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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Memories and Portraits, by Robert Louis
Stevenson
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Memories and Portraits
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: October 22, 2010 [eBook #381]
First posted: November 27, 1995
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto and Windus edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h2>MEMORIES AND<br />
PORTRAITS</h2>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">by</span><br />
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
<img alt=
"Graphic"
title=
"Graphic"
src="images/p0s.jpg" />
</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">fine-paper
edition</span></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="smcap">london</span><br />
CHATTO & WINDUS<br />
1912</p>
<p style="text-align: center">Printed by <span
class="smcap">Ballantyne</span>, <span class="smcap">Hanson &
Co.</span><br />
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">to</span><br />
MY MOTHER<br />
<span class="smcap">in the</span><br />
<span class="smcap">name of past joy and present sorrow</span><br
/>
<i>I DEDICATE</i><br />
<span class="smcap">these memories and portraits</span></p>
<p><i>S.S.</i> “<i>Ludgate Hill</i>”<br />
<i>within sight of Cape
Race</i></p>
<h2>NOTE</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared
already in <i>The Cornhill</i>, <i>Longman’s</i>,
<i>Scribner</i>, <i>The English Illustrated</i>, <i>The Magazine
of Art</i>, <i>The Contemporary Review</i>; three are here in
print for the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what
may he regarded as a private circulation.</p>
<p style="text-align: right">R. L S.</p>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The foreigner at Home</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Some College Memories</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Old Morality</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A College Magazine</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">An Old Scotch Gardener</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Pastoral</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Manse</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Memories of an Islet</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Thomas Stevenson</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Talk and Talkers: First
Paper</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XI.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Talk and Talkers: Second
Paper</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XII.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Character of Dogs</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XIII.</p>
</td>
<td><p>“<span class="smcap">A Penny Plain and Twopence
Coloured</span>”</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XIV.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Gossip on a Novel of
Dumas’s</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XV.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Gossip on Romance</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p style="text-align: right">XVI.</p>
</td>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Humble Remonstrance</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2>CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME</h2>
<blockquote><p>“This is no my ain house;<br />
I ken by the biggin’ o’t.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Two recent books <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1"
class="citation">[1]</a> 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—<i>imperia in imperio</i>, foreign things at
home.</p>
<p>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 vassals 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 suffer 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <i>la trêve de Dieu</i>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <span
class="smcap">No</span>; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES <a name="citation15"></a><a
href="#footnote15" class="citation">[15]</a></h2>
<p>I am asked to write something (it is not specifically stated
what) to the profit and glory of my <i>Alma Mater</i>; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Alma Mater</i>; 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.</p>
<p>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
<a name="citation17"></a><a href="#footnote17"
class="citation">[17]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
east 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.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Gallo canente, spes redit,<br />
Aegris salus refunditur,<br />
Lapsis fides revertitur,”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER III. OLD MORTALITY</h2>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 off when people will
begin to count <i>Moll Flanders</i>, ay, or <i>The Country
Wife</i>, more wholesome and more pious diet than these
guide-books to consistent egoism.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <i>Là ci darem la mano</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>abandon</i>, 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: <i>mene</i>, <i>mene</i>; and
condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble
enough; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to
murmur.</p>
<p>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</p>
<blockquote><p> “In the vast cathedral
leave him;<br />
God accept him,<br />
Christ receive him!”</p>
</blockquote>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE</h2>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Vanity of Morals</i>: it was to have had a second
part, <i>The Vanity of Knowledge</i>; 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: <i>Cain</i>, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of
<i>Sordello</i>: <i>Robin Hood</i>, a tale in verse, took an
eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and
Morris: in <i>Monmouth</i>, 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 <i>The King’s
Pardon</i>, 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 <i>Book of
Snobs</i>. 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 <i>Semiramis</i>: <i>a Tragedy</i>, I have
observed on bookstalls under the <i>alias</i> of <i>Prince
Otto</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 life 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
<i>Comédie Humaine</i>. 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 <i>Courant</i>, and the day after was dashed lower
than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the
<i>Scotsman</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Alma Mater</i> (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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Shakespeare</i> 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.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER</h2>
<p>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
<i>Walker’s Lives</i> and <i>The Hind let Loose</i>.</p>
<p>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 <i>genius loci</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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>I am old and well stricken in
years</i>,” 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, “<i>That I wull</i>,
<i>mem</i>,” he would say, “<i>with pleasure</i>,
<i>for it is mair blessed to give than to
receive</i>.” 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
“<i>our wull was his pleasure</i>,” but yet reminding
us that he would do it “<i>with
feelin’s</i>,”—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.”</p>
<p>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
“<i>proud</i>” 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.</p>
<p>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 “<i>finer o’ them</i>;” 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:
“<i>Paul may plant and Apollos may water</i>;” all
blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or
untimely frosts.</p>
<p>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. “<i>They are indeed wonderfu’
creatures</i>, <i>mem</i>,” he said once.
