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+*****The Project Gutenberg Etext of Memories and Portraits*****
+#12 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson 
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+Memories and Portraits
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+by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+December, 1995  [Etext #381]
+
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+Memories and Portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson.  1912 Chatto and 
+Windus edition.  Scanned and proofed by David Price, email 
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+THIS volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better 
+to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random.  
+A certain thread of meaning binds them.  Memories of childhood and 
+youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle - 
+taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since 
+and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself.  This has come 
+by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was 
+but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the 
+irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of 
+the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I 
+was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.
+
+My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager 
+sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed.  Of their 
+descendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not 
+because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a 
+business partnership, and cannot divide interests.
+
+Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already 
+in THE CORNHILL, LONGMAN'S, SCRIBNER, THE ENGLISH ILLUSTRATED, THE 
+MAGAZINE OF ART, THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEW; three are here in print 
+for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he 
+regarded as a private circulation.
+
+R. L S.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.    THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
+II.   SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
+III.  OLD MORALITY
+IV.   A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
+V.    AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
+VI.   PASTORAL
+VII.  THE MANSE
+VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
+IX.   THOMAS STEVENSON
+X.    TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
+XI.   TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER
+XII.  THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
+XIII. "A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"
+XIV.  A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
+XV.   A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
+XVI.  A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
+
+
+"This is no my ain house;
+I ken by the biggin' o't."
+
+Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on 
+France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set 
+people thinking on the divisions of races and nations.  Such 
+thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to 
+inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different 
+stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its 
+extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to 
+the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of 
+Rannoch.  It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; 
+there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered 
+so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands 
+whence she sprang.  Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains 
+still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech.  It was but the 
+other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show 
+in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
+speaking woman.  English itself, which will now frank the traveller 
+through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea 
+Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the 
+ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home 
+country, in half a hundred varying stages of transition.  You may 
+go all over the States, and - setting aside the actual intrusion 
+and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese - you shall 
+scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty 
+miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the 
+hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen.  Book English has 
+gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms 
+of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its 
+own quality of speech, vocal or verbal.  In like manner, local 
+custom and prejudice, even local religion and local law, linger on 
+into the latter end of the nineteenth century - IMPERIA IN IMPERIO, 
+foreign things at home.
+
+In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his 
+neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull.  His is a 
+domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but 
+neither curious nor quick about the life of others.  In French 
+colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an 
+immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated 
+race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a 
+transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.  But the 
+Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance.  He 
+figures among his vassal in the hour of peace with the same 
+disdainful air that led him on to victory.  A passing enthusiasm 
+for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot 
+impose upon his intimates.  He may be amused by a foreigner as by a 
+monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any 
+patience.  Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in 
+love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable - a 
+staggering pretension.  So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was 
+celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed 
+to give them solid English fare - roast beef and plum pudding, and 
+no tomfoolery.  Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly.  
+We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the 
+chance, will we eager him to eat of it himself.  The same spirit 
+inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands 
+of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their 
+ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant.
+
+I quote an American in this connection without scruple.  Uncle Sam 
+is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick.  
+For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and 
+nothing more.  He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let 
+him try San Francisco.  He wittily reproves English ignorance as to 
+the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten 
+Wyoming?  The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used 
+over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach.  The Yankee 
+States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the 
+bucket.  And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the 
+life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, not 
+raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to 
+a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere not 
+American, but merely Yankee.  I will go far beyond him in 
+reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to 
+their cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the 
+silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where 
+to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my 
+countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog.  But in the 
+case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept.  Wyoming 
+is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to 
+the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better 
+justified than the Britannic.
+
+It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most 
+ignorant of the foreigners at home.  John Bull is ignorant of the 
+States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his 
+opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own 
+door.  There is one country, for instance - its frontier not so far 
+from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all 
+essentials with the English - of which I will go bail he knows 
+nothing.  His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described; 
+it can only be illustrated by anecdote.  I once travelled with a 
+man of plausible manners and good intelligence - a University man, 
+as the phrase goes - a man, besides, who had taken his degree in 
+life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in.  We were 
+deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other 
+things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had 
+recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things 
+were not so in Scotland.  "I beg your pardon," said he, "this is a 
+matter of law."  He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he 
+choose to be informed.  The law was the same for the whole country, 
+he told me roundly; every child knew that.  At last, to settle 
+matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal 
+body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in 
+question.  Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and 
+dropped the conversation.  This is a monstrous instance, if you 
+like, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots.
+
+England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in 
+religion, in education, and in the very look of nature and men's 
+faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly.  Many particulars 
+that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less 
+forcibly; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common 
+provocations.  A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and 
+the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression 
+of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as on his first 
+excursion into England.  The change from a hilly to a level country 
+strikes him with delighted wonder.  Along the flat horizon there 
+arise the frequent venerable towers of churches.  He sees at the 
+end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails.  He may go 
+where he pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and 
+lions; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment.  
+There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many 
+windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody 
+country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant 
+business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their 
+air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit 
+of romance into the tamest landscape.  When the Scotch child sees 
+them first he falls immediately in love; and from that time forward 
+windmills keep turning in his dreams.  And so, in their degree, 
+with every feature of the life and landscape.  The warm, habitable 
+age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the 
+country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the 
+fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; 
+chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech - 
+they are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs 
+in the child's story that he tells himself at night.  The sharp 
+edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt 
+whether it is ever killed.  Rather it keeps returning, ever the 
+more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have 
+been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to 
+enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.
+
+One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye - 
+the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the 
+quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm 
+colouring of all.  We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient 
+buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are 
+all of hewn or harled masonry.  Wood has been sparingly used in 
+their construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not 
+flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched; 
+even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent 
+appearance.  English houses, in comparison, have the look of 
+cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter.  And to this the 
+Scotchman never becomes used.  His eye can never rest consciously 
+on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call 
+them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly 
+reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his 
+home.  "This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't."  And 
+yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it 
+long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be, 
+thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he cease to 
+remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native 
+country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.
+
+But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count 
+England foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of 
+the empire, surprise and even pain us.  The dull, neglected 
+peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a 
+startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed, 
+thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman.  A week or two in such a place 
+as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping.  It seems incredible that 
+within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been 
+thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our 
+own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with 
+a difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things 
+with less interest and conviction.  The first shock of English 
+society is like a cold plunge.  It is possible that the Scot comes 
+looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be 
+in the wrong direction.  Yet surely his complaint is grounded; 
+surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous 
+ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the 
+social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with 
+terror.  A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own 
+experience.  He will not put you by with conversational counters 
+and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one 
+interested in life and man's chief end.  A Scotchman is vain, 
+interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth 
+his thoughts and experience in the best light.  The egoism of the 
+Englishman is self-contained.  He does not seek to proselytise.  He 
+takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the 
+unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference.  
+Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all 
+he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to associate, he 
+would rather not be reminded of your baser origin.  Compared with 
+the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity 
+and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest.  That 
+you should continually try to establish human and serious 
+relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, 
+and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue 
+something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you 
+in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation.  Thus even the 
+lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the 
+head and shoulders.
+
+Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English 
+youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and 
+gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of 
+future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.  
+I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys 
+of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once 
+more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance 
+chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider 
+extremes of temperament and sensibility.  The boy of the South 
+seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to 
+games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily 
+transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in 
+mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser 
+and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more 
+immersed in present circumstances.  And certainly, for one thing, 
+English boys are younger for their age.  Sabbath observance makes a 
+series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of 
+Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the 
+rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the 
+intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and 
+senses prey upon and test each other.  The typical English Sunday, 
+with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads 
+perhaps to different results.  About the very cradle of the Scot 
+there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two 
+divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two 
+first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely 
+inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scottish striking at the very 
+roots of life with, "What is the chief end of man?" and answering 
+nobly, if obscurely, "To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever."  I 
+do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Catechism; but the fact 
+of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of 
+speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the 
+peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together.  No 
+Englishman of Byron's age, character, and history would have had 
+patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for 
+Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days 
+kept their influence to the end.  We have spoken of the material 
+conditions; nor need much more be said of these: of the land lying 
+everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of 
+the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone 
+cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared with the level 
+streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic quaintness 
+of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up 
+and come to themselves in life.  As the stage of the University 
+approaches, the contrast becomes more express.  The English lad 
+goes to Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, 
+to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by 
+proctors.  Nor is this to be regarded merely as a stage of 
+education; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that 
+separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots.  At an 
+earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly different 
+experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell 
+hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the 
+public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he 
+has been wandering fancy-free.  His college life has little of 
+restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility.  He will find no 
+quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten 
+borough of the arts.  All classes rub shoulders on the greasy 
+benches.  The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his 
+scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school.  
+They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a 
+watering-place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside 
+his peasant family.  The first muster of a college class in 
+Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads, 
+fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish 
+embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, 
+and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices.  It was in 
+these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection 
+of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrageous students at their 
+ease with ready human geniality.  Thus, at least, we have a healthy 
+democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work; even when there 
+is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different 
+classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of 
+each is plainly demonstrated to the other.  Our tasks ended, we of 
+the North go forth as freemen into the humming, lamplit city.  At 
+five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college 
+gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of 
+the winter sunset.  The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies 
+in wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the 
+masters of the world; and some portion of our lives is always 
+Saturday, LA TREVE DE DIEU.
+
+Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his 
+country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story 
+and from observation.  A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, 
+outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; 
+much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.  
+Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of 
+foraying hoofs.  He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the 
+iron girdle and the handful of oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and 
+lived so sparely on their raids.  Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, 
+and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his 
+country's history.  The heroes and kings of Scotland have been 
+tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish history - 
+Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five were still either failures or 
+defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the 
+Bruce combine with the very smallness of the country to teach 
+rather a moral than a material criterion for life.  Britain is 
+altogether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire: 
+Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his 
+imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, 
+sterile and unpopulous.  It is not so for nothing.  I once seemed 
+to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of 
+sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his 
+own.  It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish 
+romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine.  But the error 
+serves the purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that 
+the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by 
+paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life.
+
+So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained.  That 
+Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was 
+yet composed in the city of Westminster.  The division of races is 
+more sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than 
+between the countries.  Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, 
+are like foreign parts; yet you may choose a man from any of them, 
+and, ten to one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot.  A 
+century and a half ago the Highlander wore a different costume, 
+spoke a different language, worshipped in another church, held 
+different morals, and obeyed a different social constitution from 
+his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.  Even the 
+English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the 
+Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the 
+Scotch.  Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot.  He would 
+willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him 
+at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely 
+land.  When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service, 
+returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at 
+Port Patrick.  They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of 
+their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated 
+with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at 
+the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not 
+understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged 
+them since the dawn of history.  Last, and perhaps most curious, 
+the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of 
+Europe.  They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, 
+not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland.  Now, what idea had 
+they in their minds when they thus, in thought, identified 
+themselves with their ancestral enemies?  What was the sense in 
+which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish?  
+Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of 
+men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts?  
+The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer, NO; the far 
+more galling business of Ireland clenches the negative from nearer 
+home.  Is it common education, common morals, a common language or 
+a common faith, that join men into nations?  There were practically 
+none of these in the case we are considering.
+
+The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, 
+the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the 
+Highlander.  When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's 
+necks in spirit; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy 
+in their talk.  But from his compatriot in the south the Lowlander 
+stands consciously apart.  He has had a different training; he 
+obeys different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is 
+otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an 
+English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to 
+remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the 
+Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the 
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES (2)
+
+
+I AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) 
+to the profit and glory of my ALMA MATER; and the fact is I seem to 
+be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for 
+while I am willing enough to write something, I know not what to 
+write.  Only one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it 
+should be of the University itself and my own days under its 
+shadow; of the things that are still the same and of those that are 
+already changed: such talk, in short, as would pass naturally 
+between a student of to-day and one of yesterday, supposing them to 
+meet and grow confidential.
+
+The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life; 
+more swiftly still in the little bubbling back-water of the 
+quadrangle; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly 
+diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men.  I looked 
+for my name the other day in last year's case-book of the 
+Speculative.  Naturally enough I looked for it near the end; it was 
+not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it 
+had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on 
+the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture 
+like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the 
+dignity of years.  This kind of dignity of temporal precession is 
+likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less 
+welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and 
+I am the more emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of 
+a parent and a praiser of things past.
+
+For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it 
+has doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline 
+by gradual stages; but decline, in spite of all seeming 
+embellishments, it does; and what is perhaps more singular, began 
+to do so when I ceased to be a student.  Thus, by an odd chance, I 
+had the very last of the very best of ALMA MATER; the same thing, I 
+hear (which makes it the more strange), had previously happened to 
+my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at 
+all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors 
+of to-day.  Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the 
+past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near 
+examination, they look wondrous cloudy.  The chief and far the most 
+lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle, 
+unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of 
+the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes 
+of good, flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-
+windy, morning journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during 
+lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up 
+the sunshine and shadow of my college life.  You cannot fancy what 
+you missed in missing him; his virtues, I make sure, are 
+inconceivable to his successors, just as they were apparently 
+concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically alone in 
+the pleasure I had in his society.  Poor soul, I remember how much 
+he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun) 
+seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune 
+and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went.  
+And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in 
+their season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the 
+troubles of youth in particular are things but of a moment.  So 
+this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full share of these 
+concerns, and that very largely by his own fault; but he still 
+clung to his fortune, and in the midst of much misconduct, kept on 
+in his own way learning how to work; and at last, to his wonder, 
+escaped out of the stage of studentship not openly shamed; leaving 
+behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal of its 
+interest for myself.
+
+But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is 
+by no means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-
+day, if they knew what they had lost, would regret also.  They have 
+still Tait, to be sure - long may they have him! - and they have 
+still Tait's class-room, cupola and all; but think of what a 
+different place it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll 
+days) would be present on the benches, and, at the near end of the 
+platform, Lindsay senior (3) was airing his robust old age.  It is 
+possible my successors may have never even heard of Old Lindsay; 
+but when he went, a link snapped with the last century.  He had 
+something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke 
+with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire; his 
+reminiscences were all of journeys on foot or highways busy with 
+post-chaises - a Scotland before steam; he had seen the coal fire 
+on the Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own 
+grandfather.  Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished; it 
+was only in his memory that I could see the huge shock of flames of 
+the May beacon stream to leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the 
+fire, lay hold unscorched of the windward bars of the furnace; it 
+was only thus that I could see my grandfather driving swiftly in a 
+gig along the seaboard road from Pittenweem to Crail, and for all 
+his business hurry, drawing up to speak good-humouredly with those 
+he met.  And now, in his turn, Lindsay is gone also; inhabits only 
+the memories of other men, till these shall follow him; and figures 
+in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his.
+
+To-day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a 
+prodigious deal of Greek; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is 
+a man filled with the mathematics.  And doubtless these are set-
+offs.  But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie has 
+retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead.  No man's education is 
+complete or truly liberal who knew not Kelland.  There were 
+unutterable lessons in the mere sight of that frail old clerical 
+gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and 
+keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of that very 
+kindness.  I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class time, 
+though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in out-
+of-the-way English parishes when he was young; thus playing the 
+same part as Lindsay - the part of the surviving memory, signalling 
+out of the dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished 
+things.  But it was a part that scarce became him; he somehow 
+lacked the means: for all his silver hair and worn face, he was not 
+truly old; and he had too much of the unrest and petulant fire of 
+youth, and too much invincible innocence of mind, to play the 
+veteran well.  The time to measure him best, to taste (in the old 
+phrase) his gracious nature, was when he received his class at 
+home.  What a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to amuse 
+us like children with toys; and what an engaging nervousness of 
+manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed!  Truly he 
+made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed, but 
+at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious, 
+troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us.  A 
+theorist has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-
+tale as his spectacles; that the mouth may be compressed and the 
+brow smoothed artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is 
+diagnostic.  And truly it must have been thus with Kelland; for as 
+I still fancy I behold him frisking actively about the platform, 
+pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most clearly is the way 
+his glasses glittered with affection.  I never knew but one other 
+man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle; 
+and that was Dr. Appleton.  But the light in his case was tempered 
+and passive; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and flashed 
+vivaciously among the students, like a perpetual challenge to 
+goodwill.
+
+I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason.  
+Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certificate of 
+merit, the only distinction of my University career.  But although 
+I am the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's 
+own hand, I cannot remember to have been present in the Greek class 
+above a dozen times.  Professor Blackie was even kind enough to 
+remark (more than once) while in the very act of writing the 
+document above referred to, that he did not know my face.  Indeed, 
+I denied myself many opportunities; acting upon an extensive and 
+highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great deal of 
+trouble to put in exercise - perhaps as much as would have taught 
+me Greek - and sent me forth into the world and the profession of 
+letters with the merest shadow of an education.  But they say it is 
+always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its 
+own reward, whatever be its nature; so that, perhaps, even upon 
+this I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with 
+more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less 
+education.  One consequence, however, of my system is that I have 
+much less to say of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor 
+Kelland; and as he is still alive, and will long, I hope, continue 
+to be so, it will not surprise you very much that I have no 
+intention of saying it.
+
+Meanwhile, how many others have gone - Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know 
+not who besides; and of that tide of students that used to throng 
+the arch and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into 
+the remotest parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down 
+beside their fathers in their "resting-graves"!  And again, how 
+many of these last have not found their way there, all too early, 
+through the stress of education!  That was one thing, at least, 
+from which my truantry protected me.  I am sorry indeed that I have 
+no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I were dead; nor do I 
+know the name of that branch of knowledge which is worth acquiring 
+at the price of a brain fever.  There are many sordid tragedies in 
+the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or 
+both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than the case of the 
+lad who is in too much hurry to be learned.  And so, for the sake 
+of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have 
+done.  A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate 
+manner of study that now grows so common, read night and day for an 
+examination.  As he went on, the task became more easy to him, 
+sleep was more easily banished, his brain grew hot and clear and 
+more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller and more 
+orderly.  It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all night 
+in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of 
+success.  His window looked eastward, and being (as I said) high 
+up, and the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over 
+dwindling suburbs to a country horizon.  At last my student drew up 
+his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad.  Day 
+was breaking, the cast was tinging with strange fires, the clouds 
+breaking up for the coming of the sun; and at the sight, nameless 
+terror seized upon his mind.  He was sane, his senses were 
+undisturbed; he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew 
+that it was normal; but he could neither bear to see it nor find 
+the strength to look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into 
+the enclosure of the street.  In the cool air and silence, and 
+among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed.  Nothing 
+troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject fear 
+of its return.
