. ‘What!’
he screamed. ‘Bad? O Lord! I’m robbed
again!’ And falling on his knees before the settle he began
to pour forth the most dreadful curses on the head of his deceiver.
His eyes were shut, for to him this vile solemnity was prayer.
He held up the bad half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying
it to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the curses
he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted - old age and poverty,
rheumatism and an ungrateful son. Nance listened appalled; then
she sprang forward and dragged down his arm and laid her hand upon his
mouth.<br>
<br>
‘Whist!’ she cried. ‘Whist ye, for God’s
sake! O my man, whist ye! If Heaven were to hear; if poor
Aunt Susan were to hear! Think, she may be listening.’
And with the histrionism of strong emotion she pointed to a corner of
the kitchen.<br>
<br>
His eyes followed her finger. He looked there for a little, thinking,
blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and resumed his place upon
the settle, the bad piece still in his hand. So he sat for some
time, looking upon the half-crown, and now wondering to himself on the
injustice and partiality of the law, now computing again and again the
nature of his loss. So he was still sitting when Mr. Archer entered
the kitchen. At this a light came into his face, and after some
seconds of rumination he dispatched Nance upon an errand.<br>
<br>
‘Mr. Archer,’ said he, as soon as they were alone together,
‘would you give me a guinea-piece for silver?’<br>
<br>
‘Why, sir, I believe I can,’ said Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the apartment.
The blood shot into her face.<br>
<br>
‘What’s to do here?’ she asked rudely.<br>
<br>
‘Nothing, my dearie,’ said old Jonathan, with a touch of
whine.<br>
<br>
‘What’s to do?’ she said again.<br>
<br>
‘Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,’ returned
Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,’ replied
the girl. ‘I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up
among the good.’<br>
<br>
‘Well, well,’ replied Mr. Archer, smiling, ‘I must
take the merchant’s risk of it. The money is now mixed.’<br>
<br>
‘I know my piece,’ quoth Nance. ‘Come, let me
see your silver, Mr. Archer. If I have to get it by a theft I’ll
see that money,’ she cried.<br>
<br>
‘Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the world
to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘There it is as I received it.’<br>
<br>
Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.<br>
<br>
‘Give him another,’ she said, looking Jonathan in the face;
and when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney and flung
the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire. Its base constituents
began immediately to run; even as she watched it the disc crumbled,
and the lineaments of the King became confused. Jonathan, who
had followed close behind, beheld these changes from over her shoulder,
and his face darkened sorely.<br>
<br>
‘Now,’ said she, ‘come back to table, and to-day it
is I that shall say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about
with Dick’; and covering her eyes with one hand, ‘O Lord,’
said she with deep emotion, ‘make us thankful; and, O Lord, deliver
us from evil! For the love of the poor souls that watch for us
in heaven, O deliver us from evil.’<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER VII - THE BLEACHING-GREEN<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen from
the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river dell.
The mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the bare branches,
and the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet with the fragrance
of new grass.<br>
<br>
Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter ‘S.’
The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep projection
which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed a lawny promontory,
fringed by thorn and willow. It was easy to reach it from the
castle side, for the river ran in this part very quietly among innumerable
boulders and over dam-like walls of rock. The place was all enclosed,
the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so it was chosen by
Nance to be her bleaching-green.<br>
<br>
One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to wring
and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on the far
side, drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence on the grass.
Nance looked up to greet him with a smile, but finding her smile was
not returned, she fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily
to her employment. Man or woman, the whole world looks well at
any work to which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed of what
she did. She was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet that so well
became her, and ashamed of her bare arms, which were her greatest beauty.<br>
<br>
‘Nausicaa,’ said Mr. Archer at last, ‘I find you like
Nausicaa.’<br>
<br>
‘And who was she?’ asked Nance, and laughed in spite of
herself, an empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer’s
ears, indeed, like music, but to her own like the last grossness of
rusticity.<br>
<br>
‘She was a princess of the Grecian islands,’ he replied.
‘A king, being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore.
Certainly I, too, was shipwrecked,’ he continued, plucking at
the grass. ‘There was never a more desperate castaway -
to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience,
duties willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to
this - idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.’ He seemed
to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again.
‘Nance,’ said he, ‘would you have a man sit down and
suffer or rise up and strive?’<br>
<br>
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘I would always rather see
him doing.’<br>
<br>
‘Ha!’ said Mr. Archer, ‘but yet you speak from an
imperfect knowledge. Conceive a man damned to a choice of only
evil - misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet
naught before him but this choice of sins. How would you say then?’<br>
<br>
‘I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,’ returned
Nance. ‘I would say there was a third choice, and that the
right one.’<br>
<br>
‘I tell you,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘the man I have in
view hath two ways open, and no more. One to wait, like a poor
mewling baby, till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his troubles
in his hand, and to perish or be saved at once. It is no point
of morals; both are wrong. Either way this step-child of Providence
must fall; which shall he choose, by doing or not doing?’<br>
<br>
‘Fall, then, is what I would say,’ replied Nance.
‘Fall where you will, but do it! For O, Mr. Archer,’
she continued, stooping to her work, ‘you that are good and kind,
and so wise, it doth sometimes go against my heart to see you live on
here like a sheep in a turnip-field! If you were braver - ’
and here she paused, conscience-smitten.<br>
<br>
‘Do I, indeed, lack courage?’ inquired Mr. Archer of himself.
‘Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand?
Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that
does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I
to fail there, I wonder? But what is courage, then? The
constancy to endure oneself or to see others suffer? The itch
of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and
patient? To inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves
of what we seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand
still is the least heroic. Nance,’ he said, ‘did you
ever hear of <i>Hamlet</i>?’<br>
<br>
‘Never,’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
‘’Tis an old play,’ returned Mr. Archer, ‘and
frequently enacted. This while I have been talking Hamlet.
You must know this Hamlet was a Prince among the Danes,’ and he
told her the play in a very good style, here and there quoting a verse
or two with solemn emphasis.<br>
<br>
‘It is strange,’ said Nance; ‘he was then a very poor
creature?’<br>
<br>
‘That was what he could not tell,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘Look at me, am I as poor a creature?’<br>
<br>
She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her hours;
the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless ruffles,
the slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven face, the wide
and somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that were so full of depth
and change and colour. He was gazing at her with his brows a little
knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow resting on his knee.<br>
<br>
‘Ye look a man!’ she cried, ‘ay, and should be a great
one! The more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before
the fire.’<br>
<br>
‘My fair Holdaway,’ quoth Mr. Archer, ‘you are much
set on action. I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.’
He continued, looking at her with a half-absent fixity, ‘’Tis
a strange thing, certainly, that in my years of fortune I should never
taste happiness, and now when I am broke, enjoy so much of it, for was
I ever happier than to-day? Was the grass softer, the stream pleasanter
in sound, the air milder, the heart more at peace? Why should
I not sink? To dig - why, after all, it should be easy.
To take a mate, too? Love is of all grades since Jupiter; love
fails to none; and children’ - but here he passed his hand suddenly
over his eyes. ‘O fool and coward, fool and coward!’
he said bitterly; ‘can you forget your fetters? You did
not know that I was fettered, Nance?’ he asked, again addressing
her.<br>
<br>
But Nance was somewhat sore. ‘I know you keep talking,’
she said, and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet
across her shoulder. ‘I wonder you are not wearied of your
voice. When the hands lie abed the tongue takes a walk.’<br>
<br>
Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water’s
edge. In this part the body of the river poured across a little
narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles,
then getting wind, as it were, of another shelf of rock which barred
the channel, began, by imperceptible degrees, to separate towards either
shore in dancing currents, and to leave the middle clear and stagnant.
The set towards either side was nearly equal; about one half of the
whole water plunged on the side of the castle, through a narrow gullet;
about one half ran ripping past the margin of the green and slipped
across a babbling rapid.<br>
<br>
‘Here,’ said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time
at the fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, ‘come
here and see me try my fortune.’<br>
<br>
‘I am not like a man,’ said Nance; ‘I have no time
to waste.’<br>
<br>
‘Come here,’ he said again. ‘I ask you seriously,
Nance. We are not always childish when we seem so.’<br>
<br>
She drew a little nearer.<br>
<br>
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you see these two channels - choose
one.’<br>
<br>
‘I’ll choose the nearest, to save time,’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
‘Well, that shall be for action,’ returned Mr. Archer.
‘And since I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other
channel but yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for lying still.
You see this?’ he continued, pulling up a withered rush.
‘I break it in three. I shall put each separately at the
top of the upper fall, and according as they go by your way or by the
other I shall guide my life.’<br>
<br>
‘This is very silly,’ said Nance, with a movement of her
shoulders.<br>
<br>
‘I do not think it so,’ said Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘And then,’ she resumed, ‘if you are to try your fortune,
why not evenly?’<br>
<br>
‘Nay,’ returned Mr. Archer with a smile, ‘no man can
put complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.’<br>
<br>
By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and, bidding
her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of the intake.
The rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall, came up again far
on the right hand, leaned ever more and more in the same direction,
and disappeared under the hanging grasses on the castle side.<br>
<br>
‘One,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘one for standing still.’<br>
<br>
But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a while
about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the bleaching-green
and danced down the rapid under Nance’s eyes.<br>
<br>
‘One for me,’ she cried with some exultation; and then she
observed that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock,
with his hand raised like a person petrified. ‘Why,’
said she, ‘you do not mind it, do you?’<br>
<br>
‘Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?’
said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely. ‘And this is more than
fortune. Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate, put up a
prayer before I launch the next one.’<br>
<br>
‘A prayer,’ she cried, ‘about a game like this?
I would not be so heathen.’<br>
<br>
‘Well,’ said he, ‘then without,’ and he closed
his eyes and dropped the piece of rush. This time there was no
doubt. It went for the rapid as straight as any arrow.<br>
<br>
‘Action then!’ said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; ‘and
then God forgive us,’ he added, almost to himself.<br>
<br>
‘God forgive us, indeed,’ cried Nance, ‘for wasting
the good daylight! But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so
serious I shall begin to think you was in earnest.’<br>
<br>
‘Nay,’ he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile;
‘but is not this good advice? I have consulted God and demigod;
the nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-eyed
Minerva. Both have said the same. My own heart was telling
it already. Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with
all this paralysing casuistry. I am happy to-day for the first
time.’<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER VIII - THE MAIL GUARD<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the castle,
a clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a copious drift
of rain that streamed from the windows. The wind soon blew itself
out, but the day broke cloudy and dripping, and when the little party
assembled at breakfast their humours appeared to have changed with the
change of weather. Nance had been brooding on the scene at the
river-side, applying it in various ways to her particular aspirations,
and the result, which was hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out
of her cheeks. Mr. Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts
were of a mingled strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance
there were betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation,
which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears.
But Jonathan was the most altered: he was strangely silent, hardly passing
a word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive eye.
It seemed as if the idea that had so long hovered before him had now
taken a more solid shape, and, while it still attracted, somewhat alarmed
his imagination.<br>
<br>
At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only
broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone roof
and about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved when the
note of a man whistling and the sound of approaching footsteps in the
grassy court announced a visitor. It was the ostler from the ‘Green
Dragon’ bringing a letter for Mr. Archer. Nance saw her
hero’s face contract and then relax again at sight of it; and
she thought that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross black characters
of the address were easily distinguishable from the fine writing on
the former letter that had so much disturbed him. He opened it
and began to read; while the ostler sat down to table with a pot of
ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable after his fashion.<br>
<br>
‘Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,’ said he. ‘I
haven’t been abed this blessed night.’<br>
<br>
Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer, who
was reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference that
she was tempted to suspect him of assumption.<br>
<br>
‘Yes,’ continued the ostler, ‘not been the like of
it this fifteen years: the North Mail stopped at the three stones.’<br>
<br>
Jonathan’s cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with
a great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made
so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and stayed
between his finger and thumb. It was some little time before the
old man was sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to go on, and he
still kept coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes. Mr. Archer,
on his side, laid the letter down, and, putting his hands in his pocket,
listened gravely to the tale.<br>
<br>
‘Yes,’ resumed Sam, ‘the North Mail was stopped by
a single horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him! There were four
insides and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard. Tom showed
himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him covered, too,
and could swear to that; but the Captain never let on, up with a pistol
and fetched poor Tom a bullet through the body. Tom, he squelched
upon the seat, all over blood. Up comes the Captain to the window.
“Oblige me,” says he, “with what you have.”
Would you believe it? Not a man says cheep! - not them.
“Thy hands over thy head.” Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes,
seven-and-forty pounds overhead in gold. One Dicksee, a grazier,
tries it on: gives him a guinea. “Beg your pardon,”
says the Captain, “I think too highly of you to take it at your
hand. I will not take less than ten from such a gentleman.”
This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but there was the pistol
at his eye. Down he goes, offs with his stocking, and there was
thirty golden guineas. “Now,” says the Captain, “you’ve
tried it on with me, but I scorns the advantage. Ten I said,”
he says, “and ten I take.” So, dash my buttons, I
call that man a man!’ cried Sam in cordial admiration.<br>
<br>
‘Well, and then?’ says Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘Then,’ resumed Sam, ‘that old fat fagot Engleton,
him as held the ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to,
picks up his cattle, and drives off again. Down they came to the
“Dragon,” all singing like as if they was scalded, and poor
Tom saying nothing. You would ‘a’ thought they had
all lost the King’s crown to hear them. Down gets this Dicksee.
“Postmaster,” he says, taking him by the arm, “this
is a most abominable thing,” he says. Down gets a Major
Clayton, and gets the old man by the other arm. “We’ve
been robbed,” he cries, “robbed!” Down gets
the others, and all around the old man telling their story, and what
they had lost, and how they was all as good as ruined; till at last
Old Engleton says, says he, “How about Oglethorpe?” says
he. “Ay,” says the others, “how about the guard?”
Well, with that we bousted him down, as white as a rag and all blooded
like a sop. I thought he was dead. Well, he ain’t
dead; but he’s dying, I fancy.’<br>
<br>
‘Did you say four watches?’ said Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘Four, I think. I wish it had been forty,’ cried Sam.
‘Such a party of soused herrings I never did see - not a man among
them bar poor Tom. But us that are the servants on the road have
all the risk and none of the profit.’<br>
<br>
‘And this brave fellow,’ asked Mr. Archer, very quietly,
‘this Oglethorpe - how is he now?’<br>
<br>
‘Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through
him,’ said Sam. ‘The doctor hasn’t been yet.
He’d ‘a’ been bright and early if it had been a passenger.
But, doctor or no, I’ll make a good guess that Tom won’t
see to-morrow. He’ll die on a Sunday, will poor Tom; and
they do say that’s fortunate.’<br>
<br>
‘Did Tom see him that did it?’ asked Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘Well, he saw him,’ replied Sam, ‘but not to swear
by. Said he was a very tall man, and very big, and had a ’ankerchief
about his face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough
gentleman, as he is.’<br>
<br>
‘A gentleman!’ cried Nance. ‘The dirty knave!’<br>
<br>
‘Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,’ returned the
ostler; ‘that’s what I mean by a gentleman.’<br>
<br>
‘You don’t know much of them, then,’ said Nance.<br>
<br>
‘A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing. I call
my uncle a better gentleman than any thief.’<br>
<br>
‘And you would be right,’ said Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘How many snuff-boxes did he get?’ asked Jonathan.<br>
<br>
‘O, dang me if I know,’ said Sam; ‘I didn’t
take an inventory.’<br>
<br>
‘I will go back with you, if you please,’ said Mr. Archer.
‘I should like to see poor Oglethorpe. He has behaved well.’<br>
<br>
‘At your service, sir,’ said Sam, jumping to his feet.
‘I dare to say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow
like Tom - no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep
to nurse him. And excuse me, sir,’ added Sam, ‘you
won’t forget about the letter neither?’<br>
<br>
‘Surely not,’ said Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the
inn. The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute
drops; there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by servants,
the air of the garret was both close and chilly. Mr. Archer’s
heart sank at the threshold to see a man lying perhaps mortally hurt
in so poor a sick-room, and as he drew near the low bed he took his
hat off. The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-looking soul with
a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned up; his cheeks were crimson,
and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on his brow he found him burning with
fever.<br>
<br>
‘I fear you suffer much,’ he said, with a catch in his voice,
as he sat down on the bedside.<br>
<br>
‘I suppose I do, sir,’ returned Oglethorpe; ‘it is
main sore.’<br>
<br>
‘I am used to wounds and wounded men,’ returned the visitor.
‘I have been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now;
and, if you will suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till the doctor
comes.’<br>
<br>
‘It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,’ said Oglethorpe.
‘The trouble is they won’t none of them let me drink.’<br>
<br>
‘If you will not tell the doctor,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘I
will give you some water. They say it is bad for a green wound,
but in the Low Countries we all drank water when we found the chance,
and I could never perceive we were the worse for it.’<br>
<br>
‘Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?’ called Oglethorpe.<br>
<br>
‘Twice,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘and was as proud of these
hurts as any lady of her bracelets. ’Tis a fine thing to
smart for one’s duty; even in the pangs of it there is contentment.’<br>
<br>
‘Ah, well!’ replied the guard, ‘if you’ve been
shot yourself, that explains. But as for contentment, why, sir,
you see, it smarts, as you say. And then, I have a good wife,
you see, and a bit of a brat - a little thing, so high.’<br>
<br>
‘Don’t move,’ said Mr. Archer.<br>
<br>
‘No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,’ said Oglethorpe.
