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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pagan Papers, by Kenneth Grahame
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Pagan Papers
+
+Author: Kenneth Grahame
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2002 [eBook #5319]
+[Most recently updated: December 26, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: William McClain
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN PAPERS ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Pagan Papers
+
+By Kenneth Grahame
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+ The Romance of the Road
+ The Romance of the Rail
+ Non Libri Sed Liberi
+ Loafing
+ Cheap Knowledge
+ The Rural Pan
+ Marginalia
+ The Eternal Whither
+ Deus Terminus
+ Of Smoking
+ An Autumn Encounter
+ The White Poppy
+ A Bohemian in Exile
+ Justifiable Homicide
+ The Fairy Wicket
+ Aboard the Galley
+ The Lost Centaur
+ Orion
+
+
+
+
+The Romance of the Road
+
+
+Among the many places of magic visited by Pantagruel and his company
+during the progress of their famous voyage, few surpass that island
+whose roads did literally “go” to places—_“ou les chemins cheminent,
+comme animaulx”_: and would-be travellers, having inquired of the road
+as to its destination, and received satisfactory reply, _“se guindans”_
+(as the old book hath it—hoisting themselves up on) _“au chemin
+opportun, sans aultrement se poiner ou fatiguer, se trouvoyent au lieu
+destiné.”_
+
+The best example I know of an approach to this excellent sort of
+vitality in roads is the Ridgeway of the North Berkshire Downs. Join it
+at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames; at once it strikes
+you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid, purposeful
+manner, running along the highest ridge of the Downs a broad green
+ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the neighbouring
+grass, yet distinct for all that. No villages nor homesteads tempt it
+aside or modify its course for a yard; should you lose the track where
+it is blent with the bordering turf or merged in and obliterated by
+criss-cross paths, you have only to walk straight on, taking heed of no
+alternative to right or left; and in a minute ’tis with you
+again—arisen out of the earth as it were. Or, if still not quite
+assured, lift you your eyes, and there it runs over the brow of the
+fronting hill. Where a railway crosses it, it disappears indeed—hiding
+Alpheus-like, from the ignominy of rubble and brick-work; but a little
+way on it takes up the running again with the same quiet persistence.
+Out on that almost trackless expanse of billowy Downs such a track is
+in some sort humanly companionable: it really seems to lead you by the
+hand.
+
+The “Rudge” is of course an exceptional instance; but indeed this
+pleasant personality in roads is not entirely fanciful. It exists as a
+characteristic of the old country road, evolved out of the primitive
+prehistoric track, developing according to the needs of the land it
+passes through and serves: with a language, accordingly, and a meaning
+of its own. Its special services are often told clearly enough; but
+much else too of the quiet story of the country-side: something of the
+old tale whereof you learn so little from the printed page. Each is
+instinct, perhaps, with a separate suggestion. Some are martial and
+historic, and by your side the hurrying feet of the dead raise a
+ghostly dust. The name of yon town—with its Roman or Saxon suffix to
+British root—hints at much. Many a strong man, wanting his _vates
+sacer,_ passed silently to Hades for that suffix to obtain. The little
+rise up yonder on the Downs that breaks their straight green line
+against the sky showed another sight when the sea of battle surged and
+beat on its trampled sides; and the Roman, sore beset, may have gazed
+down this very road for relief, praying for night or the succouring
+legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under
+her sun-bonnet—so may some girl-ancestress of hers have watched with
+beating heart the Wessex levies hurry along to clash with the heathen
+and break them on the down where the ash trees grew. And yonder, where
+the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of drooping boughs—is
+that gleam of water or glitter of lurking spears?
+
+Some sing you pastorals, fluting low in the hot sun between dusty
+hedges overlooked by contented cows; past farmsteads where man and
+beast, living in frank fellowship, learn pleasant and serviceable
+lessons each of the other; over the full-fed river, lipping the
+meadow-sweet, and thence on either side through leagues of hay. Or
+through bending corn they chant the mystical wonderful song of the
+reaper when the harvest is white to the sickle. But most of them,
+avoiding classification, keep each his several tender significance; as
+with one I know, not so far from town, which woos you from the valley
+by gentle ascent between nut-laden hedges, and ever by some touch of
+keen fragrance in the air, by some mystery of added softness under
+foot—ever a promise of something to come, unguessed, delighting. Till
+suddenly you are among the pines, their keen scent strikes you through
+and through, their needles carpet the ground, and in their swaying tops
+moans the unappeasable wind—sad, ceaseless, as the cry of a warped
+humanity. Some paces more, and the promise is fulfilled, the hints and
+whisperings become fruition: the ground breaks steeply away, and you
+look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads, rolling woodland,
+and—bounding all, blent with the horizon, a greyness, a gleam—the
+English Channel. A road of promises, of hinted surprises, following
+each other with the inevitable sequence in a melody.
+
+But we are now in another and stricter sense an island of _chemins qui
+cheminent:_ dominated, indeed, by them. By these the traveller,
+veritably _se guindans,_ may reach his destination _“sans se poiner ou
+se fatiguer”_ (with large qualifications); but _sans_ very much else
+whereof he were none the worse. The gain seems so obvious that you
+forget to miss all that lay between the springing stride of the early
+start and the pleasant weariness of the end approached, when the limbs
+lag a little as the lights of your destination begin to glimmer through
+the dusk. All that lay between! “A Day’s Ride a Life’s Romance” was the
+excellent title of an unsuccessful book; and indeed the journey should
+march with the day, beginning and ending with its sun, to be the
+complete thing, the golden round, required of it. This makes that mind
+and body fare together, hand in hand, sharing the hope, the action, the
+fruition; finding equal sweetness in the languor of aching limbs at eve
+and in the first god-like intoxication of motion with braced muscle in
+the sun. For walk or ride take the mind over greater distances than a
+throbbing whirl with stiffening joints and cramped limbs through a
+dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover vaster spaces with Lavengro,
+footing it with gipsies or driving his tinker’s cart across lonely
+commons, than with many a globe-trotter or steam-yachtsman with diary
+or log? And even that dividing line—strictly marked and rarely
+overstepped—between the man who bicycles and the man who walks, is less
+due to a prudent regard for personal safety of the one part than to an
+essential difference in minds.
+
+There is a certain supernal, a deific, state of mind which may indeed
+be experienced in a minor degree, by any one, in the siesta part of a
+Turkish bath. But this particular golden glow of the faculties is only
+felt at its fulness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open
+air. “A man ought to be seen by the gods,” says Marcus Aurelius,
+“neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.” Though this does
+not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make of humanity, yet
+the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight in these
+unblest days of hurry. If ever seen at all, ’tis when after many a mile
+in sun and wind—maybe rain—you reach at last, with the folding star,
+your destined rustic inn. There, in its homely, comfortable
+strangeness, after unnumbered chops with country ale, the hard facts of
+life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from accustomed
+cares and worries—you are set in a peculiar nook of rest. Then old
+failures seem partial successes, then old loves come back in their
+fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of regret, then old
+jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing of the gods above,
+nothing of men below—not even their company. To-morrow you shall begin
+life again: shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything;
+meanwhile you sit, and the jolly world swings round, and you seem to
+hear it circle to the music of the spheres. What pipe was ever thus
+beatifying in effect? You are aching all over, and enjoying it; and the
+scent of the limes drifts in through the window. This is undoubtedly
+the best and greatest country in the world; and none but good fellows
+abide in it.
+
+    Laud we the Gods,
+And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
+From our blest altars.
+
+
+
+
+The Romance of the Rail
+
+
+In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
+is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of
+the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer
+begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier times,
+three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out
+from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and wot not
+rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar, or
+if it were not North and South America. “And there be certaine flitting
+islands,” says one, “which have been oftentimes seene, and when men
+approached near them they vanished.” “It may be that the gulfs will
+wash us down,” said Ulysses (thinking of what Americans call the
+“getting-off place”); “it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” And
+so on, and so on; each with his special hope or “wild surmise.” There
+was always a chance of touching the Happy Isles. And in that first fair
+world whose men and manners we knew through story-books, before
+experience taught us far other, the Prince mounts his horse one fine
+morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning,
+lo! a new country: and he rides by fields and granges never visited
+before, through faces strange to him, to where an unknown King steps
+down to welcome the mysterious stranger. And he marries the Princess,
+and dwells content for many a year; till one day he thinks “I will look
+upon my father’s face again, though the leagues be long to my own
+land.” And he rides all day, and sleeps in a forest; and next morning
+he is made welcome at home, where his name has become a dim memory.
+Which is all as it should be; for, annihilate time and space as you
+may, a man’s stride remains the true standard of distance; an eternal
+and unalterable scale. The severe horizon, too, repels the thoughts as
+you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about, within touch
+and hail; and the night cometh, when no man can work.