+
+"Gallo canente, spes redit,
+Aegris salus refunditur,
+Lapsis fides revertitur,"
+
+as they sang of old in Portugal in the Morning Office.  But to him 
+that good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had 
+brought panic, and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook 
+to think of.  He dared not return to his lodging; he could not eat; 
+he sat down, he rose up, he wandered; the city woke about him with 
+its cheerful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; and still he grew 
+but the more absorbed in the distress of his recollection and the 
+fear of his past fear.  At the appointed hour, he came to the door 
+of the place of examination; but when he was asked, he had 
+forgotten his name.  Seeing him so disordered, they had not the 
+heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted him, 
+still nameless, to the Hall.  Vain kindness, vain efforts.  He 
+could only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant 
+of all, his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day 
+and his own intolerable fear.  And that same night he was tossing 
+in a brain fever.
+
+People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with 
+excellent reason; but these are not to be compared with such 
+chaotic terrors of the mind as fell on this young man, and made him 
+cover his eyes from the innocent morning.  We all have by our 
+bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough 
+shut; but when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have 
+a care, for he is playing with the lock.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY
+
+
+I
+
+
+THERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a 
+prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under 
+a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and 
+the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to 
+it all day long.  The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres 
+of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the 
+morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall 
+memorials, fall upon the graves.  There, in the hot fits of youth, 
+I came to be unhappy.  Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory 
+of the place.  I here made friends with a plain old gentleman, a 
+visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon 
+the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter 
+sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days 
+together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild 
+heart flying; and once - she possibly remembers - the wise Eugenia 
+followed me to that austere inclosure.  Her hair came down, and in 
+the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair 
+the braid.  But for the most part I went there solitary and, with 
+irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten.  Name 
+after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle 
+dates: a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, 
+and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the 
+dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality.  In that 
+whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had 
+received a picture; and he, with his comely, florid countenance, 
+bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and 
+popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of 
+phantom appellations.  It was then possible to leave behind us 
+something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying 
+epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and 
+what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable 
+than mere oblivion.  Even David Hume, as he lay composed beneath 
+that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the 
+housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, 
+the fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the 
+sea.
+
+And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for 
+David Hume.  The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, 
+like Noah's dove, come home to roost.  The fire, sensibility, and 
+volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to 
+recognise.  The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of 
+routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with 
+contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs 
+of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much 
+rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see 
+himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own 
+for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city 
+street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope.  
+In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, 
+the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform - for there, on the most 
+thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will 
+continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the 
+forgotten graveyard.  The length of man's life, which is endless to 
+the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought.  He cannot 
+bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly.  He 
+cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and 
+by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.  The parable 
+of the talent is the brief epitome of youth.  To believe in 
+immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in 
+life.  Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be 
+taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of 
+time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the 
+inadequate gift.  Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets 
+them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange 
+extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead.
+
+Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing 
+upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and 
+immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or 
+heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, 
+shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we 
+all sit down, the hanger-back not least.  But the average sermon 
+flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we 
+know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, 
+and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits us.  Upon the 
+average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-
+hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he 
+should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann.  
+Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a 
+grudge.  The day is perhaps not far oft when people will begin to 
+count MOLL FLANDERS, ay, or THE COUNTRY WIFE, more wholesome and 
+more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.
+
+But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of 
+Obermann.  And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the 
+graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-
+diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of 
+visitors.  This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great 
+darkness.  Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from 
+within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the 
+sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows 
+of my affectation.  Once I remember to have observed two working-
+women with a baby halting by a grave; there was something 
+monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the 
+other with bowed face crouching by her side.  A wreath of 
+immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, 
+drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder.  "Eh! what 
+extravagance!"
+
+To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint 
+and pregnant saying appeared merely base.
+
+My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was 
+unremarkable.  One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the 
+red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane 
+Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still 
+attended on his labours; how some would even perch about him, 
+waiting for their prey; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the 
+species varied with the season of the year.  But this was the very 
+poetry of the profession.  The others whom I knew were somewhat 
+dry.  A faint flavour of the gardener hung about them, but 
+sophisticated and dis-bloomed.  They had engagements to keep, not 
+alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man-
+kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time.  And thus there 
+was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, 
+foot on spade.  They were men wrapped up in their grim business; 
+they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the 
+key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds 
+a calendar of names and dates.  It would be "in fifty-twa" that 
+such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy."  It was thus they 
+spoke of their past patients -familiarly but not without respect, 
+like old family servants.  Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget 
+that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at 
+the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the 
+mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of 
+our race.  To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial 
+touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he 
+attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave.  But perhaps 
+it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English 
+sexton differs from the Scotch.  The "goodman delver," reckoning up 
+his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts.  
+It is a pride common among sextons.  A cabinet-maker does not count 
+his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare 
+upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves.  
+He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary 
+open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind.  
+There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the 
+cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, 
+he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like 
+minute drops into eternity.  As they fall, he counts them; and this 
+enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in 
+the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to 
+be his pride and pleasure.  There are many common stories telling 
+how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries.  But I will rather 
+tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering 
+bedside the minister was summoned.  He dwelt in a cottage built 
+into the wall of the church-yard; and through a bull's-eye pane 
+above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and 
+the upright and recumbent stones.  Dr. Laurie was, I think, a 
+Moderate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of 
+deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived 
+beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and 
+reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to 
+his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his 
+loins and follow the majority.  The grave-digger heard him out; 
+then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand 
+pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labours.  
+"Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in 
+that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I 
+would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner."  But it 
+was not to be; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part 
+to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry 
+him.
+
+
+II
+
+
+I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical; but the 
+ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting 
+of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness.  It 
+is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are 
+forgotten; his is the vague epitaph.  Pity him but the more, if 
+pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and 
+personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded.  In every 
+part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to 
+forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable and tragic 
+fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, 
+is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.  But by-and-by his truant 
+interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather 
+flowers.  Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; 
+no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning 
+injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value 
+him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not 
+without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet 
+storing up.
+
+The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble 
+fallibility.  When we have fallen through storey after storey of 
+our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it 
+is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they 
+stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, 
+linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential 
+circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary 
+life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices 
+that appeared gigantic in our youth.  So that at the last, when 
+such a pin falls out - when there vanishes in the least breath of 
+time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our 
+supply - when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the 
+faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard 
+with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a 
+breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole 
+wing of the palace of our life.
+
+
+III
+
+
+One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of 
+us labour to dissemble.  In his youth he was most beautiful in 
+person, most serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words 
+and quaint thoughts.  Laughter attended on his coming.  He had the 
+air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to 
+the poorest student gentle and attentive.  Power seemed to reside 
+in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him 
+marked for higher destinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely 
+had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, 
+my acknowledged friend.  So he walked among us, both hands full of 
+gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential 
+life.
+
+The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking 
+back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for 
+some shadow of what he was to be.  For with all his beauty, power, 
+breeding, urbanity and mirth, there was in those days something 
+soulless in our friend.  He would astonish us by sallies, witty, 
+innocent and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, 
+demolish honest sentiment.  I can still see and hear him, as he 
+went his way along the lamplit streets, LA CI DAREM LA MANO on his 
+lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and 
+incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of 
+life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self-
+respect, miserably went down.
+
+From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately 
+ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family 
+he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise.  But in his 
+face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it.  Of the 
+wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, 
+with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only 
+from his silence.  He returned to that city where he had lorded it 
+in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to 
+retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that 
+mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his 
+friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; 
+and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which 
+he had disavowed and which had brought him low.  Lastly, when his 
+bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, 
+still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step 
+gentle, urbane and with the will to smile.
+
+The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to 
+him, the tale of a success.  In his youth he took thought for no 
+one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, 
+he seemed to think of none but others.  Such was his tenderness for 
+others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that 
+impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret 
+was rare with him, and pointed with a jest.  You would not have 
+dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great 
+failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society 
+had hissed and pointed fingers.  Often have we gone to him, red-hot 
+with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our 
+princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely 
+counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that 
+we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we 
+disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the 
+garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and 
+salted; silently awaiting the deliverer.  Then something took us by 
+the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and 
+pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in 
+admiration that we could not dare to pity him.  Even if the old 
+fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost 
+battle, he should have still the energy to fight.  He had gone to 
+ruin with a kind of kingly ABANDON, like one who condescended; but 
+once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.  
+Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, 
+rail the louder against God or destiny.  Most men, when they 
+repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that 
+repentance.  But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: MENE, 
+MENE; and condemned himself to smiling silence.  He had given 
+trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right 
+to murmur.
+
+Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of 
+strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength 
+was gone that had betrayed him - "for our strength is weakness" - 
+he began to blossom and bring forth.  Well, now, he is out of the 
+fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great 
+deliverer.  We
+
+"In the vast cathedral leave him;
+God accept him,
+Christ receive him!"
+
+
+IV
+
+
+If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and 
+the irony are strangely fled.  They do not stand merely to the 
+dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up 
+to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man.  This 
+ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat.
+
+I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; 
+pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had 
+sunk.  A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most 
+uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder.  Before those who loved him, 
+his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent 
+lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them 
+of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead.  For this proud man 
+was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; - of 
+whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard hap to meet 
+in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former 
+times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and 
+have in this place found the words of life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
+
+
+I
+
+
+ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for 
+the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own 
+private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two books 
+in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.  As I walked, my mind 
+was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by 
+the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-
+book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or 
+commemorate some halting stanzas.  Thus I lived with words.  And 
+what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written 
+consciously for practice.  It was not so much that I wished to be 
+an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I 
+would learn to write.  That was a proficiency that tempted me; and 
+I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with 
+myself.  Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to 
+any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and 
+town and country are but one continuous subject.  But I worked in 
+other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic 
+dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself 
+in writing down conversations from memory.
+
+This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes 
+tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them 
+a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception.  And yet this 
+was not the most efficient part of my training.  Good though it 
+was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the 
+lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the 
+essential note and the right word: things that to a happier 
+constitution had perhaps come by nature.  And regarded as training, 
+it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.  
+So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more 
+effort, in my secret labours at home.  Whenever I read a book or a 
+passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or 
+an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some 
+conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must 
+sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.  I was 
+unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again 
+unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain 
+bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction 
+and the co-ordination of parts.  I have thus played the sedulous 
+ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to 
+Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.  
+I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called THE VANITY 
+OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF 
+KNOWLEDGE; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names 
+were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first 
+part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like, 
+from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of 
+Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a 
+passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas 
+Browne.  So with my other works: CAIN, an epic, was (save the 
+mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took 
+an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and 
+Morris: in MONMOUTH, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. 
+Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many 
+masters; in the first draft of THE KING'S PARDON, a tragedy, I was 
+on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second 
+draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted 
+my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a 
+less serious vein - for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his 
+exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy.  Even at the 
+age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the 
+famous city of Peebles in the style of the BOOK OF SNOBS.  So I 
+might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to 
+my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not 
+only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, 
+but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by another 
+hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the 
+other, originally known as SEMIRAMIS: A TRAGEDY, I have observed on 
+bookstalls under the ALIAS of Prince Otto.  But enough has been 
+said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely 
+ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.
+
+That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have 
+profited or not, that is the way.  It was so Keats learned, and 
+there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it 
+was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and 
+that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded 
+by a cast back to earlier and fresher models.  Perhaps I hear some 
+one cry out: But this is not the way to be original!  It is not; 
+nor is there any way but to be born so.  Nor yet, if you are born 
+original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the 
+wings of your originality.  There can be none more original than 
+Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no 
+craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his 
+time to imitate the other.  Burns is the very type of a prime force 
+in letters: he was of all men the most imitative.  Shakespeare 
+himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school.  It is only 
+from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost 
+invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless 
+exceptions, issue.  Nor is there anything here that should astonish 
+the considerate.  Before he can tell what cadences he truly 
+prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; 
+before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should 
+long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years 
+of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words 
+swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously 
+bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do 
+and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.
+
+And it is the great point of these imitations that there still 
+shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable model.  Let him 
+try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old 
+and a very true saying that failure is the only highroad to 
+success.  I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-
+sightedly condemned my own performances.  I liked doing them 
+indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish.  In 
+consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such 
+friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for 
+they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, "Padding," 
+said one.  Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so 
+badly."  No more could I!  Thrice I put myself in the way of a more 
+authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine.  These were 
+returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained.  If they had not 
+been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, 
+there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been 
+looked at - well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must 
+keep on learning and living.  Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune 
+which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see 
+my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I 
+stood from the favour of the public.
+
+
+II
+
+
+The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has 
+counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, 
+Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local 
+celebrity besides.  By an accident, variously explained, it has its 
+rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, 
+Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at 
+night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; a 
+passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a 
+corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous 
+members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.  
+Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance 
+of Senatus-consults, he can smoke.  The Senatus looks askance at 
+these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the 
+whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned 
+mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this 
+haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.
+
+I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a 
+very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much 
+credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; 
+proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in 
+particular, proud of being in the next room to three very 
+distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the 
+corridor fire.  One of these has now his name on the back of 
+several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law 
+courts.  Of the death of the second, you have just been reading 
+what I had to say.
+
+And the third also has escaped out of that battle of in which he 
+fought so hard, it may be so unwisely.  They were all three, as I 
+have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous.  
+Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of 
+Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one of 
+Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill 
+fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the COMEDIE 
+HUMAINE.  He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the 
+time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political 
+dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the COURANT, and the day 
+after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in 
+the SCOTSMAN.  Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that 
+he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that 
+the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips.  
+Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied 
+by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly 
+disgraced.  The blow would have broken a less finely tempered 
+spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took 
+flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk 
+of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter.  For 
+years thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, 
+always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets.  
+The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but 
+though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in 
+them a source of livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his 
+continued existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the 
+philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, "there 
+was a suffering relative in the background."  From this genteel 
+eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out 
+in the character of a generous editor.  It is in this part that I 
+best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; 
+looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane 
+adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one 
+peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and 
+sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with 
+singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.  
+After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich 
+student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still 
+perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end.  Yet he was then 
+upon the brink of his last overthrow.  He had set himself to found 
+the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets 
+from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young 
+gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, 
+to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private 
+individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a 
+man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of 
+demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, 
+as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on 
+railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger; 
+and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.  
+Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would 
+sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the 
+foundations of their palace.  It was with his own life that my 
+companion disarmed the envy of the gods.  He fought his paper 
+single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up 
+early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-
+wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation.  In 
+that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of 
+courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and 
+doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love 
+also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he 
+succeeded.  But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all 
+this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes 
+as if there had come literally nothing.
+
+These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under 
+the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former 
+secretary.  We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and 
+thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no 
+more behind one than Macbean.  And yet of these three, two are gone 
+and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and 
+foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and 
+glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, 
+and perhaps for the love of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant 
+and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence - 
+this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and 
+Robert Glasgow Brown.
+
+Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they 
+were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to 
+them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken 
+with pride and hope.  We were to found a University magazine.  A 
+pair of little, active brothers - Livingstone by name, great 
+skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-
+shop over against the University building - had been debauched to 
+play the part of publishers.  We four were to be conjunct editors 
+and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own 
+works; while, by every rule of arithmetic - that flatterer of 
+credulity - the adventure must succeed and bring great profit.  
+Well, well: it was a bright vision.  I went home that morning 
+walking upon air.  To have been chosen by these three distinguished 
+students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my first 
+draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my 
+fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I 
+could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly.  Yet, in the 
+bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I 
+knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that 
+nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able, 
+upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, 
+to meet my share in the expense.  It was a comfortable thought to 
+me that I had a father.
+
+The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part 
+of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in 
+undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp.  The first number 
+was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle; the second 
+fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I 
+edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who it was 
+that edited the fourth.  It would perhaps be still more difficult 
+to say who read it.  Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully 
+Livingtones' window!  Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to 
+print a SHAKESPEARE on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with 
+nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors?  I cannot pity myself, to 
+whom it was all pure gain.  It was no news to me, but only the 
+wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled 
+into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night.  I 
+had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time 
+somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and 
+she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished 
+contributions in silence.  I will not say that I was pleased at 
+this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the 
+work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste.  
+I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary 
+interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my 
+share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed 
+their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than 
+formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the 
+enterprise with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the 
+whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor 
+the man ready; and to work I went again with my penny version-
+books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the 
+manuscript student.
+
+
+III
+
+
+From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own 
+papers.  The poor little piece is all tail-foremost.  I have done 
+my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and 
+it remains invertebrate and wordy.  No self-respecting magazine 
+would print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, 
+not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it 
+purports dimly to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; 
+so that in this volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the 
+Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston 
+shepherd.  Not that John and Robert drew very close together in 
+their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and 
+Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow.  
+Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two; 
+he had grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases 
+men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a way-farer 
+besides, and took my gipsy fancy.  But however that may be, and 
+however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that 
+follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, 
+if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like 
+well to draw again with a maturer touch.  And as I think of him and 
+of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be found 
+dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the 
+woody fold of a green hill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
+
+
+I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in 
+the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern 
+hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone 
+good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only 
+met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath 
+with Andrew Fairservice, - though without his vices.  He was a man 
+whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to 
+the baldest and most modern flower-plots.  There was a dignity 
+about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled 
+face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come 
+through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his 
+youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.
+
+Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch 
+preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take 
+this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he 
+can the infirmities of my description.  To me, who find it so 
+difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as 
+a GENIUS LOCI.  It is impossible to separate his spare form and old 
+straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks 
+overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid 
+breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner.  The 
+garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other.  When I 
+take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for 
+me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can 
+say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me 
+it will be ever impotent.
+
+The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old 
+already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking 
+horse.  Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, 
+considering a reference to the parish register worth all the 
+reasons in the world, "I AM OLD AND WELL STRICKEN IN YEARS," he was 
+wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the 
+argument.  Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were 
+not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener.  
+He shrank the very place he cultivated.  The dignity and reduced 
+gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry 
+figure.  He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger 
+days.  He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.  