‘At York they are. A very good lass is my wife - far too
good for me. And the little rascal - well, I don’t know
how to say it, but he sort of comes round you. If I were to go,
sir, it would be hard on my poor girl - main hard on her!’<br>
<br>
‘Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you here,’
said Archer.<br>
<br>
‘Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,’
replied the guard. ‘He played his hand, if you come to look
at it; and I wish he had shot worse, or me better. And yet I’ll
go to my grave but what I covered him,’ he cried. ‘It
looks like witchcraft. I’ll go to my grave but what he was
drove full of slugs like a pepper-box.’<br>
<br>
‘Quietly,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘you must not excite yourself.
These deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the moment of alert,
is hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke blows away you see the man
you fired at, taking aim, it may be, at yourself. You should observe,
too, that you were in the dark night, and somewhat dazzled by the lamps,
and that the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted you. In such
circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a blunder-buss, and no blame
attach to his marksmanship.’ . . .<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
THE YOUNG CHEVALIER<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
PROLOGUE - THE WINE-SELLER’S WIFE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
There was a wine-seller’s shop, as you went down to the river
in the city of the Anti-popes. There a man was served with good
wine of the country and plain country fare; and the place being clean
and quiet, with a prospect on the river, certain gentlemen who dwelt
in that city in attendance on a great personage made it a practice (when
they had any silver in their purses) to come and eat there and be private.<br>
<br>
They called the wine-seller Paradou. He was built more like a
bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and with
a hand like a baby for size. Marie-Madeleine was the name of his
wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor was any
fairer than herself. She was tall, being almost of a height with
Paradou; full-girdled, point-device in every form, with an exquisite
delicacy in the face; her nose and nostrils a delight to look at from
the fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair’s-breadth
inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid on even like a flower’s.
A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she had been found unawares bathing,
and had blushed from head to foot. She was of a grave countenance,
rarely smiling; yet it seemed to be written upon every part of her that
she rejoiced in life. Her husband loved the heels of her feet
and the knuckles of her fingers; he loved her like a glutton and a brute;
his love hung about her like an atmosphere; one that came by chance
into the wine-shop was aware of that passion; and it might be said that
by the strength of it the woman had been drugged or spell-bound.
She knew not if she loved or loathed him; he was always in her eyes
like something monstrous - monstrous in his love, monstrous in his person,
horrific but imposing in his violence; and her sentiment swung back
and forward from desire to sickness. But the mean, where it dwelt
chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, partly of horror; as of Europa
in mid ocean with her bull.<br>
<br>
On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign gentlemen in
the wine-seller’s shop. They were both handsome men of a
good presence, richly dressed. The first was swarthy and long
and lean, with an alert, black look, and a mole upon his cheek.
The other was more fair. He seemed very easy and sedate, and a
little melancholy for so young a man, but his smile was charming.
In his grey eyes there was much abstraction, as of one recalling fondly
that which was past and lost. Yet there was strength and swiftness
in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across his face, the under
lip a thought upon side, like that of a man accustomed to resolve.
These two talked together in a rude outlandish speech that no frequenter
of that wine-shop understood. The swarthy man answered to the
name of <i>Ballantrae</i>; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes called
<i>Balmile</i>, and sometimes <i>my Lord</i>, or <i>my</i> <i>Lord Gladsmuir</i>;
but when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in jesting,
not without bitterness.<br>
<br>
The mistral blew in the city. The first day of that wind, they
say in the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the
dust, the second all the stones, and the third it blows back others
from the mountains. It was now come to the third day; outside
the pebbles flew like hail, and the face of the river was puckered,
and the very building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be curdled
with the savage cold and fury of that continuous blast. It could
be heard to hoot in all the chimneys of the city; it swept about the
wine-shop, filling the room with eddies; the chill and gritty touch
of it passed between the nearest clothes and the bare flesh; and the
two gentlemen at the far table kept their mantles loose about their
shoulders. The roughness of these outer hulls, for they were plain
travellers’ cloaks that had seen service, set the greater mark
of richness on what showed below of their laced clothes; for the one
was in scarlet and the other in violet and white, like men come from
a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.<br>
<br>
It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence
on the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our tale.
For a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the wine-shop and
eat a meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more
often alone, when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and
the thoughts would show in the man’s face in little glooms and
lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a water. For a long
time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart. His sadness, the
beauty of his smile when by any chance he remembered her existence and
addressed her, the changes of his mind signalled forth by an abstruse
play of feature, the mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached
from the local and the accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected
her. Kindness was ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch of
an occasion to effervesce and crystallise. Now Balmile had come
hitherto in a very poor plain habit; and this day of the mistral, when
his mantle was just open, and she saw beneath it the glancing of the
violet and the velvet and the silver, and the clustering fineness of
the lace, it seemed to set the man in a new light, with which he shone
resplendent to her fancy.<br>
<br>
The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of its
outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man’s whole periphery,
accelerated the functions of the mind. It set thoughts whirling,
as it whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up in flights,
as it stirred up the dust in chambers. As brief as sparks, the
fancies glittered and succeeded each other in the mind of Marie-Madeleine;
and the grave man with the smile, and the bright clothes under the plain
mantle, haunted her with incongruous explanations. She considered
him, the unknown, the speaker of an unknown tongue, the hero (as she
placed him) of an unknown romance, the dweller upon unknown memories.
She recalled him sitting there alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet
she was sure he was not stupid. She recalled one day when he had
remained a long time motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act
of starting up, his eyes fixed on vacancy. Any one else must have
looked foolish; but not he. She tried to conceive what manner
of memory had thus entranced him; she forged for him a past; she showed
him to herself in every light of heroism and greatness and misfortune;
she brooded with petulant intensity on all she knew and guessed of him.
Yet, though she was already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still
unalarmed; her thoughts were still disinterested; she had still to reach
the stage at which - beside the image of that other whom we love to
contemplate and to adorn - we place the image of ourself and behold
them together with delight.<br>
<br>
She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her back, her
shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced out. Her face
was bright with the wind and her own thoughts; as a fire in a similar
day of tempest glows and brightens on a hearth, so she seemed to glow,
standing there, and to breathe out energy. It was the first time
Ballantrae had visited that wine-seller’s, the first time he had
seen the wife; and his eyes were true to her.<br>
<br>
‘I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty
tavern,’ he said at last.<br>
<br>
‘I believe it is propinquity,’ returned Balmile.<br>
<br>
‘You play dark,’ said Ballantrae, ‘but have a care!
Be more frank with me, or I will cut you out. I go through no
form of qualifying my threat, which would be commonplace and not conscientious.
There is only one point in these campaigns: that is the degree of admiration
offered by the man; and to our hostess I am in a posture to make victorious
love.’<br>
<br>
‘If you think you have the time, or the game worth the candle,’
replied the other with a shrug.<br>
<br>
‘One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe her,’
said Ballantrae.<br>
<br>
‘I am not very observant,’ said Balmile. ‘She
seems comely.’<br>
<br>
‘You very dear and dull dog!’ cried Ballantrae; ‘chastity
is the most besotting of the virtues. Why, she has a look in her
face beyond singing! I believe, if you was to push me hard, I
might trace it home to a trifle of a squint. What matters?
The height of beauty is in the touch that’s wrong, that’s
the modulation in a tune. ’Tis the devil we all love; I
owe many a conquest to my mole’ - he touched it as he spoke with
a smile, and his eyes glittered; - ‘we are all hunchbacks, and
beauty is only that kind of deformity that I happen to admire.
But come! Because you are chaste, for which I am sure I pay you
my respects, that is no reason why you should be blind. Look at
her, look at the delicious nose of her, look at her cheek, look at her
ear, look at her hand and wrist - look at the whole baggage from heels
to crown, and tell me if she wouldn’t melt on a man’s tongue.’<br>
<br>
As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile was constrained
to do as he was bidden. He looked at the woman, admired her excellences,
and was at the same time ashamed for himself and his companion.
So it befell that when Marie-Madeleine raised her eyes, she met those
of the subject of her contemplations fixed directly on herself with
a look that is unmistakable, the look of a person measuring and valuing
another - and, to clench the false impression, that his glance was instantly
and guiltily withdrawn. The blood beat back upon her heart and
leaped again; her obscure thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew
in fancy straight to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant
like a nymph. And at that moment there chanced an interruption,
which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last consecration
on her now articulate love.<br>
<br>
Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the last
refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his passage in
the wind. It was to be judged he had come from the same formal
gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps that he
had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae
with unceremonious eagerness.<br>
<br>
‘At last, here you are!’ he cried in French. ‘I
thought I was to miss you altogether.’<br>
<br>
The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid his
hand on his companion’s shoulder.<br>
<br>
‘My lord,’ said he, ‘allow me to present to you one
of my best friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir.’<br>
<br>
The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.<br>
<br>
‘<i>Monseigneur</i>,’ said Balmile, ‘<i>je n’ai
pas la prétention de m’affubler d’un titre que la
mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me permet pas de porter comma il sied.