+
+To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
+and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
+iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
+as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
+is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
+ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
+making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
+this second generation of steam. _Pereunt et imputantur;_ they pass
+away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
+ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
+the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed—not fully nor
+worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
+for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
+immediate recognition as poetic material. “For as it is dislocation and
+detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet, who
+re-attaches things to Nature and the whole—re-attaching even artificial
+things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper insight—disposes
+very easily of the most disagreeable facts”; so that he looks upon “the
+factory village and the railway” and “sees them fall within the great
+Order not less than the bee-hive or the spider’s geometrical web.” The
+poet, however, seems hard to convince hereof. Emerson will have it that
+“Nature loves the gliding train of cars”; “instead of which” the poet
+still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been
+more flexible and liberal. Turner saw and did his best to seize the
+spirit of the thing, its kinship with the elements, and to blend
+furnace-glare and rush of iron with the storm-shower, the wind and the
+thwart-flashing sun-rays, and to make the whole a single expression of
+irresoluble force. And even in a certain work by another and a very
+different painter—though I willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate
+romantic intention—you shall find the element of romance in the
+vestiges of the old order still lingering in the first transition
+period: the coach-shaped railway carriages with luggage piled and
+corded on top, the red-coated guard, the little engine tethered well
+ahead as if between traces. To those bred within sight of the sea,
+steamers will always partake in somewhat of the “beauty and mystery of
+the ships”; above all, if their happy childhood have lain among the
+gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western Highlands, where,
+twice a week maybe, the strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a
+piece of the busy, mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand
+alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing
+whistle—judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In
+the days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
+golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
+wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
+luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles from
+certain railway stations, veritable “horns of Elf-land, faintly
+blowing.” Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom
+train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the journey bit by
+bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of
+dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses looming up on
+either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and
+purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed in through
+the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter; Endymion-like, “my first touch
+of the earth went nigh to kill”: but it was only to hurry northwards
+again on the wings of imagination, from dust and heat to the dear
+mountain air. “We are only the children who might have been,” murmured
+Lamb’s dream babes to him; and for the sake of those dream-journeys,
+the journeys that might have been, I still hail with a certain
+affection the call of the engine in the night: even as I love sometimes
+to turn the enchanted pages of the railway a b c, and pass from one to
+the other name reminiscent or suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian
+maybe, or savouring of Wessex, or bearing me away to some sequestered
+reach of the quiet Thames.
+
+
+
+
+Non Libri Sed Liberi
+
+
+It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
+That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always
+fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them—all night if
+you let him—wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed tears
+over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not read
+them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a
+remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers start with the
+honest resolution that some day they will “shut down on” this fatal
+practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter into their charmed
+circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind them. Then will they
+read out of nothing but first editions; every day shall be a debauch in
+large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco shall be familiar to
+their touch as buckram. Meanwhile, though, books continue to flaunt
+their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun the fray. In fine,
+one buys and continues to buy; and the promised Sabbath never comes.
+
+The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein resembling
+the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the first sight of
+the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a trembling in the
+limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a habit of melancholy
+in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed with amorously for an
+hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior passion aforesaid) takes
+its destined place on the shelf—where it stays. And this saith the
+scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail to remark with a certain awe
+that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a happy secret and
+radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is insufferably conceited, and
+his conceit waxeth as his coat, now condemned to a fresh term of
+servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby though his coat may be, yet
+will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by the price
+of any book. No man—no human, masculine, natural man—ever sells a book.
+Men have been known in moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by
+temporary necessity, to rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit
+what they should not, to “wince and relent and refrain” from what they
+should: these things, howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and
+may happen to any of us. But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural;
+and it is noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity,
+contains no distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately it is hardly
+known to exist: the face of the public being set against it as a
+flint—and the trade giving such wretched prices.
+
+In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the
+reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment,
+sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking
+capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed,
+books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life
+that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. _Non angli sed
+Angeli_ was the comment of a missionary (old style) on the small human
+duodecimos exposed for sale in the Roman market-place; and many a
+buyer, when some fair-haired little chattel passed into his possession,
+must have felt that here was something vendible no more. So of these
+you may well affirm _Non libri sed liberi;_ children now, adopted into
+the circle, they shall be trafficked in never again.
+
+There is one exception which has sadly to be made—one class of men, of
+whom I would fain, if possible, have avoided mention, who are strangers
+to any such scruples. These be Executors—a word to be strongly accented
+on the penultimate; for, indeed, they are the common headsmen of
+collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for harmless
+books. Hoary, famous old collections, budding young collections, fair
+virgin collections of a single author—all go down before the executor’s
+remorseless axe. He careth not and he spareth not. “The iniquity of
+oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,” and it is chiefly by the hand
+of the executor that she doth love to scatter it. May oblivion be his
+portion for ever!
+
+Of a truth, the foes of the book-lover are not few. One of the most
+insidious, because he cometh at first in friendly, helpful guise, is
+the bookbinder. Not in that he bindeth books—for the fair binding is
+the final crown and flower of painful achievement—but because he
+bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and
+the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart
+grows sick with hope deferred. Each morn the maiden binds her hair,
+each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage-porch, each autumn the
+harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds lake and
+stream, and still the bookbinder he bindeth not. Then a secret voice
+whispereth: “Arise, be a man, and slay him! Take him grossly, full of
+bread, with all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May; At gaming,
+swearing, or about some act That hath no relish of salvation in it!”
+But when the deed is done, and the floor strewn with fragments of
+binder—still the books remain unbound. You have made all that horrid
+mess for nothing, and the weary path has to be trodden over again. As a
+general rule, the man in the habit of murdering bookbinders, though he
+performs a distinct service to society, only wastes his own time and
+takes no personal advantage.
+
+And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in
+leathern surcoats bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet
+weathered the Cape and sailed into halcyon seas. For these books—well,
+you kept them many weeks before binding them, that the oleaginous
+printer’s-ink might fully dry before the necessary hammering; you
+forbore to open the pages, that the autocratic binder might refold the
+sheets if he pleased; and now that all is over—_consummatum est_—still
+you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a quiet mind. For these purple
+emperors are not to be read in bed, nor during meals, nor on the grass
+with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief periods are all the whirling
+times allow you for solid serious reading. Still, after all, you have
+them; you can at least pulverise your friends with the sight; and what
+have they to show against them? Probably some miserable score or so of
+half-bindings, such as lead you scornfully to quote the hackneyed
+couplet concerning the poor Indian whose untutored mind clothes him
+before but leaves him bare behind. Let us thank the gods that such
+things are: that to some of us they give not poverty nor riches but a
+few good books in whole bindings. Dowered with these and (if it be
+vouchsafed) a cup of Burgundy that is sound even if it be not old, we
+can leave to others the foaming grape of Eastern France that was
+vintaged in ’74, and with it the whole range of shilling shockers,—the
+Barmecidal feast of the purposeful novelist—yea, even the countless
+series that tell of Eminent Women and Successful Men.
+
+
+
+
+Loafing
+
+
+When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn
+has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows
+who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and
+stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest,
+realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence
+has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures
+than the other—that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
+reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart
+supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes
+straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been spent
+in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others, the men
+of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.
+
+And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the
+Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it: they are
+very necessary to him. For _“Suave mari magno”_ is the motto of your
+true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the struggles
+and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making holiday that he
+is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and maintain his
+self-satisfaction at boiling-point. And so is he never very far away
+from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof, but hovers more
+or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star amidst whirling
+constellations, he may watch the mad world “glance, and nod, and hurry
+by.”
+
+There are many such centres of contemplation along the West Coast of
+Scotland. Few places are better loafing-ground than a pier, with its
+tranquil “lucid interval” between steamers, the ever recurrent throb of
+paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles, splash
+of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry and scurry
+of the human morrice. Here, _tanquam in speculo,_ the Loafer as he
+lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in the
+great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting, departing
+woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference—he may
+experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a dream;
+as if, indeed, he were Heine’s god in dream on a mountain-side. Let the
+drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his dream, will
+vanish into the nothing whence they came. And these emotions may be
+renewed each morning; if a fair one sail to-day, be sure that one as
+fair will land to-morrow. The supply is inexhaustible.
+
+But in the South perhaps the happiest loafing-ground is the gift of
+Father Thames; for there again the contrast of violent action, with its
+blisters, perspiration, and the like, throws into fine relief the bliss
+of  “quietism.” I know one little village in the upper reaches where
+loafing may be pushed to high perfection. Here the early hours of the
+morning are vexed by the voices of boaters making their way down the
+little street to the river. The most of them go staggering under
+hampers, bundles of waterproofs, and so forth. Their voices are clamant
+of feats to be accomplished: they will row, they will punt, they will
+paddle, till they weary out the sun. All this the Loafer hears through
+the open door of his cottage, where in his shirt-sleeves he is dallying
+with his bacon, as a gentleman should. He is the only one who has had a
+comfortable breakfast—and he knows it. Later he will issue forth and
+stroll down in their track to the bridge. The last of these Argonauts
+is pulling lustily forth; the river is dotted with evanishing blazers.
+Upon all these lunatics a pitiless Phoebus shines triumphant. The
+Loafer sees the last of them off the stage, turns his back on it, and
+seeks the shady side of the street.
+
+A holy calm possesses the village now; the foreign element has passed
+away with shouting and waving of banners, and its natural life of
+somnolency is in evidence at last. And first, as a true Loafer should,
+let him respectfully greet each several village dog. _Arcades
+ambo_—loafers likewise—they lie there in the warm dust, each outside
+his own door, ready to return the smallest courtesy. Their own lords
+and masters are not given to the exchange of compliments nor to
+greetings in the market-place. The dog is generally the better
+gentleman, and he is aware of it; and he duly appreciates the loafer,
+who is not too proud to pause a moment, change the news, and pass the
+time of day. He will mark his sense of this attention by rising from
+his dust-divan and accompanying his caller some steps on his way. But
+he will stop short of his neighbour’s dust-patch; for the morning is
+really too hot for a shindy. So, by easy stages (the street is not a
+long one: six dogs will see it out), the Loafer quits the village; and
+now the world is before him. Shall he sit on a gate and smoke? or lie
+on the grass and smoke? or smoke aimlessly and at large along the road?
+Such a choice of happiness is distracting; but perhaps the last course
+is the best—as needing the least mental effort of selection. Hardly,
+however, has he fairly started his first daydream when the snappish
+“ting” of a bellkin recalls him to realities. By comes the bicyclist:
+dusty, sweating, a piteous thing to look upon. But the irritation of
+the strepitant metal has jarred the Loafer’s always exquisite nerves:
+he is fain to climb a gate and make his way towards solitude and the
+breezy downs.