+He told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, 
+where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and 
+wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not 
+help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your 
+humbler garden plots.  You were thrown at once into an invidious 
+position.  You felt that you were profiting by the needs of 
+dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your 
+vulgar rule.  Involuntarily you compared yourself with the 
+swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen 
+who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen 
+Dionysius.  Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and 
+metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he 
+extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet.  He 
+would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most 
+favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that 
+none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion.  If you 
+asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, "THAT I WULL, 
+MEM," he would say, "WITH PLEASURE, FOR IT IS MAIR BLESSED TO GIVE 
+THAN TO RECEIVE."  Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the 
+screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own 
+inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that 
+"OUR WULL WAS HIS PLEASURE," but yet reminding us that he would do 
+it "WITH FEELIN'S," - even then, I say, the triumphant master felt 
+humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that 
+he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that 
+the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit 
+of the unworthy takes."
+
+In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting 
+sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in 
+supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild.  
+There was one exception to this sweeping ban.  Foxgloves, though 
+undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but 
+loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand 
+and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately 
+stem.  In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that 
+only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his 
+heart grew "PROUD" within him when he came on a burn-course among 
+the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; 
+and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so many years of 
+precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections from his 
+heart.  Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that 
+was bygone.  He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept 
+pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a 
+holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where 
+he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite 
+reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might 
+have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.
+
+But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his 
+liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all 
+flowers together.  They were but garnishings, childish toys, 
+trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves.  It was towards his 
+cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm.  His 
+preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were 
+found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once 
+discovered in the centre of the lawn.  He would prelect over some 
+thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on 
+reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.  Yet even 
+then he did not let the credit leave himself.  He had, indeed, 
+raised "FINER O' THEM;" but it seemed that no one else had been 
+favoured with a like success.  All other gardeners, in fact, were 
+mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, 
+with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had 
+wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes.  
+Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame.  
+If you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely 
+touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the 
+matter falling to him.  If, on the other hand, you called his 
+attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote Scripture: 
+"PAUL MAY PLANT AND APOLLOS MAY WATER;" all blame being left to 
+Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.
+
+There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with 
+his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive.  
+Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had 
+taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory 
+or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to 
+him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood.  
+Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me 
+rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office 
+towards them.  But he could stand by while one of the contemned 
+rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in 
+spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the 
+distressed assistant.  In regard to bees, he was rather a man of 
+word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the 
+bees for text.  "THEY ARE INDEED WONDERFUL CREATURES, MEM," he said 
+once.  "THEY JUST MIND ME O' WHAT THE QUEEN OF SHEBA SAID TO 
+SOLOMON - AND I THINK SHE SAID IT WI' A SIGH, - 'THE HALF OF IT 
+HATH NOT BEEN TOLD UNTO ME.'"
+
+As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read.  Like the old 
+Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth 
+was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied 
+most and thought upon most deeply.  To many people in his station 
+the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital 
+literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on 
+the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not 
+very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series.  This was 
+Robert's position.  All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew 
+stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel 
+ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the 
+very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke 
+without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a 
+raciness to the merest trivialities of talk.  But the influence of 
+the Bible did not stop here.  There was more in Robert than quaint 
+phrase and ready store of reference.  He was imbued with a spirit 
+of peace and love: he interposed between man and wife: he threw 
+himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the 
+ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds from everybody but 
+himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between official 
+execution and wanton sport.  His mistress telling him one day to 
+put some ferns into his master's particular corner, and adding, 
+"Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't 
+help me to gather them," "EH, MEM," replies Robert, "BUT I WOULDNAE 
+SAY THAT, FOR I THINK HE'S JUST A MOST DESERVIN' GENTLEMAN."  
+Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and 
+accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the 
+bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position 
+of a seat in the garden.  The discussion, as was usual when these 
+two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides.  
+Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a day was 
+quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit - every 
+one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel 
+seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his 
+conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected 
+every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly 
+in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "EH, BUT, GENTLEMEN, I 
+WAD HAE NAE MAIR WORDS ABOUT IT!"  One thing was noticeable about 
+Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor sectarian.  He never 
+expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, 
+and he never condemned anybody else.  I have no doubt that he held 
+all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably out 
+of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the 
+natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about 
+Free-Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these views, 
+never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the 
+belief or practice of anybody.  Now all this is not generally 
+characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches 
+militant with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders 
+the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other.  
+Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart was what made the 
+difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among 
+fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those 
+whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and the soft 
+influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,
+
+"Annihilating all that's made
+To a green thought in a green shade."
+
+But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or 
+telling of his innocent and living piety.  I had meant to tell of 
+his cottage, with the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, 
+and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he 
+would say pathetically:  "HE WAS REAL PLEASED WI' IT AT FIRST, BUT 
+I THINK HE'S GOT A KIND O' TIRED O' IT NOW" - the son being then a 
+man of about forty.  But I will let all these pass.  "'Tis more 
+significant: he's dead."  The earth, that he had digged so much in 
+his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that 
+he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and 
+nearer way.  A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished 
+to honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in 
+favour of its kind.  "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, 
+and yet not one of them falleth to the ground."
+
+Yes, he is dead.  But the kings did not rise in the place of death 
+to greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the 
+haughty Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker 
+and a servant of God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL
+
+
+TO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with 
+novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing 
+light upon the past.  As in those composite photographs of Mr. 
+Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more 
+clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has 
+flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality 
+and the desire of native places.  So may some cadet of Royal 
+Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French 
+citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-
+Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides 
+upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of 
+peat-smoke.  And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all 
+men.  This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and 
+Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of 
+Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers 
+about the lilied lowland waters of that shire.  But the streams of 
+Scotland are incomparable in themselves - or I am only the more 
+Scottish to suppose so - and their sound and colour dwell for ever 
+in the memory.  How often and willingly do I not look again in 
+fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling 
+in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn 
+that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie!  I think shame to 
+leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too 
+long if I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor 
+birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, 
+that Water of Leith of the many and well-named mills - Bell's 
+Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of 
+pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless 
+trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed 
+from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss 
+under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a 
+rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then 
+kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of 
+the sea-beholding city in the plain.  From many points in the moss 
+you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its 
+tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its 
+corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed; 
+Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on 
+a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem 
+to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a 
+bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would 
+take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most 
+part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the 
+sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I 
+am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the 
+nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my 
+pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.
+
+John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the 
+Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-
+scattering, sheep-collecting life.  He remembered the droving days, 
+when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the 
+heather, were thronged thoroughfares.  He had himself often marched 
+flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; 
+and by his account it was a rough business not without danger.  The 
+drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the 
+wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in 
+the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case 
+rough habits and fist-law were the rule.  Crimes were committed, 
+sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which 
+offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the 
+courts of justice.  John, in those days, was at least once 
+attacked, - by two men after his watch, - and at least once, 
+betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law 
+and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which 
+he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter.  
+When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had 
+no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of 
+pedestrians from town.  But for a man of his propensity to wrath 
+these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by 
+snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far 
+up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his 
+shoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced 
+late at night.  This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said 
+to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no 
+doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of 
+something legendary.  For my own part, he was at first my enemy, 
+and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence.  
+It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some 
+sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot 
+amang the sheep."  The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this 
+ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the 
+Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my 
+questing dragoons.  Little by little we dropped into civilities; 
+his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war-
+slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, which was 
+with him, like the calumet with the Red Indian, a part of the 
+heraldry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew 
+to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in 
+the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry" over 
+the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me 
+to overtake and bear him company.
+
+That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, 
+fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of 
+honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently 
+Scottish.  He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a 
+sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from 
+a rock.  His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff 
+with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a 
+certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like 
+that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual 
+vigilance.  He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard; 
+the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, 
+so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new 
+acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, 
+stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging 
+loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and 
+guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems 
+peculiar to men of his trade.  I might count him with the best 
+talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem 
+incomparable acts.  He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned 
+it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as 
+he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a 
+colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.  The clans of 
+sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in 
+the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally 
+thinned and strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the 
+signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite 
+stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he 
+could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and 
+living gusto, that weariness was excluded.  And in the midst he 
+would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly 
+abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll 
+out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use 
+of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the 
+hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and 
+raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and 
+spread themselves upon the indicated circuit.  It used to fill me 
+with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story.  But 
+John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the 
+constant butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to 
+work with the like of them, he said, - not more than possible.  And 
+then he would expand upon the subject of the really good dogs that 
+he had known, and the one really good dog that he had himself 
+possessed.  He had been offered forty pounds for it; but a good 
+collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a "herd;" 
+he did the herd's work for him.  "As for the like of them!" he 
+would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his 
+assistants.
+
+Once - I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being 
+born BRITANNIS IN MONTIBUS, indeed, but alas! INERUDITO SAECULO - 
+once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in 
+Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were 
+lost.  This was a reproach to John, and a slur upon the dog; and 
+both were alive to their misfortune.  Word came, after some days, 
+that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep; and thither 
+went John and the dog to ask for restitution.  But the farmer was a 
+hard man and stood upon his rights.  "How were they marked?" he 
+asked; and since John had bought right and left from many sellers 
+and had no notion of the marks - "Very well," said the farmer, 
+"then it's only right that I should keep them." - "Well," said 
+John, "it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, 
+will ye let me have them?"  The farmer was honest as well as hard, 
+and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had 
+all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's 
+dog into their midst.  That hairy man of business knew his errand 
+well; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their 
+shame) lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord 
+knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for 
+their recovery; and without pause or blunder singled out, first one 
+and then another, the two waifs.  It was that afternoon the forty 
+pounds were offered and refused.  And the shepherd and his dog - 
+what do I say? the true shepherd and his man - set off together by 
+Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and "smiled to ither" all the way 
+home, with the two recovered ones before them.  So far, so good; 
+but intelligence may be abused.  The dog, as he is by little man's 
+inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and 
+John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion.  At 
+the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) 
+there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for washing 
+sheep.  John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he 
+was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the 
+deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth.  He knew the dog; 
+knew him for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant 
+farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully 
+steering flocks to market.  But what did the practitioner so far 
+from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the 
+pool? - for it was towards the pool that he was heading.  John lay 
+the closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth 
+upon the margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere 
+observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, 
+and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over 
+the hills.  That same night word was sent his master, and the 
+rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence, 
+before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for 
+alas! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; 
+and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so 
+far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.
+
+A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of 
+life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a 
+hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, 
+vocal or written.  The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the 
+skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited 
+experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular 
+thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that 
+innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds.  Thus 
+novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of 
+mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of 
+manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with 
+fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus 
+ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields 
+the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift 
+romance into a near neighbourhood with epic.  These aged things 
+have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much 
+to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and 
+aboriginal taproot of the race.  A thousand interests spring up in 
+the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an 
+eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire; 
+and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that 
+roused men in all epochs of the past.  There is a certain critic, 
+not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set 
+before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a 
+percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in 
+caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a 
+pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries - his wife, that 
+accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard, 
+but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for 
+recognition.  Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of 
+all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims 
+of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle 
+with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have 
+moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.
+
+We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I 
+had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me.  But yet I 
+think I owe my taste for that hillside business rather to the art 
+and interest of John Todd.  He it was that made it live for me, as 
+the artist can make all things live.  It was through him the simple 
+strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant 
+scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-champ, was an affair that I 
+never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to 
+mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable 
+black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already 
+come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the 
+snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings 
+of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these 
+features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his 
+captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a 
+spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker.  It is 
+thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of 
+the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, 
+his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to 
+the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit 
+should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into 
+his easy, even conversation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE
+
+
+I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that 
+dirty Water of Leith.  Often and often I desire to look upon it 
+again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me.  It should 
+be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery.  The river is 
+there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so 
+that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown 
+obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited 
+by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling 
+merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy 
+eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly 
+steering to and fro upon the surface.  Or so it was when I was 
+young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been 
+busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must 
+be on many and impossible conditions.  I must choose, as well as 
+the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale 
+may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may 
+seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am 
+standing, seem as low as Styx.  And I must choose the season also, 
+so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the 
+songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to 
+leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants 
+unchanged.
+
+It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into 
+provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church 
+and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, 
+and after nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by 
+children; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the 
+great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of 
+water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills; the 
+sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills - the wheel and 
+the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and 
+from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes 
+until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the 
+manse.  I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a 
+great and roomy house.  In truth, it was not so large as I 
+supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is 
+difficult to suppose that it was healthful.  Yet a large family of 
+stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came 
+to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the 
+face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and 
+letters with outlandish stamps became familiar to the local 
+postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the 
+wonders of the East.  The dullest could see this was a house that 
+had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house 
+- its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers.
+
+Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men.  I read him, 
+judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as 
+a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the 
+display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a 
+lover of his life and innocent habits to the end.  We children 
+admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for 
+none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all, 
+for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we 
+beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the 
+pulpit.  But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, 
+of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind 
+of terror.  When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or 
+letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a 
+library of bloodless books - or so they seemed in those days, 
+although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well 
+enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the 
+greater gloom for our imaginations.  But the study had a redeeming 
+grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young 
+eyes.  I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed 
+with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a 
+psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at 
+the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might 
+reward me with an Indian picture.
+
+"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
+He slumber that thee keeps,"
+
+it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model 
+to set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, 
+and a task in recitation that really merited reward.  And I must 
+suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or 
+amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most 
+unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly 
+sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and 
+parson.  I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise 
+that I forgot my disappointment.  And indeed the hope was one of 
+those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon 
+reality.  Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should 
+strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of 
+his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow 
+it upon me.  He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that 
+to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod 
+in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.  
+The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key.  He 
+had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the 
+end of his many days.  He sat by the dining-room fire, with his 
+white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; 
+and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, 
+Dr. Gregory's powder.  Now that remedy, as the work of a near 
+kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the 
+imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate.  The old 
+gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being 
+accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching 
+a "barley-sugar kiss."  But when my aunt, having the canister open 
+in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered 
+at once.  I had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar 
+kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation.  And just then the 
+phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door - for such was our 
+unlordly fashion - I was taken for the last time from the presence 
+of my grandfather.
+
+Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister.  I 
+must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so 
+am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to 
+hear them.  He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and 
+I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept 
+it, I am still on the quest.  He was a great lover of Shakespeare, 
+whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my 
+Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I 
+own I never have been told so.  He made embroidery, designing his 
+own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a 
+kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which 
+was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.  He loved 
+port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better 
+with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract.  He 
+had chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may 
+possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble 
+presence.  Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the 
+reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write 
+the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and 
+sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.  In his 
+garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills - or had I 
+an ancestor a miller? - and a kindness for the neighbourhood of 
+graves, as homely things not without their poetry - or had I an 
+ancestor a sexton?  But what of the garden where he played himself? 
+- for that, too, was a scene of my education.  Some part of me 
+played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the 
+green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, 
+which was still a country place, and sat on the High School 
+benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam.  The house where I 
+spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made holiday 
+parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and 
+cream near by at a gardener's.  All this I had forgotten; only my 
+grandfather remembered and once reminded me.  I have forgotten, 
+too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first 
+Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of 
+Burns's Dr. Smith - "Smith opens out his cauld harangues."  I have 
+forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns 
+at first hand.
+
+And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this HOMUNCULUS or 
+part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr. 
+Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other HOMUNCULOS or 
+part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors.  These were of a 
+lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly.  But as I 
+went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil 
+man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; - we 
+may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain 
+carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon 
+some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a 
+cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his 
+shuttle.  And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; 
+and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn 
+father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by 
+to college.  Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young 
+student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in 
+that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated.  It 
+would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the 
+lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural 
+metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a 
+grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; 
+and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year 
+or two longer in the person of their child.
+
+But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of 
+fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that 
+we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be 
+reminded of our antenatal lives.  Our conscious years are but a 
+moment in the history of the elements that build us.  Are you a 
+bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham?  It was not always so.  And 
+though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or 
+I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-
+surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal 
+Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted 
+the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying 
+from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a 
+West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol 
+Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I 
+was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and 
+oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise 
+that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD OF THE ISLES; I was with him, 
+too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted 
+from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized 
+upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his 
+tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the 
+Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the 
+tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his 
+Bible - or affecting to read - till one after another slunk back 
+with confusion of countenance to their engineer.  Yes, parts of me 
+have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.  
+And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up 
+can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of 
+ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly 
+preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the 
+legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on 
+Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that 
+fancy can see peering through the disparted branches?  What sleeper 
+in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree?  
+Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .
+
+And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about 
+with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as 
+he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, 
+there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; 
+tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his 
+mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably 
+Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and 
+chattered in the brain of the old divine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET
+
+
+THOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of 
+their recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories 
+of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in 
+the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or 
+murder to be done, on the playground of their youth.  But the 
+memories are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using.  After 
+a dozen services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of 
+the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament 
+defaced, not a tint impaired.  GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD GESANG, if 
+Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the original re-
+embodying after each.  So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder 
+at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to 
+fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and 
+looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last, 
+substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.
+
+One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid.  I used 
+one but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, 
+where I once waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song 
+of the river on both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed 
+and at last upon an island.  Two of my puppets lay there a summer's 
+day, hearkening to the shearers at work in riverside fields and to 
+the drums of the gray old garrison upon the neighbouring hill.  And 
+this was, I think, done rightly: the place was rightly peopled - 
+and now belongs not to me but to my puppets - for a time at least.  
+In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint; the original memory 
+swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more lie in bed, and see 
+the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in nature, and the 
+child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and wonder at 
+the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be pricked 
+again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into 
+art.
+
+There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which 
+besieges me.  I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and 
+later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of 
+rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another.  
+The ink is not yet faded; the sound of the sentences is still in my 
+mind's ear; and I am under a spell to write of that island again.
+
+
+I
+
+
+The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner 
+of the Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which 
+you may see the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the 
+other, where you shall be able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the 
+breakers running white on many sunken rocks.  I first saw it, or 
+first remembered seeing it, framed in the round bull's-eye of a 
+cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores like the waters 
+of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early morning making 
+plain its heathery and rocky hummocks.  There stood upon it, in 
+these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by 
+a pier of wreckwood.  It must have been very early, for it was then 
+summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; 
+but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats 
+which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the 
+cotter were wading by the pier.  The same day we visited the shores 
+of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, 
+sounding as we went; and having taken stock of all possible 
+accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of 
+operations.  For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse 
+steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid.  Fifteen miles away to 
+seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic 
+rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs.  Here was a tower to be 
+built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen.  But as the 
+rock was small, and hard of access, and far from land, the work 
+would be one of years; and my father was now looking for a shore 
+station, where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men 
+live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.