Je m’appelle, pour vous servir, Blair de Balmile tout court</i>.’
[My lord, I have not the effrontery to cumber myself with a title which
the ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should
be. I call myself, at your service, plain Blair of Balmile.]<br>
<br>
‘<i>Monsieur le Vicomte ou monsieur Blèr’ de Balmaïl</i>,’
replied the newcomer, ‘<i>le nom n’y fait rien, et l’on
connaît vos beaux faits</i>.’ [The name matters nothing,
your gallant actions are known.]<br>
<br>
A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together to the
table, called for wine. It was the happiness of Marie-Madeleine
to wait unobserved upon the prince of her desires. She poured
the wine, he drank of it; and that link between them seemed to her,
for the moment, close as a caress. Though they lowered their tones,
she surprised great names passing in their conversation, names of kings,
the names of de Gesvre and Belle-Isle; and the man who dealt in these
high matters, and she who was now coupled with him in her own thoughts,
seemed to swim in mid air in a transfiguration. Love is a crude
core, but it has singular and far-reaching fringes; in that passionate
attraction for the stranger that now swayed and mastered her, his harsh
incomprehensible language, and these names of grandees in his talk,
were each an element.<br>
<br>
The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left behind him matter
of much interest to his companions; they spoke together earnestly, their
heads down, the woman of the wine-shop totally forgotten; and they were
still so occupied when Paradou returned.<br>
<br>
This man’s love was unsleeping. The even bluster of the
mistral, with which he had been combating some hours, had not suspended,
though it had embittered, that predominant passion. His first
look was for his wife, a look of hope and suspicion, menace and humility
and love, that made the over-blooming brute appear for the moment almost
beautiful. She returned his glance, at first as though she knew
him not, then with a swiftly waxing coldness of intent; and at last,
without changing their direction, she had closed her eyes.<br>
<br>
There passed across her mind during that period much that Paradou could
not have understood had it been told to him in words: chiefly the sense
of an enlightening contrast betwixt the man who talked of kings and
the man who kept a wine-shop, betwixt the love she yearned for and that
to which she had been long exposed like a victim bound upon the altar.
There swelled upon her, swifter than the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence
and disgust. She had succumbed to the monster, humbling herself
below animals; and now she loved a hero, aspiring to the semi-divine.
It was in the pang of that humiliating thought that she had closed her
eyes.<br>
<br>
Paradou - quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence - felt the
insult through his blood; his inarticulate soul bellowed within him
for revenge. He glanced about the shop. He saw the two indifferent
gentlemen deep in talk, and passed them over: his fancy flying not so
high. There was but one other present, a country lout who stood
swallowing his wine, equally unobserved by all and unobserving - to
him he dealt a glance of murderous suspicion, and turned direct upon
his wife. The wine-shop had lain hitherto, a space of shelter,
the scene of a few ceremonial passages and some whispered conversation,
in the howling river of the wind; the clock had not yet ticked a score
of times since Paradou’s appearance; and now, as he suddenly gave
tongue, it seemed as though the mistral had entered at his heels.<br>
<br>
‘What ails you, woman?’ he cried, smiting on the counter.<br>
<br>
‘Nothing ails me,’ she replied. It was strange; but
she spoke and stood at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn upward
by her aspirations.<br>
<br>
‘You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!’ cried
the husband.<br>
<br>
The man’s passion was always formidable; she had often looked
on upon its violence with a thrill, it had been one ingredient in her
fascination; and she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar off,
gesticulating but impotent. His fury might be dangerous like a
torrent or a gust of wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared or
braved, it should never be respected. And with that there came
in her a sudden glow of courage and that readiness to die which attends
so closely upon all strong passions.<br>
<br>
‘I do scorn you,’ she said.<br>
<br>
‘What is that?’ he cried.<br>
<br>
‘I scorn you,’ she repeated, smiling.<br>
<br>
‘You love another man!’ said he.<br>
<br>
‘With all my soul,’ was her reply.<br>
<br>
The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with it.<br>
<br>
‘Is this the - ?’ he cried, using a foul word, common in
the South; and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to the
ground. There he lay for the least interval of time insensible;
thence fled from the house, the most terrified person in the county.
The heavy measure had escaped from his hands, splashing the wine high
upon the wall. Paradou caught it. ‘And you?’
he roared to his wife, giving her the same name in the feminine, and
he aimed at her the deadly missile. She expected it, motionless,
with radiant eyes.<br>
<br>
But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the unconscious
rivals stood confronted. It was hard to say at that moment which
appeared the more formidable. In Paradou, the whole muddy and
truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy; the lust of
destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in his face but it
talked murder. Balmile had dropped his cloak: he shone out at
once in his finery, and stood to his full stature; girt in mind and
body all his resources, all his temper, perfectly in command in his
face the light of battle. Neither spoke; there was no blow nor
threat of one; it was war reduced to its last element, the spiritual;
and the huge wine-seller slowly lowered his weapon. Balmile was
a noble, he a commoner; Balmile exulted in an honourable cause.
Paradou already perhaps began to be ashamed of his violence. Of
a sudden, at least, the tortured brute turned and fled from the shop
in the footsteps of his former victim, to whose continued flight his
reappearance added wings.<br>
<br>
So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself, Marie-Madeleine
transferred to him her eyes. It might be her last moment, and
she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable courage and illimitable
valour to protect. And when the momentary peril was gone by, and
the champion turned a little awkwardly towards her whom he had rescued,
it was to meet, and quail before, a gaze of admiration more distinct
than words. He bowed, he stammered, his words failed him; he who
had crossed the floor a moment ago, like a young god, to smite, returned
like one discomfited; got somehow to his place by the table, muffled
himself again in his discarded cloak, and for a last touch of the ridiculous,
seeking for anything to restore his countenance, drank of the wine before
him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift. It was little wonder
if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent eyes, laughed out loud
and brief, and drank with raised glass, ‘To the champion of the
Fair.’<br>
<br>
Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she disdained
the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not reach her
spirit. For her, the world of living persons was all resumed again
into one pair, as in the days of Eden; there was but the one end in
life, the one hope before her, the one thing needful, the one thing
possible - to be his.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - THE PRINCE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
That same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in distress
of mind. Now he sat, now walked in a high apartment, full of draughts
and shadows. A single candle made the darkness visible; and the
light scarce sufficed to show upon the wall, where they had been recently
and rudely nailed, a few miniatures and a copper medal of the young
man’s head. The same was being sold that year in London,
to admiring thousands. The original was fair; he had beautiful
brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little
hard, a little weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning
to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with
a touch of puffiness. He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour
and silver; his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons;
for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished
personage incognito. Now he sat with a bowed head, now walked
precipitately to and fro, now went and gazed from the uncurtained window,
where the wind was still blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.<br>
<br>
The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the high notes
and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly near or were suddenly
swallowed up, in the current of the mistral. Tears sprang in the
pale blue eyes; the expression of his face was changed to that of a
more active misery, it seemed as if the voices of the bells reached,
and touched and pained him, in a waste of vacancy where even pain was
welcome. Outside in the night they continued to sound on, swelling
and fainting; and the listener heard in his memory, as it were their
harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a northern city, and the acclamations
of a multitude, the cries of battle, the gross voices of cannon, the
stridor of an animated life. And then all died away, and he stood
face to face with himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came
upon his mind, and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes men upon
the brink of cliffs.<br>
<br>
On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of glasses, a
bottle, and a silver bell. He went thither swiftly, then his hand
lowered first above the bell, then settled on the bottle. Slowly
he filled a glass, slowly drank it out; and, as a tide of animal warmth
recomforted the recesses of his nature, stood there smiling at himself.
He remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose, and he saw his
life shine and broaden and flow out majestically, like a river sunward.
The smile still on his lips, he lit a second candle and a third; a fire
stood ready built in a chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones
and the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle
on the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his
hopes. To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped,
his breath deeply and pleasurably taken. Victory walked with him;
he marched to crowns and empires among shouting followers; glory was
his dress. And presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary.
Under the gilt of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment
showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up the
actual failure: defeat, the long distress of the flight, exile, despair,
broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets, friends estranged.
The memory of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied;
despair sharpened into wrath. There was one who had led armies
in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a
man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court,
the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous
gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests? A pretty
king, if he had not a martial son to lean upon! A king at all?<br>
<br>
‘There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians;
he was more of a man than my papa!’ he thought. ‘I
saw him lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him - and he
died for my papa! All died for him, or risked the dying, and I
lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in heather like
a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio - me, the
man of the house, the only king in that king’s race.’