“<i>They just mind me o’ what the Queen of Sheba said
to Solomon—and I think she said it wi’ a
sigh</i>,—‘<i>The half of it hath not been told unto
me</i>.’”</p>
<p>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,” “<i>Eh</i>, <i>mem</i>,” replies
Robert, “<i>But I wouldnae say that</i>, <i>for I think
he’s just a most deservin’
gentleman</i>.” 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: “<i>Eh</i>,
<i>but</i>, <i>gentlemen</i>, <i>I wad hae nae mair words about
it</i>!” 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,</p>
<blockquote><p>“Annihilating all that’s made<br />
To a green thought in a green shade.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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: “<i>He was real
pleased wi’ it at first</i>, <i>but I think he’s got
a kind o’ tired o’ it now</i>”—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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL</h2>
<p>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 Écossais 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 <i>genius loci</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Once—I translate John’s Lallan, for I cannot do it
justice, being born <i>Britannis in montibus</i>, indeed, but
alas! <i>inerudito sæculo</i>—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.</p>
<p>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
<i>dilettanti</i> 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.</p>
<p>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-camp, 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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Thy foot He’ll not let slide, nor
will<br />
He slumber that thee keeps,”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this
<i>homunculus</i> or part-man of mine that walked about the
eighteenth century with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was in the way
of meeting other <i>homunculos</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>homunculos</i> 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 <i>Pirate</i> and the <i>Lord
of the Isles</i>; I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock, in the
fog, when the <i>Smeaton</i> 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, fleërs from before the legions of
Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on
Chaldæan 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. . . .</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET</h2>
<p>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
manœuvre, 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. <i>Glück und Unglück wird Gesang</i>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>I</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>“Delightful would it be to me to be in
<i>Uchd Ailiun</i><br />
On the pinnacle of a rock,<br />
That I might often see<br />
The face of the ocean;<br />
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,<br />
Source of happiness;<br />
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves<br />
Upon the rocks:<br />
At times at work without compulsion—<br />
This would be delightful;<br />
At times plucking dulse from the rocks<br />
At times at fishing.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve
hundred years before. And so might I have sung of
Earraid.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON—CIVIL ENGINEER</h3>
<p>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
<i>Dr. Jekyll</i>; what he had in his eye, what was esteemed in
Peru, where the volumes of the engineer.</p>
<p>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, <a name="citation84"></a><a href="#footnote84"
class="citation">[84]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 formulæ 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, <i>emeritus</i> 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.</p>
<p>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, <i>Guy Mannering</i> and <i>The Parent’s
Assistant</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS</h3>
<blockquote><p>Sir, we had a good talk.—<span
class="smcap">Johnson</span>.</p>
<p>As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every
idle silence.—<span class="smcap">Franklin</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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
æsthetic 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.</p>
<p>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 bond 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>entr’acte</i> 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 <i>The Flying Dutchman</i> (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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 effective, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>vim</i> of these impersonations, the strange scale of
language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major
Dyngwell—</p>
<blockquote><p>“As fast as a musician scatters sounds<br />
Out of an instrument”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Cockshot <a name="citation100"></a><a href="#footnote100"
class="citation">[100]</a> 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 <i>should</i>
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 be 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.</p>
<p>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—<i>proxime accessit</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XI. TALK AND TALKERS <a name="citation105"></a><a
href="#footnote105" class="citation">[105]</a></h2>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>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 primæval 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 be particularly exercised.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 is 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 <i>Life of