+
+I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam 
+Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our 
+baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve.  And behold! 
+there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, 
+travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the 
+resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the 
+courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind 
+the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was 
+quarried.  In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings.  All day 
+long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and 
+even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and 
+fro in the dark settlement and could light the pipe of any midnight 
+muser.  It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, 
+when the sound of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet.  
+All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their 
+Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing 
+toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the 
+stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls.  And it was 
+strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of 
+the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the 
+congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; 
+and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the chapters," the 
+inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse 
+prayer.
+
+In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was 
+observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of 
+preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen 
+from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay.  Over 
+fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed 
+her way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone-lighters.  
+The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the 
+mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her 
+unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its 
+black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its 
+spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their 
+arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea.  An 
+ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of 
+shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for 
+a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the 
+Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled 
+with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a 
+dingy insect between a slater and a bug.  No other life was there 
+but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a 
+mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and 
+again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock 
+itself.  Times were different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew, and 
+the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and 
+Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in 
+their iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the 
+sprays.  Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and 
+the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck 
+the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow.  
+It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see 
+before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get 
+his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of 
+the storm.  But it was in sunshine only that I saw Dhu-Heartach; 
+and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that 
+the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea; 
+the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding in her 
+wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose on the 
+long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.
+
+But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly.  The 
+lighthouse settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the 
+top of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut 
+out, the face of things unchanged by any of man's doings.  Here was 
+no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some 
+old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den 
+betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the 
+gulls.  It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts, 
+and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests.  The earthy savour 
+of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the 
+inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, 
+the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing 
+up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, 
+all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt 
+with scarce a difference.  I steeped myself in open air and in past 
+ages.
+
+"Delightful would it be to me to be in UCHD AILIUN
+On the pinnacle of a rock,
+That I might often see
+The face of the ocean;
+That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
+Source of happiness;
+That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
+Upon the rocks:
+At times at work without compulsion -
+This would be delightful;
+At times plucking dulse from the rocks
+At times at fishing."
+
+So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve 
+hundred years before.  And so might I have sung of Earraid.
+
+And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and 
+sun-burning was for me but a holiday.  In that year cannon were 
+roaring for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit 
+in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon 
+the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain 
+of the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching.  And I 
+would think too of that other war which is as old as mankind, and 
+is indeed the life of man: the unsparing war, the grinding slavery 
+of competition; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, 
+precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards.  
+It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as with trumpet 
+calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching; 
+and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish 
+bather on the beach.
+
+There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were 
+much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail 
+a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the 
+roost.  But the most part of the time we spoke of the great 
+uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together what should 
+there befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices 
+in the empty vestibule of youth.  As far, and as hard, as it seemed 
+then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now to look 
+backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath 
+submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our 
+necks under the yoke of destiny.  I met my old companion but the 
+other day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon 
+my part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so 
+composed and sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, 
+and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure; and which 
+had been upon the whole our best estate: when we sat there prating 
+sensibly like men of some experience, or when we shared our 
+timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON - CIVIL ENGINEER
+
+
+THE death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the 
+general reader.  His service to mankind took on forms of which the 
+public knows little and understands less.  He came seldom to 
+London, and then only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a 
+convinced provincial; putting up for years at the same hotel where 
+his father had gone before him; faithful for long to the same 
+restaurant, the same church, and the same theatre, chosen simply 
+for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out.  He had a circle 
+of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more beloved in 
+Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever 
+he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, 
+humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up 
+friends and admirers.  But to the general public and the world of 
+London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained 
+unknown.  All the time, his lights were in every part of the world, 
+guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the 
+Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so 
+that Edinburgh was a world centre for that branch of applied 
+science; in Germany, he had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse 
+illumination"; even in France, where his claims were long denied, 
+he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition, recognised 
+and medalled.  And to show by one instance the inverted nature of 
+his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world, 
+a friend of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main, 
+and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr. Stevenson the author, 
+because his works were much esteemed in Peru?"  My friend supposed 
+the reference was to the writer of tales; but the Peruvian had 
+never heard of DR. JEKYLL; what he had in his eye, what was 
+esteemed in Peru, where the volumes of the engineer.
+
+Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818, the 
+grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern 
+Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that 
+his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of 
+his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who has 
+held, successively or conjointly, that office.  The Bell Rock, his 
+father's great triumph, was finished before he was born; but he 
+served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the 
+noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and, in conjunction with his 
+brother David, he added two - the Chickens and Dhu Heartach - to 
+that small number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean.  Of shore 
+lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer than twenty-
+seven; of beacons, (4) about twenty-five.  Many harbours were 
+successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief 
+disaster of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too 
+strong for man's arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, 
+and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now 
+stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-
+o'-Groat's.  In the improvement of rivers the brothers were 
+likewise in a large way of practice over both England and Scotland, 
+nor had any British engineer anything approaching their experience.
+
+It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my 
+father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these 
+proceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily business.  Thus it 
+was as a harbour engineer that he became interested in the 
+propagation and reduction of waves; a difficult subject in regard 
+to which he has left behind him much suggestive matter and some 
+valuable approximate results.  Storms were his sworn adversaries, 
+and it was through the study of storms that he approached that of 
+meteorology at large.  Many who knew him not otherwise, knew - 
+perhaps have in their gardens - his louvre-boarded screen for 
+instruments.  But the great achievement of his life was, of course, 
+in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination.  Fresnel had done 
+much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle 
+that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in 
+and brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not 
+unnatural jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France.  It 
+had its hour; and, as I have told already, even in France it has 
+blown by.  Had it not, it would have mattered the less, since all 
+through his life my father continued to justify his claim by fresh 
+advances.  New apparatus for lights in new situations was 
+continually being designed with the same unwearied search after 
+perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and though the 
+holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant 
+contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much 
+later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications.  
+The number and the value of these improvements entitle their author 
+to the name of one of mankind's benefactors.  In all parts of the 
+world a safer landfall awaits the mariner.  Two things must be 
+said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician.  
+Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great 
+intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to 
+calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had 
+conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help 
+of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate 
+friend, EMERITUS Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his later 
+friend, Professor P. G. Tait.  It is a curious enough circumstance, 
+and a great encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped 
+should have succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks 
+of applied science.  The second remark is one that applies to the 
+whole family, and only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the 
+great number and importance of his inventions: holding as the 
+Stevensons did a Government appointment they regarded their 
+original work as something due already to the nation, and none of 
+them has ever taken out a patent.  It is another cause of the 
+comparative obscurity of the name: for a patent not only brings in 
+money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's 
+instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are 
+passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least 
+considerable patent would stand out and tell its author's story.
+
+But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, 
+what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion.  He 
+was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness 
+and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat 
+bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition 
+and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in 
+company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately 
+prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no 
+very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles.  Yet he was 
+a wise adviser; many men, and these not inconsiderable, took 
+counsel with him habitually.  "I sat at his feet," writes one of 
+these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set in 
+thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no man 
+could add to the worth of the conclusion."  He had excellent taste, 
+though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and delighted 
+specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Wilde; took a 
+lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout admirer of 
+Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste; and 
+though he read little, was constant to his favourite books.  He had 
+never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had 
+left school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, 
+for Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors.  
+The first he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, 
+keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on 
+journeys.  Another old theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in 
+his hands.  When he was indisposed, he had two books, GUY MANNERING 
+and THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT, of which he never wearied.  He was a 
+strong Conservative, or, as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; 
+except in so far as his views were modified by a hot-headed 
+chivalrous sentiment for women.  He was actually in favour of a 
+marriage law under which any woman might have a divorce for the 
+asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same sentiment 
+found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh, 
+founded and largely supported by himself.  This was but one of the 
+many channels of his public generosity; his private was equally 
+unstrained.  The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines 
+(though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's 
+loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a 
+morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would never consent to be 
+an office-bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the 
+Church on many committees.  What he perhaps valued highest in his 
+work were his contributions to the defence of Christianity; one of 
+which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson Stirling and 
+reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.
+
+His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, 
+too, were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for 
+death.  He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his 
+own character; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the 
+Celtic melancholy.  Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to 
+him, and that delicate employment of a scientific witness cost him 
+many qualms.  But he found respite from these troublesome humours 
+in his work, in his lifelong study of natural science, in the 
+society of those he loved, and in his daily walks, which now would 
+carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and now 
+keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another, 
+and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed.  His 
+talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish 
+humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a 
+perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to 
+settle on his mind.  His use of language was both just and 
+picturesque; and when at the beginning of his illness he began to 
+feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear 
+him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length 
+desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than 
+finish it without propriety.  It was perhaps another Celtic trait 
+that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and 
+liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent 
+expression both in words and gestures.  Love, anger, and 
+indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what 
+we read of Southern races.  For all these emotional extremes, and 
+in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the 
+whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which 
+at the last came to him unaware.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS
+
+
+Sir, we had a good talk. - JOHNSON.
+
+As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle 
+silence. - FRANKLIN.
+
+
+THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be 
+affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, 
+or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the 
+flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great 
+international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are 
+first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of 
+public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.  
+No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago 
+prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that 
+has not been largely composed by their assistance.  Literature in 
+many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but 
+the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and 
+effect.  There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, 
+comparing experience and according conclusions.  Talk is fluid, 
+tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while 
+written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found 
+wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber 
+of the truth.  Last and chief, while literature, gagged with 
+linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, 
+talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade.  Talk has none 
+of the freezing immunities of the pulpit.  It cannot, even if it 
+would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature.  
+A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and 
+speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open 
+fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of 
+school.  And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and 
+ourselves.  In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is 
+his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious 
+speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures.  
+It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our 
+education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed 
+at any age and in almost any state of health.
+
+The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a 
+kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in 
+our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, 
+and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity.  It is still by force 
+of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to 
+worthy pleasures.  Men and women contend for each other in the 
+lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide 
+their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit 
+down to chess or conversation.  All sluggish and pacific pleasures 
+are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable 
+band between human beings is founded in or heightened by some 
+element of competition.  Now, the relation that has the least root 
+in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I 
+suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends.  
+Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.  It 
+is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy 
+that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge 
+of relations and the sport of life.
+
+A good talk is not to be had for the asking.  Humours must first be 
+accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and 
+circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, 
+the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the 
+wood.  Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he 
+has all and more than all his ardour.  The genuine artist follows 
+the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a 
+brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill."  He trusts implicitly 
+to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual 
+pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the 
+best of education.  There is nothing in a subject, so called, that 
+we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings 
+of desire.  Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are 
+truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three: 
+that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people 
+dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.  Wherever talk 
+may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines.  The 
+theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts 
+and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and 
+opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and 
+the admiration of his adversary.  All natural talk is a festival of 
+ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the 
+vanity of the other.  It is from that reason that we venture to lay 
+ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that 
+we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion.  For 
+talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their 
+ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret 
+pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, 
+musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to 
+be.  So they weave for themselves with words and for a while 
+inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where 
+they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the 
+gods, exulting in Kudos.  And when the talk is over, each goes his 
+way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing 
+clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, 
+not in a moment, but by slow declension.  I remember, in the 
+ENTR'ACTE of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the 
+sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; 
+and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to 
+sit there and evaporate THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (for it was that I had 
+been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being 
+and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and marching 
+feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra.  In 
+the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while 
+after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still 
+simmering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the 
+colours of the sunset.
+
+Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of 
+life, rather than dig mines into geological strata.  Masses of 
+experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical 
+instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and 
+in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and 
+from every degree of mental elevation and abasement - these are the 
+material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the 
+talkers thrive.  Such argument as is proper to the exercise should 
+still be brief and seizing.  Talk should proceed by instances; by 
+the apposite, not the expository.  It should keep close along the 
+lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the 
+level where history, fiction and experience intersect and 
+illuminate each other.  I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; 
+but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, 
+instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the 
+spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering 
+voices to corroborate the story in the face.  Not less surprising 
+is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities - the bad, 
+the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus - and 
+call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and 
+feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous 
+names, still glowing with the hues of life.  Communication is no 
+longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, 
+systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk.  That which 
+is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality 
+alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may 
+say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most 
+obscure and intricate thoughts.  Strangers who have a large common 
+ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the 
+grapple of genuine converse.  If they know Othello and Napoleon, 
+Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they 
+can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
+
+Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and 
+that embrace the widest range of facts.  A few pleasures bear 
+discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social 
+or most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among 
+their devotees.  A technicality is always welcome to the expert, 
+whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of 
+talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both 
+know and love their business.  No human being ever spoke of scenery 
+for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too 
+much of it in literature.  The weather is regarded as the very 
+nadir and scoff of conversational topics.  And yet the weather, the 
+dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and 
+far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable 
+features of the landscape.  Sailors and shepherds, and the people 
+generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often 
+excitingly presented in literature.  But the tendency of all living 
+talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity.  
+Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, feeding on 
+gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals.  
+That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high 
+pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities.  
+You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or 
+theological discussion.  These are to all the world what law is to 
+lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through 
+which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express 
+their judgments.  I knew three young men who walked together daily 
+for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in 
+cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and 
+yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects - theology 
+and love.  And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of 
+divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their 
+conclusions.
+
+Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by 
+private thinking.  That is not the profit.  The profit is in the 
+exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at 
+large on any subject, we review our state and history in life.  
+From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, 
+talk becomes elective, conquering like war, widening the boundaries 
+of knowledge like an exploration.  A point arises; the question 
+takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air; the talkers 
+begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; 
+towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, 
+and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the 
+summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment 
+the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed.  Like enough, 
+the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and 
+unwound out of words.  But the sense of joint discovery is none the 
+less giddy and inspiriting.  And in the life of the talker such 
+triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart; they are 
+attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the 
+nature of the process, they are always worthily shared.
+
+There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, 
+eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once 
+the talkable man.  It is not eloquence, not fairness, not 
+obstinacy, but a certain proportion of all of these that I love to 
+encounter in my amicable adversaries.  They must not be pontiffs 
+holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth.  
+Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers 
+with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms.  We must reach 
+some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk 
+becomes a torture.  But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or 
+quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies.
+
+The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-
+Heel'd Jack.  I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so 
+largely the possible ingredients of converse.  In the Spanish 
+proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman 
+to mix it: Jack is that madman.  I know not which is more 
+remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclusions the humorous 
+eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the 
+whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the 
+conversational salad like a drunken god.  He doubles like the 
+serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleidoscope, 
+transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the 
+twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions 
+inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a 
+triumphant conjuror.  It is my common practice when a piece of 
+conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such 
+grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length 
+shall spur him up in its defence.  In a moment he transmigrates, 
+dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy 
+justifies the act in question.  I can fancy nothing to compare with 
+the VIM of these impersonations, the strange scale of language, 
+flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell -
+
+"As fast as a musician scatters sounds
+Out of an instrument"
+
+the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant 
+particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and 
+bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the 
+admired disorder of their combination.  A talker of a different 
+calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly.  Burly is a 
+man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the 
+impression of a grosser mass of character than most men.  It has 
+been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you 
+entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other 
+powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction.  There 
+is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which 
+suits well enough with this impression.  He will roar you down, he 
+will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt 
+and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both 
+conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd, 
+and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain 
+subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and 
+you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration.  The outcry 
+only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and 
+precious.  Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect 
+intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and 
+an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions.  You have, with Burly, 
+none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who 
+may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, 
+create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on 
+you for holding it.  These, at least, are my two favourites, and 
+both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers.  This argues that I 
+myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we 
+love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by 
+foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give 
+us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle.  Both these 
+men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a 
+high and hard adventure, worth attempting.  With both you can pass 
+days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and 
+manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active and 
+glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk 
+is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind 
+still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still 
+around you.  Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more 
+honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic 
+prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and 
+makes a light in darkness; the other, with many changing hues of 
+fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have 
+the same humour and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardour 
+in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of 
+contradiction.
+
+Cockshot (5) is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and 
+has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening.  His manner 
+is dry, brisk and pertinacious, and the choice of words not much.  
+The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit.  You 
+can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready-
+made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay 
+its timbers and launch it in your presence.  "Let me see," he will 
+say.  "Give me a moment.  I SHOULD have some theory for that."  A 
+blither spectacle than the vigour with which he sets about the 
+task, it were hard to fancy.  He is possessed by a demoniac energy, 
+welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete 
+bends a horse-shoe, with a visible and lively effort.  He has, in 
+theorising, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic 
+gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of 
+the thing.  You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your 
+faith in these brand-new opinions.  But some of them are right 
+enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock shy 
+- as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and 
+have an hour's diversion ere it sinks.  Whichever they are, serious 
+opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures 
+with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but 
+taking punishment like a man.  He knows and never forgets that 
+people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts 
+himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough 
+"glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary.  
+Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep.  Three-
+in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim.  His talk is like the 
+driest of all imaginable dry champagnes.  Sleight of hand and 
+inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives.  
+Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a 
+sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud.  He is the most 
+unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation.  You may see him 
+sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two 
+together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end.  And there is 
+something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity 
+with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the 
+works as well as the dial of the clock.  Withal he has his hours of 
+inspiration.  Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming 
+from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the 
+more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour.  
+There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the 
+very grain of the language; you would think he must have worn the 
+words next his skin and slept with them.  Yet it is not as a sayer 
+of particular good things that Athelred is most to he regarded, 
+rather as the stalwart woodman of thought.  I have pulled on a 
+light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-axe; 
+and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy 
+has fallen.  I have known him to battle the same question night 
+after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly 
+applying it and re-applying it to life with humorous or grave 
+intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor 
+taking an unfair advantage of the facts.  Jack at a given moment, 
+when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radiantly 
+just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his 
+thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge 
+excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the 
+world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully 
+contending with his doubts.
+
+Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion 
+studied in the "dry light" of prose.  Indirectly and as if against 
+his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled 
+and poetic talk of Opalstein.  His various and exotic knowledge, 
+complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, 
+discriminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of 
+talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me - PROXIME 
+ACCESSIT, I should say.  He sings the praises of the earth and the 
+arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, 
+serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from 
+his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the 
+upper notes.  But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he 
+still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx.  Jarring Byronic notes 
+interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours.  His mirth has 
+something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; 
+and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly 
+sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance.  He 
+is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this 
+instant war in his members sometimes divides the man's attention.  
