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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Virginibus Puerisque, 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: Virginibus Puerisque
and Other Papers
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: November 6, 2012 [eBook #386]
[This book was first posted May 23, 1995]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1897 Chatto & Windus edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1>VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE AND OTHER PAPERS</h1>
<h2>“VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE”</h2>
<h3>I.</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">With</span> the single exception of
Falstaff, all Shakespeare’s characters are what we call
marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick
and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run.
Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was
jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in <i>Lear</i>,
although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single
out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not, as we do
nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the
single state. For that matter, if you turn to George
Sand’s French version of <i>As You Like It</i> (and I think
I can promise you will like it but little), you will find Jacques
marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosalind.</p>
<p>At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over
marriage in Shakespeare’s days; and what hesitation there
was was of a laughing sort, and not much more serious, one way or
the other, than that of Panurge. In modern comedies the
heroes are mostly of Benedick’s way of thinking, but twice
as much in earnest, and not one quarter so confident. And I
take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror
is. They know they are only human after all; they know what
gins and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of
matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.
They would wish to keep their liberty; but if that may not be,
why, God’s will be done! “What, are you afraid
of marriage?” asks Cécile, in <i>Maître
Guerin</i>. “Oh, mon Dieu, non!” replies
Arthur; “I should take chloroform.” They look
forward to marriage much in the same way as they prepare
themselves for death: each seems inevitable; each is a great
Perhaps, and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in
the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That
splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of
marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his
contemporaries. “C’est
désespérant,” he cried, throwing himself down
in the arm-chair at Madame Schontz’s; “c’est
désespérant, nous nous marions tous!”
Every marriage was like another gray hair on his head; and the
jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years and
fair round belly.</p>
<p>The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our
ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or
not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and
forlorn old age. The friendships of men are vastly
agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time
that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second
accept a situation in China, and become no more to you than a
name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very
laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious
crotchet and treat you to sour looks thence-forward. So, in
one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the
goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and ease
which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they
endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a
man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be
any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how
precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or
two of fate—a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped
paper, a woman’s bright eyes—he may be left, in a
month, destitute of all. Marriage is certainly a perilous
remedy. Instead of on two or three, you stake your
happiness on one life only. But still, as the bargain is
more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the
other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not
every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as
Death withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at
home. People who share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown
together on an uninhabited isle, if they do not immediately fall
to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of
compromise. They will learn each other’s ways and
humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they
may lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first
years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom
and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into one.</p>
<p>But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It
certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men. In
marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty
degeneration of his moral being. It is not only when
Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when Ladislaw
marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be
exemplified. The air of the fireside withers out all the
fine wildings of the husband’s heart. He is so
comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and
happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included.
Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day
“his first duty is to his family,” and is fulfilled
in large measure by laying down vintages and husbanding the
health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man
was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for
neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without
constraint; you will not wake him. It is not for nothing
that Don Quixote was a bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married
ill. For women, there is less of this danger.
Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much
more of life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and
usefulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly
miss some benefit. It is true, however, that some of the
merriest and most genuine of women are old maids; and that those
old maids, and wives who are unhappily married, have often most
of the true motherly touch. And this would seem to show,
even for women, some narrowing influence in comfortable married
life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you wish
the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good
wife.</p>
<p>I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are
passably successful, and so few come to open failure, the more so
as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate
their choice. I see women marrying indiscriminately with
staring burgesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and men
dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or taking into their
lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say the
good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you
may use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the
world along with you. But love is at least a somewhat
hyperbolical expression for such luke-warm preference. It
is not here, anyway, that Love employs his golden shafts; he
cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign here and
revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the
poets have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the
world. And you have only to look these happy couples in the
face, to see they have never been in love, or in hate, or in any
other high passion, all their days. When you see a dish of
fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your affections upon one
particular peach or nectarine, watch it with some anxiety as it
comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible disappointment
when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase
“high passion.” Well, I should say this was
about as high a passion as generally leads to marriage. One
husband hears after marriage that some poor fellow is dying of
his wife’s love. “What a pity!” he
exclaims; “you know I could so easily have got
another!” And yet that is a very happy union.
Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his
loves. “I like it well enough as long as her sisters
are there,” said this amorous swain; “but I
don’t know what to do when we’re alone.”
Once more: A married lady was debating the subject with another
lady. “You know, dear,” said the first,
“after ten years of marriage, if he is nothing else, your
husband is always an old friend.” “I have many
old friends,” returned the other, “but I prefer them
to be nothing more.” “Oh, perhaps I might
<i>prefer</i> that also!” There is a common note in
these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be
owned the god goes among us with a limping gait and blear
eyes. You wonder whether it was so always; whether desire
was always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally
cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they
marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote
to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so
charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote
a few phrases. “The young lady is in every sense
formed to make one of your disposition really happy. She
has a pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical
instrument with judgment. She has an easy politeness in her
manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good
housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous
disposition. As to her internal accomplishments, I have
reason to speak still more highly of them: good sense without
vanity, a penetrating judgment without a disposition to satire,
with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a
wish that she was my William’s wife.” That is
about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks,
unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style of the
copy-book, with about as much religion as my William likes; and
then, with all speed, to church.</p>
<p>To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love,
most people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be
not a few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of
Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In
the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to
make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment. Like other
violent excitements, it throws up not only what is best, but what
is worst and smallest, in men’s characters. Just as
some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent
under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody,
jealous, and exacting when they are in love, who are honest,
downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday affairs
and humours of the world.</p>
<p>How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people
choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so
well? One is almost tempted to hint that it does not much
matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjective
affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, and once
talked yourself fairly over, you could “pull it
through” with anybody. But even if we take matrimony
at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of
friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the
freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple
folk in their selection. Now what should this principle
be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found
in the Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the bans on the
ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to
separate classes; and in all this most critical matter, has
common sense, has wisdom, never a word to say? In the
absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between
friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and
maidens.</p>
<p>In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate,
and ways of life, community of taste is to be sought for.
It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board with an
early riser or a vegetarian. In matters of art and
intellect, I believe it is of no consequence. Certainly it
is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more
readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a
humorous tongue, than with another who shares all their favourite
hobbies and is melancholy withal. If your wife likes
Tupper, that is no reason why you should hang your head.
She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her
opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a
mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure,
if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent,
he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and
most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and
wearisome to read. And not long ago I was able to lay by my
lantern in content, for I found the honest man. He was a
fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an
eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not
much of a judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes
before me sometimes at night. How strong, supple, and
living the ship seems upon the billows! With what a dip and
rake she shears the flying sea! I cannot fancy the man who
saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and
spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the
heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it
known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William
Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this
would be about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste
that is plentiful, but courage that is rare. And what have
we in place? How many, who think no otherwise than the
young painter, have we not heard disbursing second-hand
hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of
critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on
you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is
become a function of the average female being, which she performs
with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an
ingenious and well-regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the
calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives
with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful
moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put
things strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like
George the Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry
and painting.</p>
<p>The word “facts” is, in some ways, crucial.
I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians
and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in
bird’s-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word
“facts” in an occult sense of his own. Try as I
might, I could get no nearer the principle of their
division. What was essential to them, seemed to me trivial
or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to what was,
or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the
sky-line and different constellations overhead. We had each
of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than
anything else, and which discoloured all experience to its own
shade. How would you have people agree, when one is deaf
and the other blind? Now this is where there should be
community between man and wife. They should be agreed on
their catchword in “<i>facts of religion</i>,” or
“<i>facts of science</i>,” or “<i>society</i>,
<i>my dear</i>”; for without such an agreement all
intercourse is a painful strain upon the mind. “About
as much religion as my William likes,” in short, that is
what is necessary to make a happy couple of any William and his
spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor
affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry
with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget,
the wife of the successful merchant! The best of men and
the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives,
and, for want of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each
other lost spirits to the end.</p>
<p>A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people
who would spend years together and not bore themselves to
death. But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and
about life. To dwell happily together, they should be
versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for
willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a woman,
and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing
else. She must know her <i>métier de femme</i>, and
have a fine touch for the affections. And it is more
important that a person should be a good gossip, and talk
pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one
nothings of the day and hour, than that she should speak with the
tongues of men and angels; for a while together by the fire,
happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a
distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh
over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of
“grouse in the gun-room,” many an old joke between
them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better
preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things
higher and better sounding in the world’s ears. You
could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a
joke with some one else. You can forgive people who do not
follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your
wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when
you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a
dissolution of the marriage.</p>
<p>I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could
never so much as understand the meaning of the word
<i>politics</i>, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs
from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about
other men or women and the chicanery of everyday
existence—the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life
turns—and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant,
and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind,
this same woman has a share of the higher and more poetical
understanding, frank interest in things for their own sake, and
enduring astonishment at the most common. She is not to be
deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is
repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder herself
crazy over the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of
us walk very contentedly in the little lit circle of their own
reason, and have to be reminded of what lies without by specious
and clamant exceptions—earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius,
banjos floating in mid-air at a <i>séance</i>, and the
like—a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable
gift. I will own I think it a better sort of mind than goes
necessarily with the clearest views on public business. It
will wash. It will find something to say at an odd
moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint
fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all night
long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes,
although my companion on the other side of the hearth held the
most enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot.</p>
<p>The question of professions, in as far as they regard
marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days, but
it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it, I
would never marry a wife who wrote. The practice of letters
is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or
two’s work, all the more human portion of the author is
extinct; he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music,
I hear, is not much better. But painting, on the contrary,
is often highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after
your picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of
that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual
series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity,
into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this
sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have
always something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice
your loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the
first law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau,
indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of
livelihood, when he copied out the <i>Héloïse</i> for
<i>dilettante</i> ladies; and therein showed that strange
eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand
follies and insanities. It would be well for all of the
<i>genus irritabile</i> thus to add something of skilled labour
to intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so
doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no
satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed
a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is
almost equally certain he has found a right tone or a right
colour, or made a dexterous stroke with his brush. And,
again, painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the
deliberate seasons, and the “tranquillising
influence” of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of
thought, and keep them cool, placable, and prosaic.</p>
<p>A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of
love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it
bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the feeling
is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn open and the
solder has never time to set. Men who fish, botanise, work
with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds, will make admirable
husbands; and a little amateur painting in water-colour shows the
innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates are
to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their hat in
their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of
acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise
an easy disposition and no rival to the wife’s
influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but
they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable women
manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that
those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better
educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an
odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and
needs a deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps,
the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man
who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this
“ignoble tabagie,” as Michelet calls it, spreads over
all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders
you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this
will seem no evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps
a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and
all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and
contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness.</p>
<p>These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably
amuse him more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at
least they will do no harm, for nobody will follow my
advice. But the last word is of more concern.
Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts
light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have
been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often
sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning
heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below their
feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary bark
upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the
royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we
have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at
night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They
think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a
brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil
and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the
devil’s. To the end, spring winds will sow
disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the
whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For
marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle,
and not a bed of roses.</p>
<h3>II.</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Hope</span>, they say, deserts us at no
period of our existence. From first to last, and in the
face of smarting disillusions, we continue to expect good
fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so
confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I
think it improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare,
conduct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus
Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope
prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I shall combine
all these various excellences in my own person, and go marching
down to posterity with divine honours. There is nothing so
monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About
ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt
by choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No
one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer’s aspiration: “Ah,
if he could only die <i>temporarily</i>!” Or,
perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the two pirates,
that “so long as they remained in that business, their
piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of
stealing.” Here we recognise the thoughts of our
boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I
think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor
yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in
the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man,
after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their
barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit
of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord
Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the
manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have
reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and
still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and
first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that
is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our
faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into
the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.</p>
<p>The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality
are nowhere better displayed than in questions of conduct.
There is a character in the <i>Pilgrim’s Progress</i>, one
Mr. <i>Linger-after-Lust</i> with whom I fancy we are all on
speaking terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of hope
up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after eighty
years of contrary experience, will believe it possible to
continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of
theft. Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a
remarkable turning-point in our career. Any overt act,
above all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A
drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not
help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make
and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he
was discouraged in the end. By such steps we think to fix a
momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the
dentist’s while the tooth is stinging.</p>
<p>But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can
neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no
hocus-pocus in morality; and even the “sanctimonious
ceremony” of marriage leaves the man unchanged. This
is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For there is
something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has
an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever
many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and
familiar company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of
the blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and
active; it is approached not only through the delights of
courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal
signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him
if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august
circumvallations.</p>
<p>And yet there is probably no other act in a man’s life
so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For
years, let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent
business of your career. Your experience has not, we may
dare to say, been more encouraging than Paul’s or
Horace’s; like them, you have seen and desired the good
that you were not able to accomplish; like them, you have done
the evil that you loathed. You have waked at night in a hot
or a cold sweat, according to your habit of body, remembering
with dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts and
sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to withdraw
entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but
misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards.
You have fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most
sharply smarted for your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive
phrase, that you were nobody’s enemy but your own.
And then you have been made aware of what was beautiful and
amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your behaviour; and
it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the contradiction, as
indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut your
mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the
making, you have recognised that yours was quite a special case,
and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.</p>
<p>Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these
apologies; let us agree that you are nobody’s enemy but
your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple,
impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled pity
due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on
these terms, we can never agree:—we can never agree to have
you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have
failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to
conjoin with it the management of some one else’s?
Because you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose
yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself
by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.
You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your
wife’s also. You have been hitherto in a mere
subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet
only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or
movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take things
on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and
for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but
you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere he
undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous
pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with
consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully
seize your wife’s hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you
to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you
select. She, whose happiness you most desire, you choose to
be your victim. You would earnestly warn her from a
tottering bridge or bad investment. If she were to marry
some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she
were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how
doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than
yourself!</p>
<p>Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more
by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road
lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness,
which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to
wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were to
befall you. What happened last November might surely happen
February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,
because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy
you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your
wife’s confidence and peace! A thousand things
unpleasing went on in the <i>chiaroscuro</i> of a life that you
shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in
those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would
recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But
the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully
introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats,
and can no longer close the mind’s eye upon uncomely
passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your
actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the
victim of your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest
penalties, but she must herself share feelingly in their
endurance. And observe, once more, with what temerity you
have chosen precisely <i>her</i> to be your spy, whose esteem you
value highest, and whom you have already taught to think you
better than you are. You may think you had a conscience,
and believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife?
Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and
consciously performed their part in life before those marble
eyes. A god watched them at the board, and stood by their
bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about their
ancient cities, where they bought and sold, or where they piped
and wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the things that
are outside of man. These were lessons, delivered in the
quiet dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, but
gently. It is the same lesson, if you will—but how
harrowingly taught!—when the woman you respect shall weep
from your unkindness or blush with shame at your
misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas
to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife. To marry is to
domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married,
there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be
good.</p>
<p>And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere
single virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be
realised. A girl, it is true, has always lived in a glass
house among reproving relatives, whose word was law; she has been
bred up to sacrifice her judgments and take the key submissively
from dear papa; and it is wonderful how swiftly she can change
her tune into the husband’s. Her morality has been,
too often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in the
case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy
and freedom, his moral judgments have been passed in some
accordance with his nature. His sins were always sins in
his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act
against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was
obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any
grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to
this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing
jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life
appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong,
must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak
brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my
wife. For her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous
judgments, and go crookedly about my life. How, then, in
such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and
abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put aside
love’s pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity,
to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after
these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who
has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence
lies the particular peril to morality in married life.
Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a
while continue to accept these changelings with a gross
complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds
his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee;
finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the
flash of that first disenchantment, flees for ever.</p>
<p>Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the
wife commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although
it makes the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of
misconception hangs above the doubtful business. Women, I
believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman
myself, I daresay I should hold the reverse; and at least we all
enter more or less wholly into one or other of these camps.
A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often
scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side of
man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to
your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive
lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to
be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder,
panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth. The
proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to
the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are
similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal
sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations
of this life, which pass current among us as the wisdom of the
elders, this difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious
lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats
nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings
ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely
called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after
all. Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a
thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My
compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work
of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion
figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the
education of young men. That doctrine of the excellence of
women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It
is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you
take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties;
whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.</p>
<p>But it is the object of a liberal education not only to
obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the
natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who
lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and
the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by
simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to
the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small
field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more
largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally
widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to
hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each other,
in different achievements. What should be the result of
such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two
flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a
rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the
ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted
and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious contract,
and setting out upon life’s journey with ideas so
monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make
shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does
almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at
as a debasing vice; what is to her the mere common sense of
tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through
such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple steer their
way; and contrive to love each other; and to respect, forsooth;
and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men
and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.</p>
<p>And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back
from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from
battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse
degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a
fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into
temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to
us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this
century, is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the
partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero. <a
name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1"
class="citation">[1]</a> Without some such manly note, it
were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there
is a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points
of peril that a man may march the more warily. And the true
conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions,
and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith. Hope
is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase
swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet
smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is
built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of
circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope
looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on
failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of
victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in
Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one
temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to
heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of
his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has
come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of
honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in
the last, he knows that she is like himself—erring,
thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a
struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with
ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with
hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson
of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are
excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a
perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt
and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of
infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you
have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that,
while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation,
you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will
become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through
life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own
unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your
friend. Nay, you will be I wisely glad that you retain the
sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually
spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and
love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures,
there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and
console.</p>
<h3>III.—ON FALLING IN LOVE</h3>
<blockquote><p>“Lord, what fools these mortals
be!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is only one event in life
which really astonishes a man and startles him out of his
prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him very much as
he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable
variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or
intense; they form together no more than a sort of background, or
running accompaniment to the man’s own reflections; and he
falls naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind,
and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects
to-morrow to be after the pattern of to-day and yesterday.
He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friends and
acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes
look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible
expectation. But it is a subject in which neither intuition
nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher to the
truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly
written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the
person’s experience. I remember an anecdote of a
well-known French theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in
his <i>cénacle</i>. It was objected against him that
he had never experienced love. Whereupon he arose, left the
society, and made it a point not to return to it until he
considered that he had supplied the defect.
“Now,” he remarked, on entering, “now I am in a
position to continue the discussion.” Perhaps he had
not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the
story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an apologue to
readers of this essay.</p>
<p>When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without
something of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in
such changed conditions. He has to deal with commanding
emotions instead of the easy dislikes and preferences in which he
has hitherto passed his days; and he recognises capabilities for
pain and pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the
existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure,
the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural,
in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all
proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it
may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and
look a little into each other’s eyes. That has been
done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no
great result. But on this occasion all is different.
They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes
to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and
demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our
ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the
trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion,
and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain
in the same world with so precious and desirable a
fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look
on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate
emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-an-one in
that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you.
For my part, I cannot think what the women mean. It might
be very well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all
over into life, and step forward from the pedestal with that
godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who
call themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I
never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love—no, nor
read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his
youth. About women I entertain a somewhat different
opinion; but there, I have the misfortune to be a man.</p>
<p>There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and
bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking,
adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part
of this or the other person’s spiritual bill of fare, are
within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be
patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to
fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put
into when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in
love. I do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in
love. Scott, if it were not for a passage or two in <i>Rob
Roy</i>, would give me very much the same effect. These are
great names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, healthy,
high-strung, and generous natures, of whom the reverse might have
been expected. As for the innumerable army of anæmic
and tailorish persons who occupy the face of this planet with so
much propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any such
situation as a love-affair. A wet rag goes safely by the
fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much
impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many
lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some
unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of
declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of
opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far,
and at least another quarter do there cease and determine.
A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to prepare the way and
out with his declaration in the nick of time. And then
there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub;
and if he has to declare forty times, will continue imperturbably
declaring, amid the astonished consideration of men and angels,
until he has a favourable answer. I daresay, if one were a
woman, one would like to marry a man who was capable of doing
this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a
little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; and
marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered into
consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation.
Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed,
the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for
step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children
venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment
when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage
after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read
the expression of their own trouble in each other’s
eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the
feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what
it is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the
woman’s.</p>
<p>This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it
is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of
years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and
awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found
it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment
which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon the
strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look
exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a
prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse;
and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent
these advantages. He joined himself to the following of
what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called
<i>nonchaloir</i>; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of
self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash
of that fear with which honest people regard serious interests,
kept himself back from the straightforward course of life among
certain selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he
is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation.
His heart, which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last
year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregularly in
his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or
seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must
have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the
preoccupied attention of a brown study. He is practically
incommoded by the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he
is alone, and develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the
moon and stars. But it is not at all within the province of
a prose essayist to give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of
mind; and the thing has been done already, and that to
admiration. In <i>Adelaide</i>, in Tennyson’s
<i>Maud</i>, and in some of Heine’s songs, you get the
absolute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and
Juliet were very much in love; although they tell me some German
critics are of a different opinion, probably the same who would
have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in
love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, in <i>Les
Misérables</i>, is also a genuine case in his own way, and
worth observation. A good many of George Sand’s
people are thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George
Meredith’s. Altogether, there is plenty to read on
the subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he
has the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may
occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah
which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of the City
of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes
and perilous illusions.</p>
<p>One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is
certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not quite
see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in all
parts of life—in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion,
in breathing, in continuing to be—the lover begins to
regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the world and
highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able
contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a
few young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable star, does
not re-echo among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable
effect. In much the same taste, when people find a great
to-do in their own breasts, they imagine it must have some
influence in their neighbourhood. The presence of the two
lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must
be the best thing possible for everybody else. They are
half inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that
the sky is blue and the sun shines. And certainly the
weather is usually fine while people are courting. . . In
point of fact, although the happy man feels very kindly towards
others of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of
the magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming
and self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy
See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life
without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is
to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted
lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other
men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of
life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women,
they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if
they were so many Joan-of-Arc’s; but this does not come out
in their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs
marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain
that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after
having bemused myself over <i>Daniel Deronda</i>, I have given up
trying to understand what they like.</p>
<p>If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous
superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed to
others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, would
serve at least to keep love generous and great-hearted. Nor
is it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other lovers
are hugely interested. They strike the nicest balance
between pity and approval, when they see people aping the
greatness of their own sentiments. It is an understood
thing in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting
on the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a
light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman
and the singing chambermaid. As people are generally cast
for the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can
apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going
wrong. In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair
is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to see
it going forward. And love, considered as a spectacle, must
have attractions for many who are not of the confraternity.
The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and
he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can
look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and
sympathy. For nature commends itself to people with a most
insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great
sunset; and you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you will,
but you cannot help some emotion when you read of well-disputed
battles, or meet a pair of lovers in the lane.</p>
<p>Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at
large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the
sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the
lover’s grand intention. It is the happiness of the
other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is
not possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride,
humility, pity and passion, which are excited by a look of happy
love or an unexpected caress. To make one’s self
beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything
and all things that puff out the character and attributes and
make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify
one’s self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the
same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are
done by lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed
it may be best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to
speak, run mad and become importunate and violent. Vanity
in a merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover
takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points
and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.
He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that
good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he
can contrive to set forward. For, although it may have been
a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write
the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult
piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set
about explaining his own character to others. Words and
acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they
are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful
job we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people
mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong
valuation. And generally we rest pretty content with our
failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts;
but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he
makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He
cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this
importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a
mistake.</p>
<p>He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of
his life. To all that has not been shared with her, rights
and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he can look back
only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the will. That
he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was
really important, that he may have entertained the thought of
other women with any show of complacency, is a burthen almost too
heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought of
another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned
wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the
bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable
enough in all good conscience. But that She should have
permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent with a
Divine providence.</p>
<p>A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is
an artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient.
This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely
attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in
exactly the same sense and to the same degree. I suppose
what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has not always
been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit
of sentiments with which he is supposed to have begun the world;
but waited to make its appearance in better days and among richer
natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship,
and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties
of nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in
particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who
have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts
in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in other
periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest
doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and
changing that a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy,
at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it
or not, at pleasure; but there it is.</p>
<p>It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we
reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of letters
found after years of happy union creates no sense of insecurity
in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply. The two
people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but this
pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something
indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had
twin birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that
unites them. Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and
without reserve or afterthought. Then they would understand
each other with a fulness impossible otherwise. There would
be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be
imparted. They would be led into none of those comparisons
that send the blood back to the heart. And they would know
that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as
much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation
that must follow some time or other in the future, men feel
anger, and something like remorse, when they think of that other
separation which endured until they met. Some one has
written that love makes people believe in immortality, because
there seems not to be room enough in life for so great a
tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of
our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few
years. Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind
analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.</p>
<p>“The blind bow-boy,” who smiles upon us from the
end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his
bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as
ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity
from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck;
the other has but time to make one gesture and give one
passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment.
When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the
thirty years’ panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from
the stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these
great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who
despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only
show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth
remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy
stamp from the disposition of their parents.</p>
<h3>IV.—TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">Among</span> sayings that have a currency
in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake
of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally
combined with the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys
the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and
hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the
truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and
exactly uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived
for such a purpose—with a foot rule, a level, or a
theodolite—it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas!
to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a scale
to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of
the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute,
unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or
to sure knowledge even of external and constant things. But
it is easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing
appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this
more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to
communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial
sense—not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a
matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have
read Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I know
not one syllable of Spanish—this, indeed, is easy and to
the same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of this sort,
according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a
certain sense even they may or may not be false. The
habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with
his wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal
falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie—heart and
face, from top to bottom. This is the kind of lie which
poisons intimacy. And, <i>vice versâ</i>, veracity to
sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your
friends, never to feign or falsify emotion—that is the
truth which makes love possible and mankind happy.</p>
<p><i>L’art de bien dire</i> is but a drawing-room
accomplishment unless it be pressed into the service of the
truth. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to
write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him
precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the
case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or
writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the
world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures
understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as
unseizable to their wits as a high flight of
metaphysics—namely, that the business of life is mainly
carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and
according to a man’s proficiency in that art shall be the
freedom and the fulness of his intercourse with other men.
Anybody, it is supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of
their notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to
suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have been
reading—Mr. Leland’s captivating <i>English
Gipsies</i>. “It is said,” I find on p. 7,
“that those who can converse with Irish peasants in their
own native tongue form far higher opinions of their appreciation
of the beautiful, and of <i>the elements of humour and pathos in
their hearts</i>, than do those who know their thoughts only
through the medium of English. I know from my own
observations that this is quite the case with the Indians of
North America, and it is unquestionably so with the
gipsy.” In short, where a man has not a full
possession of the language, the most important, because the most
amiable, qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow;
for the pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of
love, rest upon these very “elements of humour and
pathos.” Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack
of a medium he can put none of it out to interest in the market
of affection! But what is thus made plain to our
apprehensions in the case of a foreign language is partially true
even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we
all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact,
another loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker
shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact—not
clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly
adhering, like an athlete’s skin. And what is the
result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his
friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly
valuable—intimacy with those he loves. An orator
makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, some
vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side
wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one
sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and
you are not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and
filled with perils. “O frivolous mind of man, light
ignorance!” As if yourself, when you seek to explain
some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, speaking
swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not
harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if yourself required
less tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious
lover were not more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent
politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round;
the matters he discusses have been discussed a thousand times
before; language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of
a cut and dry vocabulary. But you—may it not be that
your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as
touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer,
you must venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed,
and become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love
there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words,
may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured
one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would
understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be
shown—it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you
think it is a hard thing to write poetry? Why, that is to
write poetry, and of a high, if not the highest, order.</p>
<p>I should even more admire “the lifelong and heroic
literary labours” of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up
in words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their
autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for a
circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration by
equal parts. For life, though largely, is not entirely
carried on by literature. We are subject to physical
passions and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and
speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible
countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look
eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the
body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing
signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a
paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and
speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message
flies by these interpreters in the least space of time, and the
misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its birth. To
explain in words takes time and a just and patient hearing; and
in the critical epochs of a close relation, patience and justice
are not qualities on which we can rely. But the look or the
gesture explains things in a breath; they tell their message
without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the
way, on a reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend
against the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for
they are the direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted
through the unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not long
ago I wrote a letter to a friend which came near involving us in
quarrel; but we met, and in personal talk I repeated the worst of
what I had written, and added worse to that; and with the
commentary of the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or
say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of
intimacy; an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who
know each other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so
preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet on
the same terms as they had parted.</p>
<p>Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face;
pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes of the
voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there
are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been denied all
the symbols of communication, who have neither a lively play of
facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice,
nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people truly made
of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can
undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can
speak no language under heaven. Such people we must learn
slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through yea and nay
communications; or we take them on trust on the strength of a
general air, and now and again, when we see the spirit breaking
through in a flash, correct or change our estimate. But
these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the
end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence.