Christ</i> 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 <i>Othello</i> 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
<i>Othello</i> 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 <i>Othello</i>,” 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.</p>
<p>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, <i>a trait
d’union</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Egoist</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
commercing 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>tête-à-tête</i> 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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<i>je ne sais quoi de
généreux</i>.” 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> 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 <i>Sturm und Drang</i> is
closed.</p>
<p>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, off
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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, <a
name="citation128"></a><a href="#footnote128"
class="citation">[128]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED</h2>
<p>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
<i>Aladdin</i>, <i>The Red Rover</i>, <i>The Blind Boy</i>,
<i>The Old Oak Chest</i>, <i>The Wood Dæmon</i>, <i>Jack
Sheppard</i>, <i>The Miller and his Men</i>, <i>Der
Freischütz</i>, <i>The Smuggler</i>, <i>The Forest of
Bondy</i>, <i>Robin Hood</i>, <i>The Waterman</i>, <i>Richard
I.</i>, <i>My Poll and my Partner Joe</i>, <i>The Inchcape
Bell</i> (imperfect), and <i>Three-Fingered Jack</i>, <i>The
Terror of Jamaica</i>; and I have assisted others in the
illumination of <i>Maid of the Inn</i> and <i>The Battle of
Waterloo</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>crux</i> 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 <i>The Miller</i>, or <i>The Rover</i>, 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 <i>Arabian Entertainments</i> 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!</p>
<p>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 <i>The Blind
Boy</i>, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince and
once, I think, abducted, I know nothing. And <i>The Old Oak
Chest</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <i>The Floating Beacon</i>—why was that denied
me? or <i>The Wreck Ashore</i>? <i>Sixteen-String Jack</i>
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: <i>Lodoiska</i>, <i>Silver Palace</i>,
<i>Echo of Westminster Bridge</i>. Names, bare names, are
surely more to children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools
remember.</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>The scenery of Skeltdom—or, shall we say, the kingdom of
Transpontus?—had a prevailing character. Whether it
set forth Poland as in <i>The Blind Boy</i>, or Bohemia with
<i>The Miller and his Men</i>, or Italy with <i>The Old Oak
Chest</i>, 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
<i>Quercus Skeltica</i>—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 Hyères, 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 occidental 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. <span class="smcap">i</span>.
“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 <i>Der Freischütz</i> 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?</p>
<p>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: <i>Wreck Ashore</i> and <i>Sixteen-String
Jack</i>; 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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS’S</h2>
<p>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,
Molière, Montaigne, <i>The Egoist</i>, and the <i>Vicomte
de Bragelonne</i>, form the inner circle of my intimates.
Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances; <i>The
Pilgrim’s Progress</i> in the front rank, <i>The Bible in
Spain</i> 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</p>
<blockquote><p>“Their sometime selves the same throughout
the year,”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>Richard III.</i>, <i>Henry VI.</i>, <i>Titus
Andronicus</i>, and <i>All’s Well that Ends Well</i>; 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
Molière—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 <i>Guy Mannering</i>, <i>Rob Roy</i>, or
<i>Redgauntlet</i>, I have no means of guessing, having begun
young. But it is either four or five times that I have read
<i>The Egoist</i>, and either five or six that I have read the
<i>Vicomte de Bragelonne</i>.</p>
<p>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 <i>Vicomte</i> 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’Eyméric
and Lyodot—a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy, who
could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de Grêve, 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
<i>Vicomte</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Vicomte</i> 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 <i>Vicomte</i> with that of <i>Monte
Cristo</i>, or its own elder brother, the <i>Trois
Mousquetaires</i>, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.</p>
<p>To those who have already made acquaintance with the titular
hero in the pages of <i>Vingt Ans Après</i>, 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: “<i>Enfin</i>, <i>dit Miss
Stewart</i>,”—and it was of Bragelonne she
spoke—“<i>enfin il a fait quelquechose</i>:
<i>c’est</i>, <i>ma foi</i>! <i>bien
heureux</i>.” 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.</p>
<p>Or perhaps it is La Vallière that the reader of
<i>Vingt Ans Après</i> 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 “<i>Allons</i>, <i>aimez-moi
donc</i>,” 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 Vallière.