+He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in 
+conversation.  He brings into the talk other thoughts than those 
+which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on 
+something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite 
+forget himself.  Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an 
+occasional unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one 
+day giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of 
+season, giving perhaps too little.  Purcel is in another class from 
+any I have mentioned.  He is no debater, but appears in 
+conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of 
+which I admire and fear, and the other love.  In the first, he is 
+radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, 
+and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favours.  
+He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no 
+sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, 
+so polished that the dull do not perceive it, but so right that the 
+sensitive are silenced.  True talk should have more body and blood, 
+should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true 
+talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks 
+with; and that is one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel 
+in his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful 
+gossip, singing like the fireside kettle.  In these moods he has an 
+elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne.  I know 
+another person who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a 
+Restoration comedy, speaking, I declare, as Congreve wrote; but 
+that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for 
+there is none, alas! to give him answer.
+
+One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that 
+the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the 
+circle of common friends.  To have their proper weight they should 
+appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker.  Good 
+talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting where 
+each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that 
+is the best kind of talk where each speaker is most fully and 
+candidly himself, and where, if you were to shift the speeches 
+round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in 
+significance and perspicuity.  It is for this reason that talk 
+depends so wholly on our company.  We should like to introduce 
+Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in 
+talk with Cordelia seems even painful.  Most of us, by the Protean 
+quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true 
+talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only 
+with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as 
+love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish 
+with all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful for 
+forever.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS (6)
+
+
+II
+
+
+IN the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and 
+there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is 
+merely luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet 
+of the evening shared by ruminating friends.  There is something, 
+aside from personal preference, to be alleged in support of this 
+omission.  Those who are no chimney-cornerers, who rejoice in the 
+social thunderstorm, have a ground in reason for their choice.  
+They get little rest indeed; but restfulness is a quality for 
+cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert, and it is in 
+repose that men prepare themselves for evil.  On the other hand, 
+they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves and others; they 
+have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity displayed 
+and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms, paying for it 
+as they go; and once the talk is launched, they are assured of 
+honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves.  The 
+aboriginal man within us, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he 
+fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of 
+equal battle from afar; it is like his old primaeval days upon the 
+crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life from the 
+comfortable fictions of the civilised.  And if it be delightful to 
+the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother, 
+the conscientious gentleman I feel never quite sure of your urbane 
+and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in 
+silence, suffer him to encroach, encourage him on to be an ass, and 
+send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but 
+radically more contemptible than when he entered.  But if I have a 
+flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a 
+point, my vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in 
+the course of the debate.  He will not spare me when we differ; he 
+will not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face.
+
+For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered 
+society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, 
+the admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval.  They 
+demand more atmosphere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," 
+as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well 
+breathed in an uproarious Valhalla.  And I suspect that the choice, 
+given their character and faults, is one to be defended.  The 
+purely wise are silenced by facts; they talk in a clear atmosphere, 
+problems lying around them like a view in nature; if they can be 
+shown to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a 
+thrashing, and make better intellectual blood.  They stand 
+corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance reminds them of the 
+great eternal law.  But it is not so with all.  Others in 
+conversation seek rather contact with their fellow-men than 
+increase of knowledge or clarity of thought.  The drama, not the 
+philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity.  
+Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of 
+what we may call human scenery along the road they follow.  They 
+dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their 
+eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that 
+makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, 
+living, loving, talking, tangible people.  To a man of this 
+description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly.  
+By a strong expression, a perturbed countenance, floods of tears, 
+an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is 
+brought round to knowledge which no syllogism would have conveyed 
+to him.  His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively 
+conscious of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to 
+hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold 
+on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a god.  
+Talk might be to such an one the very way of moral ruin; the school 
+where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous.
+
+This character is perhaps commoner than philosophers suppose.  And 
+for persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must 
+speak with their superiors, not in intellect, for that is a 
+superiority that must be proved, but in station.  If they cannot 
+find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either 
+an old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the 
+artificial order of society, that courtesy may he particularly 
+exercised.
+
+The best teachers are the aged.  To the old our mouths are always 
+partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen.  
+They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once 
+to our respect and pity.  A flavour of the old school, a touch of 
+something different in their manner - which is freer and rounder, 
+if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid 
+and precise if they are of the middle class - serves, in these 
+days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to 
+gray hairs.  But their superiority is founded more deeply than by 
+outward marks or gestures.  They are before us in the march of man; 
+they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled 
+through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their 
+course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and 
+harbour.  It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's 
+darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed.  
+Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity 
+befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant humour, rallies 
+us upon our inattention, sitting composed in the holy evening of 
+man's life, in the clear shining after rain.  We grow ashamed of 
+our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside 
+brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, under the heavens of 
+faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented 
+elders, look forward and take patience.  Fear shrinks before them 
+"like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of 
+death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and 
+revenges of life.  Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report 
+lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their 
+serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story.  
+Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; 
+what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make 
+a shift to bear.
+
+Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their 
+minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain 
+considerations overlooked by youth.  They have matter to 
+communicate, be they never so stupid.  Their talk is not merely 
+literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the 
+speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things 
+we should not otherwise have learnt.  In virtue, I have said, of 
+the speaker's detachment, - and this is why, of two old men, the 
+one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sensible 
+authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively 
+interests and remain still young.  Thus I have known two young men 
+great friends; each swore by the other's father; the father of each 
+swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were 
+perpetually by the ears.  This is typical: it reads like the germ 
+of some kindly comedy.
+
+The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically 
+silent and the garrulous anecdotic.  The last is perhaps what we 
+look for; it is perhaps the more instructive.  An old gentleman, 
+well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window 
+of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye; and chirping and 
+smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the lesson of his 
+long career.  Opinions are strengthened, indeed, but they are also 
+weeded out in the course of years.  What remains steadily present 
+to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still 
+ministers to his content, what still quickens his old honest heart 
+- these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to 
+prefer.  Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom 
+lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in 
+tune with his gray-bearded teacher's that a lesson may be learned.  
+I have known one old gentleman, whom I may name, for he in now 
+gathered to his stock - Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton, and 
+author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished.  
+Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess.  
+When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and 
+shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by 
+ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot 
+gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close 
+shaved, except under his chin - and for that he never failed to 
+apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life.  
+You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; yet 
+this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the 
+plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness, 
+and staunch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities.  You 
+could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat 
+Shakespeare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page 
+together; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for 
+fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating the same 
+anecdote on many successive visits.  His voice survived in its full 
+power, and he took a pride in using it.  On his last voyage as 
+Commissioner of lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made 
+himself clearly audible without a speaking trumpet, ruffling the 
+while with a proper vanity in his achievement.  He had a habit of 
+eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and 
+a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a 
+survival from some former stage of bodily portliness.  Of yore, 
+when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may 
+have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench.  
+His humour was perfectly equable, set beyond the reach of fate; 
+gout, rheumatism, stone and gravel might have combined their forces 
+against that frail tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday 
+evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's LIFE OF CHRIST and 
+greet me with the same open brow, the same kind formality of 
+manner.  His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a 
+decade.  He had begun life, under his mother's influence, as an 
+admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his 
+admiration to Burke.  He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be 
+punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a 
+Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I 
+attempted the colloquial, I should certainly, be shamed: the remark 
+was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume.  Scott was too 
+new for him; he had known the author - known him, too, for a Tory; 
+and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always something of a 
+trouble.  He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he 
+was proud to tell, played a certain part in the history of 
+Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray, 
+of the old Edinburgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's 
+fairy pieces with great scenic display.  A moderate in religion, he 
+was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation 
+with two young lads, revivalists "H'm," he would say - "new to me.  
+I have had - h'm - no such experience."  It struck him, not with 
+pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a 
+Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a standing, should 
+hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own 
+weapons that he had fought the battle of life with, - "and - h'm - 
+not understand."  In this wise and graceful attitude he did justice 
+to himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and 
+recognised their limits without anger or alarm.  His last recorded 
+remark, on the last night of his life, was after he had been 
+arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted by 
+an intolerable pang.  "After all," he said, "of all the 'isms, I 
+know none so bad as rheumatism."  My own last sight of him was some 
+time before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on 
+circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a chief part of his 
+existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever 
+soiled his lips with slang - a thing he loathed.  We were both 
+Roberts; and as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a 
+twinkle: "We are just what you would call two bob."  He offered me 
+port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty-
+shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of old-world 
+pleasantry and quaintness, like an ancient boy on a holiday.  But 
+what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read 
+OTHELLO to an end.  Shakespeare was his continual study.  He loved 
+nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing 
+parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word 
+was employed, or the same idea differently treated.  But OTHELLO 
+had beaten him.  "That noble gentleman and that noble lady - h'm - 
+too painful for me."  The same night the hoardings were covered 
+with posters, "Burlesque of OTHELLO," and the contrast blazed up in 
+my mind like a bonfire.  An unforgettable look it gave me into that 
+kind man's soul.  His acquaintance was indeed a liberal and pious 
+education.  All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room 
+beside his gouty footstool.  He was a piece of good advice; he was 
+himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk.  
+Nor could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart 
+from envy, fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a 
+life so honest and composed; a soul like an ancient violin, so 
+subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in music - as in that 
+dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under 
+the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.
+
+The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather 
+hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and 
+critical attention.  To have this sort of intercourse to 
+perfection, I think we must go to old ladies.  Women are better 
+hearers than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to 
+bear with the tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we 
+will take more from a woman than even from the oldest man in the 
+way of biting comment.  Biting comment is the chief part, whether 
+for profit or amusement, in this business.  The old lady that I 
+have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years 
+of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.  
+If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the 
+malignity of age.  But if you chance to please even slightly, you 
+will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy, 
+and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as 
+heavy as a pole-axe.  It requires a singular art, as well as the 
+vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the 
+coxcombs of the young.  The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it 
+is administered as a compliment - if you had not pleased, you would 
+not have been censured; it is a personal affair - a hyphen, A TRAIT 
+D'UNION, between you and your censor; age's philandering, for her 
+pleasure and your good.  Incontestably the young man feels very 
+much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self-
+love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile.  The 
+correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have 
+transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye.  If 
+a man were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a 
+moment.  But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow 
+with any good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of 
+witty criticism, every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with 
+a shrewd missile, and reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a 
+fine moral reaction, and ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-
+third loath, for a repetition of the discipline.
+
+There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps 
+toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true 
+thing with a kind of genial cruelty.  Still there are some - and I 
+doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment.  The class 
+of man represented by Vernon Whitford in THE EGOIST says, indeed, 
+the true thing, but he says it stockishly.  Vernon is a noble 
+fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and instructive contrast to 
+Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honour; but 
+we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully 
+considers "its astonishing dryness."  He is the best of men, but 
+the best of women manage to combine all that and something more.  
+Their very faults assist them; they are helped even by the 
+falseness of their position in life.  They can retire into the 
+fortified camp of the proprieties.  They can touch a subject and 
+suppress it.  The most adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve 
+as a means to be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake 
+hands.  But a man has the full responsibility of his freedom, 
+cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent without rudeness, 
+must answer for his words upon the moment, and is not seldom left 
+face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less 
+dishonourable wriggling of Deronda and the downright woodenness of 
+Vernon Whitford.
+
+But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; they do not 
+sit throned on infirmities like the old; they are suitors as well 
+as sovereigns; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too 
+apt to follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes 
+degenerates into something unworthy of the name.  The desire to 
+please, to shine with a certain softness of lustre and to draw a 
+fascinating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation all that 
+is sterling and most of what is humorous.  As soon as a strong 
+current of mutual admiration begins to flow, the human interest 
+triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the commerce of words, 
+consciously or not, becomes secondary to the commencing of eyes.  
+But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a man and 
+woman converse equally and honestly, something in their nature or 
+their education falsifies the strain.  An instinct prompts them to 
+agree; and where that is impossible, to agree to differ.  Should 
+they neglect the warning, at the first suspicion of an argument, 
+they find themselves in different hemispheres.  About any point of 
+business or conduct, any actual affair demanding settlement, a 
+woman will speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, not only 
+with natural wisdom, but with candour and logical honesty.  But if 
+the subject of debate be something in the air, an abstraction, an 
+excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater 
+instantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, be 
+supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him nothing; what the 
+woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will 
+repeat at the end.  Hence, at the very junctures when a talk 
+between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to 
+bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolution.  
+The point of difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the 
+brilliant woman, under a shower of irrelevant conversational 
+rockets; it is bridged by the discreet woman with a rustle of silk, 
+as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety.  And 
+this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of 
+sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an altered shape, 
+is a piece of tactics among the true drawing-room queens.
+
+The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our 
+choice and for our sins.  The subjection of women; the ideal 
+imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, 
+with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to 
+man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts - the arts of 
+a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians - are all painful 
+ingredients and all help to falsify relations.  It is not till we 
+get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations 
+are founded, or ideas honestly compared.  In the garden, on the 
+road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from interruptions, 
+occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and 
+nowhere more often than in married life.  Marriage is one long 
+conversation, chequered by disputes.  The disputes are valueless; 
+they but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman 
+prompting her at once to nail her colours to the mast.  But in the 
+intervals, almost unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the 
+whole material of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck 
+out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions 
+one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of 
+trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
+
+
+THE civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a 
+great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man.  
+This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of 
+inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours the caprices of 
+the tyrant.  But the potentate, like the British in India, pays 
+small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him 
+with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword.  Listless have 
+been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of 
+praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations.  And yet more 
+idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of 
+his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in 
+their proper place"; who say "poo' fellow, poo' fellow," and are 
+themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or 
+heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the creature's 
+instinct"; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate 
+the theory of animal machines.  The "dog's instinct" and the 
+"automaton-dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like 
+strange anachronisms.  An automaton he certainly is; a machine 
+working independently of his control, the heart, like the mill-
+wheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness, like a person 
+shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window and 
+shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton in one corner of 
+which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man.  Instinct 
+again he certainly possesses.  Inherited aptitudes are his, 
+inherited frailties.  Some things he at once views and understands, 
+as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he came 
+"trailing clouds of glory."  But with him, as with man, the field 
+of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; 
+and about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master 
+must conduct their steps by deduction and observation.
+
+The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps 
+before the different duration of their lives, is that the one can 
+speak and that the other cannot.  The absence of the power of 
+speech confines the dog in the development of his intellect.  It 
+hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of 
+meta-physic.  At the same blow it saves him from many 
+superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name for 
+virtue than his conduct justifies.  The faults of the dog are many.  
+He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly 
+intolerant of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the 
+degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth.  The day of an 
+intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the 
+laborious communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he 
+lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw; and when he 
+rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is other than 
+appears.  But he has some apology to offer for the vice.  Many of 
+the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary 
+meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet 
+when a new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of 
+meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose; and this 
+necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the 
+sanctity of symbols.  Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own 
+conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between 
+formal and essential truth.  Of his punning perversions, his 
+legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has 
+told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body 
+but confesses guilt.  To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and 
+falsehood are disgraceful vices.  The canine, like the human, 
+gentleman demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne's "JE NE SAIS QUOI 
+DE GENEREUX."  He is never more than half ashamed of having barked 
+or bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the 
+desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under 
+physical correction, a share of pride.  But to be caught lying, if 
+he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece.
+
+Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog 
+has been credited with modesty.  It is amazing how the use of 
+language blunts the faculties of man - that because vain glory 
+finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been 
+unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious.  If a small spoiled 
+dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate 
+interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we 
+should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining 
+jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would 
+have gone far to weary out our love.  I was about to compare him to 
+Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of 
+their own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready.  Hans 
+Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, 
+thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting 
+even along the street for shadows of offence - here was the talking 
+dog.
+
+It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog 
+into his satellite position as the friend of man.  The cat, an 
+animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence.  But the 
+dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into 
+slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his 
+nature.  Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the 
+Rubicon was crossed.  Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; 
+and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more 
+and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.  The number of 
+things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small.  
+Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is 
+far more theatrical than average man.  His whole life, if he be a 
+dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in 
+the hot pursuit of admiration.  Take out your puppy for a walk, and 
+you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, 
+but natural.  Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the 
+process you will find nature buried in convention.  He will do 
+nothing plainly; but the simplest processes of our material life 
+will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious 
+etiquette.  Instinct, says the fool, has awakened.  But it is not 
+so.  Some dogs - some, at the very least - if they be kept separate 
+from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they 
+meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to 
+them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to 
+its rules.  I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would 
+radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an 
+elaborate and mysterious etiquette.  It is their bond of sympathy 
+that both are the children of convention.
+
+The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned 
+to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members 
+fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing.  
+And the converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious 
+manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand 
+confessed.  To follow for ten minutes in the street some 
+swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art 
+and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you 
+see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, 
+beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody 
+that charming ease.  For to be a high-mannered and high-minded 
+gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of 
+the dog.  The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon 
+with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born 
+with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part.  And it is 
+more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small 
+dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip 
+Sidney.  For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the 
+ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules 
+them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of 
+size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the 
+appearance of the democratic notion.  Or we might more exactly 
+compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a 
+school - ushers, monitors, and big and little boys - qualified by 
+one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.  In each, we 
+should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat 
+similar points of honour.  In each the larger animal keeps a 
+contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-
+like impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall 
+find a double life producing double characters, and an excursive 
+and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical 
+timidity.  I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, 
+set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if we 
+desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the 
+school playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping.
+
+Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised.  Incessant 
+massacre of female innocents has changed the proportions of the 
+sexes and perverted their relations.  Thus, when we regard the 
+manners of the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, once 
+perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions.  
+Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more 
+damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of Touchstone.  But 
+his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the 
+rare surviving ladies.  In that society they reign without a rival: 
+conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine wife-beater 
+that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat 
+excused by the circumstances of his story.  He is a little, very 
+alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet 
+bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes.  To the human 
+observer, he is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his 
+race he seems abhorrent.  A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the 
+plume and sword-knot order, he was born with a nice sense of 
+gallantry to women.  He took at their hands the most outrageous 
+treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have seen him 
+streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner; and 
+yet he would scorn to make reprisals.  Nay more, when a human lady 
+upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been 
+so cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one hoarse 
+cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail.  This is the tale of a 
+soul's tragedy.  After three years of unavailing chivalry, he 
+suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he 
+been Shakespeare he would then have written TROILUS AND CRESSIDA to 
+brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to 
+bite them.  The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated 
+the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his 
+better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the 
+same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he proceeded to 
+attack the aged also.  The fact is worth remark, showing, as it 
+does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that 
+with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens 
+all.  "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, 
+"the greatest sinner may return."  I have been cheered to see 
+symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the 
+handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an 
+indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of STURM UND DRANG 
+is closed.