Some minds, romantically dull, despise physical endowments.
That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like their
fellow-creatures it must always be meaningless; and, for my part,
I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such
radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a
lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond
with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so
that we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing,
and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become
unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates
there is one creature (for I will not call him man) conspicuous
in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited his birthright
of expression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has
taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every side
perverted or cut off his means of communication with his
fellow-men. The body is a house of many windows: there we
all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come
and love us. But this fellow has filled his windows with
opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be admired
for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows,
but meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languishing within,
uncomforted, unchangeably alone.</p>
<p>Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to
refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood
and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer
formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay
communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration,
such as is often found in mutual love. <i>Yea</i> and
<i>nay</i> mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in
the question. Many words are often necessary to convey a
very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit
the gold; the most that we can hope is by many arrows, more or
less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of
time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour’s
talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single
principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt,
pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous
babbler will often add three new offences in the process of
excusing one. It is really a most delicate affair.
The world was made before the English language, and seemingly
upon a different design. Suppose we held our converse not
in words, but in music; those who have a bad ear would find
themselves cut off from all near commerce, and no better than
foreigners in this big world. But we do not consider how
many have “a bad ear” for words, nor how often the
most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and
questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a
lie. “<i>Do you forgive me</i>?” Madam
and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I have never yet
been able to discover what forgiveness means. “<i>Is
it still the same between us</i>?” Why, how can it
be? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the
friend of my heart. “<i>Do you understand
me</i>?” God knows; I should think it highly
improbable.</p>
<p>The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may
have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet
come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile
calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from
pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which
withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the
critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held
his tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a
truth conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always
truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in
answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact
may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that
which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of
a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate
statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the
intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you
address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell truth,
rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey
a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the
true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical
discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing
as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in
this connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a
good woman is the true index of her heart.</p>
<p>“It takes,” says Thoreau, in the noblest and most
useful passage I remember to have read in any modern author, <a
name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2"
class="citation">[2]</a> “two to speak truth—one to
speak and another to hear.” He must be very little
experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, who does not
recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain of
suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear
greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who have once
quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to
break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral
equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child
intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and
misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is another
side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of
the child’s character, formed in early years or during the
equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the
facts which suit with his preconception; and wherever a person
fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up
the effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the
other hand, and still more between lovers (for mutual
understanding is love’s essence), the truth is easily
indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A
hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of long and
delicate explanations; and where the life is known even
<i>yea</i> and <i>nay</i> become luminous. In the closest
of all relations—that of a love well founded and equally
shared—speech is half discarded, like a roundabout,
infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two
communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and
fewer words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each
other’s hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical
basis; it is a familiarity of nature’s making and apart
from voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort
outrun knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the
acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so it
is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows
more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by a
natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of the
body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent. The
thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would only
lose to be set down in words—ay, although Shakespeare
himself should be the scribe.</p>
<p>Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we
must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a doubt
arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and confidence is but
another charge against the person doubted. “<i>What a
monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been deceived so long and
so completely</i>!” Let but that thought gain
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to
the past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, convince
the reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you.
“<i>If you can abuse me now</i>, <i>the more likely that
you have abused me from the first</i>.”</p>
<p>For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, and
they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover’s
heart and speaks her own language; it is not you but she herself
who can defend and clear you of the charge. But in slighter
intimacies, and for a less stringent union? Indeed, is it
worth while? We are all <i>incompris</i>, only more or less
concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all
fawning at each other’s feet like dumb, neglected
lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye—this is our
opportunity in the ages—and we wag our tail with a poor
smile. “<i>Is that all</i>?” All?
If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not
love us; the more fools we to squander life on the
indifferent.</p>
<p>But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is
excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others that we
can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of human
feeling the clement judge is the most successful pleader.</p>
<h2>CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH</h2>
<blockquote><p>“You know my mother now and then argues very
notably; always very warmly at least. I happen often to
differ from her; and we both think so well of our own arguments,
that we very seldom are so happy as to convince one
another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all
<i>vehement</i> debatings. She says, I am <i>too witty</i>;
Anglicè, <i>too pert</i>; I, that she is <i>too wise</i>;
that is to say, being likewise put into English, <i>not so young
as she has been</i>.”—Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe,
<i>Clarissa</i>, vol. ii. Letter xiii.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is a strong feeling in favour
of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a
man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is
supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person
has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he
should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket
wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage
them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their
mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk
of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does
not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than
the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps
more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful
Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is
still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless
this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand,
some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races and
natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and
proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It
is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such sayings
with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who
goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella
through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of
achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you
are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil
the whole duty of man.</p>
<p>It is a still more difficult consideration for our average
men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin
Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal
of manners, caution, and respectability, those characters in
history who have most notoriously flown in the face of such
precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and
honoured with public monuments in the streets of our commercial
centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense.
You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable
livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in
the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France;
surely a melancholy example for one’s daughters! And
then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when
all is said, was a most imprudent navigator. His life is
not the kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of
young people; rather, one would do one’s utmost to keep it
from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and
disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me if
I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are
perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business
mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must
engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards
the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will
read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they
assist at a performance of the <i>Lyons Mail</i>. Persons
of substance take in the <i>Times</i> and sit composedly in pit
or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in
business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down
among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats—as for the actors
who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the
stage—they must belong, thank God! to a different order of
beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the
windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in ancient
and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no more
think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffing
their clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence of
certain admissions in the first chapter of their school history
of England.</p>
<p>Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs
hold their own in theory; and it is another instance of the same
spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have been
accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made for the
illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the
disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old
gentleman waggles his head and says: “Ah, so I thought when
I was your age.” It is not thought an answer at all,
if the young man retorts: “My venerable sir, so I shall
most probably think when I am yours.” And yet the one
is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for
an Oliver.</p>
<p>“Opinion in good men,” says Milton, “is but
knowledge in the making.” All opinions, properly so
called, are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow
that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as
far. This does not apply to formulæ got by rote,
which are stages on the road to nowhere but second childhood and
the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is not the
same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing
as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of
these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like
an oath and by way of an argument. They have a currency as
intellectual counters; and many respectable persons pay their way
with nothing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of
theory in the background. The imputed virtue of folios full
of knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as
some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the
constable’s truncheon. They are used in pure
superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an
exorcism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking
unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and
sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of
intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a
gymnastic at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.</p>
<p>Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having
passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good
places to pass through, and I am none the less at my
destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the
way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way
to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a
red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a
sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a
million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to
convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must do
something, be something, believe something. It is not
possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and
blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately
to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a
state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite
intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be
ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very
zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian.
For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with
something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the
moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we
call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more
perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of
men. I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and
all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some
elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged
others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and
travelling in the common orbit of men’s opinions. I
submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a
concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I
do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the
better—I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I
have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this
tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from beginning
to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I
shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no
hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself
on the immunity. Just in the same way, I do not greatly
pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of
Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend
to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from
the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see
that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows,
of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards
the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these
forms and sources of error.</p>
<p>As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of
knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now
chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong
course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man is carried
away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he grapples for a
moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and
overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no more
than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories; we
are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of
life, until only fools or knaves can hold to their
opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life, and say
we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more than an
impression. If we had breathing space, we should take the
occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we
are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than
married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another,
and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin to
decline towards the grave. It is in vain to seek for
consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium so
perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in
which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol
to our head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on
which we have not only to pass a judgment, but to take action,
before the hour is at an end. And we cannot even regard
ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity
itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we
find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade. In
the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate
things we loved. Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor
perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. It is decidedly harder to
climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit still. There is
no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek
has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified
or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do
not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same
views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for
a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an
unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as
if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London;
and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first
setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole
voyage.</p>
<p>And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at
Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. <i>Si Jeunesse
savait</i>, <i>si Vieillesse pouvait</i>, is a very pretty
sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of
ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that
they do not choose. There is something irreverent in the
speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to do with
the wise resolutions of age than we are always willing to
admit. It would be an instructive experiment to make an old
man young again and leave him all his <i>savoir</i>. I
scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank after
all; I doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led
to expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he
would out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to
the blush. Prudence is a wooden juggernaut, before whom
Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a high priest, and
after whom dances many a successful merchant in the character of
Atys. But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If
a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he
laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth
a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.</p>
<p>It is customary to say that age should be considered, because
it comes last. It seems just as much to the point, that
youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if
you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at
all. Disease and accident make short work of even the most
prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense of a
headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To
be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is
tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself
his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the
festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically
moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce.
The victim is dead—and he has cunningly overreached
himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for
being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch
turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how
much more with a whole cellar—a whole bodily
existence! People may lay down their lives with
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its
admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in
a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, old
age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should
refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the
dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or
not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world,
we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on
great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous
old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know
that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young,
we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of
tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round, and
let us have a pipe before we go!</p>
<p>Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation
for old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard,
and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us. After
the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to fill
with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable
jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and downs
of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our
hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less
intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a
word, this period for which we are asked to hoard up everything
as for a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest,
easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own
work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is doing the
best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth
is your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and
the muff inevitably develops into the bore. There are not
many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon their first romantic
voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or
visit a thieves’ kitchen in the East End, to go down in a
diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are
still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged
with prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to
ask us: “What does Gravity out of bed?” Youth
is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other
both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations;
to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and
country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the
metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and
wait all day long in the theatre to applaud <i>Hernani</i>.
There is some meaning in the old theory about wild oats; and a
man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it for
good, is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated
infant. “It is extraordinary,” says Lord
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths
up to the date of his last novel, <a name="citation3"></a><a
href="#footnote3" class="citation">[3]</a> “it is
extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings of
an inexperienced young man.” And this mobility is a
special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible
virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt through
great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest
passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can,
do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will
live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse.
Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair
chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they
must have been feeble fellows—creatures made of putty and
pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in
their composition; we may sympathise with their parents, but
there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; for
to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind.</p>
<p>When the old man waggles his head and says, “Ah, so I
thought when I was your age,” he has proved the
youth’s case. Doubtless, whether from growth of
experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but
he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so
while they were young, since there was dew in the morning or
hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding his vote to
those of previous generations and rivetting another link to the
chain of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a
young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and
circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly
captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love
their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than
their lives.</p>
<p>By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than
usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the
following little tale. A child who had been remarkably fond
of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found himself
growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without any
abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen; already
he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he
had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades
of the prison-house were closing about him with a
vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than to put the
thoughts of children into the language of their elders; but this
is the effect of his meditations at this juncture:
“Plainly,” he said, “I must give up my
playthings, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to
secure myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I am
sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give
them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a
little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they
can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I
shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their
foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall
retire and shut myself up among my playthings until the day I
die.” Nay, as he was passing in the train along the
Esterel mountains between Cannes and Fréjus, he remarked a
pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and
decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux;
childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple
nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as
the reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be
carried into effect. There was a worm i’ the bud, a
fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and
then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is
to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in
changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child,
to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when
the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good
artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your
neighbour.</p>
<p>You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may
have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are
probably over the score on the other. But they had a point;
they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and
passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and
implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which you
need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see that
they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a
strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.
The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much
as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings.
Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our
society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder,
you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if
the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the
Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal
atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of
society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and
Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are
these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a
fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the
shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and
incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a
forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a
pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images
pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me the young
man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for
the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands,
and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be
over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the
last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all
those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt
the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are
indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow
larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career
in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost
while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person
with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.</p>
<p>In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there
is a strong probability that age is not much more so.
Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible
credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding
stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion
that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries
of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional
millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without
result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to
explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a
champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if
there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another,
and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?</p>
<p>I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I
take the liberty to reproduce. “What I advance is
true,” said one. “But not the whole
truth,” answered the other. “Sir,”
returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a smack of Dr.
Johnson in the speech), “Sir, there is no such thing as the
whole truth!” Indeed, there is nothing so evident in
life as that there are two sides to a question. History is
one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged,
day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward
intelligences. We never pause for a moment’s
consideration but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast
sways humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and
dinning it into our ears that this or that question has only one
possible solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow,
dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a doze;
but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential
people set to work to remind us of the other side and demolish
the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody
exactly right in his <i>Institutes</i>, and hot-headed Knox is
thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the
other side in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they
will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found
already in the Church. Age may have one side, but assuredly
Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than
that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.
Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to
differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of
difference?</p>
<p>I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of
a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face.
For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have
the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the
mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there
is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its
centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every
ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song
of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our
musical voices.</p>
<h2>AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS</h2>
<blockquote><p>“<span class="smcap">Boswell</span>: We grow
weary when idle.”</p>
<p>“<span class="smcap">Johnson</span>: That is, sir,
because others being busy, we want company; but if we were idle,
there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one
another.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">Just</span> now, when every one is bound,
under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of
<i>lèse</i>-respectability, to enter on some lucrative
profession, and labour therein with something not far short of
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when
they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile,
savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this
should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist
in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the
dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to
state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that
the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap
race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a
disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see
so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in
the emphatic Americanism, it “goes for” them.
And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it
is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool
persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief
over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is
touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of
Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for
these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their
success? It is a sore thing to have laboured along and
scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity
indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn
the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for
those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the
unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those
who have none.</p>
<p>But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not
the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking
against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking
like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is
to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an
apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued
in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said
against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to
say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to
all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in
Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to
Richmond.</p>
<p>It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal
idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay
may escape from school honours with all his wits about him, most
boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have
a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And
the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating
himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have
been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford
in these words: “Young man, ply your book diligently now,
and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you,
you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome
task.” The old gentleman seems to have been unaware
that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a
few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles
and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in
their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for
life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott,
peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle
and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for
thought.</p>
<p>If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not
be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you
regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between
sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have
attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember
that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability.