It is my only consolation that not one of all of them, except the
first, could have plucked at the moustache of
d’Artagnan.</p>
<p>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
Sénart; 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 unstrained or a more wholesome morality?</p>
<p>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 <i>Thousand and One Nights</i>, 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
<i>Vicomte de Bragelonne</i>. 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 <i>Vicomte</i> a reader who was in quest of what we
may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the
great eater, 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 precisian. 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: “<i>Monsieur</i>, <i>j’étais une
de ces bonnes pâtes d’hommes que Dieu a fait pour
s’animer pendant un certain temps et pour trouver bonnes
toutes choses qui accompagnent leur séjour sur la
terre</i>.” 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: “<i>D’Artagnan
s’assit alors près de la fenêtre</i>,
<i>et</i>, <i>cette philosophie de Planchet lui ayant paru
solide</i>, <i>il y rêva</i>.” 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 <i>Vicomte</i>, 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 Mandé; once it is touched on by
Aramis in the forest of Sénart; 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,
“<i>l’homme de bruit</i>, <i>l’homme de
plaisir</i>, <i>l’homme qui n’est que parceque les
autres sont</i>,” 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.</p>
<p>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
<i>Vicomte</i>, not across country, but by the legitimate,
five-volumed avenue of the <i>Mousquetaires</i> and <i>Vingt Ans
Après</i>, 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.</p>
<p>There is yet another point in the <i>Vicomte</i> 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
<i>Vicomte</i>, I did laugh once at the small Coquelin de
Volière 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!</p>
<p>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.
<i>Adieu</i>—rather <i>au revoir</i>! Yet a sixth
time, dearest d’Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and take
horse together for Belle Isle.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE</h2>
<p>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
<i>What will he Do with It</i>: 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. <a
name="citation153"></a><a href="#footnote153"
class="citation">[153]</a> Different as they are, all these
early favourites have a common note—they have all a touch
of the romantic.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Endymion</i> 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
<i>Antiquary</i>. 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. <a name="citation155"></a><a
href="#footnote155" class="citation">[155]</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>English people of the present day <a name="citation157"></a><a
href="#footnote157" class="citation">[157]</a> 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
<i>Sandy’s Mull</i>, 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, <i>Vanity
Fair</i> 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 <i>Esmond</i> 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
<i>Robinson Crusoe</i> with the discredit of <i>Clarissa
Harlowe</i>. <i>Clarissa</i> 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 <i>Clarissa</i> 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 <i>Robinson</i> 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 <i>Robinson</i>. It is like the story
of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from
<i>Clarissa</i>, would he have been fired with the same
chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet <i>Clarissa</i> has
every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone
excepted—pictorial or picture-making romance. While
<i>Robinson</i> depends, for the most part and with the
overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of
circumstance.</p>
<p>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 <i>Arabian Nights</i>—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 <i>Monte Cristo</i>, 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
Dantès 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
<i>Monte Cristo</i>. Here are stories which powerfully
affect the reader, which can be 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.</p>
<p>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. <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>
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, <i>The Sailor’s
Sweetheart</i>, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of
the brig <i>Morning Star</i> 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 <i>Swiss Family Robinson</i>,
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 <i>Mysterious Island</i> 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 <i>Morning Star</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 Eugène 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.</p>
<p>Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics.