+
+Up here all vestiges of a sordid humanity disappear. The Loafer is
+alone with the south-west wind and the blue sky. Only a carolling of
+larks and a tinkling from distant flocks break the brooding noonday
+stillness; above, the wind-hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the
+blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky,
+his fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at will
+among the tranquil clouds. This way Nirvana nearest lies. Earth no
+longer obtrudes herself; possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so
+below him the thing still “spins like a fretful midge.” The Loafer
+knows not nor cares. His is now an astral body, and through golden
+spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammelled flight. And
+there he really might remain for ever, but that his vagrom spirit is
+called back to earth by a gentle but resistless, very human summons,—a
+gradual, consuming, Pantagruelian, god-like, thirst: a thirst to thank
+Heaven on. So, with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation, he
+bends his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one is
+good; to commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom; but beer
+is a thing of deity—beer is divine.
+
+Later the Loafer may decently make some concession to popular taste by
+strolling down to the river and getting out his boat. With one paddle
+out he will drift down the stream: just brushing the flowering rush and
+the meadow-sweet and taking in as peculiar gifts the varied sweets of
+even. The loosestrife is his, and the arrow-head: his the distant moan
+of the weir; his are the glories, amber and scarlet and silver, of the
+sunset-haunted surface. By-and-by the boaters will pass him
+homeward-bound. All are blistered and sore: his withers are unwrung.
+Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories; no corporeal
+pangs clog his _æsthesis_—his perceptive faculty. Some have quarrelled
+in the day and are no longer on speaking terms; he is at peace with
+himself and with the whole world. Of all that lay them down in the
+little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the
+sweetest. For not even the blacksmith himself will have better claim to
+have earned a night’s repose.
+
+
+
+
+Cheap Knowledge
+
+
+When at times it happens to me that I ’gin to be aweary of the sun, and
+to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core—just because,
+perhaps, I can’t afford Melampus Brown’s last volume of poems in large
+paper, but must perforce condescend upon the two-and-sixpenny edition
+for the million—then I bring myself to a right temper by recalling to
+memory a sight which now and again in old days would touch the heart of
+me to a happier pulsation. In the long, dark winter evenings, outside
+some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest into the chilly
+street, I would see some lad—sometimes even a girl—book in hand,
+heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and straining eyes, careless
+of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil behind them and about,
+their happy spirits far in an enchanted world: till the ruthless
+shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter
+reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers. “My brother!” or “My
+sister!” I would cry inwardly, feeling the link that bound us together.
+They possessed, for the hour, the two gifts most precious to the
+student—light and solitude: the true solitude of the roaring street.
+
+Somehow this vision rarely greets me now. Probably the Free Libraries
+have supplanted the flickering shop lights; and every lad and lass can
+enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon “in luxury’s
+sofa-lap of leather”; and of course this boon is appreciated and
+profited by, and we shall see the divine results in a year or two. And
+yet sometimes, like the dear old Baron in the “Red Lamp,” “I wonder?”
+
+For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely
+wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the
+feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these
+other readers, “all silent and all damned,” combine to set up a nervous
+irritation fatal to quiet study. Had I to choose, I would prefer the
+windy street. And possibly others have found that the removal of checks
+and obstacles makes the path which leads to the divine mountain-tops
+less tempting, now that it is less rugged. So full of human nature are
+we all—still—despite the Radical missionaries that labour in the
+vineyard. Before the National Gallery was extended and rearranged,
+there was a little “St Catherine” by Pinturicchio that possessed my
+undivided affections. In those days she hung near the floor, so that
+those who would worship must grovel; and little I grudged it. Whenever
+I found myself near Trafalgar Square with five minutes to spare I used
+to turn in and sit on the floor before the object of my love, till
+gently but firmly replaced on my legs by the attendant. She hangs on
+the line now, in the grand new room; but I never go to see her. Somehow
+she is not my “St Catherine” of old. Doubtless Free Libraries affect
+many students in the same way: on the same principle as that now
+generally accepted—that it is the restrictions placed on vice by our
+social code which make its pursuit so peculiarly agreeable.
+
+But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for,
+it remains a question whether the type of mind that a generation or two
+of Free Libraries will evolve is or is not the one that the world most
+desiderates; and whether the spare reading and consequent fertile
+thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive
+of sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the
+free run of these grocers’ shops to omnivorous appetites (and all young
+readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
+resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared. Of
+all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
+work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
+thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
+expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer’s boy of
+letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
+fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
+scores.
+
+But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation may
+be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would appear
+that the patrons of these libraries are confining their reading, with a
+charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed they cannot do
+better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a good novel, not
+the least merit of which is that it induces a state of passive,
+unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go out and put
+the world right. Next to fairy tales—the original world-fiction—our
+modern novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions; and so it
+has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or
+ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the
+Free Library: convinced at last that the money is not wasted in
+training exponents of the subjectivity of this writer and the
+objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead
+discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support of
+wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.
+
+
+
+
+The Rural Pan
+
+(An April Essay)
+
+
+Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the
+restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little
+hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic
+Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin)
+bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years
+float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these
+the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches
+only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and
+stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins
+to blow a clearer note.
+
+When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities will
+abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this that
+flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the day?
+Mercury is out—some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed banks
+crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his wake is
+marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and fragments
+of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to embrace the
+slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the full gaze of
+the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime reposeth, passively
+beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards’ Club at Maidenhead. Here, O
+Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity subjectively inclined, he is
+neither objective nor, it must be said for him, at all objectionable,
+like them of Mercury.
+
+Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural
+Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be
+paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked
+for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great
+shadow of Streatley Hill, “annihilating all that’s made to a green
+thought in a green shade”; or better yet, pushing an explorer’s prow up
+the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester’s stately roof broods
+over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and dabbles,
+and all the air is full of the music of his piping. Southwards, again,
+on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and jostling; dust that
+is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither comes the young Apollo,
+calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth certain Mercuries of the baser
+sort, who do him obeisance, call him captain and lord, and then proceed
+to skin him from head to foot as thoroughly as the god himself flayed
+Marsyas in days of yore, at a certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good
+instance of Time’s revenges. And yet Apollo returns to town and swears
+he has had a grand day. He does so every year. Out of hearing of all
+the clamour, the rural Pan may be found stretched on Ranmore Common,
+loitering under Abinger pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the
+sinuous Mole, abounding in friendly greetings for his foster-brothers
+the dab-chick and water-rat.
+
+For a holiday, Mercury loveth the Pullman Express, and a short hour
+with a society paper; anon, brown boots on the pier, and the pleasant
+combination of Métropole and Monopole. Apollo for his part will urge
+the horses of the Sun: and, if he leaveth the society weekly to
+Mercury, yet he loveth well the Magazine. From which _omphalos_ or hub
+of the universe he will direct his shining team even to the far
+Hesperides of Richmond or of Windsor. Both iron road and level highway
+are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the
+sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath
+through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with feather
+and fir. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is unsocial.
+Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities, he loveth
+the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are _adscripti
+glebæ,_ addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof: perfect
+in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is only half a god after
+all, and the red earth in him is strong. When the pelting storm drives
+the wayfarers to the sheltering inn, among the little group on bench
+and settle Pan has been known to appear at times, in homely guise of
+hedger-and-ditcher or weather-beaten shepherd from the downs. Strange
+lore and quaint fancy he will then impart, in the musical Wessex or
+Mercian he has learned to speak so naturally; though it may not be till
+many a mile away that you begin to suspect that you have unwittingly
+talked with him who chased the flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the
+tide of fight at Marathon.
+
+Yes: to-day the iron horse has searched the country through—east and
+west, north and south—bringing with it Commercialism, whose god is
+Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco and garrotes the streams
+with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and corner fashion and
+chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily a great part is
+still spared—how great these others fortunately do not know—in which
+the rural Pan and his following may hide their heads for yet a little
+longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last common, spinney,
+and sheep-down, and driven the kindly god, the well-wisher to
+man—whither?
+
+
+
+
+Marginalia
+
+
+American Hunt, in his suggestive “Talks about Art,” demands that the
+child shall be encouraged—or rather permitted, for the natural child
+needs little encouragement—to draw when- and whereon-soever he can;
+for, says he, the child’s scribbling on the margin of his school-books
+is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them, and indeed,
+“to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it
+the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.” Doubtless Sir
+Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul, had some dim
+feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarto of his,
+in which “a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of
+margin”: boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the
+print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton’s “Bookhunter”:
+wherein you read of certain folios with “their majestic stream of
+central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, _sedgy with
+citations._” But the good Doctor leaves the main stream for a backwater
+of error in inferring that the chief use of margins is to be a
+parading-ground for notes and citations. As if they had not absolute
+value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In truth, Hunt’s child was
+vastly the wiser man.
+
+For myself, my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and
+illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or “tail” edge,
+the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old Nile;
+up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them, let
+fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys, gibbering with
+terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees—a plant to the untutored hand of
+easier outline than (say) your British oak. Meanwhile, all over the
+unregarded text Balbus slew Caius on the most inadequate provocation,
+or Hannibal pursued his victorious career, while Roman generals
+delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving the usual satisfactory
+licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal—all alike were pallid shades with faint,
+thin voices powerless to pierce the distance. The margins of Cocytus
+doubtless knew them: mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh
+and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropic forest. Or,
+in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded
+in the text. To these digressions I probably owe what little education
+I possess. For example, there was one sentence in our Roman history:
+“By this single battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his
+conquests in Asia Minor.” Serious historians really should not thus
+forget themselves. ’Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform
+“battle” into “bottle”; for “conquests” one could substitute a word for
+which not even Macaulay’s school-boy were at a loss; and the result,
+depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least one
+ancient fight on the illustrator’s memory. But this plodding and
+material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a
+“clear sky” ever through which I could sail away at will to more
+gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance
+of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and ’twas no better.