I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part
with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them
as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open
street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment
to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the
favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly
many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of
Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in
the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he
may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may
pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable
pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will
sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of
kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why,
if this be not education, what is? We may conceive Mr.
Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that
should thereupon ensue:—</p>
<p>“How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?”</p>
<p>“Truly, sir, I take mine ease.”</p>
<p>“Is not this the hour of the class? and should’st
thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou
mayest obtain knowledge?”</p>
<p>“Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your
leave.”</p>
<p>“Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray
thee? Is it mathematics?”</p>
<p>“No, to be sure.”</p>
<p>“Is it metaphysics?”</p>
<p>“Nor that.”</p>
<p>“Is it some language?”</p>
<p>“Nay, it is no language.”</p>
<p>“Is it a trade?”</p>
<p>“Nor a trade neither.”</p>
<p>“Why, then, what is’t?”</p>
<p>“Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon
Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by
persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and
Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the
best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn
by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call
Peace, or Contentment.”</p>
<p>Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion,
and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke
forth upon this wise: “Learning, quotha!” said he;
“I would have all such rogues scourged by the
Hangman!”</p>
<p>And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a
crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.</p>
<p>Now this, of Mr. Wiseman’s, is the common opinion.
A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does
not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry
must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or
else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the
work-house is too good for you. It is supposed that all
knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard
all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a
few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether
you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential
calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in
the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person,
looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile
on his face all the time, will get more true education than many
another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some
chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal
and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the
trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and
palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their
memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget
before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful
art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with
ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have
“plied their book diligently,” and know all about
some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the
study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry,
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of
life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and
pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes
the idler, who began life along with them—by your leave, a
different picture. He has had time to take care of his
health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air,
which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind;
and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places,
he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent
purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots,
and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the
idler’s knowledge of life at large, and Art of
Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more important
quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has
much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in
their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical
indulgence. He will not be heard among the
dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all
sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way
truths, he will identify himself with no very burning
falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much
frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called
Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of
Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no
very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West,
the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort
of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of
shadows running speedily and in many different directions into
the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the
generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into
ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man
may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful
landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking,
and making love as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the
hawthorn.</p>
<p>Extreme <i>busyness</i>, whether at school or college, kirk or
market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for
idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of
personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed
people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the
exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these
fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have
no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random
provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their
faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them
with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good
speaking to such folk: they <i>cannot</i> be idle, their nature
is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the
gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office,
when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole
breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an
hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their
eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing
to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard
workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a
deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and
college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they
have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but
all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if
a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have
dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play;
until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind
vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub
against another, while they wait for the train. Before he
was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was
twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is
smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt
upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not
appeal to me as being Success in Life.</p>
<p>But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his
busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and
relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway
carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man
calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect
of many other things. And it is not by any means certain
that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to
do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many
of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are
to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous
performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of
idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking
gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the
orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the
benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices
towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent
on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and
signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there
not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other
benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or
season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome
helped to lose his friend’s money; Fred Bayham had an ugly
trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to
fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced
Barabbases whom the world could better have done without.
Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to
Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a
service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he
thought a good companion emphatically the greatest
benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot
feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of
pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish
disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper
covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half
an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his;
do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the
manuscript in his heart’s blood, like a compact with the
devil? Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to
your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for
your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties
because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and
they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss,
and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an
element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and,
among generous people, received with confusion. There is no
duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By
being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which
remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed,
surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a
ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with so
jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour;
one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than
usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him
some money with this remark: “You see what sometimes comes
of looking pleased.” If he had looked pleased before,
he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part,
I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful
children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the
stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite
commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find
than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of
goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another
candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they
could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing
than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the
Liveableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be
happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is
a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse,
one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is
one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of
Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a
moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion;
he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a
large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he
absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse
in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he
comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his
whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns
to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this
fellow is an evil feature in other people’s lives.
They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do
without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can
tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the
well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a
scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.</p>
<p>And what, in God’s name, is all this pother about?
For what cause do they embitter their own and other
people’s lives? That a man should publish three or
thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his
great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to
the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a
thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach.
When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding
women’s work, she answered there were plenty to spin and
wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When
nature is “so careless of the single life,” why
should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of
exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been
knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy’s
preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the
pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student
to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss.
There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all
over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of
limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the
proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may,
upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in
the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the
qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor
precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how
you will, but the services of no single individual are
indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted
nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour
themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy
court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until
their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though
Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a
pyramid: and fine young men who work themselves into a decline,
and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it.
Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the
Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny?
and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was
the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the universe?
And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away
their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or
hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may
find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so
inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.</p>
<h2>ORDERED SOUTH</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">By</span> a curious irony of fate, the
places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often
singularly beautiful. Often, too, they are places we have
visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept
ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the
fancy that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations,
and take up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit
as we let it fall. We shall now have an opportunity of
finishing many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore before
our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be that we have
kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of some
valley into which we have just looked down for a moment before we
lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we
have lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with
the thought of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all
but climbed: we shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to
complete all these unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the
barriers that confined our recollections.</p>
<p>The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away
when hope and memory are both in one story, that I daresay the
sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of
banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-health as not the
least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he immediately
undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the
restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep
between two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his
dull nerves into something of their old quickness and
sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal
splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard
and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the
first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into
withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable
brevity and simplicity of such little glimpses of country and
country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train;
little glimpses that have a character all their own; sights seen
as a travelling swallow might see them from the wing, or Iris as
she went abroad over the land on some Olympian errand. Here
and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave their hands to
the express; but for the most part it is an interruption too
brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease
from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a
canal boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the
splash of a leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty
equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood
and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and
there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the averted
head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of its
passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of
railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train
disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our
heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country;
and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of
carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at
unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley that
leads towards the town; they are left behind with the signalman
as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the long train
sweep away into the golden distance.</p>
<p>Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of
wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed
the indefinable line that separates South from North. And
this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness is
forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight
association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not
until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine
peeping through the <i>persiennes</i>, and the southern patois
confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early
or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the
anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It
will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new
significance to all he may see for many days to come. There
is something in the mere name of the South that carries
enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he
pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties
and to get by heart the permanent lines and character of the
landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his
own—an estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and
which he was now to receive in free and full possession.
Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had
been; and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar,
and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would
think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of
travelling hourly farther abroad.</p>
<p>It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his
chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand the change
that has befallen him. Everything about him is as he had
remembered, or as he had anticipated. Here, at his feet,
under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea.
Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of the naked
Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the
railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay
after another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of
all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is divorced from
enjoyment. He recognises with his intelligence that this
thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his heart of hearts
he has to confess that it is not beautiful for him. It is
in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain that he
chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking with all
his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he
remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the
coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an
enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent
tourist. There is some one by who is out of sympathy with
the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of the occasion;
and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted for
him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled
hands, and to see them through a veil. His life becomes a
palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found
and struck them. He cannot recognise that this phlegmatic
and unimpressionable body with which he now goes burthened, is
the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and
alive.</p>
<p>He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and
amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of the
winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and
flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of
fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for
the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his
window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first
flakes, and the white roofs relieved against the sombre
sky. And yet the stuff of which these yearnings are made,
is of the flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below
its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the
snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the
instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry streets
at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The
hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching
gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the
rainy streets towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor
defined by the clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note
of the North-easter on days when the very houses seem to stiffen
with cold: these, and such as these, crowd back upon him, and
mockingly substitute themselves for the fanciful winter scenes
with which he had pleased himself a while before. He cannot
be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others
could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a
little in the sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this
once, upon a kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anywhere,
and no nakedness, and no hunger; if only it were as well with all
men as it is with him!</p>
<p>For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after
all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly
into his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with
it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity.
There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad
activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred
and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very
trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the “spirit
of delight” comes often on small wings. For the
pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially
capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look for it;
and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to
gape joylessly for days together, in the very home-land of the
beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and
one; and on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and
stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull
circle of surroundings; so that we see it “with a
child’s first pleasure,” as Wordsworth saw the
daffodils by the lake side. And if this falls out
capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the
invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and be
lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the
clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour
so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may
see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle,
against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the
tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant
or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint
colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these
southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in
him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are
the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be
something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine,
which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the
large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance
isolation—as he changes the position of his
sunshade—of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and
weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of
the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is
indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was
green, now gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like
“cloud on cloud,” massed into filmy indistinctness;
and now, at the wind’s will, the whole sea of foliage is
shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and
shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way.
To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provocations;
and their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of
women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effects, with
canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of
the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always
as if they were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind;
of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles
and the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up,
solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at
evening.</p>
<p>There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one
such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy
agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration of
many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must
depend. Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some
attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to
and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the landscape
has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken
forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning
touch, the composition of the picture? And not only a
change of posture—a snatch of perfume, the sudden singing
of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible
sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the merest nothing
that sends a little shiver along the most infinitesimal nerve of
a man’s body—not one of the least of these but has a
hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of
its own into the character of the pleasure we feel.</p>
<p>And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle,
even more so are those within our own bodies. No man can
find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because
the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of us
to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of
harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure
of admiration, precisely because some of these circumstances are
hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own
bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or
hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some
sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or
some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which
is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to
the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and
great pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the
mind within us, that gathers together these scattered details for
its delight, and makes out of certain colours, certain
distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible
whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt,
relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great
man’s house to another’s in search of works of art,
begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners,
because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions
than they were; because they had paid the money and he had
received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for
self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able
to buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the
picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living
spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I
repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better
part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than
those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is
not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a
less degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus
improved and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a
man’s enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares
and disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to
depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten
and harmonise the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a
degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly
disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of
his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his
pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the
sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.</p>
<p>It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the
invalid resembles a premature old age. Those excursions
that he had promised himself to finish, prove too long or too
arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills are as
impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on
the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain side,
beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as
inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the
clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully;
and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the
first few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of
his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and
familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just
as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active life, he
now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow
waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come
and go about their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in
goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man’s activity is all
about him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner;
and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of interest,
such as a man may feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes
of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he
has planted over-night.</p>
<p>In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other
men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and
desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a
gentle preparation for the final insensibility of death.
And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent
and harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as
a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long
decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every
moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude
more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and
we move no more, so desire after desire leaves him; day by day
his strength decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever
narrower; and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from
the passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of
death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly and
fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the
coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild
approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to
persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It
is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that
withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has
outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and if
there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and
strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him
always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the
far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will
not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only
strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the
perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes,
let her either rejuvenate or slay.</p>
<p>And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many
and kindly. The sight of children has a significance for
him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for
others. If he has been used to feel humanely, and to look
upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of
personal pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a
portion of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this
proximity of death. He knows that already, in English
counties, the sower follows the ploughman up the face of the
field, and the rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he
may not live to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen,
and be cut down at last, and brought home with gladness.
And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought or
the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as
ever. For he has long been used to wait with interest the
issue of events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be
joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did not
increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency
of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all the
disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future which have
been the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has
set beyond the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and
it makes small difference whether he die five thousand years, or
five thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he
faithfully labours. He has not deceived himself; he has
known from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and
cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it was
reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of the
land. And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter about
him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions
accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with friendly voices
and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The
desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of
health, more strongly than these generous aspirations move him
now; and so life is carried forward beyond life, and a vista kept
open for the eyes of hope, even when his hands grope already on
the face of the impassable.</p>
<p>Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his
friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought for
him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven
into the very stuff of life, beyond the power of bodily
dissolution to undo? In a thousand ways will he survive and
be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived
during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse
with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much
of what was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited
places that knew him no more, and found no better consolation
than the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at
rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek
and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, it
will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our decease,
would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch
who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the
map or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk
of his empire under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned
about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and
that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, in a certain
far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our
identity—that central metropolis of self, of which alone we
are immediately aware—or the diligent service of arteries
and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know
(as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and
substance of the whole? At the death of every one whom we
love, some fair and honourable portion of our existence falls
away, and we are dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and
they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long
series of such impoverishments, till their life and influence
narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and
death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p><span class="smcap">Note</span>.—To this essay I must in
honesty append a word or two of qualification; for this is one of
the points on which a slightly greater age teaches us a slightly
different wisdom:</p>
<p>A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from
particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself
pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the
advance of the human species and the coming of the kingdom of
justice and love. As he grows older, he begins to think
more narrowly of man’s action in the general, and perhaps
more arrogantly of his own in the particular. He has not
that same unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he
been spared, seeing finally that that would have been little; but
he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by
dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world;
his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious
utility; no ties, but to his parents. and these he is sure to
disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been
made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere
fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact or else
the feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed to
our own useless figure in the world, or else—and this,
thank God, in the majority of cases—we so collect about us
the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our
effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain
no longer the question of our right to be.</p>
<p>And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself
dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view
expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to
help, some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to
punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the
man himself. It is he, not another, who is one
woman’s son and a second woman’s husband and a third
woman’s father. That life which began so small, has
now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of
others. It is not indispensable; another will take the
place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better
the man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted
to regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his
personality. To have lived a generation, is not only to
have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed
innumerable duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but
the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. A
man does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a
future that is never to be his; but beholding himself so early a
deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he might
have done already. To have been so useless and now to lose
all hope of being useful any more—there it is that death
and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on,
founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising
steadily from strength to strength; even if his work shall be
fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better
than he; how shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a
career which was his only business in this world, which was so
fitfully pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?</p>
<h2>ÆS TRIPLEX</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> changes wrought by death are in
themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in
their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man’s
experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all
other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes
it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it
lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score
of years. And when the business is done, there is sore
havoc made in other people’s lives, and a pin knocked out
by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There
are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night.
Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away
utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon
intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.
Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind,
from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of
mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of
pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over
the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of
respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we
must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the
hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and
much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of
poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in
many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with
every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and
swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left
them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with
more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have
less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. We
have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of
fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood,
the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of
mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the
greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers
and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the
foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl,
and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the
moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust.