He ground his teeth. ‘The only king in Europe!’
Who else? Who has done and suffered except me? who has lain and
run and hidden with his faithful subjects, like a second Bruce?
Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France, at least, the lewd effeminate
traitor!’ And filling the glass to the brim, he drank a
king’s damnation. Ah, if he had the power of Louis, what
a king were here!<br>
<br>
The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he persevered
in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the fire of his excitement
with driblets of Rhine wine: a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark
of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile
reverie and solitary excess.<br>
<br>
From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted
him.<br>
<br>
‘By . . .<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
HEATHERCAT<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER I - TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
The period of this tale is in the heat of the <i>killing</i>-<i>time</i>;
the scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted
only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in
chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild
birds of the moorland that have cried there since the beginning.
It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written
there in prehistoric symbols. Strange green raths are to be seen
commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the
dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and
handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, and
still living and active - a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled
Celtic population. These rugged and grey hills were once included
in the boundaries of the Caledonian Forest. Merlin sat here below
his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here
fell into his enchanted trance. And the legend of his slumber
seems to body forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many
centuries of their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral
inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate courage.<br>
<br>
The Traquairs of Montroymont <i>(Mons Romanus</i>, as the erudite expound
it) had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and in
the back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary. For two hundred
years they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain decency (almost
to be named distinction) of repute; and the annals of their house, or
what is remembered of them, were obscure and bloody. Ninian Traquair
was ‘cruallie slochtered’ by the Crozers at the kirk-door
of Balweary, anno 1482. Francis killed Simon Ruthven of Drumshoreland,
anno 1540; bought letters of slayers at the widow and heir, and, by
a barbarous form of compounding, married (without tocher) Simon’s
daughter Grizzel, which is the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first
to an intermarriage. About the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage,
it is the business of this book, among many other things, to tell.<br>
<br>
The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King also,
but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for Montroymont
when the Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels of them.
Ninian (then laird) was an anxious husband of himself and the property,
as the times required, and it may be said of him, that he lost both.
He was heavily suspected of the Pentland Hills rebellion. When
it came the length of Bothwell Brig, he stood his trial before the Secret
Council, and was convicted of talking with some insurgents by the wayside,
the subject of the conversation not very clearly appearing, and of the
reset and maintenance of one Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before
Bothwell with a musket, and afterwards, for a continuance of months,
delved the garden at Montroymont. Matters went very ill with Ninian
at the Council; some of the lords were clear for treason; and even the
boot was talked of. But he was spared that torture; and at last,
having pretty good friendship among great men, he came off with a fine
of seven thousand marks, that caused the estate to groan. In this
case, as in so many others, it was the wife that made the trouble.
She was a great keeper of conventicles; would ride ten miles to one,
and when she was fined, rejoiced greatly to suffer for the Kirk; but
it was rather her husband that suffered. She had their only son,
Francis, baptized privately by the hands of Mr. Kidd; there was that
much the more to pay for! She could neither be driven nor wiled
into the parish kirk; as for taking the sacrament at the hands of any
Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at those of Curate Haddo, there
was nothing further from her purposes; and Montroymont had to put his
hand in his pocket month by month and year by year. Once, indeed,
the little lady was cast in prison, and the laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested
man, had to ride up and take her place; from which he was not discharged
under nine months and a sharp fine. It scarce seemed she had any
gratitude to him; she came out of gaol herself, and plunged immediately
deeper in conventicles, resetting recusants, and all her old, expensive
folly, only with greater vigour and openness, because Montroymont was
safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to consider. When
he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed, in December
1680, and late in the black night, my lady was from home. He came
into the house at his alighting, with a riding-rod yet in his hand;
and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught her by the scruff of the
neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the passageway, and went
upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light. It was three
in the morning when my lady returned from that conventicle, and, hearing
of the assault (because the maid had sat up for her, weeping), went
to their common chamber with a lantern in hand and stamping with her
shoes so as to wake the dead; it was supposed, by those that heard her,
from a design to have it out with the good man at once. The house-servants
gathered on the stair, because it was a main interest with them to know
which of these two was the better horse; and for the space of two hours
they were heard to go at the matter, hammer and tongs. Montroymont
alleged he was at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within
his power to pay the annual rents; she had served him basely by keeping
conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake; his friends were weary,
and there was nothing else before him but the entire loss of the family
lands, and to begin life again by the wayside as a common beggar.
She took him up very sharp and high: called upon him, if he were a Christian?
and which he most considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry glebes,
or of his soul? Presently he was heard to weep, and my lady’s
voice to go on continually like a running burn, only the words indistinguishable;
whereupon it was supposed a victory for her ladyship, and the domestics
took themselves to bed. The next day Traquair appeared like a
man who had gone under the harrows; and his lady wife thenceforward
continued in her old course without the least deflection.<br>
<br>
Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and suffered
his wife to go on hers without remonstrance. He still minded his
estate, of which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell, and
counted it already lost; looking ruefully on the acres and the graves
of his fathers, on the moorlands where the wild-fowl consorted, the
low, gurgling pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling
curlews - things that were yet his for the day and would be another’s
to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering till the dusk at
his approaching ruin, which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond
a year or two. He was essentially the simple ancient man, the
farmer and landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons
come and go, and his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would
have been content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing first
in his instinctive calendar. And now he saw everywhere the image
of the new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or
fowling for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very gooseberries
in the Place garden; and saw always, on the other hand, the figure of
Francis go forth, a beggar, into the broad world.<br>
<br>
It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every test
and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with the dragoons
in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly to the church
to Curate Haddo, with his son beside him. The mad, raging, Presbyterian
zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house
must have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence
of the curate, who had a great sympathy with the laird, and winked hard
at the doings in Montroymont. This curate was a man very ill reputed
in the countryside, and indeed in all Scotland. ‘Infamous
Haddo’ is Shield’s expression. But Patrick Walker
is more copious. ‘Curate Hall Haddo,’ says he, <i>sub</i>
<i>voce</i> Peden, ‘or <i>Hell</i> Haddo, as he was more justly
to be called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile
lusts of the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common gross drunkard,
continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually
breathing flames against the remnant of Israel. But the Lord put
an end to his piping, and all these offences were composed into one
bloody grave.’ No doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter;
and I have never heard it claimed for Walker that he was either a just
witness or an indulgent judge. At least, in a merely human character,
Haddo comes off not wholly amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not
that he showed any graces of the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan
decency, which might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden,
violent, and unprepared fate.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER II - FRANCIE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of his
age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on far
by a private governor, one M’Brair, a forfeited minister harboured
in that capacity at Montroymont. The boy, already much employed
in secret by his mother, was the most apt hand conceivable to run upon
a message, to carry food to lurking fugitives, or to stand sentry on
the skyline above a conventicle. It seemed no place on the moorlands
was so naked but what he would find cover there; and as he knew every
hag, boulder, and heather-bush in a circuit of seven miles about Montroymont,
there was scarce any spot but what he could leave or approach it unseen.
This dexterity had won him a reputation in that part of the country;
and among the many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he
passed under the by-name of Heathercat.<br>
<br>
How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.
He took much forethought for the boy’s future, seeing he was like
to be left so poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons, sighing
heavily, yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on the shoulder
if he seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private, kind encouragement.
But a great part of the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his
eyes sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the particulars
of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be absent a dozen times
for once that his father would observe it.<br>
<br>
On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which must
be kept private from all, the father included in the first of them.
Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse’s shoes, and
claps down incontinent in a hag by the wayside. And presently
he spied his father come riding from one direction, and Curate Haddo
walking from another; and Montroymont leaning down from the saddle,
and Haddo getting on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy, bald-pated
man, more like a dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came to a halt within
two fathoms of the child.<br>
<br>
‘Montroymont,’ the curate said, ‘the deil’s
in ’t but I’ll have to denunciate your leddy again.’<br>
<br>
‘Deil’s in ’t indeed!’ says the laird.<br>
<br>
‘Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?’ pursues
Haddo; ‘or to a communion at the least of it? For the conventicles,
let be! and the same for yon solemn fule, M’Brair: I can blink
at them. But she’s got to come to the kirk, Montroymont.’<br>
<br>
‘Dinna speak of it,’ says the laird. ‘I can
do nothing with her.’<br>
<br>
‘Couldn’t ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,’
suggested Haddo. ‘No? I’m wae to hear it.
And I suppose ye ken where you’re going?’<br>
<br>
‘Fine!’ said Montroymont. ‘Fine do I ken where:
bankrup’cy and the Bass Rock!’<br>
<br>
‘Praise to my bones that I never married!’ cried the curate.