+Along Milton’s margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the
+Arimaspian—what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative pencil!
+And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly effaced
+from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that vengeful
+Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the Lobster
+Quadrille by a certain shore.
+
+It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins
+is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and
+crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled
+against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent
+pew: as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless,
+and went to church. Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets
+entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior
+rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated: a depraved habit,
+akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognised is the
+absolute value of the margin itself—a value frequently superior to its
+enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and takes
+care to get it in “the little verses wot they puts inside the
+crackers.” The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic
+verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in
+the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier
+remains the more popular—because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper
+might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this
+first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is
+pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it
+deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote “Beowulf,” our other
+English epic, grasped the great fact from the first, so that his work
+is much the more popular of the two. The moral is evident. An authority
+on practical book-making has stated that “margin is a matter to be
+studied”; also that “to place the print in the centre of the paper is
+wrong in principle, and to be deprecated.” Now, if it be “wrong in
+principle,” let us push that principle to its legitimate conclusion,
+and “deprecate” the placing of print on any part of the paper at all.
+Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards,
+when, I may ask—when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the
+trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting
+entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper
+copies!
+
+
+
+
+The Eternal Whither
+
+
+There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment, whose
+practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike-man
+at his post, and performing all the duties appertaining thereunto. This
+was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere mill-horse enslavement to
+his groove—the reception of payments; and it was spoken of both in
+mockery of all mill-horses and for the due admonishment of others. And
+yet that clerk had discovered for himself an unique method of seeing
+Life at its best, the flowing, hurrying, travelling, marketing Life of
+the Highway; the life of bagman and cart, of tinker, and pig-dealer,
+and all cheery creatures that drink and chaffer together in the sun. He
+belonged, above all, to the scanty class of clear-seeing persons who
+know both what they are good for and what they really want. To know
+what you would like to do is one thing; to go out boldly and do it is
+another—and a rarer; and the sterile fields about Hell-Gate are strewn
+with the corpses of those who would an if they could.
+
+To be sure, being bent on the relaxation most congenial to one’s soul,
+it is possible to push one’s disregard for convention too far: as is
+seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation, in the
+same establishment. In his office there was the customary
+“attendance-book,” wherein the clerks were expected to sign each day.
+Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing; he signs,
+indeed, no more. Instead of signature you find, a little later, writ in
+careful commercial hand, this entry: “Mr—- did not attend at his office
+to-day, having been hanged at eight o’clock in the morning for
+horse-stealing.” Through the faded ink of this record do you not seem
+to catch, across the gulf of years, some waft of the jolly humanity
+which breathed in this prince among clerks? A formal precisian,
+doubtless, during business hours; but with just this honest love of
+horseflesh lurking deep down there in him—unsuspected, sweetening the
+whole lump. Can you not behold him, freed from his desk, turning to
+pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still striveth to bury his
+bone deep in the hearth-rug? For no filthy lucre, you may be sure, but
+from sheer love of the pursuit itself! All the same, he erred; erred,
+if not in taste, at least in judgment: for we cannot entirely acquit
+him of blame for letting himself be caught.
+
+In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy
+selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our
+happier fathers were free. Book-stealing, to be sure, remains to us;
+but every one is not a collector; and, besides, ’tis a diversion you
+can follow with equal success all the year round. Still, the instance
+may haply be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily ask each
+year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps for the
+holiday-maker. ’Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men lead
+flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to some
+flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner that
+is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom
+stimulus. To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness: why not
+try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch—for
+every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits
+him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to
+all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in
+doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done;
+the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the
+sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and discussing crimes
+with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town; these new
+pleasures—these and their like—would furnish just that gentle
+stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired
+worker. And then the fact, that you would naturally have to select and
+plan out your particular line of diversion without advice or
+assistance, has its own advantage. For the moment a man takes to
+dinning in your ears that you ought, you really ought, to go to Norway,
+you at once begin to hate Norway with a hate that ever will be; and to
+have Newlyn, Cromer, or Dawlish, Carinthia or the Austrian Tyrol jammed
+down your throat, is enough to initiate the discovery that your own
+individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking for manslaughter.
+
+Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime. After
+all, it is mostly a matter of heredity; these unfortunates are less
+culpable than their neglectful ancestors; and it is a fault that none
+need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still
+remains the example of the turnpike-loving clerk, with all its golden
+possibilities. Denied the great delight of driving a locomotive, or a
+fire-engine—whirled along in a glorious nimbus of smoke-pant,
+spark-shower, and hoarse warning roar—what bliss to the palefaced
+quilldriver to command a penny steamboat between London Bridge and
+Chelsea! to drive a four-horsed Jersey-car to Kew at sixpence a head!
+Though turnpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be
+taken on many a pleasant reach of Thames. What happiness in quiet
+moments to tend the lock-keeper’s flower-beds—perhaps make love to his
+daughter; anon in busier times to let the old gates swing, work the
+groaning winches, and hear the water lap and suck and gurgle as it
+slowly sinks or rises with its swaying freight; to dangle legs over the
+side and greet old acquaintances here and there among the
+parti-coloured wayfarers passing up or down; while tobacco palleth not
+on the longest day, and beer is ever within easy reach. The iron tetter
+that scurfs the face of our island has killed out the pleasant life of
+the road; but many of its best conditions still linger round these old
+toll gates, free from dust and clatter, on the silent liquid Highway to
+the West.
+
+These for the weaker brethren: but for him who is conscious of the
+Gift, the path is plain.
+
+
+
+
+Deus Terminus
+
+
+The practical Roman, stern constructor of roads and codes, when he
+needs must worship, loved a deity practical as himself; and in his
+parcelling of the known world into plots, saying unto this man, Bide
+here, and to that, Sit you down there, he could scarce fail to evolve
+the god Terminus: visible witness of possession and dominion, type of
+solid facts not to be quibbled away. We Romans of this latter day—so
+hailed by others, or complacently christened by ourselves—are Roman in
+nothing more than in this; and, as much in the less tangible realms of
+thought as in our solid acres, we are fain to set up the statue which
+shall proclaim that so much country is explored, marked out, allotted,
+and done with; that such and such ramblings and excursions are
+practicable and permissible, and all else is exploded, illegal, or
+absurd. And in this way we are left with naught but a vague lingering
+tradition of the happier days before the advent of the ruthless deity.
+
+The sylvan glories of yonder stretch of woodland renew themselves each
+autumn, regal as ever. It is only the old enchantment that is gone;
+banished by the matter-of-fact deity, who has stolidly settled exactly
+where Lord A.’s shooting ends and Squire B.’s begins. Once, no such
+petty limitations fettered the mind. A step into the woodland was a
+step over the border—the margin of the material; and then, good-bye to
+the modern world of the land-agent and the “Field” advertisement! A
+chiming of little bells over your head, and lo! the peregrine, with
+eyes like jewels, fluttered through the trees, her jesses catching in
+the boughs. ’Twas the favourite of the Princess, the windows of whose
+father’s castle already gleamed through the trees, where honours and
+favours awaited the adventurous. The white doe sprang away through the
+thicket, her snowy flank stained with blood; she made for the enchanted
+cot, and for entrance you too had the pass-word. Did you fail on her
+traces, nor fox nor mole was too busy to spare a moment for friendly
+advice or information. Little hands were stretched to trip you, fairy
+gibe and mockery pelted you from every rabbit-hole; and O what Dryads
+you have kissed among the leaves, in that brief blissful moment ere
+they hardened into tree! ’Tis pity, indeed, that this sort of thing
+should have been made to share the suspicion attaching to the poacher;
+that the stony stare of the boundary god should confront you at the end
+of every green ride and rabbit-run; while the very rabbits themselves
+are too disgusted with the altered circumstances to tarry a moment for
+so much as to exchange the time of day.
+
+Truly this age is born, like Falstaff, with a white head and something
+a round belly: and will none of your jigs and fantasies. The golden era
+of princesses is past. For your really virtuous ’prentices there still
+remain a merchant’s daughter or two, and a bottle of port o’ Sundays on
+the Clapham mahogany. For the rest of us, one or two decent clubs, and
+plenty of nice roomy lunatic asylums. “Go spin, you jade, go spin!” is
+the one greeting for Imagination. And yet—what a lip the slut has! What
+an ankle! Go to: there’s nobody looking; let us lock the door, pull
+down the blinds, and write us a merry ballad.
+
+’Tis ungracious, perhaps, to regret what is gone for ever, when so much
+is given in return. A humour we have, that is entirely new; and
+allotments that shall win back Astræa. Our Labor Program stands for
+evidence that the Board School, at least, has done enduring work; and
+the useless race of poets is fast dying out. Though we no longer
+conjecture what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
+when he hid himself among women, yet many a prize (of guineas galore)
+awaits the competitor who will stoop, week by week, to more practical
+research. “Le monde marche,” as Renan hath it, “vers une sorte
+d’americanisme.... Peut-être la vulgarité générale sera-t-elle un jour
+la condition du bonheur des élus. Nous n’avons pas le droit d’etre fort
+difficiles.” We will be very facile, then, since needs must;
+remembering the good old proverb that “scornful dogs eat dirty
+puddings.” But, ere we show Terminus the door, at least let us fling
+one stone at the shrieking sulphureous houses of damnation erected as
+temples in his honour, and dignified with his name! There, ’mid
+clangour, dirt, and pestilence of crowding humanity, the very spirit of
+worry and unrest sits embodied. The old Roman was not such a bad
+fellow. His deity of demarcation at least breathed open air, and knew
+the kindly touch of sun and wind. His simple rites were performed amid
+flowers and under blue sky, by sunny roads or tranquil waters; and on
+this particular altar the sacrifice was ordained to be free from any
+stain of gore. Our hour of sacrifice, alas, has not yet come. When it
+does—(_et haud procul absit!_)—let the offering be no bloodless one,
+but let (for choice) a fat and succulent stationmaster smoke and
+crackle on the altar of expiation!