In the eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there
is something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a
picture. It seems not credible that respectable married
people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper
within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life
begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so
close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems,
could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something
like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for
nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere
born-devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse.</p>
<p>And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation
of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure
for the state of ordinary mankind. This world itself,
travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, among a
million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary
directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into
explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically
looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere
bagful of petards? The least of these is as dangerous to
the whole economy as the ship’s powder-magazine to the
ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we
are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as
devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea
of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for
the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might
sound by the hour and no one would follow them into
battle—the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who would
climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers
were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront
the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any
battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our
ancestors have miserably left their bones! What woman would
ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the
wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old? For,
after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the
ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind
us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a
man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a
mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the
night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never
see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of
fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have
their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of
the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as
if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure
at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff
them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter
them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and
unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through
years of man’s age compared to which the valley at
Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on
Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the
peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to
plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to
doff his clothes and clamber into bed.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what
unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wilderness of snares,
and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, is
irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all,
like a party for the Derby. Perhaps the reader remembers
one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he
encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge
over Baiæ bay; and when they were in the height of their
enjoyment, turned loose the Prætorian guards among the
company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad
miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of
man. Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even
while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by
any swimmer, God’s pale Prætorian throws us over in
the end!</p>
<p>We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a
ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the
instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not,
in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should
think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the
devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of
Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the
more we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an
immense proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people
held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet,
unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some
landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God’s
creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man’s
unconcern and brazen boldness in the face of death!</p>
<p>We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we
import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness. We
have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and
some of its consequences to others; and although we have some
experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown
so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the
meaning of the word <i>life</i>. All literature, from Job
and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an
attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view
as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to
the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the
best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a
vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with
dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at
the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged
over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon
another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has
the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her
contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man
may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely,
surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be
afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a
club, or even an undertaker’s man; but not certainly of
abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its
dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in
terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true
throughout—that we do not love life, in the sense that we
are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do not,
properly speaking, love life at all, but living. Into the
views of the least careful there will enter some degree of
providence; no man’s eyes are fixed entirely on the passing
hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good
weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the
sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a
general view of life’s possibilities and issues; nor are
those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous
of their personal safety. To be deeply interested in the
accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of
human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions,
and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love of
living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a
hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who
lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest
of his constitution.</p>
<p>There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both
sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the
dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly
decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it
were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little
ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in
their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of
wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question.
When a man’s heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great
deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of
contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, like the
Commander’s statue; we have something else in hand, thank
God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the
world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is
parting company with all his aches and ecstasies. For us
also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we
have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a
honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest.
Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing
bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry
curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and
the pride of our own nimble bodies.</p>
<p>We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring
about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man’s head is
generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes to
that. Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead
wall—a mere bag’s end, as the French say—or
whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait
our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny;
whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic
poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look
justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into
a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of
these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible:
that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and
run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No
one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror
from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and
yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and
boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of
life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour;
and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before
twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage and
intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man’s
cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise
our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to
be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat
headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying
in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well
armoured for this world.</p>
<p>And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and
a good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender
dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has
least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider
others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in
tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work
cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own
digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the
brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a
paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink
spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated
temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes
and tepid milk. The care of one important body or soul
becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world
begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the regulated
temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and
rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger
ends by standing stockstill. Now the man who has his heart
on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who
reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully
hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps
all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he
runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than
wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the
end. Lord look after his health, Lord have a care of his
soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes
through incongruity and peril towards his aim. Death is on
all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of
all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed
friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little
elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all
this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something
pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other
soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his
best pace until he touch the goal. “A peerage or
Westminster Abbey!” cried Nelson in his bright, boyish,
heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of
these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about
their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable
men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass
flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think
of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to
mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried
him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were
wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any
work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who
would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had
each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to
begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?</p>
<p>And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this
is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a
regulated temperature—as if that were not to die a hundred
times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were
not to die in one’s own lifetime, and without even the sad
immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be
the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The
Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully
held at arm’s length, as if one kept a photographic plate
in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a
spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to
live and be done with it, than to die daily in the
sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor
does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month,
make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a
week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought
to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who
means execution, which out-lives the most untimely ending.
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done
good work, although they may die before they have the time to
sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully
has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered
the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people,
like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast
projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope,
and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at
once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and
spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a
better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than
miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the
Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die
young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also
in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the
man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to
take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit
of life, a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a
bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and
chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done
blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this
happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual
land.</p>
<h2>EL DORADO</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> seems as if a great deal were
attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and
decisive battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the day,
and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals
finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us.
And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of
as much as possible was the one goal of man’s contentious
life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a
semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live
happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and
although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business
and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so
constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the
term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be
truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end,
of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a
joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune
which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a
revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is
to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and
ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece;
and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a
mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may
very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own
desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even
patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people,
and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work
and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through
which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they
that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may
squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these
two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of
pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and
comprehensive that he should never hunger any more; suppose him,
at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay
the desire for knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any
province of experience—would not that man be in a poor way
for amusement ever after?</p>
<p>One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his
knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and
often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or the
prints in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end of his
entertainment, and be left companionless on the last stages of
his journey. A young fellow recently finished the works of
Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten
note-books upon Frederick the Great. “What!”
cried the young fellow, in consternation, “is there no more
Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?” A more
celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly
because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon
had finished the <i>Decline and Fall</i>, he had only a few
moments of joy; and it was with a “sober melancholy”
that he parted from his labours.</p>
<p>Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our
hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of
nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow
themselves again, like mustard. You would think, when the
child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is
only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it
through its teething and its education, and at last its marriage,
alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities,
with every day; and the health of your children’s children
grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again,
when you have married your wife, you would think you were got
upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy
slope. But you have only ended courting to begin
marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to
keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both
man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true
love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the
married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity,
and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal.
Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact
that they are two instead of one.</p>
<p>“Of making books there is no end,” complained the
Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising letters
as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making books
or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth.
Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever, and
we are never as learned as we would. We have never made a
statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a
continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find
another ocean or another plain upon the further side. In
the infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence
and to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which
can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a private
park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and
the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there
for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and
delight us.</p>
<p>There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing
that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety
of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it be worth
attaining.</p>
<p>A strange picture we make on our way to our chimæras,
ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest;
indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we
shall never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that
there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were
endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not
much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not
whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth
on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further,
against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.
Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully
is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to
labour.</p>
<h2>THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS</h2>
<blockquote><p>“Whether it be wise in men to do such
actions or no, I am sure it is so in States to honour
them.”—<span class="smcap">Sir William
Temple</span>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is one story of the wars of
Rome which I have always very much envied for England.
Germanicus was going down at the head of the legions into a
dangerous river—on the opposite bank the woods were full of
Germans—when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed
to marshal the Romans on their way; they did not pause or waver,
but disappeared into the forest where the enemy lay
concealed. “Forward!” cried Germanicus, with a
fine rhetorical inspiration, “Forward! and follow the Roman
birds.” It would be a very heavy spirit that did not
give a leap at such a signal, and a very timorous one that
continued to have any doubt of success. To appropriate the
eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make imaginary allies of the
forces of nature; the Roman Empire and its military fortunes, and
along with these the prospects of those individual Roman
legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked altogether
greater and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to
produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a
particular star, the holiday of some particular saint, anything
in short to remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old
successes, may be enough to change the issue of a pitched battle;
for it gives to the one party a feeling that Right and the larger
interests are with them.</p>
<p>If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be
about the sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not been
taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised as an English
emblem. We know right well that a lion would fall foul of
us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian Jew, and
we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle. But
the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of our
greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical
strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences
of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable
side to English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire,
who does not know one end of the ship from the other until she
begins to move, swaggers among such persons with a sense of
hereditary nautical experience. To suppose yourself endowed
with natural parts for the sea because you are the countryman of
Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just as unwarrantable as to
imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will
look well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated
beyond the reach of argument. We should consider ourselves
unworthy of our descent if we did not share the arrogance of our
progenitors, and please ourselves with the pretension that the
sea is English. Even where it is looked upon by the guns
and battlements of another nation we regard it as a kind of
English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers take
their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other nation
has lost as many ships, or sent as many brave fellows to the
bottom.</p>
<p>There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble,
terrifying, and picturesque conditions of some of our sea
fights. Hawke’s battle in the tempest, and Aboukir at
the moment when the French Admiral blew up, reach the limit of
what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval annals
owe some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful
appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea
and everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a
half-holiday at the coast. Nay, and what we know of the
misery between decks enhances the bravery of what was done by
giving it something for contrast. We like to know that
these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold
and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings. No reader
can forget the description of the <i>Thunder</i> in <i>Roderick
Random</i>: the disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of
officers and men; deck after deck, each with some new object of
offence; the hospital, where the hammocks were huddled together
with but fourteen inches space for each; the cockpit, far under
water, where, “in an intolerable stench,” the
spectacled steward kept the accounts of the different messes; and
the canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip
and salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore
his queer Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this
business on board the <i>Thunder</i> over which the reader passes
lightly and hurriedly, like a traveller in a malarious
country. It is easy enough to understand the opinion of Dr.
Johnson: “Why, sir,” he said, “no man will be a
sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a
jail.” You would fancy any one’s spirit would
die out under such an accumulation of darkness, noisomeness, and
injustice, above all when he had not come there of his own free
will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the
press-gang. But perhaps a watch on deck in the sharp sea
air put a man on his mettle again; a battle must have been a
capital relief; and prize-money, bloodily earned and grossly
squandered, opened the doors of the prison for a twinkling.
Somehow or other, at least, this worst of possible lives could
not overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did their
duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of that
country which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns
merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear
for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any class of men the world
ever produced.</p>
<p>Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names. Pym
and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they must not think to cope
with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And you could not find a
better case in point than that of the English Admirals.
Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men of
execution. Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather, Jack
Byron, are all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval
history. Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and
sounding syllables. Benbow has a bulldog quality that suits
the man’s character, and it takes us back to those English
archers who were his true comrades for plainness, tenacity, and
pluck. Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an
act of bold conduct in the field. It is impossible to judge
of Blake or Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of
such heroes. But still it is odd enough, and very
appropriate in this connection, that the latter was greatly taken
with his Sicilian title. “The signification, perhaps,
pleased him,” says Southey; “Duke of Thunder was what
in Dahomey would have been called a <i>strong name</i>; it was to
a sailor’s taste, and certainly to no man could it be more
applicable.” Admiral in itself is one of the most
satisfactory of distinctions; it has a noble sound and a very
proud history; and Columbus thought so highly of it, that he
enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that title as long as
the house should last.</p>
<p>But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I
wish to speak about in this paper. That spirit is truly
English; they, and not Tennyson’s cotton-spinners or Mr.
D’Arcy Thompson’s Abstract Bagman, are the true and
typical Englishmen. There may be more <i>head</i> of bagmen
in the country, but human beings are reckoned by number only in
political constitutions. And the Admirals are typical in
the full force of the word. They are splendid examples of
virtue, indeed, but of a virtue in which most Englishmen can
claim a moderate share; and what we admire in their lives is a
sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in our
land, except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been
depressed by exceptionally æsthetic surroundings, can
understand and sympathise with an Admiral or a
prize-fighter. I do not wish to bracket Benbow and Tom
Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically bracketed for
admiration in the minds of many frequenters of ale-houses.
If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus
going back to Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep; but
tell them about Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and
the Nile, and they put down their pipes to listen. I have
by me a copy of <i>Boxiana</i>, on the fly-leaves of which a
youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle of remarkable
events and an obituary of great men. Here we find piously
chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and
pugilists—Johnny Moore, of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom
Spring, aged fifty-six; “Pierce Egan, senior, writer of
<i>Boxiana</i> and other sporting works”—and among
all these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in
the time of this annalist, do you suppose his name would not have
been added to the glorious roll? In short, we do not all
feel warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleasure
in <i>Paradise Lost</i>; but there are certain common sentiments
and touches of nature by which the whole nation is made to feel
kinship. A little while ago everybody, from Hazlitt and
John Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his
register on the fly-leaves of <i>Boxiana</i>, felt a more or less
shamefaced satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters.
And the exploits of the Admirals are popular to the same degree,
and tell in all ranks of society. Their sayings and doings
stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if the Indian
Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward and visible
ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should still leave
behind us a durable monument of what we were in these sayings and
doings of the English Admirals.</p>
<p>Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the
<i>Venerable</i>, and only one other vessel, heard that the whole
Dutch fleet was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham to
anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the channel, and
fight his vessel till she sank. “I have taken the
depth of the water,” added he, “and when the
<i>Venerable</i> goes down, my flag will still fly.”
And you observe this is no naked Viking in a prehistoric period;
but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering of the
classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel
underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir
with six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it
should not be imagined he had struck. He too must needs
wear his four stars outside his Admiral’s frock, to be a
butt for sharp-shooters. “In honour I gained
them,” he said to objectors, adding with sublime
illogicality, “in honour I will die with them.”
Captain Douglas of the <i>Royal Oak</i>, when the Dutch fired his
vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was burned along
with her himself rather than desert his post without
orders. Just then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a
moth round the supper-table with the ladies of his court.