+
+All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists.  The duty to the 
+female dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they 
+will sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors.  I knew 
+another little Skye, somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a 
+creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom.  His family going 
+abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in 
+the same city.  The winter over, his own family home again, and his 
+own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself 
+in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and 
+gratitude.  His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed 
+hardly decent to desert the new.  This was how he solved the 
+problem.  Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, of posted 
+Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted 
+the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and 
+his bit of fish.  Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his 
+part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and 
+jewel of his day - his morning's walk with my father.  And, perhaps 
+from this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, 
+and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits.  But the 
+same decision served him in another and more distressing case of 
+divided duty, which happened not long after.  He was not at all a 
+kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness 
+during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored 
+my father - although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her 
+position as "only a servant" - he still cherished for her a special 
+gratitude.  Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to 
+lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same 
+situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable 
+benefit of a faithful nurse.  The canine conscience did not solve 
+the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas.  No longer content to 
+pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to 
+his solitary friend.  And so, day by day, he continued to comfort 
+her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand 
+and cannot approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the 
+graceful habit.  Here, it is not the similarity, it is the 
+difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of 
+gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits.  Anything 
+further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is 
+even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute 
+of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly 
+obedient to the voice of reason.
+
+There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people.  
+But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine 
+family.  Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat 
+oppressive respectability.  He was a sworn foe to the unusual and 
+the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle 
+modified by Cheeryble.  And as he was precise and conscientious in 
+all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same 
+precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, 
+my father.  It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting 
+like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he 
+respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the 
+proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.
+
+I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying 
+degrees.  It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for 
+though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot 
+grasp what is the criterion.  Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of 
+the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met 
+in the morning to - the phrase is technical - to "rake the backets" 
+in a troop.  A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one 
+day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined 
+another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the result of an 
+invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess.  And this 
+illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their 
+social ambitions and their social hierarchies.  At least, in their 
+dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the 
+difference of station.  And that in the most snobbish manner; for 
+the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and 
+keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his 
+master.  And again, for every station they have an ideal of 
+behaviour, to which the master, under pain of derogation, will do 
+wisely to conform.  How often has not a cold glance of an eye 
+informed me that my dog was disappointed; and how much more gladly 
+would he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in the 
+seat of piety!
+
+I knew one disrespectable dog.  He was far liker a cat; cared 
+little or nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do 
+with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching.  A 
+house would not hold him, and to live in a town was what he 
+refused.
+
+He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and 
+perished beyond all question in a trap.  But this was an exception, 
+a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the hairy human 
+infant.  The true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge by the 
+remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with 
+respectability.  A street-dog was once adopted by a lady.  While 
+still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud, 
+charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a 
+common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid 
+aside these inconsistent pleasures.  He stole no more, he hunted no 
+more cats; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old 
+companions.  Yet the canine upper class was never brought to 
+recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human 
+countenance, he was alone.  Friendless, shorn of his sports and the 
+habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, 
+content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to 
+support it solemnly.  Are we to condemn or praise this self-made 
+dog?  We praise his human brother.  And thus to conquer vicious 
+habits is as rare with dogs as with men.  With the more part, for 
+all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are 
+born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all 
+their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of 
+their defects.  Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among 
+a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of 
+mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs, (7) whose soul's 
+shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has 
+only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the 
+temptation.  The eighth is his favourite commandment.  There is 
+something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal 
+frailties of the best.  Still more painful is the bearing of those 
+"stammering professors" in the house of sickness and under the 
+terror of death.  It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or 
+other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of 
+sickness and the consciousness of guilt.  To the pains of the body 
+he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times 
+his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a 
+dreadful parody or parallel.
+
+I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the 
+double etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most 
+addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less 
+careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man.  But 
+the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally 
+in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with 
+unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes 
+the arts of insinuation to their crowning point.  The attention of 
+man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the 
+same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, 
+they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees.  Dogs 
+live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery 
+of his notice and enriched with sinecures.  To push their favour in 
+this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of 
+their lives; and their joys may lie outside.  I am in despair at 
+our persistent ignorance.  I read in the lives of our companions 
+the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts 
+of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too 
+rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, 
+inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, 
+devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on 
+the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I 
+must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to 
+man.  Is man the friend, or is he the patron only?  Have they 
+indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from 
+courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the 
+brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives?  Doubtless, 
+when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the 
+pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the 
+affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul.  But 
+doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a 
+merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving 
+and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority 
+of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes 
+of their ambition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
+
+
+THESE words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile 
+Drama.  That national monument, after having changed its name to 
+Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, 
+has now become, for the most part, a memory.  Some of its pillars, 
+like Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished.  It may 
+be the Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else 
+her gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the 
+plain private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable.  
+I have, at different times, possessed ALADDIN, THE RED ROVER, THE 
+BLIND BOY, THE OLD OAK CHEST, THE WOOD DAEMON, JACK SHEPPARD, THE 
+MILLER AND HIS MEN, DER FREISCHUTZ, THE SMUGGLER, THE FOREST OF 
+BONDY, ROBIN HOOD, THE WATERMAN, RICHARD I., MY POLL AND MY PARTNER 
+JOE, THE INCHCAPE BELL (imperfect), and THREE-FINGERED JACK, THE 
+TERROR OF JAMAICA; and I have assisted others in the illumination 
+of MAID OF THE INN and THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO.  In this roll-call 
+of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and 
+though not half of them are still to be procured of any living 
+stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive, 
+kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.
+
+There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain 
+stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins 
+the city of my childhood with the sea.  When, upon any Saturday, we 
+made a party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since 
+in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, 
+this of itself had been enough to hallow it.  But there was more 
+than that.  In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there 
+stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a 
+"combat," and a few "robbers carousing" in the slides; and below 
+and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those 
+budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another.  Long and often 
+have I lingered there with empty pockets.  One figure, we shall 
+say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol 
+in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell 
+the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d 
+dress?  O, how I would long to see the rest! how - if the name by 
+chance were hidden - I would wonder in what play he figured, and 
+what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel!  
+And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending 
+purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles 
+and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating villains, 
+epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning 
+fortresses and prison vaults - it was a giddy joy.  That shop, 
+which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all 
+that bore the name of boy.  They could not pass it by, nor, having 
+entered, leave it.  It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the 
+Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task.  They kept us at the 
+stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand 
+ere we were trusted with another, and, increditable as it may 
+sound, used to demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we 
+came with money or with empty hand.  Old Mr. Smith himself, worn 
+out with my eternal vacillation, once swept the treasures from 
+before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child, that you are an 
+intending purchaser at all!"  These were the dragons of the garden; 
+but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of 
+Jamaica himself.  Every sheet we fingered was another lightning 
+glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the 
+raw stuff of story-books.  I know nothing to compare with it save 
+now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain 
+unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world 
+all vanity.  The CRUX of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the 
+uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on 
+these bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the 
+sight and touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when 
+at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient 
+shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy 
+was forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into 
+light in the blue winter's even, and THE MILLER, or THE ROVER, or 
+some kindred drama clutched against his side - on what gay feet he 
+ran, and how he laughed aloud in exultation!  I can hear that 
+laughter still.  Out of all the years of my life, I can recall but 
+one home-coming to compare with these, and that was on the night 
+when I brought back with me the ARABIAN ENTERTAINMENTS in the fat, 
+old, double-columned volume with the prints.  I was just well into 
+the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman-
+grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me.  I 
+grew blind with terror.  But instead of ordering the book away, he 
+said he envied me.  Ah, well he might!
+
+The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.  
+Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little.  The fable, 
+as set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the 
+scenes and characters: what fable would not?  Such passages as: 
+"Scene 6. The Hermitage.  Night set scene.  Place back of scene 1, 
+No. 2, at back of stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. 
+H. in a slanting direction" - such passages, I say, though very 
+practical, are hardly to be called good reading.  Indeed, as 
+literature, these dramas did not much appeal to me.  I forget the 
+very outline of the plots.  Of THE BLIND BOY, beyond the fact that 
+he was a most injured prince and once, I think, abducted, I know 
+nothing.  And THE OLD OAK CHEST, what was it all about? that 
+proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of banditti, that old 
+woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in the third act 
+(was it in the third?) - they are all fallen in a deliquium, swim 
+faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
+
+I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite 
+forget that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to 
+"twopence coloured."  With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it - 
+crimson lake! - the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) - 
+with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be 
+compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal.
+
+The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite 
+pigment, supplied a green of such a savoury greenness that to-day 
+my heart regrets it.  Nor can I recall without a tender weakness 
+the very aspect of the water where I dipped my brush.  Yes, there 
+was pleasure in the painting.  But when all was painted, it is 
+needless to deny it, all was spoiled.  You might, indeed, set up a 
+scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was simply 
+sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, 
+and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance.  Two 
+days after the purchase the honey had been sucked.  Parents used to 
+complain; they thought I wearied of my play.  It was not so: no 
+more than a person can be said to have wearied of his dinner when 
+he leaves the bones and dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said 
+grace.
+
+Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study 
+that enticing double file of names, where poetry, for the true 
+child of Skelt, reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the 
+Queen.  Much as I have travelled in these realms of gold, I have 
+yet seen, upon that map or abstract, names of El Dorados that still 
+haunt the ear of memory, and are still but names.  THE FLOATING 
+BEACON - why was that denied me? or THE WRECK ASHORE?  SIXTEEN-
+STRING JACK whom I did not even guess to be a highwayman, troubled 
+me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is one sequence of 
+three from that enchanted calender that I still at times recall, 
+like a loved verse of poetry: LODOISKA, SILVER PALACE, ECHO OF 
+WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.  Names, bare names, are surely more to children 
+than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.
+
+The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the 
+charm of his productions.  It may be different with the rose, but 
+the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had 
+crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt's nest.  
+And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs.  Indeed, 
+this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt 
+it boldly to design these qualities.  Skeltery, then, is a quality 
+of much art.  It is even to be found, with reverence be it said, 
+among the works of nature.  The stagey is its generic name; but it 
+is an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically 
+British; not of to-day, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the 
+great age of melodrama: a peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering 
+its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of 
+fresh antiquity.  I will not insist upon the art of Skelt's 
+purveyors.  These wonderful characters that once so thrilled our 
+soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and 
+incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme 
+hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; 
+the villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the 
+scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the 
+efforts of a prentice hand.  So much of fault we find; but on the 
+other side the impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of 
+a great unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a 
+man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight 
+glamour, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a 
+thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
+
+The scenery of Skeltdom - or, shall we say, the kingdom of 
+Transpontus? - had a prevailing character.  Whether it set forth 
+Poland as in THE BLIND BOY, or Bohemia with THE MILLER AND HIS MEN, 
+or Italy with THE OLD OAK CHEST, still it was Transpontus.  A 
+botanist could tell it by the plants.  The hollyhock was all 
+pervasive, running wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the 
+bending reed; and overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato 
+tree, and QUERCUS SKELTICA - brave growths.  The caves were all 
+embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden 
+by the light pump of T. P. Cooke.  Skelt, to be sure, had yet 
+another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and 
+in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des 
+Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised.  But on 
+these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the 
+accidental scenery that Skelt was all himself.  It had a strong 
+flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and 
+drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming.  How the roads 
+wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates 
+from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves 
+up-roll, as stiff as bolsters!  Here is the cottage interior, the 
+usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of 
+onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the 
+inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold 
+Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day 
+clock; and there again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, 
+which was so dull to colour.  England, the hedgerow elms, the thin 
+brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames - 
+England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made 
+evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to 
+Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all 
+foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt.  If, at the ripe age of 
+fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, 
+and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, 
+radiating pure romance - still I was but a puppet in the hand of 
+Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the 
+antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from 
+Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. I.  "This is 
+mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation.  
+What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my 
+Skelt has made them?  He stamped himself upon my immaturity.  The 
+world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it 
+was all coloured with romance.  If I go to the theatre to see a 
+good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded.  If I visit a 
+bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been 
+certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree - that set 
+piece - I seem to miss it in the foreground.  Indeed, out of this 
+cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem 
+to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there 
+the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a 
+late future; got the romance of DER FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to 
+hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes 
+and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I 
+might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts 
+an enduring and transforming pleasure.  Reader - and yourself?
+
+A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 
+73 Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old 
+stage favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a 
+modest readiness to issue other thirty-three.  If you love art, 
+folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to 
+Clarke's of Garrick Street.  In Pollock's list of publicanda I 
+perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations: WRECK ASHORE and 
+SIXTEEN-STRING JACK; and I cherish the belief that when these shall 
+see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember this 
+apologist.  But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a 
+dream.  I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street - E. W., I 
+think, the postal district - close below the fool's-cap of St. 
+Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey 
+bridge.  There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong 
+of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great 
+Skelt himself, the aboriginal all dusty from the tomb.  I buy, with 
+what a choking heart - I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I 
+pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
+
+
+THE books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we 
+admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and 
+various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends.  One or 
+two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, THE EGOIST, 
+and the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE, form the inner circle of my 
+intimates.  Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; 
+THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS in the front rank, THE BIBLE IN SPAIN not 
+far behind.  There are besides a certain number that look at me 
+with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once 
+thumbed and studied: houses which were once like home to me, but 
+where I now rarely visit.  I am on these sad terms (and blush to 
+confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt.  Last of 
+all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy - 
+glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance 
+until the fit return.  Chief of those who thus smile and frown on 
+me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but
+
+"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"
+
+must have stood in the first company with the six names of my 
+continual literary intimates.  To these six, incongruous as they 
+seem, I have long been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day 
+of death.  I have never read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not 
+like to be long without reading some of him, and my delight in what 
+I do read never lessens.  Of Shakespeare I have read all but 
+RICHARD III, HENRY VI., TITUS ANDRONICAS, and ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS 
+WELL; and these, having already made all suitable endeavour, I now 
+know that I shall never read - to make up for which unfaithfulness 
+I could read much of the rest for ever.  Of Moliere - surely the 
+next greatest name of Christendom - I could tell a very similar 
+story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are 
+too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on.  
+How often I have read GUY MANNERING, ROB ROY, OR REDGAUNTLET, I 
+have no means of guessing, having begun young.  But it is either 
+four or five times that I have read THE EGOIST, and either five or 
+six that I have read the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.
+
+Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have 
+spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little 
+famous as the last.  And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my 
+own devotion, but the coldness of the world.  My acquaintance with 
+the VICOMTE began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, 
+when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert 
+plates in a hotel at Nice.  The name of d'Artagnan in the legends I 
+already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year 
+before in a work of Miss Yonge's.  My first perusal was in one of 
+those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels, 
+and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes.  I understood 
+but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the 
+execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot - a strange testimony to the 
+dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place 
+de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers.  My 
+next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the 
+Pentlands.  I would return in the early night from one of my 
+patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the 
+door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; 
+and I would sit down with the VICOMTE for a long, silent, solitary 
+lamp-light evening by the fire.  And yet I know not why I call it 
+silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, 
+and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I 
+call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends.  I 
+would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow 
+and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter 
+moonlight brighten the white hills.  Thence I would turn again to 
+that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to 
+forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a 
+city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and 
+sounding with delightful speech.  I carried the thread of that epic 
+into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge 
+into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must 
+lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world 
+has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my 
+friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d'Artagnan.
+
+Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in 
+my favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me 
+call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it 
+more seriously than ever.  Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, 
+being so well known in these six volumes.  Perhaps I think that 
+d'Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is 
+gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Aramis, although he 
+knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as 
+to an old patron of the show.  Perhaps, if I am not careful, 
+something may befall me like what befell George IV. about the 
+battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the VICOMTE one of the 
+first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works.  At least, I 
+avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the 
+VICOMTE with that of MONTRO CRISTO, or its own elder brother, the 
+TROIS MOUSQUETAIRES, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.
+
+To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular hero 
+in the pages of VINGT ANS APRES, perhaps the name may act as a 
+deterrent.  A man might, well stand back if he supposed he were to 
+follow, for six volumes, so well-conducted, so fine-spoken, and 
+withal so dreary a cavalier as Bragelonne.  But the fear is idle.  
+I may be said to have passed the best years of my life in these six 
+volumes, and my acquaintance with Raoul has never gone beyond a 
+bow; and when he, who has so long pretended to be alive, is at last 
+suffered to pretend to be dead, I am sometimes reminded of a saying 
+in an earlier volume: "ENFIN, DIT MISS STEWART," - and it was of 
+Bragelonne she spoke - "ENFIN IL A FAIL QUELQUECHOSE: C'EST, MA 
+FOI! BIEN HEUREUX."  I am reminded of it, as I say; and the next 
+moment, when Athos dies of his death, and my dear d'Artagnan bursts 
+into his storm of sobbing, I can but deplore my flippancy.
+
+Or perhaps it is La Valliere that the reader of VINGT ANS APRES is 
+inclined to flee.  Well, he is right there too, though not so 
+right.  Louise is no success.  Her creator has spared no pains; she 
+is well-meant, not ill-designed, sometimes has a word that rings 
+out true; sometimes, if only for a breath, she may even engage our 
+sympathies.  But I have never envied the King his triumph.  And so 
+far from pitying Bragelonne for his defeat, I could wish him no 
+worse (not for lack of malice, but imagination) than to be wedded 
+to that lady.  Madame enchants me; I can forgive that royal minx 
+her most serious offences; I can thrill and soften with the King on 
+that memorable occasion when he goes to upbraid and remains to 
+flirt; and when it comes to the "ALLONS, AIMEZ-MOI DONC," it is my 
+heart that melts in the bosom of de Guiche.  Not so with Louise.  
+Readers cannot fail to have remarked that what an author tells us 
+of the beauty or the charm of his creatures goes for nought; that 
+we know instantly better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth 
+but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall 
+from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands 
+before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps 
+a strapping market-woman.  Authors, at least, know it well; a 
+heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no 
+disease is more difficult to cure.  I said authors; but indeed I 
+had a side eye to one author in particular, with whose works I am 
+very well acquainted, though I cannot read them, and who has spent 
+many vigils in this cause, sitting beside his ailing puppets and 
+(like a magician) wearying his art to restore them to youth and 
+beauty.  There are others who ride too high for these misfortunes.  