+
+
+
+
+Of Smoking
+
+
+Concerning Cigarette Smoking: It hath been well observed by a certain
+philosopher that this is a practice commendable enough, and pleasant to
+indulge in, “when you’re not smoking”; wherein the whole criticism of
+the cigarette is found, in a little room. Of the same manner of
+thinking was one that I knew, who kept by him an ample case bulging
+with cigarettes, to smoke while he was filling his pipe. Toys they be
+verily, _nugæ,_ and shadows of the substance. Serviceable,
+nevertheless, as shadows sometimes be when the substance is temporarily
+unattainable; as between the acts of a play, in the park, or while
+dressing for dinner: that such moments may not be entirely wasted. That
+cigarette, however, which is so prompt to appear after dinner I would
+reprehend and ban and totally abolish: as enemy to that diviner thing
+before which it should pale its ineffectual fires in shame—to wit, good
+drink, _“la dive bouteille”;_ except indeed when the liquor be bad, as
+is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve in some sort as a sorry
+consolation. But to leave these airy substitutes, and come to smoking.
+
+It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter,
+or that first pipe of the evening which “Hesperus, who bringeth all
+good things,” brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is
+smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss
+of one’s first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of
+merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to the
+vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to the
+latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that arises
+at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although with most
+of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, the
+morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarums and
+excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there are certain
+halcyon periods sure to arrive—Sundays, holidays, and the like—the
+whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one beatific pipe
+after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that of the gods
+“when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are lightly curled.”
+Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so this particular pipe
+of the day always carries with it festal reminiscences: memories of
+holidays past, hopes for holidays to come; a suggestion of sunny lawns
+and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense withal of something free and
+stately, as of  “faint march-music in the air,” or the old Roman cry of
+“Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement.”
+
+If there be any fly in the pipe-smoker’s ointment, it may be said to
+lurk in the matter of  “rings.” Only the exceptionally gifted smoker
+can recline in his chair and emit at will the perfect smoke-ring, in
+consummate eddying succession. He of the meaner sort must be content
+if, at rare heaven-sent intervals—while thinking, perhaps, of nothing
+less—there escape from his lips the unpremeditated flawless circle.
+Then _“deus fio”_ he is moved to cry, at that breathless moment when
+his creation hangs solid and complete, ere the particles break away and
+blend with the baser atmosphere. Nay, some will deny to any of us
+terrene smokers the gift of fullest achievement: for what saith _the_
+poet of the century? “On the earth the broken arcs: in the heaven the
+perfect round!”
+
+It was well observed by a certain character in one of Wilkie Collins’s
+novels (if an imperfect memory serveth me rightly) that women will take
+pleasure in scents derived from animal emanations, clarified fats, and
+the like; yet do illogically abhor the “clean, dry, vegetable smell” of
+tobacco. Herein the true base of the feminine objection is reached;
+being, as usual, inherent want of logic rather than any distaste, in
+the absolute, for the thing in question. Thinking that they ought to
+dislike, they do painfully cast about for reasons to justify their
+dislike, when none really exist. As a specimen of their so-called
+arguments, I remember how a certain fair one triumphantly pointed out
+to me that my dog, though loving me well, could yet never be brought to
+like the smell of tobacco. To whom I, who respected my dog (as Ben
+saith of Master Shakespeare) on this side idolatry as much as anything,
+was yet fain to point out—more in sorrow than in anger—that a dog,
+being an animal who delights to pass his whole day, from early morn to
+dewy eve, in shoving his nose into every carrion beastliness that he
+can come across, could hardly be considered _arbiter elegantiarum_ in
+the matter of smells. But indeed I did wrong to take such foolish
+quibbling seriously; nor would I have done so, if she hadn’t dragged my
+poor innocent dog into the discussion.
+
+Of Smoking in Bed: There be who consider this a depravity—an instance
+of that excess in the practice of a virtue which passes into vice—and
+couple it with dram-drinking: who yet fail to justify themselves by
+argument. For if bed be by common consent the greatest bliss, the
+divinest spot, on earth, _“ille terrarum qui præter omnes angulus
+ridet”;_ and if tobacco be the true Herb of Grace, and a joy and
+healing balm, and respite and nepenthe,—if all this be admitted, why
+are two things, super-excellent separately, noxious in conjunction? And
+is not the Bed Smoker rather an epicure in pleasure—self indulgent
+perhaps, but still the triumphant creator of a new “blend,” reminding
+one of a certain traveller’s account of an intoxicant patronised in the
+South Sea Islands, which combines the blissful effect of getting drunk
+and remaining sober to enjoy it? Yet I shall not insist too much on
+this point, but would only ask—so long as the smoker be unwedded—for
+some tolerance in the matter and a little logic in the discussion
+thereof.
+
+Concerning Cigars: That there be large sums given for these is within
+common knowledge. 1_d.,_ 2_d.,_ nay even 4_d.,_ is not too great a
+price, if a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In
+this sort of smoking, however, I find more of vainglory and ostentation
+than solid satisfaction; and its votaries would seem to display less a
+calm, healthy affection for tobacco than (as Sir T. Browne hath it) a
+“passionate prodigality.” And, besides grievous wasting of the pocket,
+atmospheric changes, varyings in the crops, and the like, cause
+uncertainty to cling about each individual weed, so that man is always
+more or less at the mercy of Nature and the elements—an unsatisfactory
+and undignified position in these latter days of the Triumphant
+Democracy. But worst and fatallest of all, to every cigar-smoker it is
+certain to happen that once in his life, by some happy combination of
+time, place, temperament, and Nature—by some starry influence, maybe,
+or freak of the gods in mocking sport—once, and once only, he will
+taste the aroma of the perfect leaf at just the perfect point—the ideal
+cigar. Henceforth his life is saddened; as one kissed by a goddess in a
+dream, he goes thereafter, as one might say, in a sort of
+love-sickness. Seeking he scarce knows what, his existence becomes a
+dissatisfied yearning; the world is spoiled for him, its joys are
+tasteless: so he wanders, vision-haunted, down dreary days to some
+miserable end.
+
+Yet, if one will walk this path and take the risks, the thing may be
+done at comparatively small expense. To such I would commend the Roman
+motto, slightly altered—_Alieni appetens, sui avarus._ There be always
+good fellows, with good cigars for their friends. Nay, too, the boxes
+of these lie open; an the good cigar belongs rather to him that can
+appreciate it aright than to the capitalist who, owing to a false
+social system, happens to be its temporary guardian and trustee. Again
+there is a saying—bred first, I think, among the schoolmen at
+Oxford—that it is the duty of a son to live up to his father’s income.
+Should any young man have found this task too hard for him, after the
+most strenuous and single-minded efforts, at least he can resolutely
+smoke his father’s cigars. In the path of duty complete success is not
+always to be looked for; but an approving conscience, the sure reward
+of honest endeavour, is within reach of all.
+
+
+
+
+An Autumn Encounter
+
+
+For yet another mile or two the hot dusty road runs through level
+fields, till it reaches yonder shoulder of the downs, already golden
+three-parts up with ripening corn. Thitherwards lies my inevitable way;
+and now that home is almost in sight it seems hard that the last part
+of the long day’s sweltering and delightful tramp must needs be haunted
+by that hateful speck, black on the effulgence of the slope. Did I not
+know he was only a scarecrow, the thing might be in a way
+companionable: a pleasant suggestive surmise, piquing curiosity,
+gilding this last weary stage with some magic of expectancy. But I
+passed close by him on my way out. Early as I was, he was already up
+and doing, eager to introduce himself. He leered after me as I swung
+down the road,—mimicked my gait, as it seemed, in a most uncalled-for
+way; and when I looked back, he was blowing derisive kisses of farewell
+with his empty sleeve.
+
+I had succeeded, however, in shaking off the recollection between the
+morning’s start and now; so it was annoying that he should force
+himself on me, just when there was no getting rid of him. At this
+distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it
+seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering,
+heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate—are
+the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable?—I used to watch Her
+pacing demurely towards me through the corn. It was ridiculous, it was
+fatuous, under all the circumstances it was monstrous, and yet{...}! We
+were both under twenty, so She was She, and I was I, and there were
+only we three the wide world over, she and I and the unbetraying gate.
+_Porta eburnea!_ False visions alone sped through you, though Cupid was
+wont to light on your topmost bar, and preen his glowing plumes. And to
+think that I should see her once more, coming down the path as if not a
+day had passed, hesitating as of old, and then—but surely her ankles
+seem—Confound that scarecrow!...
+
+His sex is by this time painfully evident; also his condition in life,
+which is as of one looking back on better days. And now he is upon a
+new tack. Though here on the level it is still sultry and airless, an
+evening breeze is playing briskly along the slope where he stands, and
+one sleeve saws the air violently; the other is pointed stiffly
+heavenwards. It is all plain enough, my poor friend! The sins of the
+world are a heavy burden and a grievous unto you. You have a mission,
+you must testify; it will forth, in season and out of season. For man,
+he wakes and sleeps and sins betimes: but crows sin steadily, without
+any cessation. And this unhappy state of things is your own particular
+business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it:
+“Salvation, damnation, damnation, salvation!” And the jolly earth
+smiles in the perfect evenglow, and the corn ripples and laughs all
+round you, and one young rook (only fledged this year, too!), after an
+excellent simulation of prostrate, heart-broken penitence, soars
+joyously away, to make love to his neighbour’s wife. “Salvation,
+damnation, damn—” A shifty wriggle of the road, and he is transformed
+once more. Flung back in an ecstasy of laughter, holding his lean
+sides, his whole form writhes with the chuckle and gurgle of merriment.
+Ho, ho! what a joke it was! How I took you all in! Even the rooks! What
+a joke is everything, to be sure!