When Raleigh sailed into Cadiz, and all the forts and ships
opened fire on him at once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made
answer with a flourish of insulting trumpets. I like this
bravado better than the wisest dispositions to insure victory; it
comes from the heart and goes to it. God has made nobler
heroes, but he never made a finer gentleman than Walter
Raleigh. And as our Admirals were full of heroic
superstitions, and had a strutting and vainglorious style of
fight, so they discovered a startling eagerness for battle, and
courted war like a mistress. When the news came to Essex
before Cadiz that the attack had been decided, he threw his hat
into the sea. It is in this way that a schoolboy hears of a
half-holiday; but this was a bearded man of great possessions who
had just been allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not
lie still in his bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on
deck in a basket to direct and animate the fight. I said
they loved war like a mistress; yet I think there are not many
mistresses we should continue to woo under similar
circumstances. Trowbridge went ashore with the
<i>Culloden</i>, and was able to take no part in the battle of
the Nile. “The merits of that ship and her gallant
captain,” wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, “are too
well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her
misfortune was great in getting aground, <i>while her more
fortunate companions were in the full tide of
happiness</i>.” This is a notable expression, and
depicts the whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the English
Admirals to a hair. It was to be “in the full tide of
happiness” for Nelson to destroy five thousand five hundred
and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have his own scalp
torn open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at
Copenhagen: “A shot through the mainmast knocked the
splinters about; and he observed to one of his officers with a
smile, ‘It is warm work, and this may be the last to any of
us at any moment;’ and then, stopping short at the gangway,
added, with emotion, ‘<i>But</i>, <i>mark you—I would
not be elsewhere for thousands</i>.’”</p>
<p>I must tell one more story, which has lately been made
familiar to us all, and that in one of the noblest ballads in the
English language. I had written my tame prose abstract, I
shall beg the reader to believe, when I had no notion that the
sacred bard designed an immortality for Greenville. Sir
Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas Howard, and
lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He
was a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow
apparently; and it is related of him that he would chew and
swallow wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till the blood
ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish fleet of fifty sail
came within sight of the English, his ship, the <i>Revenge</i>,
was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by the
Spaniards, that there were but two courses open—either to
turn her back upon the enemy or sail through one of his
squadrons. The first alternative Greenville dismissed as
dishonourable to himself, his country, and her Majesty’s
ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and steered into
the Spanish armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and
fall under his lee; until, about three o’clock of the
afternoon, a great ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind
out of his sails, and immediately boarded. Thence-forward,
and all night long, the <i>Revenge</i>, held her own
single-handed against the Spaniards. As one ship was beaten
off, another took its place. She endured, according to
Raleigh’s computation, “eight hundred shot of great
artillery, besides many assaults and entries.” By
morning the powder was spent, the pikes all broken, not a stick
was standing, “nothing left overhead either for flight or
defence;” six feet of water in the hold; almost all the men
hurt; and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring
them to this pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them
for fifteen hours, the <i>Admiral of the Hulks</i> and the
<i>Ascension</i> of Seville had both gone down alongside, and two
other vessels had taken refuge on shore in a sinking state.
In Hawke’s words, they had “taken a great deal of
drubbing.” The captain and crew thought they had done
about enough; but Greenville was not of this opinion; he gave
orders to the master gunner, whom he knew to be a fellow after
his own stamp, to scuttle the <i>Revenge</i> where she lay.
The others, who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral,
interfered with some decision, locked the master gunner in his
cabin, after having deprived him of his sword, for he manifested
an intention to kill himself if he were not to sink the ship; and
sent to the Spaniards to demand terms. These were
granted. The second or third day after, Greenville died of
his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship, leaving his contempt upon
the “traitors and dogs” who had not chosen to do as
he did, and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully manned,
with six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short of
stores. He at least, he said, had done his duty as he was
bound to do, and looked for everlasting fame.</p>
<p>Some one said to me the other day that they considered this
story to be of a pestilent example. I am not inclined to
imagine we shall ever be put into any practical difficulty from a
superfluity of Greenvilles. And besides, I demur to the
opinion. The worth of such actions is not a thing to be
decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous
commonsense. The man who wished to make the ballads of his
country, coveted a small matter compared to what Richard
Greenville accomplished. I wonder how many people have been
inspired by this mad story, and how many battles have been
actually won for England in the spirit thus engendered. It
is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be
sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable
occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic
fancies, will not be led far by terror of the Provost
Marshal. Even German warfare, in addition to maps and
telegraphs, is not above employing the <i>Wacht am
Rhein</i>. Nor is it only in the profession of arms that
such stories may do good to a man. In this desperate and
gleeful fighting, whether it is Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or
Nelson, who flies his colours in the ship, we see men brought to
the test and giving proof of what we call heroic feeling.
Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club smoking-room, that
they are a prey to prodigious heroic feelings, and that it costs
them more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular, than
would carry on all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose
humanity. It may very well be so, and yet not touch the
point in question. For what I desire is to see some of this
nobility brought face to face with me in an inspiriting
achievement. A man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my
club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment, without adding
anything to mankind’s treasury of illustrious and
encouraging examples. It is not over the virtues of a
curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are abashed into high
resolutions. It may be because their hearts are crass, but
to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with
some pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories
of our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full
of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any
material benefit in all the books of political economy between
Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wineglasses
at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more than a thousand
other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met in private
life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent
performance; and I contend it ought not only to enliven men of
the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant clerks
with more heart and spirit to their book-keeping by double
entry.</p>
<p>There is another question which seems bound up in this; and
that is Temple’s problem: whether it was wise of Douglas to
burn with the <i>Royal Oak</i>? and by implication, what it was
that made him do so? Many will tell you it was the desire
of fame.</p>
<p>“To what do Cæsar and Alexander owe the infinite
grandeur of their renown, but to fortune? How many men has
she extinguished in the beginning of their progress, of whom we
have no knowledge; who brought as much courage to the work as
they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the first
sally of their arms? Amongst so many and so great dangers,
I do not remember to have anywhere read that Cæsar was ever
wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than the least of
these he went through. A great many brave actions must be
expected to be performed without witness, for one that comes to
some notice. A man is not always at the top of a breach, or
at the head of an army in the sight of his general, as upon a
platform. He is often surprised between the hedge and the
ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a henroost; he
must dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must
prick out single from his party, as necessity arises, and meet
adventures alone.”</p>
<p>Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on
<i>Glory</i>. Where death is certain, as in the cases of
Douglas or Greenville, it seems all one from a personal point of
view. The man who lost his life against a henroost, is in
the same pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified
place of the first order. Whether he has missed a peerage
or only the corporal’s stripes, it is all one if he has
missed them and is quietly in the grave. It was by a hazard
that we learned the conduct of the four marines of the
<i>Wager</i>. There was no room for these brave fellows in
the boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a certain
death. They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough
it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away,
they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried
“God bless the king!” Now, one or two of those
who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the
story. That was a great thing for us; but surely it cannot,
by any possible twisting of human speech, be construed into
anything great for the marines. You may suppose, if you
like, that they died hoping their behaviour would not be
forgotten; or you may suppose they thought nothing on the
subject, which is much more likely. What can be the
signification of the word “fame” to a private of
marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past history beyond
the reminiscences of his grandmother? But whichever
supposition you make, the fact is unchanged. They died
while the question still hung in the balance; and I suppose their
bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and the
humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided whether
they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or honoured
heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it is for
fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows after
all.</p>
<p>It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to
decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain
heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral
at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of
admiration. But there is another theory of the personal
motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be
true and wholesome. People usually do things, and suffer
martyrdoms, because they have an inclination that way. The
best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but
the one who loves the practice of his art. And instead of
having a taste for being successful merchants and retiring at
thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we call heroic
forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted war like a
mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came
gaily out of the forecastle,—it is because a fight is a
period of multiplied and intense experiences, and, by
Nelson’s computation, worth “thousands” to any
one who has a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the
<i>Wager</i> gave three cheers and cried “God bless the
king,” it was because they liked to do things nobly for
their own satisfaction. They were giving their lives, there
was no help for that; and they made it a point of self-respect to
give them handsomely. And there were never four happier
marines in God’s world than these four at that
moment. If it was worth thousands to be at the Baltic, I
wish a Benthamite arithmetician would calculate how much it was
worth to be one of these four marines; or how much their story is
worth to each of us who read it. And mark you,
undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation. The
finest action is the better for a piece of purple. If the
soldiers of the <i>Birkenhead</i> had not gone down in line, or
these marines of the <i>Wager</i> had walked away simply into the
island, like plenty of other brave fellows in the like
circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far
lower value to the two stories. We have to desire a grand
air in our heroes; and such a knowledge of the human stage as
shall make them put the dots on their own i’s, and leave us
in no suspense as to when they mean to be heroic. And
hence, we should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that our
Admirals were not only great-hearted but big-spoken.</p>
<p>The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is their
object; but I do not think that is much to the purpose.
People generally say what they have been taught to say; that was
the catchword they were given in youth to express the aims of
their way of life; and men who are gaining great battles are not
likely to take much trouble in reviewing their sentiments and the
words in which they were told to express them. Almost every
person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite different
theory of life from the one on which he is patently acting.
And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought,
but it is too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments
of swift and momentous decision. It is from something more
immediate, some determination of blood to the head, some trick of
the fancy, that the breach is stormed or the bold word
spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a canoe
has exactly as much thought about fame as most commanders going
into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not one
of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed it is
difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet
so formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes
it. I suspect that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten
per cent. of why Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated
so much in the House of Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva
the other day, and why the Admirals courted war like a
mistress.</p>
<h2>SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Through</span> the initiative of a
prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in possession, for some
autumn weeks, of a gallery of paintings of singular merit and
interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scotch
Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual
spring exhibition, with astonishment and a sense of
incongruity. Instead of the too common purple sunsets, and
pea-green fields, and distances executed in putty and hog’s
lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls of room
after room, a whole army of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or
beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of
genuine instinct. It was a complete act of the Human
Drawing-Room Comedy. Lords and ladies, soldiers and
doctors, hanging judges, and heretical divines, a whole
generation of good society was resuscitated; and the Scotchman of
to-day walked about among the Scotchmen of two generations
ago. The moment was well chosen, neither too late nor too
early. The people who sat for these pictures are not yet
ancestors, they are still relations. They are not yet
altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle distance
within cry of our affections. The little child who looks
wonderingly on his grandfather’s watch in the picture, is
now the veteran Sheriff <i>emeritus</i> of Perth. And I
hear a story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh,
after an absence of sixty years: “I could see none of my
old friends,” she said, “until I went into the
Raeburn Gallery, and found them all there.”</p>
<p>It would be difficult to say whether the collection was more
interesting on the score of unity or diversity. Where the
portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the same
race, and all from the same brush, there could not fail to be
many points of similarity. And yet the similarity of the
handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief those personal
distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was a
born painter of portraits. He looked people shrewdly
between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and had
possessed himself of what was essential in their character before
they had been many minutes in his studio. What he was so
swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment
of conception. He had never any difficulty, he said, about
either hands or faces. About draperies or light or
composition, he might see room for hesitation or
afterthought. But a face or a hand was something plain and
legible. There were no two ways about it, any more than
about the person’s name. And so each of his portraits
are not only (in Doctor Johnson’s phrase, aptly quoted on
the catalogue) “a piece of history,” but a piece of
biography into the bargain. It is devoutly to be wished
that all biography were equally amusing, and carried its own
credentials equally upon its face. These portraits are
racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a volume
of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a
stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the historian from
Raeburn’s palette or Dugald Stewart’s woolly and
evasive periods. And then the portraits are both signed and
countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the
artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and
manners of men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of the
subject, who sits looking out upon you with inimitable innocence,
and apparently under the impression that he is in a room by
himself. For Raeburn could plunge at once through all the
constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and present the face,
clear, open, and intelligent as at the most disengaged
moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter is
represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle,
Doctor Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord Bannatyne hearing a
cause. Above all, from this point of view, the portrait of
Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable. A strange enough young
man, pink, fat about the lower part of the face, with a lean
forehead, a narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits with a
drawing-board upon his knees. He has just paused to render
himself account of some difficulty, to disentangle some
complication of line or compare neighbouring values. And
there, without any perceptible wrinkling, you have rendered for
you exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and the unconscious
compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an effort of the
kind. The whole pose, the whole expression, is absolutely
direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it
that Colonel Lyon had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and
thought of nothing in the world besides his own occupation of the
moment.</p>
<p>Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly
the whole of Raeburn’s works, it was too large not to
contain some that were indifferent, whether as works of art or as
portraits. Certainly the standard was remarkably high, and
was wonderfully maintained, but there were one or two pictures
that might have been almost as well away—one or two that
seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were not
successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir
Walter Scott, for instance, were very agreeable to look
upon. You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so
rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked forehead which,
according to all written accounts and many portraits, was the
distinguishing characteristic of his face? Again, in spite
of his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot
consider that Raeburn was very happy in hands. Without
doubt, he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to study
it; but it was by no means always that he gave himself the
trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about with
his portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive
faces, as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a
room full of living people. But it was not so with the
hands. The portraits differed from each other in face
perhaps ten times as much as they differed by the hand; whereas
with living people the two go pretty much together; and where one
is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be
commonplace.</p>
<p>One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of
Camperdown. He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet
slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his hand
poised upon a chart by the finger tips. The mouth is
pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly
arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and
have the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea
winds. From the whole figure, attitude and countenance,
there breathes something precise and decisive, something alert,
wiry, and strong. You can understand, from the look of him,
that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and
driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the fight
at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet under
Admiral de Winter. “Gentlemen,” says he,
“you see a severe winter approaching; I have only to advise
you to keep up a good fire.” Somewhat of this same
spirit of adamantine drollery must have supported him in the days
of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own
flagship, the <i>Venerable</i>, and only one other vessel, and
kept up active signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the
offing, to intimidate the Dutch.</p>
<p>Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye, was the
half-length of Robert M‘Queen, of Braxfield, Lord
Justice-Clerk. If I know gusto in painting when I see it,
this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment. The tart,
rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face
resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and perpetuated
with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly
subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous,
like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it has
been somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous
eyelids of old age the eyes look out with a half-youthful,
half-frosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence to
distinction, are folded on the judge’s stomach. So
sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait
painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of
sympathy on the part of the spectator. And sympathy is a
thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations, because
it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is
probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for
any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield,
than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against
his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the Scotch
bench to employ the pure Scotch idiom. His opinions, thus
given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, conversational
style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or
off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover of wine, and one
who “shone peculiarly” at tavern meetings. He
has left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel
speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows. It
was he who presided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793
and 1794; and his appearance on these occasions was scarcely cut
to the pattern of to-day. His summing up on Muir began
thus—the reader must supply for himself “the
growling, blacksmith’s voice” and the broad Scotch
accent: “Now this is the question for
consideration—Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he
not? Now, before this can be answered, two things must be
attended to that require no proof: <i>First</i>, that the British
constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the
world, and it is not possible to make it better.”