‘Well, it’s a grievous thing to me to see an auld house
dung down that was here before Flodden Field. But naebody can
say it was with my wish.’<br>
<br>
‘No more they can, Haddo!’ says the laird. ‘A
good friend ye’ve been to me, first and last. I can give
you that character with a clear conscience.’<br>
<br>
Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into the
Dule Valley. But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so easily.
He went on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a dyke, and
stopped and whistled and waved upon a lassie that was herding cattle
there. This Janet M’Clour was a big lass, being taller than
the curate; and what made her look the more so, she was kilted very
high. It seemed for a while she would not come, and Francie heard
her calling Haddo a ‘daft auld fule,’ and saw her running
and dodging him among the whins and hags till he was fairly blown.
But at the last he gets a bottle from his plaid-neuk and holds it up
to her; whereupon she came at once into a composition, and the pair
sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and laughing together, on a
mound of heather. The boy had scarce heard of these vanities,
or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if anybody could
have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph. But they seemed to be
huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised, when the curate
had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones after him with screeches
of laughter, and Haddo turn about and caper, and shake his staff at
her, and laugh louder than herself. A wonderful merry pair, they
seemed; and when Francie had crawled out of the hag, he had a great
deal to consider in his mind. It was possible they were all fallen
in error about Mr. Haddo, he reflected - having seen him so tender with
Montroymont, and so kind and playful with the lass Janet; and he had
a temptation to go out of his road and question her herself upon the
matter. But he had a strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded
on instead over the braes till he came near the House of Cairngorm.
There, in a hollow place by the burnside that was shaded by some birks,
he was aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older
than himself. The two approached with the precautions of a pair
of strange dogs, looking at each other queerly.<br>
<br>
‘It’s ill weather on the hills,’ said the stranger,
giving the watchword.<br>
<br>
‘For a season,’ said Francie, ‘but the Lord will appear.’<br>
<br>
‘Richt,’ said the barefoot boy; ‘wha’re ye frae?’<br>
<br>
‘The Leddy Montroymont,’ says Francie.<br>
<br>
‘Ha’e, then!’ says the stranger, and handed him a
folded paper, and they stood and looked at each other again. ‘It’s
unco het,’ said the boy.<br>
<br>
‘Dooms het,’ says Francie.<br>
<br>
‘What do they ca’ ye?’ says the other.<br>
<br>
‘Francie,’ says he. ‘I’m young Montroymont.
They ca’ me Heathercat.’<br>
<br>
‘I’m Jock Crozer,’ said the boy. And there was
another pause, while each rolled a stone under his foot.<br>
<br>
‘Cast your jaiket and I’ll fecht ye for a bawbee,’
cried the elder boy with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing
back his jacket.<br>
<br>
‘Na, I’ve nae time the now,’ said Francie, with a
sharp thrill of alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.<br>
<br>
‘Ye’re feared. Heathercat indeed!’ said Crozer,
for among this infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer
had gone forth and was resented by his rivals. And with that they
separated.<br>
<br>
On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the recollection
of this untoward incident. The challenge had been fairly offered
and basely refused: the tale would be carried all over the country,
and the lustre of the name of Heathercat be dimmed. But the scene
between Curate Haddo and Janet M’Clour had also given him much
to think of: and he was still puzzling over the case of the curate,
and why such ill words were said of him, and why, if he were so merry-spirited,
he should yet preach so dry, when coming over a knowe, whom should he
see but Janet, sitting with her back to him, minding her cattle!
He was always a great child for secret, stealthy ways, having been employed
by his mother on errands when the same was necessary; and he came behind
the lass without her hearing.<br>
<br>
‘Jennet,’ says he.<br>
<br>
‘Keep me,’ cries Janet, springing up. ‘O, it’s
you, Maister Francie! Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.’<br>
<br>
‘Ay, it’s me,’ said Francie. ‘I’ve
been thinking, Jennet; I saw you and the curate a while back - ’<br>
<br>
‘Brat!’ cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one
moment made as if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she
had to chase her bestial with, and the next was begging and praying
that he would mention it to none. It was ‘naebody’s
business, whatever,’ she said; ‘it would just start a clash
in the country’; and there would be nothing left for her but to
drown herself in Dule Water.<br>
<br>
‘Why?’ says Francie.<br>
<br>
The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.<br>
<br>
‘And it isna that, anyway,’ continued Francie. ‘It
was just that he seemed so good to ye - like our Father in heaven, I
thought; and I thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about
him from the first. But I’ll have to tell Mr. M’Brair;
I’m under a kind of a bargain to him to tell him all.’<br>
<br>
‘Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!’ cried the lass.
‘I’ve naething to be ashamed of. Tell M’Brair
to mind his ain affairs,’ she cried again: ‘they’ll
be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!’ And so strode off,
shoving her beasts before her, and ever and again looking back and crying
angry words to the boy, where he stood mystified.<br>
<br>
By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say nothing
to his mother. My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-room, reading
a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife to make so much
noise in the world and be able to steer about that patient sheep her
husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of her hands were like
tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like a trap; and even when
she was the most serious, and still more when she was angry, there hung
about her face the terrifying semblance of a smile.<br>
<br>
‘Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had
handed it over, and she had read and burned it, ‘Did you see anybody?’
she asked.<br>
<br>
‘I saw the laird,’ said Francie.<br>
<br>
‘He didna see you, though?’ asked his mother.<br>
<br>
‘Deil a fear,’ from Francie.<br>
<br>
‘Francie!’ she cried. ‘What’s that I hear?
an aith? The Lord forgive me, have I broughten forth a brand for
the burning, a fagot for hell-fire?’<br>
<br>
‘I’m very sorry, ma’am,’ said Francie.
‘I humbly beg the Lord’s pardon, and yours, for my wickedness.’<br>
<br>
‘H’m,’ grunted the lady. ‘Did ye see nobody
else?’<br>
<br>
‘No, ma’am,’ said Francie, with the face of an angel,
‘except Jock Crozer, that gied me the billet.’<br>
<br>
‘Jock Crozer!’ cried the lady. ‘I’ll Crozer
them! Crozers indeed! What next? Are we to repose
the lives of a suffering remnant in Crozers? The whole clan of
them wants hanging, and if I had my way of it, they wouldna want it
long. Are you aware, sir, that these Crozers killed your forebear
at the kirk-door?’<br>
<br>
‘You see, he was bigger ’n me,’ said Francie.<br>
<br>
‘Jock Crozer!’ continued the lady. ‘That’ll
be Clement’s son, the biggest thief and reiver in the country-side.
To trust a note to him! But I’ll give the benefit of my
opinions to Lady Whitecross when we two forgather. Let her look
to herself! I have no patience with half-hearted carlines, that
complies on the Lord’s day morning with the kirk, and comes taigling
the same night to the conventicle. The one or the other! is what
I say: hell or heaven - Haddie’s abominations or the pure word
of God dreeping from the lips of Mr. Arnot,<br>
<br>
<br>
‘“Like honey from the honeycomb<br>
That dreepeth, sweeter far.”’<br>
<br>
<br>
My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial subjects:
the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the turpitudes of the whole
Crozer race - which, indeed, had never been conspicuous for respectability.
She pursued the pair of them for twenty minutes on the clock with wonderful
animation and detail, something of the pulpit manner, and the spirit
of one possessed. ‘O hellish compliance!’ she exclaimed.
‘I would not suffer a complier to break bread with Christian folk.
Of all the sins of this day there is not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating,
as damnable compliance’: the boy standing before her meanwhile,
and brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet, and
Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket. And yet, with all his distraction,
it might be argued that he heard too much: his father and himself being
‘compliers’ - that is to say, attending the church of the
parish as the law required.<br>
<br>
Presently, the lady’s passion beginning to decline, or her flux
of ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience. Francie
bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned
him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious
deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over,
to the end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on ‘damnable’
and ‘hellish.’ <i>Fas est ab hoste doceri</i> - disrespect
is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt
relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor’s chamber with a quiet
mind. M’Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and shivered,
for he had a quartan ague and this was his day. The great night-cap
and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and the white, thin
hands that held the plaid about his chittering body, made a sorrowful
picture. But Francie knew and loved him; came straight in, nestled
close to the refugee, and told his story. M’Brair had been
at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had licensed both on the same
day; and at this tale, told with so much innocency by the boy, the heart
of the tutor was commoved.<br>
<br>
‘Woe upon him! Woe upon that man!’ he cried.
‘O the unfaithful shepherd! O the hireling and apostate
minister! Make my matters hot for me? quo’ she! the shameless
limmer! And true it is, that he could repose me in that nasty,
stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your mother drew me
out - the Lord reward her for it! - or to that cold, unbieldy, marine
place of the Bass Rock, which, with my delicate kist, would be fair
ruin to me. But I will be valiant in my Master’s service.
I have a duty here: a duty to my God, to myself, and to Haddo: in His
strength, I will perform it.’<br>
<br>
Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade him
in the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the curate.