+
+Truly, I shall be glad to get quit of this heartless mummer.
+Fortunately I shall soon be past him. And now, behold! the old dog
+waxes amorous. Mincing, mowing, empty sleeve on hollow breast, he would
+fain pose as the most irresistible old hypocrite that ever paced a
+metropolitan kerb. “Love, you young dogs,” he seems to croak, “Love is
+the one thing worth living for! Enjoy your present, rooks and all, as I
+do!” Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the golden influence
+of the hour? More than one supple waist (alas! for universal masculine
+frailty!) has been circled by that tattered sleeve in days gone by; a
+throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now fails to give a manly
+curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive, and not a particle of
+the passion that inspired it long ago?
+
+At last I confront him, face to face: and the villain grins
+recognition, completely unabashed. Nay, he cocks his eye with a
+significant glance under the slouch of his shapeless hat, and his arm
+points persistently and with intelligence up the road. My good fellow,
+I know the way to the Dog and Duck as well as you do: I was going there
+anyhow, without your officious interference—and the beer, as you justly
+remark, is unimpeachable. But was this really all you’ve been trying to
+say to me, this last half-hour? Well, well!
+
+
+
+
+The White Poppy
+
+
+A riot of scarlet on gold, the red poppy of our native fields tosses
+heavy tresses with gipsy _abandon;_ her sister of the sea-shore is
+golden, a yellow blossom that loves the keen salt savour of the spray.
+Of another hue is the poppy of history, of romance, of the muse. White
+as the stark death-shroud, pallid as the cheeks of that queen of a
+silent land whose temples she languorously crowns, ghost-like beside
+her fuller-blooded kin, she droops dream-laden, _Papaver somniferum,_
+the poppy of the magic juice of oblivion. In the royal plenitude of
+summer, the scarlet blooms will sometimes seem but a red cry from earth
+in memory of the many dews of battle that have drenched these acres in
+years gone by, for little end but that these same “bubbles of blood”
+might glow to-day; the yellow flower does but hint of the gold that has
+dashed a thousand wrecks at her feet around these shores: for happier
+suggestion we must turn to her of the pallid petals, our white Lady of
+Consolation. Fitting hue to typify the crowning blessing of
+forgetfulness! Too often the sable robes of night dissemble
+sleeplessness, remorse, regret, self-questioning. Let black, then,
+rather stand for hideous memory: white for blessed blank oblivion,
+happiest gift of the gods! For who, indeed, can say that the record of
+his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained with its
+petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later years,
+all which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory,
+refusing to be shut out? Leave us alone, O gods, to remember our
+felicities, our successes: only aid us, ye who recall no gifts, aptly
+and discreetly to forget.
+
+Discreetly, we say; for it is a tactful forgetfulness that makes for
+happiness. In the minor matter, for instance, of small money
+obligations, that shortness of memory which the school of Professors
+Panurge and Falstaff rashly praises, may often betray into some
+unfortunate allusion or reference to the subject which shall pain the
+delicate feelings of the obliger; or, if he be of coarser clay, shall
+lead him in his anger to express himself with unseemliness, and thereby
+to do violence to his mental tranquillity, in which alone, as Marcus
+Aurelius teacheth, lieth the perfection of moral character. This is to
+be a stumbling-block and an offence against the brethren. It is better
+to keep just memory enough to avoid such hidden rocks and shoals; in
+which thing Mr Swiveller is our great exemplar, whose mental map of
+London was a chart wherein every creditor was carefully “buoyed.”
+
+The wise man prays, we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to
+the prayer—and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think
+that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our
+friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories;
+why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be
+imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help in our
+own petty case, we are moved to add a word for certain others who,
+meaning no ill, unthinkingly go about to add to humanity’s already
+heavy load of suffering. How much needless misery is caused in this
+world by the reckless “recollections” of dramatic and other
+celebrities? You gods, in lending ear to our prayer, remember too,
+above all other sorts and conditions of men, these our poor erring
+brothers and sisters, the sometime _sommités_ of Mummerdom!
+
+Moments there are, it is true, when this traitor spirit tricks you:
+when some subtle scent, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even
+some touch of a fresher air on your cheeks at night—a breath of _“le
+vent qui vient à travers la montagne”_—have power to ravish, to catch
+you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic Paradise.
+Moments only, alas! Then the evil crowd rushes in again, howls in the
+sacred grove, tramples down and defiles the happy garden; and once more
+you cry to Our Lady of Sleep, crowned of the white poppy. And you envy
+your dog who, for full discharge of a present benefaction having wagged
+you a hearty, expressive tail, will then pursue it gently round the
+hearth-rug till, in restful coil, he reaches it at last, and oblivion
+with it; every one of his half-dozen diurnal sleeps being in truth a
+royal amnesty.
+
+But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing? Perdita
+blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but this
+gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is “grace
+and remembrance.” The fair Ophelia, rather: nay, for as a nursling she
+hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a “sorrow’s crown
+of sorrow.” What flowers are these her pale hand offers? “There’s
+pansies, that’s for thoughts!” For me rather, O dear Ophelia, the white
+poppy of forgetfulness.
+
+
+
+
+A Bohemian in Exile
+
+A Reminiscence
+
+
+When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of
+Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were
+found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the
+fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the
+swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet
+retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the
+princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and
+file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in
+thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and
+learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those
+faithful commons I would speak, narrating only “the short and simple
+annals of the poor.”
+
+It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom
+as a United States—a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities,
+or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. “There
+_once_ was a king of Bohemia”—but that was a long time ago, and even
+Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free
+States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying
+speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go.
+
+With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. “Just for
+a handful of silver he left us”; though it was not exactly that, but
+rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider
+horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.
+
+So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one—
+
+
+But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their
+success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still.
+
+When old Pan was dead and Apollo’s bow broken, there were many faithful
+pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills
+and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in
+their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind, a remnant of the
+faithful. We had never expected to become great in art or song; it was
+the life itself that we loved; that was our end—not, as with them, the
+means to an end.
+
+We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we;
+Give us the glory of going on and still to be.
+
+
+Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had
+changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.
+
+Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past
+was dead, and he wasn’t going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too,
+would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man’s
+death, said “he changed his life.” This is how Fothergill changed his
+life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the
+Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The Whitechapel barrows
+are of all sizes, from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with half a
+dozen heads of cabbages to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such as on
+Sundays take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are all
+precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes
+the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally
+suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a
+hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and
+numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized
+“developed” one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white,
+picked out with green—the barrow, not the donkey—and when his
+arrangements were complete, stabled the whole for the night in
+Bloomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite faded
+from the sky, the exodus took place, those of us who were left being
+assembled to drink a parting whisky-and-milk in sad and solemn silence.
+Fothergill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft with a short
+clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight, heading west at a
+leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater
+Road.
+
+They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey,
+from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It
+seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was
+enabled to put down his donkey and barrow, and set up a cart and a
+mare—no fashionable gipsy-cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but a
+light and serviceable cart, with a moveable tilt, constructed on his
+own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and
+other artists’ materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like
+necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he
+wanted to.
+
+He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the merest
+accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to
+Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for a long
+ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before
+dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the
+Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his
+vesper pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short grass
+beside him. He greeted me without surprise or effusion, as if we had
+only parted yesterday, and without a hint of an allusion to past times,
+but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last three years, and,
+without ever telling his story right out, left a strange picturesque
+impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty
+years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life still
+lingered on in places, it seemed, once one got well away from the
+railway: there were two Englands existing together, the one fringing
+the great iron highways wherever they might go—the England under the
+eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places
+were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as of old: the
+England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of by-lanes and
+village-greens—the England of Parson Adams and Lavengro. The spell of
+the free untrammelled life came over me as I listened, till I was fain
+to accept of his hospitality and a horse-blanket for the night,
+oblivious of civilised comforts down at the Bull. On the downs where
+Alfred fought we lay and smoked, gazing up at the quiet stars that had
+shone on many a Dane lying stark and still a thousand years ago; and in
+the silence of the lone tract that enfolded us we seemed nearer to
+those old times than to these I had left that afternoon, in the now
+hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames.
+
+When the news reached me, some time later, that Fothergill’s aunt had
+died and left him her house near town and the little all she had
+possessed, I heard it with misgivings, not to say forebodings. For the
+house had been his grandfather’s, and he had spent much of his boyhood
+there; it had been a dream of his early days to possess it in some
+happy future, and I knew he could never bear to sell or let it. On the
+other hand, can you stall the wild ass of the desert? And will not the
+caged eagle mope and pine?
+
+However, possession was entered into, and all seemed to go well for the
+time. The cart was honourably installed in the coach-house, the mare
+turned out to grass. Fothergill lived idly and happily, to all seeming,
+with “a book of verses underneath the bough,” and a bottle of old
+claret for the friend who might chance to drop in. But as the year wore
+on small signs began to appear that he who had always “rather hear the
+lark sing than the mouse squeak” was beginning to feel himself caged,
+though his bars were gilded.
+
+I was talking one day to his coachman (he now kept three men-servants),
+and he told me that of a Sunday morning when the household had gone to
+church and everything was quiet, Mr Fothergill would go into the
+coach-house and light his pipe, and sit on the step of the brougham (he
+had a brougham now), and gaze at the old cart, and smoke and say
+nothing; and smoke and say nothing again. He didn’t like it, the
+coachman confessed; and to me it seemed ominous.
+
+One morning late in March, at the end of a long hard winter, I was
+wakened by a flood of sunshine. The early air came warm and soft
+through the open window; the first magic suggestion of spring was
+abroad, with its whispered hints of daffodils and budding hawthorns;
+and one’s blood danced to imagined pipings of Pan from happy fields far
+distant. At once I thought of Fothergill, and, with a certain
+foreboding of ill, made my way down to Holly Lodge as soon as possible.