It’s a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political
trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the
relations of Muir with “those wretches,” the
French. “I never liked the French all my days,”
said his lordship, “but now I hate them.” And
yet a little further on: “A government in any country
should be like a corporation; and in this country it is made up
of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be
represented. As for the rabble who have nothing but
personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They
may pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country
in the twinkling of an eye.” After having made
profession of sentiments so cynically anti-popular as these, when
the trials were at an end, which was generally about midnight,
Braxfield would walk home to his house in George Square with no
better escort than an easy conscience. I think I see him
getting his cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a
lantern in one hand, steering his way along the streets in the
mirk January night. It might have been that very day that
Skirving had defied him in these words: “It is altogether
unavailing for your lordship to menace me; for I have long
learned to fear not the face of man;” and I can fancy, as
Braxfield reflected on the number of what he called
<i>Grumbletonians</i> in Edinburgh, and of how many of them must
bear special malice against so upright and inflexible a judge,
nay, and might at that very moment be lurking in the mouth of a
dark close with hostile intent—I can fancy that he indulged
in a sour smile, as he reflected that he also was not especially
afraid of men’s faces or men’s fists, and had
hitherto found no occasion to embody this insensibility in heroic
words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman (and I am
afraid it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was also perfectly
intrepid. You may look into the queer face of that portrait
for as long as you will, but you will not see any hole or corner
for timidity to enter in.</p>
<p>Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to
name half of the portraits that were remarkable for their
execution, or interesting by association. There was one
picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which you might palm off
upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the white
head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman who, playing
with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, invented modern
naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit
for which the old fiddler walked daily through the streets of
Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was
good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose and upper lip, and
his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out; Hutton the
geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking altogether trim and
narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than young ladies;
full-blown John Robieson, in hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and,
every inch of him, a fine old man of the world; Constable the
publisher, upright beside a table, and bearing a corporation with
commercial dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever
anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord Newton just
awakened from clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second
President Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you,
in his wig, of some droll old court officer in an illustrated
nursery story-book, and yet all these fat features instinct with
meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose combining
somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature of a bottle,
and the very double chin with an air of intelligence and
insight. And all these portraits are so pat and telling,
and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, that, compared with
the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as
bright new sovereigns to fishy and obliterated sixpences.
Some disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could hardly
fail to present themselves; but it is perhaps only the <i>sacer
vates</i> who is wanting; and we also, painted by such a man as
Carolus Duran, may look in holiday immortality upon our children
and grandchildren.</p>
<p>Raeburn’s young women, to be frank, are by no means of
the same order of merit. No one, of course, could be
insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell
of Possil. When things are as pretty as that, criticism is
out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with women of
a certain age that he can be said to have succeeded, in at all
the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger
women do not seem to be made of good flesh and blood. They
are not painted in rich and unctuous touches. They are dry
and diaphanous. And although young ladies in Great Britain
are all that can be desired of them, I would fain hope they are
not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us believe.
In all these pretty faces, you miss character, you miss fire, you
miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in
the world; and what is worst of all, you miss sex. His
young ladies are not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men
are masculine; they are so in a negative sense; in short, they
are the typical young ladies of the male novelist.</p>
<p>To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty
sitters; or he had stupefied himself with sentimentalities; or
else (and here is about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of
us labour under an obstinate blindness in one direction, and know
very little more about women after all these centuries than Adam
when he first saw Eve. This is all the more likely, because
we are by no means so unintelligent in the matter of old
women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me, in
books written by men. And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs.
Colin Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous “Old lady with a
large cap,” which are done in the same frank, perspicacious
spirit as the very best of his men. He could look into
their eyes without trouble; and he was not withheld, by any
bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw there and
unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where
people cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of
involuntary humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are
together, with a very different vein of thought, there cannot be
much room for intelligent study nor much result in the shape of
genuine comprehension. Even women, who understand men so
well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the
purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male
creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he
has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a
comb at the back of his head. Of course, no woman will
believe this, and many men will be so very polite as to humour
their incredulity.</p>
<h2>CHILD’S PLAY</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> regret we have for our
childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much a man may lay down
without fear of public ribaldry; for although we shake our heads
over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous
impulse, we more than gain in the habit of generously watching
others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost
aptitude for playing at soldiers. Terror is gone out of our
lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains
nor lie awake to listen to the wind. We go to school no
more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for another
(which is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the
daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has
overtaken us; and although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at
least we take our pleasure differently. We need pickles
nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our
Friday’s appetite; and I can remember the time when to call
it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would
have made it more palatable than the best of sauces. To the
grown person, cold mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not
all the mythology ever invented by man will make it better or
worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton
carries away before it such seductive figments. But for the
child it is still possible to weave an enchantment over eatables;
and if he has but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be
heavenly manna to him for a week.</p>
<p>If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise,
if he is not something positive in his tastes, it means he has a
feeble body and should have some medicine; but children may be
pure spirits, if they will, and take their enjoyment in a world
of moon-shine. Sensation does not count for so much in our
first years as afterwards; something of the swaddling numbness of
infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear through a sort
of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough to
see, but they have no great faculty for looking; they do not use
their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of
their own; and the things I call to mind seeing most vividly,
were not beautiful in themselves, but merely interesting or
enviable to me as I thought they might be turned to practical
account in play. Nor is the sense of touch so clean and
poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn
over your old memories, I think the sensations of this sort you
remember will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a
blunt, general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general
sense of wellbeing in bed. And here, of course, you will
understand pleasurable sensations; for overmastering
pain—the most deadly and tragical element in life, and the
true commander of man’s soul and body—alas! pain has
its own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon
the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less
surely than it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the
immortal war-god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more
than philosophy, can protect us from this sting. As for
taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar
which delight a youthful palate, “it is surely no very
cynical asperity” to think taste a character of the maturer
growth. Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I
remember many scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring
singing in the woods. But hearing is capable of vast
improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the world
between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion
with which a man listens to articulate music.</p>
<p>At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the
definition and intensity of what we feel which accompanies our
growing age, another change takes place in the sphere of
intellect, by which all things are transformed and seen through
theories and associations as through coloured windows. We
make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and gossip, and
economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in which we
walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop
windows with other eyes than in our childhood, never to wonder,
not always to admire, but to make and modify our little
incongruous theories about life. It is no longer the
uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but perhaps the
flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a countenance that has
been vividly stamped with passion and carries an adventurous
story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is
passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem mighty tame to
encounter; and we walk the streets to make romances and to
sociologise. Nor must we deny that a good many of us walk
them solely for the purposes of transit or in the interest of a
livelier digestion. These, indeed, may look back with
mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a
better case; they know more than when they were children, they
understand better, their desires and sympathies answer more
nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their minds are
brimming with interest as they go about the world.</p>
<p>According to my contention, this is a flight to which children
cannot rise. They are wheeled in perambulators or dragged
about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A vague, faint,
abiding, wonderment possesses them. Here and there some
specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart or a
guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought and calls
them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see them,
still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort
of destiny, but still staring at the bright object in their
wake. It may be some minutes before another such moving
spectacle reawakens them to the world in which they dwell.
For other children, they almost invariably show some intelligent
sympathy. “There is a fine fellow making mud
pies,” they seem to say; “that I can understand,
there is some sense in mud pies.” But the doings of
their elders, unless where they are speakingly picturesque or
recommend themselves by the quality of being easily imitable,
they let them go over their heads (as we say) without the least
regard. If it were not for this perpetual imitation, we
should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only
considered us in the light of creatures brutally strong and
brutally silly; among whom they condescended to dwell in
obedience like a philosopher at a barbarous court. At
times, indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard that is
truly staggering. Once, when I was groaning aloud with
physical pain, a young gentleman came into the room and
nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow. He
made no account of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to
accept so much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of
his elders; and like a wise young gentleman, he would waste no
wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little for
rational enjoyment, and are even the enemies of rational
enjoyment for others, he had accepted without understanding and
without complaint, as the rest of us accept the scheme of the
universe.</p>
<p>We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take
strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall,
and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone
in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do, or does not
do, at least, when he can find anything else. He works all
with lay figures and stage properties. When his story comes
to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword
and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, until he is out of
breath. When he comes to ride with the king’s pardon,
he must bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and
on which he will so furiously demean himself, that the messenger
will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least fiery red with
haste. If his romance involves an accident upon a cliff, he
must clamber in person about the chest of drawers and fall bodily
upon the carpet, before his imagination is satisfied. Lead
soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same category and
answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child’s
faith; he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the
most staring incongruities. The chair he has just been
besieging as a castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a
dragon, is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor,
and he is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a
stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasance,
he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging
potatoes for the day’s dinner. He can make
abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts
his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an
unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the ways of
children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places
daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie in
the same element. So may the telegraph wires intersect the
line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and a
bagman visit the same country, and yet move in different
worlds.</p>
<p>People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the power
of imagination in the young. Indeed there may be two words
to that. It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that
the child exhibits. It is the grown people who make the
nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve
the text. One out of a dozen reasons why <i>Robinson
Crusoe</i> should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their
level in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts
and had, in so many words, to <i>play</i> at a great variety of
professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there is
nothing that delights a child so much. Hammers and saws
belong to a province of life that positively calls for
imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most
ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are
successively simulated to the running burthen “On a cold
and frosty morning,” gives a good instance of the artistic
taste in children. And this need for overt action and lay
figures testifies to a defect in the child’s imagination
which prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of
his own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and
men. His experience is incomplete. That
stage-wardrobe and scene-room that we call the memory is so ill
provided, that he can overtake few combinations and body out few
stories, to his own content, without some external aid. He
is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel
in certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near
trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism
with a wooden sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation
over a bit of jointed stick. It may be laughable enough
just now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts,
that not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will
make you weep and tremble. For children think very much the
same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and
marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and
honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the
business man’s pleasure in method, all these and others
they anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us,
who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of
destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint for
their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at
soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the
scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. This is
perhaps the greatest oddity of all. “Art for
art” is their motto; and the doings of grown folk are only
interesting as the raw material for play. Not
Théophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can look more callously
upon life, or rate the reproduction more highly over the reality;
and they will parody an execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of
the young man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the
world.</p>
<p>The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in
conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself
an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon
philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood. It
is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading
character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of
our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when
we admit this personal element into our divagations we are apt to
stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind
ourselves sharply of old wounds. Our day-dreams can no
longer lie all in the air like a story in the <i>Arabian
Nights</i>; they read to us rather like the history of a period
in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many
unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly
reprimanded. And then the child, mind you, acts his
parts. He does not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps,
he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his body. And so
his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he
gives it vent. Alas! when we betake ourselves to our
intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying
prone in bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no
outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind,
which desires the thing itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant
dialogue with one’s enemy, although it is perhaps the most
satisfactory piece of play still left within our reach, is not
entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to a visit and an
interview which may be the reverse of triumphant after all.</p>
<p>In the child’s world of dim sensation, play is all in
all. “Making believe” is the gist of his whole
life, and he cannot so much as take a walk except in
character. I could not learn my alphabet without some
suitable <i>mise-en-scène</i>, and had to act a business
man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will
you kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did,
work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness, and for how much
you had to cheat yourself with some invention? I remember,
as though it were yesterday, the expansion of spirit, the dignity
and self-reliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt
cork, even when there was none to see. Children are even
content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the
shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking
intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by the
hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to
speak French. I have said already how even the imperious
appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by the
nose with the fag end of an old song. And it goes deeper
than this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an
interruption in the business of life; and they must find some
imaginative sanction, and tell themselves some sort of story, to
account for, to colour, to render entertaining, the simple
processes of eating and drinking. What wonderful fancies I
have heard evolved out of the pattern upon tea-cups!—from
which there followed a code of rules and a whole world of
excitement, until tea-drinking began to take rank as a
game. When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning,
we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate
his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually
buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it
to be a country suffering gradual inundation. You can
imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still
unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what
inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on
perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in
boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last corner of safe
ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment;
and how in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance,
and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with
these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever
had over a meal, were in the case of calves’ feet
jelly. It was hardly possible not to believe—and you
may be sure, so far from trying, I did all I could to favour the
illusion—that some part of it was hollow, and that sooner
or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of the
golden rock. There, might some miniature <i>Red Beard</i>
await his hour; there, might one find the treasures of the
<i>Forty Thieves</i>, and bewildered Cassim beating about the
walls. And so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath,
savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little palate
left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I took
cream with it, I used often to go without, because the cream
dimmed the transparent fractures.</p>
<p>Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with
right-minded children. It is thus that hide-and-seek has so
pre-eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance,
and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend
themselves to almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket,
which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing and
for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving. It is
a game, if you like, but not a game of play. You cannot
tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls
forth can be justified on no rational theory. Even
football, although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and
flow of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young
sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little
boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball,
and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with an
elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of
talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian
nations.</p>
<p>To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted
about the bringing up of children. Surely they dwell in a
mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their
parents. What can they think of them? what can they make of
these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their
games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs
apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest
solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down
out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the prerogatives of
age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally
rebellious. Were there ever such unthinkable deities as
parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine
cases out of ten, is the child’s unvarnished feeling.
A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best
very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of terror for
the untried residue of mankind go to make up the attraction that
he feels. No wonder, poor little heart, with such a
weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the hand he
knows! The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as it
seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to
forget. “O, why,” I remember passionately
wondering, “why can we not all be happy and devote
ourselves to play?” And when children do
philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same
purpose.</p>
<p>One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these
considerations; that whatever we are to expect at the hands of
children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about matters
of fact. They walk in a vain show, and among mists and
rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned about
realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; and
there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach them
what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is
inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we
charge him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And
why not extend the same allowance to imperfect speakers?
Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or a poet inexact
in the details of business, and we excuse them heartily from
blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human entity,
whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified town
and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes
three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open
self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of
fact as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my
heart, I think it less than decent. You do not consider how
little the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he has
seen into bewildering fiction; and that he cares no more for what
you call truth, than you for a gingerbread dragoon.</p>
<p>I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as
to the precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a very
different matter, and one bound up with the subject of play, and
the precise amount of playfulness, or playability, to be looked
for in the world. Many such burning questions must arise in
the course of nursery education. Among the fauna of this
planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and the
terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is not, the child to expect a
Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out
for magicians, kindly and potent? May he, or may he not,
reasonably hope to be cast away upon a desert island, or turned
to such diminutive proportions that he can live on equal terms
with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in his own toy
schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a
neophyte entering upon life with a view to play. Precision
upon such a point, the child can understand. But if you
merely ask him of his past behaviour, as to who threw such a
stone, for instance, or struck such and such a match; or whether
he had looked into a parcel or gone by a forbidden
path,—why, he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is
ten to one, he has already half forgotten and half bemused
himself with subsequent imaginings.</p>
<p>It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland,
where they figure so prettily—pretty like flowers and
innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens
soon enough, and have to go into offices and the
witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious
parent! Let them doze among their playthings yet a little!
for who knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them
in the future?</p>
<h2>WALKING TOURS</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> must not be imagined that a
walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or
worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of
seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of
canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But
landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is
indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the
picturesque, but of certain jolly humours—of the hope and
spirit with which the march begins at morning, and the peace and
spiritual repletion of the evening’s rest. He cannot
tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more
delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key
for that of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a
reward in itself, but will be further rewarded in the sequel; and
so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain. It is
this that so few can understand; they will either be always
lounging or always at five miles an hour; they do not play off
the one against the other, prepare all day for the evening, and
all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is here
that your overwalker fails of comprehension. His heart
rises against those who drink their curaçoa in liqueur
glasses, when he himself can swill it in a brown john. He
will not believe that the flavour is more delicate in the smaller
dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable
distance is merely to stupefy and brutalise himself, and come to
his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a
starless night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the
mild luminous evening of the temperate walker! He has
nothing left of man but a physical need for bedtime and a double
nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be
savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate of such an one
to take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness,
and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb,
in short, who goes further and fares worse.</p>
<p>Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone
upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is
no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something
else and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour
should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence;
because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way
or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your
own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince
in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all
impressions and let your thoughts take colour from what you
see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play
upon. “I cannot see the wit,” says Hazlitt,
“of walking and talking at the same time. When I am
in the country I wish to vegetate like the
country,”—which is the gist of all that can be said
upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at
your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the
morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot
surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much
motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and
sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes
comprehension.</p>
<p>During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of
bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly towards his
knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the
hedge and, like Christian on a similar occasion, “give
three leaps and go on singing.” And yet it soon
acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the
spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have
you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep
are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a shake,
and fall at once into your stride. And surely, of all
possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the
best. Of course, if he <i>will</i> keep thinking of his
anxieties, if he <i>will</i> open the merchant Abudah’s
chest and walk arm-in-arm with the hag—why, wherever he is,
and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will
not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself!
There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour, and
I would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among
the thirty. It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat
of darkness, one after another of these wayfarers, some summer
morning, for the first few miles upon the road. This one,
who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated
in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to
set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he
goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the
dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot
look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes
another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself.
His face changes from time to time, as indignation flashes from
his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is composing
articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most
impassioned interviews, by the way. A little farther on,
and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well
for him, supposing him to be no great master in that art, if he
stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such an
occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether
it is worse to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the
unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary population,
accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the
common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of
these passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a
runaway lunatic, because, although a full-grown person with a red
beard, he skipped as he went like a child. And you would be
astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads
who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they
sang—and sang very ill—and had a pair of red ears
when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into
their arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should
think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt’s own confession, from
his essay <i>On Going a Journey</i>, which is so good that there
should be a tax levied on all who have not read it:—</p>
<p>“Give me the clear blue sky over my head,” says
he, “and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road
before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and
then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on
these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for
joy.”</p>
<p>Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the
policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish that
in the first person? But we have no bravery nowadays, and,
even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish as our
neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And notice
how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the
theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in
purple stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three
hours’ march is his ideal. And then he must have a
winding road, the epicure!</p>
<p>Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one
thing in the great master’s practice that seems to me not
wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping and
running. Both of these hurry the respiration; they both
shake up the brain out of its glorious open-air confusion; and
they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so
agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the
mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable
stride, it requires no conscious thought from you to keep it up,
and yet it prevents you from thinking earnestly of anything
else. Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it
gradually neutralises and sets to sleep the serious activity of
the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and
laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning dose;
we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a
thousand ways with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest
work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we
may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great
barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each
one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on
his own private thought!</p>
<p>In the course of a day’s walk, you see, there is much
variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start,
to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly
great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one
extreme towards the other. He becomes more and more
incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air
drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts
along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful
dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the second
stage is the more peaceful. A man does not make so many
articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but the purely
animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the delight of
every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the
thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him
to his destination still content.</p>
<p>Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to
a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under
trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a
pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds
come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates upon the
afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm
upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside
your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an
evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the
roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were arrived,
when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and
remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a
lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever. You have
no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a
summer’s day, that you measure out only by hunger, and
bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village
where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the
days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fête on
Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the
month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how
slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare
hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise
inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London,
Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks
lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than
the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all
these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with
him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no
clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before the
flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments,
and punctuality was not yet thought upon. “Though ye
take from a covetous man all his treasure,” says Milton,
“he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his
covetousness.” And so I would say of a modern man of
business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give
him the elixir of life—he has still a flaw at heart, he
still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when
business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour.
And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost
free.</p>
<p>But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour
comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that
follow a good day’s march; the flavour of the tobacco is a
thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so
fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own
there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity
spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If
you read a book—and you will never do so save by fits and
starts—you find the language strangely racy and harmonious;
words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for
half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, at
every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It
seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a
dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back
with special favour. “It was on the 10th of April,
1798,” says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, “that I
sat down to a volume of the new <i>Héloïse</i>, at
the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold
chicken.” I should wish to quote more, for though we
are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like
Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt’s
essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would
a volume of Heine’s songs; and for <i>Tristram Shandy</i> I
can pledge a fair experience.</p>
<p>If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in
life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean
over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick
fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality to
the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles
are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so
idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done
with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk
with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems
as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all
narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely,
as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your
own hobbies, to watch provincial humours develop themselves
before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful
like an old tale.</p>
<p>Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and
surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember
how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when
he has been “happy thinking.” It is a phrase
that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by
clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming
dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many
far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into
solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no
time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the
Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit
all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed
world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without
discontent and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to
be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice
audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we
forget that one thing, of which these are but the
parts—namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink
hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened
sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is
done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home,
and be happy thinking. To sit still and
contemplate,—to remember the faces of women without desire,
to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain
where and what you are—is not this to know both wisdom and
virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not
they who carry flags, but they who look upon it from a private
chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you
are at that, you are in the very humour of all social
heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty
words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches,
or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that
kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes of
Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those
who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in
the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences
between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a
tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a
fiddlestick’s end.</p>
<p>You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into
the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind
enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly the
mood changes, the weather-cock goes about, and you ask yourself
one question more: whether, for the interval, you have been the
wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys? Human
experience is not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a
fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the
earth. And whether it was wise or foolish,
to-morrow’s travel will carry you, body and mind, into some
different parish of the infinite.</p>
<h2>PAN’S PIPES</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> world in which we live has been
variously said and sung by the most ingenious poets and
philosophers: these reducing it to formulæ and chemical
ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures
for the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a
mingled tissue, and the choosing mind has much to reject before
it can get together the materials of a theory. Dew and
thunder, destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belong to an
order of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate.
There is an uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web of the
world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of life.
Things are not congruous and wear strange disguises: the
consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing
itself awhile with heaven’s delicate distillations, decays
again into indistinguishable soil; and with Cæsar’s
ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily
besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly shine of summer,
when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue
from the most portentous nightmare of the universe—the
great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell’s squibs,
tumultuary, roaring aloud, inimical to life. The sun itself
is enough to disgust a human being of the scene which he
inhabits; and you would not fancy there was a green or habitable
spot in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is
by the blaze of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome
was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic
tea-parties at the arbour door.</p>
<p>The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly
stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the
woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed
the hearts of upland ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so
figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To
certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic
aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled
professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile
and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the classic
hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with a gleeful
and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and in every
wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear
the note of his pipe.</p>
<p>For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where
the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from
among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world;
sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it the birds sing among
the trees in pairing-time? What means the sound of the rain
falling far and wide upon the leafy forest? To what tune
does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning,
and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat? These are
all airs upon Pan’s pipe; he it was who gave them breath in
the exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their
outflow with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of
herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high
echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit
city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses,
beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying rivers;
the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of
hands; and the voice of things, and their significant look, and
the renovating influence they breathe forth—these are his
joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in choral
harmony. To this music the young lambs bound as to a tabor,
and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance. For it
puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on the happy
side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created
things. Some are vocal under a good influence, are pleasing
whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others,
as a child who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely.
Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, and make a halting
figure in the universal dance. And some, like sour
spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts with
an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the
general rejoicing. But let him feign never so carefully,
there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out
a stave of ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.</p>
<p>Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is
changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies,
subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; in
the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we
recognise the “dread foundation” of life and the
anger in Pan’s heart. Earth wages open war against
her children, and under her softest touch hides treacherous
claws. The cool waters invite us in to drown; the domestic
hearth burns up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of
all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in
itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in
England the hurricane must break forth and the North Sea pay a
toll of populous ships. And when the universal music has
led lovers into the paths of dalliance, confident of
Nature’s sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor,
and death makes a clutch from his ambuscade below the bed of
marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest
kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys
upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the
mother’s corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous
a scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the
idea of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the
most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we preserve
the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers too
curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that runs
through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand
from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of
death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable
citizens who flee life’s pleasures and responsibilities and
keep, with upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the
right hand and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how
surprised they would be if they could hear their attitude
mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as tooth-chattering
ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand of
Nature’s God! Shrilly sound Pan’s pipes; and
behold the banker instantly concealed in the bank parlour!
For to distrust one’s impulses is to be recreant to
Pan.</p>
<p>There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with
evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of
man’s experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about
by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting
ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or
seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while
whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry,
they travel back-foremost through the universe of space.
Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the
spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when
we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed
science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate,
that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which
we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science
writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it
is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which
it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death
strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a
glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises
for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among
men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the
goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and
terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps,
fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when
our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.</p>
<h2>A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Cities</span> given, the problem was to
light them. How to conduct individual citizens about the
burgess-warren, when once heaven had withdrawn its leading
luminary? or—since we live in a scientific age—when
once our spinning planet has turned its back upon the sun?
The moon, from time to time, was doubtless very helpful; the
stars had a cheery look among the chimney-pots; and a cresset
here and there, on church or citadel, produced a fine pictorial
effect, and, in places where the ground lay unevenly, held out
the right hand of conduct to the benighted. But sun, moon,
and stars abstracted or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant
had to fall back—we speak on the authority of old
prints—upon stable lanthorns two stories in height.
Many holes, drilled in the conical turret-roof of this vagabond
Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer’s eyes;
and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own
sun by a ring about his finger, day and night swung to and fro
and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his
path; he was beleaguered by goblins as he went; and, curfew being
struck, he found no light but that he travelled in throughout the
township.</p>
<p>Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a
world of extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to kindle,
easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their
endurance. Rudely puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly
clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and, lo! in a moment night
re-established her void empire, and the cit groped along the
wall, suppered but bedless, occult from guidance, and sorrily
wading in the kennels. As if gamesome winds and gamesome
youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling these
feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway.
There, on invisible cordage, let them swing! And suppose
some crane-necked general to go speeding by on a tall charger,
spurring the destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition, there
would indubitably be some effusion of military blood, and oaths,
and a certain crash of glass; and while the chieftain rode
forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left to
original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of the
desert night.</p>
<p>The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each
contemplation the matter for content. Out of the age of gas
lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in
which his ancestors wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the
contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest
style of poetry, lauding progress and the golden mean. When
gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall
for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality
and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper
circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of
Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its
supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of
sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was
lengthened out to every man’s fancy. The city-folk
had stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.</p>
<p>It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as
their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so elegant as that
of the best wax candles. But then the gas stars, being
nearer at hand, were more practically efficacious than Jupiter
himself. It is true, again, that they did not unfold their
rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the planets, coming out
along the firmament one after another, as the need arises. But
the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran with
a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the
punctuality of heaven’s orbs; and though perfection was not
absolutely reached, and now and then an individual may have been
knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet
people commended his zeal in a proverb, and taught their children
to say, “God bless the lamplighter!” And since
his passage was a piece of the day’s programme, the
children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of
course, in so many words, which would have been improper, but in
some chaste circumlocution, suitable for infant lips.</p>
<p>God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight
diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall we watch
him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking
another luminous hole into the dusk. The Greeks would have
made a noble myth of such an one; how he distributed starlight,
and, as soon as the need was over, re-collected it; and the
little bull’s-eye, which was his instrument, and held
enough fire to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly
commemorated in the legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his
labours draw towards apotheosis, and in the light of victory
himself shall disappear. For another advance has been
effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not one
by one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate electrician
somewhere in a back office touches a spring—and behold!
from one end to another of the city, from east to west, from the
Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is light! <i>Fiat
Lux</i>, says the sedate electrician. What a spectacle, on
some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the
monstrous city flashes into vision—a glittering hieroglyph
many square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an
image, all the evening street-lamps burst together into
song! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded the
other day by the experiment in Pall Mall. Star-rise by
electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the
compensatory benefit for an innumerable array of factories and
bankers’ clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised
about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation; consolatory, at
least, to such of them as look out upon the world through seeing
eyes, and contentedly accept beauty where it comes.</p>
<p>But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever timid of
innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; his is the
signal advising slow advance. The word <i>electricity</i>
now sounds the note of danger. In Paris, at the mouth of
the Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera portico,
and in the Rue Drouot at the <i>Figaro</i> office, a new sort of
urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious
to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as
this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the
corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror.
To look at it only once is to fall in love with gas, which gives
a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would
have thought, might have remained content with what Prometheus
stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven with
kites to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm.
Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors, and it is proposed
that we should henceforward take our walks abroad in the glare of
permanent lightning. A man need not be very superstitious
if he scruple to follow his pleasures by the light of the Terror
that Flieth, nor very epicurean if he prefer to see the face of
beauty more becomingly displayed. That ugly blinding glare
may not improperly advertise the home of slanderous
<i>Figaro</i>, which is a backshop to the infernal regions; but
where soft joys prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure
and the philosopher looks on smiling and silent, where love and
laughter and deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old
mild lustre shine upon the ways of man.</p>
<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1"
class="footnote">[1]</a> Browning’s <i>Ring and
Book</i>.</p>
<p><a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2"
class="footnote">[2]</a> <i>A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers</i>, Wednesday, p. 283.</p>
<p><a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3"
class="footnote">[3]</a> <i>Lothair</i>.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE***</p>
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