<i>The Lady of the Lake</i> 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, <i>The Lady of the Lake</i>, 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, <i>The Pirate</i>, 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 <i>Guy
Mannering</i>, again, every incident is delightful to the
imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan
is a model instance of romantic method.</p>
<p>“‘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—</p>
<blockquote><p>“‘Are these the links of Forth, she
said;<br />
Or are they the crooks of Dee,<br />
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head<br />
That I so fain would see?’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“‘By heaven!’ said Bertram, ‘it is the
very ballad.’”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 be 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE <a
name="citation168a"></a><a href="#footnote168a"
class="citation">[168a]</a></h2>
<p>We have recently <a name="citation168b"></a><a
href="#footnote168b" class="citation">[168b]</a> 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.</p>
<p>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, <i>All
Sorts and Conditions of Men</i>, the desire is natural
enough. I can conceive, then, that he would hasten to
propose two additions, and read thus: the art of
<i>fictitious</i> narrative <i>in prose</i>.</p>
<p>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”? <i>The Odyssey</i> appears to
me the best of romances; <i>The Lady of the Lake</i> 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
<i>Don Juan</i>, it is hard to see why you should include
<i>Zanoni</i> or (to bracket works of very different value)
<i>The Scarlet Letter</i>; and by what discrimination are you to
open your doors to <i>The Pilgrim’s Progress</i> and close
them on <i>The Faery Queen</i>? To bring things closer
home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A
narrative called <i>Paradise Lost</i> 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?</p>
<p>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
<i>Life of Johnson</i> (a work of cunning and inimitable art)
owes its success to the same technical manœuvres as (let us
say) <i>Tom Jones</i>: 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 <i>montibus
aviis</i>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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>I have been a child</i>, <i>but I
have never been on a quest for buried treasure</i>.”
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Gil Blas</i>, 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 <i>Author of Beltraffio</i>, 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
<i>scène-à-faire</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>cruces</i>
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 <i>Rhoda
Fleming</i>, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,
<a name="citation178"></a><a href="#footnote178"
class="citation">[178]</a> and hunted for at bookstalls like an
Aldine; Hardy’s <i>Pair of Blue Eyes</i>; and two of
Charles Reade’s, <i>Griffith Gaunt</i> and the <i>Double
Marriage</i>, originally called <i>White Lies</i>, 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 <i>The Author of Beltraffio</i> 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 <i>deus ex
machinâ</i> 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 <i>Rhoda Fleming</i>, 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 <i>Duchesse de
Langeais</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">Printed by <span
class="smcap">Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.</span><br />
Edinburgh & London</p>
<h2>Footnotes:</h2>
<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1"
class="footnote">[1]</a> 1881.</p>
<p><a name="footnote15"></a><a href="#citation15"
class="footnote">[15]</a> Written for the “Book” of
the Edinburgh University Union Fancy Fair.</p>
<p><a name="footnote17"></a><a href="#citation17"
class="footnote">[17]</a> Professor Tait’s laboratory
assistant.</p>
<p><a name="footnote84"></a><a href="#citation84"
class="footnote">[84]</a> In Dr. Murray’s admirable
new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw <i>sub voce</i>
Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be
defined as “a founded, artificial sea-mark, not
lighted.”</p>
<p><a name="footnote100"></a><a href="#citation100"
class="footnote">[100]</a> The late Fleeming Jenkin.</p>
<p><a name="footnote105"></a><a href="#citation105"
class="footnote">[105]</a> This sequel was called forth by
an excellent article in <i>The Spectator</i>.</p>
<p><a name="footnote128"></a><a href="#citation128"
class="footnote">[128]</a> 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.</p>
<p><a name="footnote153"></a><a href="#citation153"
class="footnote">[153]</a> Since traced by many obliging
correspondents to the gallery of Charles Kingsley.</p>
<p><a name="footnote155"></a><a href="#citation155"
class="footnote">[155]</a> Since the above was written I
have tried to launch the boat with my own hands in
<i>Kidnapped</i>. Some day, perhaps, I may try a rattle at
the shutters.</p>
<p><a name="footnote157"></a><a href="#citation157"
class="footnote">[157]</a> 1882.</p>
<p><a name="footnote168a"></a><a href="#citation168a"
class="footnote">[168a]</a> This paper, which does not
otherwise fit the present volume, is reprinted here as the proper
continuation of the last.</p>
<p><a name="footnote168b"></a><a href="#citation168b"
class="footnote">[168b]</a> 1884</p>
<p><a name="footnote178"></a><a href="#citation178"
class="footnote">[178]</a> Now no longer so, thank
Heaven!</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS***</p>
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