+It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master was
+missing. In the very first of the morning, it seemed, or ever the
+earliest under-housemaid had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and
+along the passages, he must have quietly left the house. The servants
+were cheerful enough, nevertheless, and thought the master must only
+have “gone for a nice long walk,” and so on, after the manner of their
+kind. Without a word I turned my steps to the coach-house. Sure enough,
+the old cart was missing; the mare was gone from the paddock. It was no
+good my saying anything; pursuit of this wild haunter of tracks and
+by-paths would have been futile indeed. So I kept my own counsel.
+Fothergill never returned to Holly Lodge, and has been more secret and
+evasive since his last flight, rarely venturing on old camping grounds
+near home, like to a bird scared by the fowler’s gun.
+
+Once indeed, since then, while engaged in pursuit of the shy quarry
+known as the Early Perp., late Dec., E. Eng., and the like, specimens
+of which I was tracking down in the west, I hit upon him by accident;
+hearing in an old village rumours concerning a strange man in a cart
+who neither carried samples nor pushed the brewing interest by other
+means than average personal consumption—tales already beginning to be
+distorted into material for the myth of the future. I found him
+friendly as ever, equally ready to spin his yarns. As the evening wore
+on, I ventured upon an allusion to past times and Holly Lodge; but his
+air of puzzled politeness convinced me that the whole thing had passed
+out of his mind, as a slight but disagreeable incident in the even
+tenor of his nomadic existence.
+
+After all, his gains may have outbalanced his losses. Had he cared, he
+might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success;
+certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any
+impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he
+was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen
+sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he
+doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from
+the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in
+toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust.
+
+Some for the glories of this life, and some
+Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come:
+Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,
+Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.
+
+
+
+
+
+Justifiable Homicide
+
+
+This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks; so he
+cannot be said to ask too much who seeks for exact information as to
+how a young man ought, in justice to himself and to society, to deal
+with his relations. During his minority he has lain entirely at their
+mercy: has been their butt, their martyr, their drudge, their _corpus
+vile._ Possessing all the sinews of war, this stiff-necked tribe has
+consistently refused to “part”: even for the provision of those
+luxuries so much more necessary than necessities. Its members have
+crammed their victim full of precepts, rules of conduct, moral maxims,
+and most miscellaneous counsel: all which he intuitively suspected at
+the time, and has ascertained by subsequent experience, to be utterly
+worthless. Now, when their hour has come, when the tocsin has sounded
+at last, and the Gaul is at the gate, they still appear to think that
+the old condition of things is to go on; unconscious, apparently, of
+atonement due, of retribution to be exacted, of wrongs to be avenged
+and of insults to be wiped away!
+
+Over the north-west frontier, where the writ of the English Raj runs
+not, the artless Afghan is happy in a code that fully provides for
+relatives who neglect or misunderstand their obligations. An Afghan it
+was who found himself compelled to reprove an uncle with an unfortunate
+habit of squandering the family estate. An excellent relative, this
+uncle, in all other respects. As a liar, he had few equals; he robbed
+with taste and discretion; and his murders were all imbued with true
+artistic feeling. He might have lived to a green old age of spotless
+respectability but for his one little failing. As it was, justice had
+to be done, _ruat cælum:_ and so it came about that one day the nephew
+issued forth to correct him with a matchlock. The innocent old man was
+cultivating his paternal acres; so the nephew was able, unperceived, to
+get a steady sight on him. His finger was on the trigger, when suddenly
+there slipped into his mind the divine precept: “Allah is merciful!” He
+lowered his piece, and remained for a little plunged in thought;
+meanwhile the unconscious uncle hoed his paddy. Then with a happy smile
+he took aim once more, for there also occurred to him the precept
+equally divine: “But Allah is also just.” With an easy conscience he
+let fly, and behold! there was an uncle the more in Paradise.
+
+It was probably some little affair of a similar quality that
+constrained a recruit in a regiment stationed at Peshawur to apply for
+leave of absence: in order to attend to family matters of importance.
+The Colonel knew it was small use refusing the leave, as in that case
+his recruit would promptly desert; so he could only ask, how long was
+the transaction like to take? It was told him, after consideration,
+that, allowing for all possible difficulties and delays, a month would
+meet the necessities of the case; and on that understanding he allowed
+his man to depart. At the end of the month he reappeared on duty, a
+subdued but mellow cheer shining through his wonted impassiveness. His
+Colonel ventured to inquire of him, in a general way, if the business
+in question were satisfactorily concluded. And he replied: “I got him
+from behind a rock.”
+
+There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such
+methods at home. We must be content to envy, without imitating, these
+free and happy sons of the hills. And yet a few of the old school are
+left us still: averse from change, mistrustful of progress, sticking
+steadily to the good old-fashioned dagger and bowl. I had a friend who
+disposed of a relative every spring. Uncles were his special line—(he
+had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an
+orphan)—though he had dabbled in aunts, and in his hot youth, when he
+was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grand-parent or
+two. But it was in uncles he excelled. He possessed (at the beginning
+of his career) a large number of these connections, and pursuit of
+them, from the mere sordid point of view of  _£ s. d.,_ proved
+lucrative. But he always protested (and I believed him) that gain with
+him was a secondary consideration. It would hardly be in the public
+interest to disclose his _modus operandi._ I shall only remark that he
+was one of the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the
+artist by the conditions of modern London. Hence it happened that he
+usually practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country
+houses of such relations as were still spared him, where he was always
+the life and soul of the place. Unfortunately he is no longer with us,
+to assist in the revision of this article: nor was it permitted me to
+soothe his last moments. The presiding Sheriff was one of those
+new-fangled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and he
+declined to admit me either in the capacity of a personal connection
+or, though I tried my hardest, as the representative of “The National
+Observer.” It only remains to be said of my much-tried and still
+lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his untimely end.
+
+But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march of
+Time, and my poor friend’s Art (as himself in later years would
+sorrowfully admit) is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of
+old, or “Robbia’s craft so apt and strange”; while our thin-blooded
+youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find
+sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations. This is indeed a
+most effective position: it exasperates, while it is unassailable. And
+yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task. Not mere forgiveness:
+it is simple duty to forgive—even one’s guardians. No young man of
+earnest aspirations will be content to stop there. Nay: lead them on,
+these lost ones, by the hand; conduct them “generously and gently, and
+with linking of the arm”; educate them, eradicate their false ideals,
+dispel their foolish prejudices; be to their faults a little blind and
+to their virtues very kind: in fine, realise that you have a
+mission—that these wretches are not here for nothing. The task will
+seem hard at first; but only those who have tried can know how much may
+be done by assiduous and kindly effort towards the chastening—ay! the
+final redemption even!—of the most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles.
+
+
+
+
+The Fairy Wicket
+
+
+From digging in the sandy, over-triturated soil of times historical,
+all dotted with date and number and sign, how exquisite the relief in
+turning to the dear days outside history—yet not so very far off
+neither for us nurslings of the northern sun—when kindly beasts would
+loiter to give counsel by the wayside, and a fortunate encounter with
+one of the Good People was a surer path to Fortune and the Bride than
+the best-worn stool that ever proved step-ladder to aspiring youth. For
+then the Fairy Wicket stood everywhere ajar—everywhere and to each and
+all. “Open, open, green hill!”—you needed no more recondite sesame than
+that: and, whoever you were, you might have a glimpse of the elfin
+dancers in the hall that is litten within by neither sun nor moon; or
+catch at the white horse’s bridle as the Fairy Prince rode through. It
+has been closed now this many a year (the fairies, always strong in the
+field, are excellent wicket-keepers); and if it open at all, ’tis but
+for a moment’s mockery of the material generation that so deliberately
+turned its back on the gap into Elf-Land—that first stage to the
+Beyond.
+
+It was a wanton trick, though, that these folk of malice used to play
+on a small school-boy, new kicked out of his nest into the draughty,
+uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the
+feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle. The barrack-like school, the
+arid, cheerless class-rooms, drove him to Nature for redress; and,
+under an alien sky, he would go forth and wander along the iron road by
+impassive fields, so like yet so unlike those hitherto a part of him
+and responding to his every mood. And to him, thus loitering with
+overladen heart, there would come suddenly a touch of warmth, of
+strange surprise. The turn of the road just ahead—that, sure, is not
+all unfamiliar? That row of elms—it cannot entirely be accident that
+they range just _so?_ And, if not accident, then round the bend will
+come the old duck-pond, the shoulder of the barn will top it, a few
+yards on will be the gate—it swings-to with its familiar click—the dogs
+race down the avenue—and then—and then! It is all wildly fanciful; and
+yet, though knowing not Tertullian, a _“credo quia impossibile”_ is on
+his tongue as he quickens his pace—for what else can he do? A step, and
+the spell is shattered—all is cruel and alien once more; while every
+copse and hedge-row seems a-tinkle with faint elfish laughter. The
+Fairies have had their joke: they have opened the wicket one of their
+own hand’s-breadths, and shut it in their victim’s face. When next that
+victim catches a fairy, he purposes to tie up the brat in sight of his
+own green hill, and set him to draw up a practical scheme for Village
+Councils.
+
+One of the many women I ever really loved, fair in the fearless old
+fashion, was used to sing, in the blithe, unfettered accent of the
+people: “I’d like to be a fairy, And dance upon my toes, I’d like to be
+a fairy, And wear short close!” And in later life it is to her sex that
+the wee (but very wise) folk sometimes delegate their power of torment.