‘You must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him there!’
says he, ‘but nowhere else. Avert your eyes, close your
ears, pass him by like a three days’ corp. He is like that
damnable monster Basiliscus, which defiles - yea, poisons! - by the
sight.’ - All which was hardly claratory to the boy’s mind.<br>
<br>
Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to Francie.
Traquair was a good shot and swordsman: and it was his pleasure to walk
with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to teach him arms in
the back court, when they made a mighty comely pair, the child being
so lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly,
pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already
white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red.
But this day Francie’s heart was not in the fencing.<br>
<br>
‘Sir,’ says he, suddenly lowering his point, ‘will
ye tell me a thing if I was to ask it?’<br>
<br>
‘Ask away,’ says the father.<br>
<br>
‘Well, it’s this,’ said Francie: ‘Why do you
and me comply if it’s so wicked?’<br>
<br>
‘Ay, ye have the cant of it too!’ cries Montroymont.
‘But I’ll tell ye for all that. It’s to try
and see if we can keep the rigging on this house, Francie. If
she had her way, we would be beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by
the wayside. When ye hear her - when ye hear folk,’ he corrected
himself briskly, ‘call me a coward, and one that betrayed the
Lord, and I kenna what else, just mind it was to keep a bed to ye to
sleep in and a bite for ye to eat. - On guard!’ he cried, and
the lesson proceeded again till they were called to supper.<br>
<br>
‘There’s another thing yet,’ said Francie, stopping
his father. ‘There’s another thing that I am not sure
that I am very caring for. She - she sends me errands.’<br>
<br>
‘Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,’ said Traquair.<br>
<br>
‘Ay, but wait till I tell ye,’ says the boy. ‘If
I was to see you I was to hide.’<br>
<br>
Montroymont sighed. ‘Well, and that’s good of her
too,’ said he. ‘The less that I ken of thir doings
the better for me; and the best thing you can do is just to obey her,
and see and be a good son to her, the same as ye are to me, Francie.’<br>
<br>
At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled within
his bosom, and his remorse was poured out. ‘Faither!’
he cried, ‘I said “deil” to-day; many’s the
time I said it, and <i>damnable</i> too, and <i>hellitsh</i>.
I ken they’re all right; they’re beeblical. But I
didna say them beeblically; I said them for sweir words - that’s
the truth of it.’<br>
<br>
‘Hout, ye silly bairn!’ said the father, ‘dinna do
it nae mair, and come in by to your supper.’ And he took
the boy, and drew him close to him a moment, as they went through the
door, with something very fond and secret, like a caress between a pair
of lovers.<br>
<br>
The next day M’Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long
advising with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle. What
passed was never wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell
on her knees to him among the whins. The same night, as soon as
it was dark, he took the road again for Balweary. In the Kirkton,
where the dragoons quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the noise
of a ranting song and people laughing grossly, which was highly offensive
to his mind. He gave it the wider berth, keeping among fields;
and came down at last by the water-side, where the manse stands solitary
between the river and the road. He tapped at the back door, and
the old woman called upon him to come in, and guided him through the
house to the study, as they still called it, though there was little
enough study there in Haddo’s days, and more song-books than theology.<br>
<br>
‘Here’s yin to speak wi’ ye, Mr. Haddie!’ cries
the old wife.<br>
<br>
And M’Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little,
round, red man seated in one chair and his feet upon another.
A clear fire and a tallow dip lighted him barely. He was taking
tobacco in a pipe, and smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and glass,
and his fiddle and bow, were beside him on the table.<br>
<br>
‘Hech, Patey M’Briar, is this you?’ said he, a trifle
tipsily. ‘Step in by, man, and have a drop brandy: for the
stomach’s sake! Even the deil can quote Scripture - eh,
Patey?’<br>
<br>
‘I will neither eat nor drink with you,’ replied M’Brair.
‘I am come upon my Master’s errand: woe be upon me if I
should anyways mince the same. Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit
this kirk which you encumber.’<br>
<br>
‘Muckle obleeged!’ says Haddo, winking.<br>
<br>
‘You and me have been to kirk and market together,’ pursued
M’Brair; ‘we have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have
sat in the same teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know
you still retain for me some carnal kindness. It would be my shame
if I denied it; I live here at your mercy and by your favour, and glory
to acknowledge it. You have pity on my wretched body, which is
but grass, and must soon be trodden under: but O, Haddo! how much greater
is the yearning with which I yearn after and pity your immortal soul!
Come now, let us reason together! I drop all points of controversy,
weighty though these be; I take your defaced and damnified kirk on your
own terms; and I ask you, Are you a worthy minister? The communion
season approaches; how can you pronounce thir solemn words, “The
elders will now bring forrit the elements,” and not quail?
A parishioner may be summoned to-night; you may have to rise from your
miserable orgies; and I ask you, Haddo, what does your conscience tell
you? Are you fit? Are you fit to smooth the pillow of a
parting Christian? And if the summons should be for yourself,
how then?’<br>
<br>
Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part of his temper.
‘What’s this of it?’ he cried. ‘I’m
no waur than my neebours. I never set up to be speeritual; I never
did. I’m a plain, canty creature; godliness is cheerfulness,
says I; give me my fiddle and a dram, and I wouldna hairm a flee.’<br>
<br>
‘And I repeat my question,’ said M’Brair: ‘Are
you fit - fit for this great charge? fit to carry and save souls?’<br>
<br>
‘Fit? Blethers! As fit’s yoursel’,’
cried Haddo.<br>
<br>
‘Are you so great a self-deceiver?’ said M’Brair.
‘Wretched man, trampler upon God’s covenants, crucifier
of your Lord afresh. I will ding you to the earth with one word:
How about the young woman, Janet M’Clour?’<br>
<br>
‘Weel, what about her? what do I ken?’ cries Haddo.
‘M’Brair, ye daft auld wife, I tell ye as true’s truth,
I never meddled her. It was just daffing, I tell ye: daffing,
and nae mair: a piece of fun, like! I’m no denying but what
I’m fond of fun, sma’ blame to me! But for onything
sarious - hout, man, it might come to a deposeetion! I’ll
sweir it to ye. Where’s a Bible, till you hear me sweir?’<br>
<br>
‘There is nae Bible in your study,’ said M’Brair severely.<br>
<br>
And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to accept the
fact.<br>
<br>
‘Weel, and suppose there isna?’ he cried, stamping.
‘What mair can ye say of us, but just that I’m fond of my
joke, and so’s she? I declare to God, by what I ken, she
might be the Virgin Mary - if she would just keep clear of the dragoons.
But me! na, deil haet o’ me!’<br>
<br>
‘She is penitent at least,’ says M’Brair.<br>
<br>
‘Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she accused
me?’ cried the curate.<br>
<br>
‘I canna just say that,’ replied M’Brair. ‘But
I rebuked her in the name of God, and she repented before me on her
bended knees.’<br>
<br>
‘Weel, I daursay she’s been ower far wi’ the dragoons,’
said Haddo. ‘I never denied that. I ken naething by
it.’<br>
<br>
‘Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,’ said
M’Brair. ‘Poor, blind, besotted creature - and I see
you stoytering on the brink of dissolution: your light out, and your
hours numbered. Awake, man!’ he shouted with a formidable
voice, ‘awake, or it be ower late.’<br>
<br>
‘Be damned if I stand this!’ exclaimed Haddo, casting his
tobacco-pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces.
‘Out of my house with ye, or I’ll call for the dragoons.’<br>
<br>
‘The speerit of the Lord is upon me,’ said M’Brair
with solemn ecstasy. ‘I sist you to compear before the Great
White Throne, and I warn you the summons shall be bloody and sudden.’<br>
<br>
And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he got
clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face of the
pursuing curate. The next Lord’s day the curate was ill,
and the kirk closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M’Brair abode
unmolested in the house of Montroymont.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
CHAPTER III - THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west
a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools. These presently drained
into a burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of pace,
about the corner of the hill. On the far side the ground swelled
into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with the presence
of the standing stones for which the place was famous. They were
many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen - you would have said
with age: and had made their abode there for untold centuries, since
first the heathens shouted for their installation. The ancients
had hallowed them to some ill religion, and their neighbourhood had
long been avoided by the prudent before the fall of day; but of late,
on the upspringing of new requirements, these lonely stones on the moor
had again become a place of assembly. A watchful picket on the
Hill-end commanded all the northern and eastern approaches; and such
was the disposition of the ground, that by certain cunningly posted
sentries the west also could be made secure against surprise: there
was no place in the country where a conventicle could meet with more
quiet of mind or a more certain retreat open, in the case of interference
from the dragoons. The minister spoke from a knowe close to the
edge of the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on the very
threshold of the devils of yore. When they pitched a tent (which
was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged over
the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew
why. And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope below,
and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the turfy soil of the
Ring itself. In truth the situation was well qualified to give
a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any wanted. But
these congregations assembled under conditions at once so formidable
and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold. They were the
last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from all other countries
of the world, still leaned from heaven to observe, with swelling sympathy,
the doings of His moorland remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal
wounds, with dropping tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised
nor firmly adopted by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to
be in the heart of each and on the lips of the minister. And over
against them was the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and
James Stuart, on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope,
and the muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell
in an ecstasy of hate and hope. ‘One pull more!’ he
seemed to cry; ‘one pull more, and it’s done. There’s
only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr,
left for God.’ And with such an august assistance of powers
and principalities looking on at the last conflict of good and evil,
it was scarce possible to spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile,
<i>ab agendo</i> devils whose holy place they were now violating.<br>
<br>
There might have been three hundred to four hundred present. At
least there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in
the ring; though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd stood
with their bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first signal.