+Who doubts the loveliness of Rosalind?  Arden itself was not more 
+lovely.  Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn, 
+Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names, 
+the daughters of George Meredith.  Elizabeth Bennet has but to 
+speak, and I am at her knees.  Ah! these are the creators of 
+desirable women.  They would never have fallen in the mud with 
+Dumas and poor La Valliere.  It is my only consolation that not one 
+of all of them, except the first, could have plucked at the 
+moustache of d'Artagnan.
+
+Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the 
+threshold.  In so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs 
+and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it 
+was at least unhappy that the vestibule should be so badly lighted; 
+and until, in the seventeenth chapter, d'Artagnan sets off to seek 
+his friends, I must confess, the book goes heavily enough.  But, 
+from thenceforward, what a feast is spread!  Monk kidnapped; 
+d'Artagnan enriched; Mazarin's death; the ever delectable adventure 
+of Belle Isle, wherein Aramis outwits d'Artagnan, with its epilogue 
+(vol. v. chap. xxviii.), where d'Artagnan regains the moral 
+superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St. 
+Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de 
+Wardes, and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at 
+the bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle 
+again, with the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the 
+taming of d'Artagnan the untamable, under the lash of the young 
+King.  What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of 
+incident? often, if you will, impossible; often of the order of an 
+Arabian story; and yet all based in human nature.  For if you come 
+to that, what novel has more human nature? not studied with the 
+microscope, but seen largely, in plain daylight, with the natural 
+eye?  What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and 
+unflagging, admirable literary skill?  Good souls, I suppose, must 
+sometimes read it in the blackguard travesty of a translation.  But 
+there is no style so untranslatable; light as a whipped trifle, 
+strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general's 
+despatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet 
+inimitably right.  And, once more, to make an end of commendations, 
+what novel is inspired with a more unstained or a more wholesome 
+morality?
+
+Yes; in spite of Miss Yonge, who introduced me to the name of 
+d'Artagnan only to dissuade me from a nearer knowledge of the man, 
+I have to add morality.  There is no quite good book without a good 
+morality; but the world is wide, and so are morals.  Out of two 
+people who have dipped into Sir Richard Burton's THOUSAND AND ONE 
+NIGHTS, one shall have been offended by the animal details; another 
+to whom these were harmless, perhaps even pleasing, shall yet have 
+been shocked in his turn by the rascality and cruelty of all the 
+characters.  Of two readers, again, one shall have been pained by 
+the morality of a religious memoir, one by that of the VICOMTE DE 
+BRAGELONNE.  And the point is that neither need be wrong.  We shall 
+always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the sun 
+into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a 
+thing) into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some 
+hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in 
+the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of 
+magnanimity.  I would scarce send to the VICOMTE a reader who was 
+in quest of what we may call puritan morality.  The ventripotent 
+mulatto, the great cater, worker, earner and waster, the man of 
+much and witty laughter, the man of the great heart and alas! of 
+the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set before the 
+world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; but with 
+whatever art that may be touched, and whatever indulgence, it will 
+not be the portrait of a precision.  Dumas was certainly not 
+thinking of himself, but of Planchet, when he put into the mouth of 
+d'Artagnan's old servant this excellent profession: "MONSIEUR, 
+J'ETAIS UNE DE CES BONNES PATES D'HOMMES QUE DIEU A FAIT POUR 
+S'ANIMER PENDANT UN CERTAIN TEMPS ET POUR TROUVER BONNES TOUTES 
+CHOSES QUI ACCOMPAGNENT LEUR SEJOUR SUR LA TERRE."  He was 
+thinking, as I say, of Planchet, to whom the words are aptly 
+fitted; but they were fitted also to Planchet's creator; and 
+perhaps this struck him as he wrote, for observe what follows: 
+"D'ARTAGNAN S'ASSIT ALORS PRES DE LA FENETRE, ET, CETTE PHILOSOPHIE 
+DE PLANCHET LUI AYANT PARU SOLIDE, IL Y REVA."  In a man who finds 
+all things good, you will scarce expect much zeal for negative 
+virtues: the active alone will have a charm for him; abstinence, 
+however wise, however kind, will always seem to such a judge 
+entirely mean and partly impious.  So with Dumas.  Chastity is not 
+near his heart; nor yet, to his own sore cost, that virtue of 
+frugality which is the armour of the artist.  Now, in the VICOMTE, 
+he had much to do with the contest of Fouquet and Colbert.  
+Historic justice should be all upon the side of Colbert, of 
+official honesty, and fiscal competence.
+
+And Dumas knew it well: three times at least he shows his 
+knowledge; once it is but flashed upon us and received with the 
+laughter of Fouquet himself, in the jesting controversy in the 
+gardens of Saint Mande; once it is touched on by Aramis in the 
+forest of Senart; in the end, it is set before us clearly in one 
+dignified speech of the triumphant Colbert.  But in Fouquet, the 
+waster, the lover of good cheer and wit and art, the swift 
+transactor of much business, "L'HOMME DE BRUIT, L'HOMME DE PLAISIR, 
+L'HOMME QUI N'EST QUE PARCEQUE LES AUTRES SONT," Dumas saw 
+something of himself and drew the figure the more tenderly.  It is 
+to me even touching to see how he insists on Fouquet's honour; not 
+seeing, you might think, that unflawed honour is impossible to 
+spendthrifts; but rather, perhaps, in the light of his own life, 
+seeing it too well, and clinging the more to what was left.  Honour 
+can survive a wound; it can live and thrive without a member.  The 
+man rebounds from his disgrace; he begins fresh foundations on the 
+ruins of the old; and when his sword is broken, he will do 
+valiantly with his dagger.  So it is with Fouquet in the book; so 
+it was with Dumas on the battlefield of life.
+
+To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the 
+man; but perhaps to sing its praises is scarcely to be called 
+morality in the writer.  And it is elsewhere, it is in the 
+character of d'Artagnan, that we must look for that spirit of 
+morality, which is one of the chief merits of the book, makes one 
+of the main joys of its perusal, and sets it high above more 
+popular rivals.  Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too 
+much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but 
+d'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and 
+upright, that he takes the heart by storm.  There is nothing of the 
+copy-book about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his 
+fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no 
+district visitor - no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void 
+of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings 
+true like a good sovereign.  Readers who have approached the 
+VICOMTE, not across country, but by the legitimate, five-volumed 
+avenue of the MOUSQUETAIRES and VINGT ANS APRES, will not have 
+forgotten d'Artagnan's ungentlemanly and perfectly improbable trick 
+upon Milady.  What a pleasure it is, then, what a reward, and how 
+agreeable a lesson, to see the old captain humble himself to the 
+son of the man whom he had personated!  Here, and throughout, if I 
+am to choose virtues for myself or my friends, let me choose the 
+virtues of d'Artagnan.  I do not say there is no character as well 
+drawn in Shakespeare; I do say there is none that I love so wholly.  
+There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions - 
+eyes of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in 
+our most private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our 
+witnesses and judges.  And among these, even if you should think me 
+childish, I must count my d'Artagnan - not d'Artagnan of the 
+memoirs whom Thackeray pretended to prefer - a preference, I take 
+the freedom of saying, in which he stands alone; not the d'Artagnan 
+of flesh and blood, but him of the ink and paper; not Nature's, but 
+Dumas's.  And this is the particular crown and triumph of the 
+artist - not to be true merely, but to be lovable; not simply to 
+convince, but to enchant.
+
+There is yet another point in the VICOMTE which I find 
+incomparable.  I can recall no other work of the imagination in 
+which the end of life is represented with so nice a tact.  I was 
+asked the other day if Dumas made me laugh or cry.  Well in this my 
+late fifth reading of the VICOMTE, I did laugh once at the small 
+Coquelin de Voliere business, and was perhaps a thought surprised 
+at having done so: to make up for it, I smiled continually.  But 
+for tears, I do not know.  If you put a pistol to my throat, I must 
+own the tale trips upon a very airy foot - within a measurable 
+distance of unreality; and for those who like the big guns to be 
+discharged and the great passions to appear authentically, it may 
+even seem inadequate from first to last.  Not so to me; I cannot 
+count that a poor dinner, or a poor book, where I meet with those I 
+love; and, above all, in this last volume, I find a singular charm 
+of spirit.  It breathes a pleasant and a tonic sadness, always 
+brave, never hysterical.  Upon the crowded, noisy life of this long 
+tale, evening gradually falls; and the lights are extinguished, and 
+the heroes pass away one by one.  One by one they go, and not a 
+regret embitters their departure; the young succeed them in their 
+places, Louis Quatorze is swelling larger and shining broader, 
+another generation and another France dawn on the horizon; but for 
+us and these old men whom we have loved so long, the inevitable end 
+draws near and is welcome.  To read this well is to anticipate 
+experience.  Ah, if only when these hours of the long shadows fall 
+for us in reality and not in figure, we may hope to face them with 
+a mind as quiet!
+
+But my paper is running out; the siege guns are firing on the Dutch 
+frontier; and I must say adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade 
+fallen on the field of glory.  ADIEU - rather AU REVOIR!  Yet a 
+sixth time, dearest d'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take horse 
+together for Belle Isle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
+
+
+IN anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process 
+itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a 
+book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, 
+our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, 
+incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.  The words, if the 
+book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the 
+noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself 
+in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.  It was for this last 
+pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in 
+the bright, troubled period of boyhood.  Eloquence and thought, 
+character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we 
+dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for 
+truffles.  For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old 
+wayside inn where, "towards the close of the year 17-," several 
+gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls.  A friend of 
+mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to 
+windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding 
+along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate.  This was further 
+afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed 
+altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected.  
+Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would 
+do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish.  I can still hear 
+that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and 
+the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of 
+John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "post-chaise," the 
+"great North road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like 
+poetry.  One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, 
+we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or 
+thought, but for some quality of the brute incident.  That quality 
+was not mere bloodshed or wonder.  Although each of these was 
+welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read 
+depended on something different from either.  My elders used to 
+read novels aloud; and I can still remember four different passages 
+which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting 
+pleasure.  One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable 
+opening of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT: it was no wonder I was pleased 
+with that.  The other three still remain unidentified.  One is a 
+little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people 
+groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door 
+of a sickroom.  In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking 
+in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and 
+the figures of the dancers as they moved.  This was the most 
+sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is 
+somewhat deaf to the sentimental.  In the last, a poet, who had 
+been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-
+beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck. 
+(8)  Different as they are, all these early favourites have a 
+common note - they have all a touch of the romantic.
+
+Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.  
+The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts - the active and 
+the passive.  Now we are conscious of a great command over our 
+destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking 
+wave, and dashed we know not how into the future.  Now we are 
+pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings.  
+It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the 
+more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant.  
+Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it 
+high.  There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not 
+immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human 
+will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; 
+where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, 
+but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and 
+hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and 
+of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the 
+shock of arms or the diplomacy of life.  With such material as this 
+it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists 
+solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the 
+dissemination of the human conscience.  But it is possible to 
+build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most 
+lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.
+
+One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events 
+and places.  The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to 
+sit there.  One place suggests work, another idleness, a third 
+early rising and long rambles in the dew.  The effect of night, of 
+any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, 
+of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anonymous 
+desires and pleasures.  Something, we feel, should happen; we know 
+not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.  And many of the happiest 
+hours of life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of 
+the place and moment.  It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low 
+rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly torture and 
+delight me.  Something must have happened in such places, and 
+perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I 
+tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, 
+just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story.  Some places 
+speak distinctly.  Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; 
+certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set 
+apart for shipwreck.  Other spots again seem to abide their 
+destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, "miching mallecho."  The inn 
+at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and silent, 
+eddying river - though it is known already as the place where Keats 
+wrote some of his ENDYMION and Nelson parted from his Emma - still 
+seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend.  Within these 
+ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business 
+smoulders, waiting for its hour.  The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's 
+Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.  There it stands, apart 
+from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half 
+inland, half marine - in front
+
+the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her 
+anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.  Americans seek it 
+already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the 
+beginning of the ANTIQUARY.  But you need not tell me - that is not 
+all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which 
+must express the meaning of that inn more fully.  So it is with 
+names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and 
+inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some 
+quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold.  How 
+many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; 
+how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, 
+and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places 
+have we not drawn near, with express intimations - "here my destiny 
+awaits me" - and we have but dined there and passed on!  I have 
+lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the 
+heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify the 
+place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me 
+again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, 
+nothing befell me in either worth remark.  The man or the hour had 
+not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the 
+Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a 
+horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green 
+shutters of the inn at Burford. (9)
+
+Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively 
+literature has to count.  The desire for knowledge, I had almost 
+added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this 
+demand for fit and striking incident.  The dullest of clowns tells, 
+or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses 
+invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, 
+joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful 
+circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation 
+and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men.  His stories 
+may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is 
+to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the 
+ideal laws of the day-dream.  The right kind of thing should fall 
+out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should 
+follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, 
+but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like 
+notes in music.  The threads of a story come from time to time 
+together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from 
+time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which 
+stamps the story home like an illustration.  Crusoe recoiling from 
+the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses 
+bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his 
+ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and each 
+has been printed on the mind's eye for ever.  Other things we may 
+forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we 
+may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it was ingenious 
+and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of 
+truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for 
+sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind 
+that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression.  
+This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, 
+thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be 
+remarkably striking to the mind's eye.  This is the highest and 
+hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, 
+equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own 
+right, the quality of epics.  Compared with this, all other 
+purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely 
+philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble 
+in result.  It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or 
+to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to 
+seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with 
+a legend.  It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most 
+cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit; 
+it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of 
+Ajax or of Hamlet.  The first is literature, but the second is 
+something besides, for it is likewise art.
+
+English people of the present day (10) are apt, I know not why, to 
+look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for 
+the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate.  It is 
+thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least 
+with a very dull one.  Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain 
+interest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of 
+human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable 
+to the words and air of SANDY'S MULL, preserved among the 
+infinitesimal occurrences recorded.  Some people work, in this 
+manner, with even a strong touch.  Mr. Trollope's inimitable 
+clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection.  But even 
+Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.  
+Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnotte 
+dallying in the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, 
+epically conceived, fitly embodying a crisis.  Or again look at 
+Thackeray.  If Rawdon Crawley's blow were not delivered, VANITY 
+FAIR would cease to be a work of art.  That scene is the chief 
+ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of energy from Rawdon's 
+fist is the reward and consolation of the reader.  The end of 
+ESMOND is a yet wider excursion from the author's customary fields; 
+the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the great and wily English 
+borrower has here borrowed from the great, unblushing French thief; 
+as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the 
+sword rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, martial 
+note.  But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the 
+necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of 
+ROBINSON CRUSOE with the discredit of CLARISSA HARLOWE.  CLARISSA 
+is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great 
+canvas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art.  It contains 
+wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and 
+insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the 
+death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial, the last 
+days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, 
+between the Elizabethans and Byron himself.  And yet a little story 
+of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a 
+thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of 
+humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on 
+from edition to edition, ever young, while CLARISSA lies upon the 
+shelves unread.  A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-
+five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a 
+chapter of ROBINSON read aloud in a farm kitchen.  Up to that 
+moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left 
+that farm another man.  There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine 
+day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for 
+money and enjoyed at pleasure.  Down he sat that day, painfully 
+learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book.  It had 
+been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in 
+English.  Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, 
+and with entire delight, read ROBINSON.  It is like the story of a 
+love-chase.  If he had heard a letter from CLARISSA, would he have 
+been fired with the same chivalrous ardour?  I wonder.  Yet 
+CLARISSA has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone 
+excepted - pictorial or picture-making romance.  While ROBINSON 
+depends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of 
+its readers, on the charm of circumstance.
+
+In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and 
+the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall 
+together by a common and organic law.  Situation is animated with 
+passion, passion clothed upon with situation.  Neither exists for 
+itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the other.  This is high 
+art; and not only the highest art possible in words, but the 
+highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and 
+diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure.  Such are epics, 
+and the few prose tales that have the epic weight.  But as from a 
+school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are 
+ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or 
+subordinated to romance.  There is one book, for example, more 
+generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and 
+still delights in age - I mean the ARABIAN NIGHTS - where you shall 
+look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest.  No human face 
+or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, 
+sorcerers and beggarmen.  Adventure, on the most naked terms, 
+furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough.  Dumas 
+approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian authors 
+in the purely material charm of some of his romances.  The early 
+part of MONTE CRISTO, down to the finding of the treasure, is a 
+piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared 
+these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing 
+of packthread and Dantes little more than a name.  The sequel is 
+one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as 
+for these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume 
+extant where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of 
+romance.  It is very thin and light to be sure, as on a high 
+mountain; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion.  I saw 
+the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting 
+forth on a second or third voyage into MONTE CRISTO.  Here are 
+stories which powerfully affect the reader, which can he reperused 
+at any age, and where the characters are no more than puppets.  The 
+bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their springs are an 
+open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with 
+bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures.  And the 
+point may be illustrated still further.  The last interview between 
+Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure drama; more than that, it is the 
+strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue.  Their 
+first meeting by the river, on the other hand, is pure romance; it 
+has nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy 
+or maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change.  And yet 
+I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these 
+passages.  Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each 
+capital in its order: in the one, human passion, deep calling unto 
+deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the second, according 
+circumstances, like instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial 
+but desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for ourselves; 
+and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give 
+the preference to either.  The one may ask more genius - I do not 
+say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the 
+memory.
+
+True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things.  It 
+reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not 
+refuse the most pedestrian realism.  ROBINSON CRUSOE is as 
+realistic as it is romantic; both qualities are pushed to an 
+extreme, and neither suffers.  Nor does romance depend upon the 
+material importance of the incidents.  To deal with strong and 
+deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure 
+with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the 
+disgrace.  The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa 
+is a very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous 
+stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and 
+stirring an impression of adventure.  It was the scene of Crusoe at 
+the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith.  
+Nor is the fact surprising.  Every single article the castaway 
+recovers from the hulk is "a joy for ever" to the man who reads of 
+them.  They are the things that should be found, and the bare 
+enumeration stirs the blood.  I found a glimmer of the same 
+interest the other day in a new book, THE SAILOR'S SWEETHEART, by 
+Mr. Clark Russell.  The whole business of the brig MORNING STAR is 
+very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the 
+books and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat.  
+We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest 
+of treasure trove.  But even treasure trove can be made dull.  