The circle of faces was strangely characteristic; long, serious, strongly
marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown cheeks, the mouth
set and the eyes shining with a fierce enthusiasm; the shepherd, the
labouring man, and the rarer laird, stood there in their broad blue
bonnets or laced hats, and presenting an essential identity of type.
From time to time a long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience,
and was propagated like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among
the keepers of the horses. It had a name; it was called ‘a
holy groan.’<br>
<br>
A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it and
whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness that carried
away the minister’s voice and twitched his tails and made him
stagger, and turned the congregation for a moment into a mere pother
of blowing plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain followed and
was dashed straight into their faces. Men and women panted aloud
in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth were bared along
all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids, mantles, and riding-coats
were proved vain, and the worshippers felt the water stream on their
naked flesh. The minister, reinforcing his great and shrill voice,
continued to contend against and triumph over the rising of the squall
and the dashing of the rain.<br>
<br>
‘In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,’
he said; ‘and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and
an hundred mile and not see a smoking house. For there’ll
be naething in all Scotland but deid men’s banes and blackness,
and the living anger of the Lord. O, where to find a bield - O
sirs, where to find a bield from the wind of the Lord’s anger?
Do ye call <i>this</i> a wind? Bethankit! Sirs, this is
but a temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of wind, this is but
a spit of rain and by with it. Already there’s a blue bow
in the west, and the sun will take the crown of the causeway again,
and your things’ll be dried upon ye, and your flesh will be warm
upon your bones. But O, sirs, sirs! for the day of the Lord’s
anger!’<br>
<br>
His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice
that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the
gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity.
Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the
rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade,
a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of
the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent
patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It
was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and redolent of the
soil.<br>
<br>
A little before the coming of the squall there was a different scene
enacting at the outposts. For the most part, the sentinels were
faithful to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was known
to be a safe meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this particular day
had been somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the
inordinate length of the discourse. Francie lay there in his appointed
hiding-hole, looking abroad between two whin-bushes. His view
was across the course of the burn, then over a piece of plain moorland,
to a gap between two hills; nothing moved but grouse, and some cattle
who slowly traversed his field of view, heading northward: he heard
the psalms, and sang words of his own to the savage and melancholy music;
for he had his own design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed
in his bosom alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague.
Courage was uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through
all its length with this impromptu strain:<br>
<br>
<br>
‘And I will ding Jock Crozer down<br>
No later than the day.’<br>
<br>
<br>
Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the wind’s
will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms of screaming,
as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred with inordinate passion,
succeeded to intervals of silence; and Francie heard them with a critical
ear. ‘Ay,’ he thought at last, ‘he’ll
do; he has the bit in his mou’ fairly.’<br>
<br>
He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer, had
been established at a very critical part of the line of outposts; namely,
where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the semicircle of high
moors. If anything was calculated to nerve him to battle it was
this. The post was important; next to the Hill-end itself, it
might be called the key to the position; and it was where the cover
was bad, and in which it was most natural to place a child. It
should have been Heathercat’s; why had it been given to Crozer?
An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed through his marrow
every time he faced the question. Was it possible that Crozer
could have boasted? that there were rumours abroad to his - Heathercat’s
- discredit? that his honour was publicly sullied? All the world
went dark about him at the thought; he sank without a struggle into
the midnight pool of despair; and every time he so sank, he brought
back with him - not drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage
by the locks. His heart beat very slowly as he deserted his station,
and began to crawl towards that of Crozer. Something pulled him
back, and it was not the sense of duty, but a remembrance of Crozer’s
build and hateful readiness of fist. Duty, as he conceived it,
pointed him forward on the rueful path that he was travelling.
Duty bade him redeem his name if he were able, at the risk of broken
bones; and his bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation.
An awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he should
disgrace himself by weeping. He consoled himself, boy-like, with
the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could easily steal
over unseen to Crozer’s post, and he had a continuous private
idea that he would very probably steal back again. His course
took him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words:
‘What news, minister, of Claver’se? He’s going
round like a roaring rampaging lion. . . .<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Footnotes:<br>
<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> From the Sydney
<i>Presbyterian</i>, October 26, 1889.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2a"></a><a href="#citation2a">{2a}</a> <i>Theater</i>
of <i>Mortality</i>, p. 10; Edin. 1713.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2b"></a><a href="#citation2b">{2b}</a> <i>History
of My Own Times</i>, beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, p. 158.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2c"></a><a href="#citation2c">{2c}</a> Wodrow’s
<i>Church History</i>, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2d"></a><a href="#citation2d">{2d}</a> Crookshank’s
<i>Church History</i>, 1751, second ed. p. 202.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote2e"></a><a href="#citation2e">{2e}</a> Burnet,
p. 348.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote3a"></a><a href="#citation3a">{3a}</a> <i>Fuller’s
Historie of the Holy Warre</i>, fourth ed. 1651.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote3b"></a><a href="#citation3b">{3b}</a> Wodrow,
vol. ii. p. 17.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote3c"></a><a href="#citation3c">{3c}</a> Sir J.
Turner’s <i>Memoirs</i>, pp. 148-50.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a">{4a}</a> <i>A Cloud
of Witnesses</i>, p. 376.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4b"></a><a href="#citation4b">{4b}</a> Wodrow,
pp. 19, 20.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4c"></a><a href="#citation4c">{4c}</a> <i>A Hind
Let Loose</i>, p. 123.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4d"></a><a href="#citation4d">{4d}</a> Turner,
p. 163.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4e"></a><a href="#citation4e">{4e}</a> Turner,
p. 198.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4f"></a><a href="#citation4f">{4f}</a> <i>Ibid</i>.
p. 167.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4g"></a><a href="#citation4g">{4g}</a> Wodrow,
p. 29.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote4h"></a><a href="#citation4h">{4h}</a> Turner,
Wodrow, and <i>Church History</i> by James Kirkton, an outed minister
of the period.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5a"></a><a href="#citation5a">{5a}</a> Kirkton,
p. 244.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5b"></a><a href="#citation5b">{5b}</a> Kirkton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5c"></a><a href="#citation5c">{5c}</a> Turner.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5d"></a><a href="#citation5d">{5d}</a> Kirkton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote5e"></a><a href="#citation5e">{5e}</a> Kirkton.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6a"></a><a href="#citation6a">{6a}</a> <i>Cloud
of Witnesses</i>, p. 389; Edin. 1765.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6b"></a><a href="#citation6b">{6b}</a> Kirkton,
p. 247.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6c"></a><a href="#citation6c">{6c}</a> Ibid.
p. 254.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6d"></a><a href="#citation6d">{6d}</a> <i>Ibid</i>.
p. 247.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6e"></a><a href="#citation6e">{6e}</a> <i>Ibid</i>.
pp. 247, 248.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6f"></a><a href="#citation6f">{6f}</a> Kirkton,
p. 248.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6g"></a><a href="#citation6g">{6g}</a> Kirkton,
p. 249.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6h"></a><a href="#citation6h">{6h}</a> <i>Naphtali</i>,
p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6i"></a><a href="#citation6i">{6i}</a> Wodrow,
p. 59.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6j"></a><a href="#citation6j">{6j}</a> Kirkton,
p. 246.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote6k"></a><a href="#citation6k">{6k}</a> Defoe’s
<i>History of the Church of Scotland.<br>
<br>
</i><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a> ‘This
paper was written in collaboration with James Waiter Ferrier, and if
reprinted this is to be stated, though his principal collaboration was
to lie back in an easy-chair and laugh.’ - [R.L.S., Oct. 25, 1894.]<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a> See a short
essay of De Quincey’s.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote9a"></a><a href="#citation9a">{9a}</a> <i>Religio
Medici</i>, Part ii.<br>
<br>
<a name="footnote9b"></a><a href="#citation9b">{9b}</a> <i>Duchess</i>
<i>of Malfi</i>.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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