+There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of 
+goods that fell to the lot of the SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, that 
+dreary family.  They found article after article, creature after 
+creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole 
+consignment; but no informing taste had presided over the 
+selection, there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these 
+riches left the fancy cold.  The box of goods in Verne's MYSTERIOUS 
+ISLAND is another case in point: there was no gusto and no glamour 
+about that; it might have come from a shop.  But the two hundred 
+and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the MORNING STAR 
+fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of 
+secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from 
+that discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; 
+and I was made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to 
+be.
+
+To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must 
+bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art.  No art 
+produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in 
+the theatre; and while we read a story, we sit wavering between two 
+minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the 
+performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with 
+the characters.  This last is the triumph of romantic story-
+telling: when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the 
+scene is a good scene.  Now in character-studies the pleasure that 
+we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at 
+incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with 
+courage, suffering or virtue.  But the characters are still 
+themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, 
+the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do 
+they thrust us back into our place as a spectator.  I cannot 
+identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, 
+for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them.  It is not 
+character but incident that woos us out of our reserve.  Something 
+happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some 
+situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in 
+the story with enticing and appropriate details.  Then we forget 
+the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into 
+the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, 
+and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.  It is not 
+only pleasurable things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there 
+are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of 
+our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be 
+cheated, wounded or calumniated.  It is thus possible to construct 
+a story, even of tragic import, in which every incident, detail and 
+trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts.  
+Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there 
+that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the 
+game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his 
+heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall 
+it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is 
+called romance.
+
+Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics.  THE LADY 
+OF THE LAKE has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the 
+inherent fitness and desirability of the tale.  It is just such a 
+story as a man would make up for himself, walking, in the best 
+health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in.  
+Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly 
+verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; 
+hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and 
+adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, 
+not unworthy of that beautiful name, THE LADY OF THE LAKE, or that 
+direct, romantic opening - one of the most spirited and poetical in 
+literature - "The stag at eve had drunk his fill."  The same 
+strength and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels.  
+In that ill-written, ragged book, THE PIRATE, the figure of 
+Cleveland - cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of 
+Dunrossness - moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish 
+words on his tongue, among the simple islanders - singing a 
+serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress - is conceived 
+in the very highest manner of romantic invention.  The words of his 
+song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a 
+lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which 
+the tale is built.  IN GUY MANNERING, again, every incident is 
+delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram 
+lands at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.
+
+"I remember the tune well," he says, "though I cannot guess what 
+should at present so strongly recall it to my memory."  He took his 
+flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody.  Apparently 
+the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel.  She 
+immediately took up the song -
+
+" 'Are these the links of Forth, she said;
+Or are they the crooks of Dee,
+Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
+That I so fain would see?'
+
+" 'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.'"
+
+On this quotation two remarks fall to be made.  First, as an 
+instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the 
+flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon for 
+omission.  Miss Braddon's idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea 
+of a wooden leg, were something strange to have expounded.  As a 
+matter of personal experience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram 
+on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, 
+and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes 
+that continue to ring in the mind after the book is laid aside.  
+The second point is still more curious.  The, reader will observe a 
+mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me.  Well, here is how 
+it runs in the original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring 
+about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the 
+castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen."  A man who gave 
+in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper.  
+Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the 
+"damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation 
+to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of 
+trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail 
+foremost, into a single shambling sentence.  It is not merely bad 
+English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.
+
+Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a 
+strong light upon the subject of this paper.  For here we have a 
+man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty 
+and charm the romantic junctures of his story; and we find him 
+utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the 
+technical matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but 
+frequently wrong in points of drama.  In character parts, indeed, 
+and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and 
+truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of his 
+heroes have already wearied two generations of readers.  At times 
+his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with 
+a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading 
+wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of 
+words.  The man who could conceive and write the character of 
+Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written 
+it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts.  How 
+comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, 
+inarticulate twaddle?
+
+It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very 
+quality of his surprising merits.  As his books are play to the 
+reader, so were they play to him.  He conjured up the romantic with 
+delight, but he had hardly patience to describe it.  He was a great 
+day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but 
+hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at 
+all.  He pleased himself, and so he pleases us.  Of the pleasures 
+of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils and 
+distresses never man knew less.  A great romantic - an idle child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE (11)
+
+
+WE have recently (12) enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, 
+in some detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. 
+Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; two men certainly of very 
+different calibre: Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning of 
+fence, so scrupulous of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so 
+friendly, with so persuasive and humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James 
+the very type of the deliberate artist, Mr. Besant the 
+impersonation of good nature.  That such doctors should differ will 
+excite no great surprise; but one point in which they seem to agree 
+fills me, I confess, with wonder.  For they are both content to 
+talk about the "art of fiction"; and Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly 
+bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to the "art 
+of poetry."  By the art of poetry he can mean nothing but the art 
+of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of 
+prose.  For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to 
+call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; 
+present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too 
+seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the 
+ode and epic.  Fiction is the same case; it is no substantive art, 
+but an element which enters largely into all the arts but 
+architecture.  Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, 
+all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth 
+or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into 
+the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's 
+charming essay.  The art of fiction, then, regarded as a 
+definition, is both too ample and too scanty.  Let me suggest 
+another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had 
+in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative.
+
+But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English 
+novel," the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author 
+of the most pleasing novel on that roll, ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS 
+OF MEN, the desire is natural enough.  I can conceive, then, that 
+he would hasten to propose two additions, and read thus: the art of 
+FICTITIOUS narrative IN PROSE.
+
+Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to 
+be denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and 
+gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of 
+literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it 
+is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground 
+then binding.  Why, then, are we to add "in prose"?  THE ODYSSEY 
+appears to me the best of romances; THE LADY OF THE LAKE to stand 
+high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to 
+contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than 
+the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie.  Whether a narrative be written in 
+blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon 
+or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art 
+of narrative must be equally observed.  The choice of a noble and 
+swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the 
+same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured 
+verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of 
+dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words.  If you 
+are to refuse DON JUAN, it is hard to see why you should include 
+ZANONI or (to bracket works of very different value) THE SCARLET 
+LETTER; and by what discrimination are you to open your doors TO 
+THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS and close them on THE FAERY QUEEN?  To bring 
+things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum.  
+A narrative called PARADISE LOST was written in English verse by 
+one John Milton; what was it then?  It was next translated by 
+Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then?  Lastly, the 
+French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George 
+Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an English novel; and, 
+in the name of clearness, what was it then?
+
+But, once more, why should we add "fictitious"?  The reason why is 
+obvious.  The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not 
+want for weight.  The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, 
+whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real 
+series of events or of an imaginary series.  Boswell's LIFE OF 
+JOHNSON (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to 
+the same technical manoeuvres as (let us say) TOM JONES: the clear 
+conception of certain characters of man, the choice and 
+presentation of certain incidents out of a great number that 
+offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation of a 
+certain key in dialogue.  In which these things are done with the 
+more art - in which with the greater air of nature - readers will 
+differently judge.  Boswell's is, indeed, a very special case, and 
+almost a generic; but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every 
+biography with any salt of life, it is in every history where 
+events and men, rather than ideas, are presented - in Tacitus, in 
+Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay - that the novelist will find 
+many of his own methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled.  
+He will find besides that he, who is free - who has the right to 
+invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more 
+precious still, of wholesale omission - is frequently defeated, 
+and, with all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of 
+reality and passion.  Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming 
+fervour on the sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful 
+examination truth will seem a word of very debateable propriety, 
+not only for the labours of the novelist, but for those of the 
+historian.  No art - to use the daring phrase of Mr. James - can 
+successfully "compete with life"; and the art that seeks to do so 
+is condemned to perish MONTIBUS AVIIS.  Life goes before us, 
+infinite in complication; attended by the most various and 
+surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to 
+the mind - the seat of wonder, to the touch - so thrillingly 
+delicate, and to the belly - so imperious when starved.  It 
+combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material, 
+not of one art only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary 
+trifling with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a 
+shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but 
+drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of 
+virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems.  To 
+"compete with life," whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions 
+and diseases waste and slay us - to compete with the flavour of 
+wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness 
+of death and separation - here is, indeed, a projected escalade of 
+heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat, 
+armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed 
+with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the 
+insufferable sun.  No art is true in this sense: none can "compete 
+with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, 
+but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even 
+when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are 
+surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be 
+quickened.  And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening 
+of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these 
+phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, 
+convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of 
+life, can torture and slay.
+
+What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the 
+source of its power?  The whole secret is that no art does "compete 
+with life."  Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to 
+half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality.  
+The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from 
+the gross, coloured and mobile nature at our feet, and regard 
+instead a certain figmentary abstraction.  Geometry will tell us of 
+a circle, a thing never seen in nature; asked about a green circle 
+or an iron circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth.  So with the 
+arts.  Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives 
+up truth of colour, as it had already given up relief and movement; 
+and instead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme of harmonious 
+tints.  Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of 
+narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead 
+an independent and creative aim.  So far as it imitates at all, it 
+imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but 
+the emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells 
+of them.  The real art that dealt with life directly was that of 
+the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire.  
+Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in 
+making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in 
+capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of 
+them towards a common end.  For the welter of impressions, all 
+forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a 
+certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly 
+represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the 
+same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or 
+like the graduated tints in a good picture.  From all its chapters, 
+from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel 
+echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to 
+this must every incident and character contribute; the style must 
+have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a 
+word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, 
+and (I had almost said) fuller without it.  Life is monstrous, 
+infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in 
+comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and 
+emasculate.  Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate 
+thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of 
+experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.  
+A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a 
+proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work 
+of art.  Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both 
+inhere in nature, neither represents it.  The novel, which is a 
+work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are 
+forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but 
+by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and 
+significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.
+
+The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible 
+magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these 
+is legion; and with each new subject - for here again I must differ 
+by the whole width of heaven from Mr. James - the true artist will 
+vary his method and change the point of attack.  That which was in 
+one case an excellence, will become a defect in another; what was 
+the making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.  
+First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for 
+itself.  I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are 
+fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which appeals to 
+certain almost sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; 
+second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual 
+appreciation of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant motives; 
+and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as 
+the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral 
+judgment.
+
+And first for the novel of adventure.  Mr. James refers, with 
+singular generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for 
+hidden treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather 
+startling words.  In this book he misses what he calls the "immense 
+luxury" of being able to quarrel with his author.  The luxury, to 
+most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale 
+as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and 
+find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside.  
+Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason.  He cannot criticise 
+the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing it with 
+another work, "I HAVE BEEN A CHILD, BUT I HAVE NEVER BEEN ON A 
+QUEST FOR BURIED TREASURE."  Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for 
+if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be 
+demonstrated that he has never been a child.  There never was a 
+child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, 
+and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has 
+fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little 
+hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and 
+triumphantly protected innocence and beauty.  Elsewhere in his 
+essay Mr. James has protested with excellent reason against too 
+narrow a conception of experience; for the born artist, he 
+contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into 
+revelations; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of 
+cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those 
+things which he has only wished to do, than of those which he has 
+done.  Desire is a wonderful telescope, and Pisgah the best 
+observatory.  Now, while it is true that neither Mr. James nor the 
+author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, gone 
+questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired 
+and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-
+dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning 
+and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been 
+frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to 
+the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the 
+building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream.  Character 
+to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair 
+of wide trousers and a liberal complement of pistols.  The author, 
+for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was himself more 
+or less grown up, admitted character, within certain limits, into 
+his design; but only within certain limits.  Had the same puppets 
+figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very 
+different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the 
+characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities - 
+the warlike and formidable.  So as they appear insidious in deceit 
+and fatal in the combat, they have served their end.  Danger is the 
+matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with 
+which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far 
+as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of 
+fear.  To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of 
+moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of 
+material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale.  The 
+stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the 
+scent.
+
+The novel of character has this difference from all others: that it 
+requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case 
+of GIL BLAS, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure.  It 
+turns on the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be 
+sure, embodied in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being 
+tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may 
+be statically shown.  As they enter, so they may go out; they must 
+be consistent, but they need not grow.  Here Mr. James will 
+recognise the note of much of his own work: he treats, for the most 
+part, the statics of character, studying it at rest or only gently 
+moved; and, with his usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he 
+avoids those stronger passions which would deform the attitudes he 
+loves to study, and change his sitters from the humorists of 
+ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more emotional 
+moments.  In his recent AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO, so just in 
+conception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is 
+indeed employed; but observe that it is not displayed.  Even in the 
+heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; and the great 
+struggle, the true tragedy, the SCENE-A-FAIRE passes unseen behind 
+the panels of a locked door.  The delectable invention of the young 
+visitor is introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. 
+James, true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion.  I 
+trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little 
+masterpiece.  I mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of 
+novel, and that it would have been very differently conceived and 
+treated had it belonged to that other marked class, of which I now 
+proceed to speak.
+
+I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because 
+it enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly 
+English misconception.  It is sometimes supposed that the drama 
+consists of incident.  It consists of passion, which gives the 
+actor his opportunity; and that passion must progressively 
+increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to 
+carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of interest and 
+emotion.  A good serious play must therefore be founded on one of 
+the passionate CRUCES of life, where duty and inclination come 
+nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for that 
+reason, the dramatic novel.  I will instance a few worthy 
+specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith's RHODA 
+FLEMING, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print, (13) 
+and hunted for at bookstalls like an Aldine; Hardy's PAIR OF BLUE 
+EYES; and two of Charles Reade's, GRIFFITH GAUNT and the DOUBLE 
+MARRIAGE, originally called WHITE LIES, and founded (by an accident 
+quaintly favourable to my nomenclature) on a play by Maquet, the 
+partner of the great Dumas.  In this kind of novel the closed door 
+of THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO must be broken open; passion must 
+appear upon the scene and utter its last word; passion is the be-
+all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the protagonist and 
+the DEUS EX MACHINA in one.  The characters may come anyhow upon 
+the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they leave 
+it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by 
+passion.  It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to 
+depict a full-length character, and then behold it melt and change 
+in the furnace of emotion.
+
+But there is no obligation of the sort; nice portraiture is not 
+required; and we are content to accept mere abstract types, so they 
+be strongly and sincerely moved.  A novel of this class may be even 
+great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great, 
+because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the 
+impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second 
+class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue 
+has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind 
+directed to passion alone.  Cleverness again, which has its fair 
+field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this 
+more solemn theatre.  A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of 
+the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us like an 
+insincerity.  All should be plain, all straightforward to the end.  
+Hence it is that, in RHODA FLEMING, Mrs. Lovell raises such 
+resentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are 
+too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings.  
+Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after having 
+begun the DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS in terms of strong if somewhat 
+swollen passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's 
+clock.  Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of 
+character; they are out of place in the high society of the 
+passions; when the passions are introduced in art at their full 
+height, we look to see them, not baffled and impotently striving, 
+as in life, but towering above circumstance and acting substitutes 
+for fate.
+
+And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to 
+intervene.  To much of what I have said he would apparently demur; 
+in much he would, somewhat impatiently, acquiesce.  It may be true; 
+but it is not what he desired to say or to hear said.  He spoke of 
+the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes, 
+the palette, and the north light.  He uttered his views in the tone 
+and for the ear of good society; I, with the emphasis and 
+technicalities of the obtrusive student.  But the point, I may 
+reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful 
+advice to the young writer.  And the young writer will not so much 
+be helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its 
+highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms.  
+The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, 
+whether of character or passion; carefully construct his plot so 
+that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every 
+property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or 
+contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, 
+the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue; 
+suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch 
+the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in 
+parlours, but with a single eye to the degree of passion he may be 
+called on to express; and allow neither himself in the narrative 
+nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one 
+sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story 
+or the discussion of the problem involved.  Let him not regret if 
+this shortens his book; it will be better so; for to add irrelevant 
+matter is not to lengthen but to bury.  Let him not mind if he miss 
+a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of 
+the one he has chosen.  Let him not care particularly if he miss 
+the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's 
+manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment.  
+These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet 
+have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better 
+depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance.  In this 
+age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the abstract, 
+the great books of the past, the brave men that lived before 
+Shakespeare and before Balzac.  And as the root of the whole 
+matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of 
+life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some 
+side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant 
+simplicity.  For although, in great men, working upon great 
+motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity, yet 
+underneath appearances the truth remains unchanged: that 
+simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their 
+excellence.
+
+
+II
+
+
+Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly 
+the lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; 
+and none ever couched a lance with narrower convictions.  His own 
+work and those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he 
+is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance 
+in art like what there is in science; he thinks of past things as 
+radically dead; he thinks a form can be outlived: a strange 
+immersion in his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the 
+history of the race!  Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works 
+(could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of this 
+illusion would be dispelled.  For while he holds all the poor 
+little orthodoxies of the day - no poorer and no smaller than those 
+of yesterday or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as 
+they are exclusive - the living quality of much that he has done is 
+of a contrary, I had almost said of a heretical, complexion.  A 
+man, as I read him, of an originally strong romantic bent - a 
+certain glow of romance still resides in many of his books, and 
+lends them their distinction.  As by accident he runs out and 
+revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as often as not, that 
+his reader rejoices - justly, as I contend.  For in all this 
+excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central 
+human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect: I 
+mean himself?  A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the 
+appearances of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other 
+passions and aspirations than those he loves to draw.  And why 
+should he suppress himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel 
+Barkers?  The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules 
+and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape, 
+and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher 
+power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw 
+the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of 
+society instead of the romance of man.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+(1) 1881.
+
+(2) Written for the "Book" of the Edinburgh University Union Fancy 
+Fair.
+
+(3) Professor Tait's laboratory assistant.
+
+(4) In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a 
+flaw SUB VOCE Beacon.  In its express, technical sense, a beacon 
+may be defined as "a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted."
+
+(5) The late Fleeming Jenkin.
+
+(6) This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in THE 
+SPECTATOR.
+
+(7) Waiter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under 
+which last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago.  Glory 
+was his aim and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of 
+Caldecott, now lies among the treasures of the nation.
+
+(8) Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of 
+Charles Kingsley.
+
+(9) Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat 
+with my own hands in KIDNAPPED.  Some day, perhaps, I may try a 
+rattle at the shutters.
+
+(10) 1882.
+
+(11) This paper, which does not otherwise fit the present volume, 
+is reprinted here as the proper continuation of the last.
+
+(12) 1884
+
+(13) Now no longer so, thank Heaven!
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Memories and Portraits
+
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