+Such understudies are found to play the part exceeding well; and many a
+time the infatuated youth believes he sees in the depth of one sole
+pair of eyes—blue, brown, or green (the fairy colour)—the authentic
+fairy wicket standing ajar: many a time must he hear the quaint old
+formula, “I’m sure, if I’ve ever done anything to lead you to think,”
+etc (runs it not so?), ere he shall realise that here is the gate upon
+no magic pleasance but on a cheap suburban villa, banging behind the
+wrathful rate-collector or hurled open to speed the pallid householder
+to the Registrar’s Office. In still grosser habitations, too, they
+lurk, do the People of Mischief, ready to frolic out on the
+unsuspecting one: as in the case, which still haunts my memory, of a
+certain bottle of an historic Château-Yquem, hued like Venetian glass,
+odorous as a garden in June. Forth from out the faint perfume of this
+haunted drink there danced a bevy from Old France, clad in the fashion
+of Louis-Quinze, peach-coloured knots of ribbon bedizening apple-green
+velvets, as they moved in stately wise among the roses of the old
+garden, to the quaint music—Rameau, was it?—of a fairy _cornemuse,_
+while fairy Watteaus, Fragonards, Lancrets, sat and painted them. Alas!
+too shallow the bottle, too brief the brawls: not to be recalled by any
+quantity of Green Chartreuse.
+
+
+
+
+Aboard the Galley
+
+
+He was cruising in the Southern Seas (was the Ulysses who told me this
+tale), when there bore down upon him a marvellous strange fleet, whose
+like he had not before seen. For each little craft was a corpse,
+stiffly “marlined,” or bound about with tarred rope, as mariners do use
+to treat plug tobacco: also ballasted, and with a fair mast and sail
+stepped through his midriff. These self-sufficing ships knew no divided
+authority: no pilot ever took the helm from the captain’s hands; no
+mutines lay in bilboes, no passengers complained of the provisions. In
+a certain island to windward (the native pilot explained) it was the
+practice, when a man died, to bury him for the time being in dry,
+desiccating sand, till a chief should pass from his people, when the
+waiting bodies were brought out and, caulked and rigged _secumdum
+artem,_ were launched with the first fair breeze, the admiral at their
+head, on their voyage to the Blessed Islands. And if a chief should
+die, and the sand should hold no store of corpses for his escort, this
+simple practical folk would solve the little difficulty by knocking
+some dozen or twenty stout fellows on the head, that the notable might
+voyage like a gentleman. Whence this gallant little company, running
+before the breeze, stark, happy, and extinct, all bound for the Isles
+of Light! ’Twas a sight to shame us sitters at home, who believe in
+those Islands, most of us, even as they, yet are content to trundle
+City-wards or to Margate, so long as the sorry breath is in us; and,
+breathless at last, to Bow or Kensal Green; without one effort, dead or
+alive, to reach the far-shining Hesperides.
+
+“Dans la galère, capitane, nous étions quatre-vingt rameurs!” sang the
+oarsmen in the ballad; and they, though indeed they toiled on the
+galley-bench, were free and happy pirates, members of an honoured and
+liberal profession. But all we—pirates, parsons, stockbrokers, whatever
+our calling—are but galley-slaves of the basest sort, fettered to the
+oar each for his little spell. A common misery links us all, like the
+chain that runs the length of the thwarts. Can _nothing_ make it worth
+our while not to quarrel with our fellows? The menace of the storms is
+for each one and for all: the master’s whip has a fine impartiality.
+Crack! the lash that scored my comrade’s back has flicked my withers
+too; yet neither of us was shirking—it was that grinning ruffian in
+front. Well: to-morrow, God willing, the evasion shall be ours, while
+he writhes howling. But why do we never once combine—seize on the ship,
+fling our masters into the sea, and steer for some pleasant isle far
+down under the Line, beyond the still-vexed Bermoothes? When ho for
+feasting! Hey for tobacco and free-quarters! But no: the days pass, and
+are reckoned up, and done with; and ever more pressing cares engage.
+Those fellows on the leeward benches are having an easier time than we
+poor dogs on the weather side? Then, let us abuse, pelt, vilify then:
+let us steal their grub, and have at them generally for a set of
+shirking, malingering brutes! What matter that to-morrow they may be to
+windward, we to lee? We never can look ahead. And they know this well,
+the gods our masters, pliers of the whip. And mayhap we like them none
+the worse for it.
+
+Indeed, there is a traitor sort among ourselves, that spins facile
+phrases in the honour of these whipmasters of ours—as _“omnes eodem
+cogimur,”_ and the rest; which is all very pretty and mighty consoling.
+The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the present
+arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we
+are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and
+make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on the
+sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a
+generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their
+books; offer them drinks, peerages, and things; and say what
+superlative fellows they are! But when the long-looked-for combination
+comes, and we poor devils have risen and abolished fate, destiny, the
+Olympian Council, early baldness, and the like, these poets will really
+have to go.
+
+And when every rhymester has walked the plank, shall we still put up
+with our relations? True members of the “stupid party,” who never
+believe in us, who know (and never forget) the follies of our
+adolescence; who are always wanting us _not_ to do things; who are
+lavish of advice, yet angered by the faintest suggestion of a small
+advance in cash: shall the idle singers perish and these endure? No: as
+soon as the last poet has splashed over the side, to the sharks with
+our relations!
+
+The old barkey is lightening famously: who shall be next to go? The
+Sportsman of intolerable yarns: who slays twice over—first, his game,
+and then the miserable being he button-holes for the tedious recital.
+Shall we suffer _him_ longer? Who else? Who is that cowering under the
+bulwarks yonder? The man who thinks he can imitate the Scottish accent!
+Splash! And the next one? What a crowd is here! How they block the
+hatchways, lumber the deck, and get between you and the purser’s
+room—these fadmongers, teetotallers, missionaries of divers isms!
+Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles! Then for tobacco
+in a hammock ’twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled in a brooklet
+losing itself in silver sands! Then for—but O these bilboes on our
+ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare
+back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern
+Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do
+it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private
+differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen of
+fortune, and I would be your Captain! “Who? you? you would make a
+pretty Captain!” Better than you, you scurvy, skulking, little
+galley-slave! “Galley-slave yourself, and be—- Pull together, boys, and
+lie low! Here’s the Master coming with his whip!”
+
+
+
+
+The Lost Centaur
+
+
+It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great
+volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from
+babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an
+ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and
+noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor humanity
+sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his pottering
+little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be
+the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the lords of earth
+even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop: below, shod
+with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality
+of the armed heel. Instead of which—! How fallen was his first fair
+hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of
+the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the
+clangorous walls of Troy—some touch of an imperial disdain ever
+lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could contentedly hail
+him—him, who had known Cheiron!—as hero and lord!
+
+Achilles has passed, with the Centaurs and Troy; but the feeling
+lingers.
+
+Of strange and divers strands is twisted the mysterious cord that,
+reaching back “through spaces out of space and timeless time,”
+somewhere joins us to the Brute; a twine of mingled yarn, not utterly
+base. As we grow from our animal infancy, and the threads snap one by
+one at each gallant wing-stroke of a soul poising for flight into
+Empyrean, we are yet conscious of a loss for every gain, we have some
+forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing enough are we to “let the
+ape and tiger die”; but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur
+and feather are not all tigers and apes: which last vile folk, indeed,
+exist for us only in picture-books, and chiefly offend by always
+carrying the Sunday School ensign of a Moral at their tails.
+Others—happily of less didactic dispositions—there be; and it is to
+these unaffected, careless companions that the sensible child is wont
+to devote himself; leaving severely alone the stiff, tame creatures
+claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates, while cheerfully
+admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his inferiority at
+every point. Vainly, his snub nose projected earthwards, he essays to
+sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the nobler animal) is leading
+in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he realises his loss. And the
+rest of the Free Company,—the pony, the cows, the great
+cart-horses,—are ever shaming him by their unboastful exercise of some
+enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who (did
+but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and
+be unto him as a brother,—which among all these unhappy bifurcations,
+so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide,
+philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times,
+when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable
+accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of
+developing a Mind, the course of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is
+wont—not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he is heir—to feel
+a little discontented?
+
+Ere now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein the animal is
+already ascendant, has led by downward paths to the Goat-Foot, in whom
+the submerged human system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments.
+He, the peevish and irascible, shy of trodden ways and pretty
+domesticities, is linked to us by little but his love of melody; but
+for which saving grace, the hair would soon creep up from thigh to horn
+of him. At times he will still do us a friendly turn: will lend a
+helping hand to poor little Psyche, wilfully seeking her own salvation;
+will stand shoulder to shoulder with us on Marathon plain. But in the
+main his sympathies are first for the beast: to which his horns are
+never horrific, but, with his hairy pelt, ever natural and familiar,
+and his voice (with its talk of help and healing) not harsh nor
+dissonant, but voice of very brother as well as very god.
+
+And this declension—for declension it is, though we achieve all the
+confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant _argot_
+of the woods—may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our
+primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform and
+irradiate body as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never:
+nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted to cut himself
+wholly adrift from these his poor relations. The mute and stunted human
+embryo that gazes appealingly from out the depths of their eyes must
+ever remind him of a kinship once (possibly) closer. Nay, at times, it
+must even seem to whelm him in reproach. As thus: “Was it really
+necessary, after all, that we two should part company so early? May you
+not have taken a wrong turning somewhere, in your long race after your
+so-called progress, after the perfection of this be-lauded species of
+yours? A turning whose due avoidance might perhaps have resulted in no
+such lamentable cleavage as is here, but in some perfect embodiment of
+the dual nature: as who should say a being with the nobilities of both
+of us, the basenesses of neither? So might you, more fortunately
+guided, have been led at last up the green sides of Pelion, to the
+ancestral, the primeval, Centaur still waiting majestic on the summit!”
+It is even so. Perhaps this thing might once have been, O cousin
+outcast and estranged! But the opportunity was long since lost.
+Henceforth, two ways for us for ever!
+
+
+
+
+Orion
+
+
+The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
+dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
+steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as of
+the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
+half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
+seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.
+
+Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
+passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
+forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
+Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
+fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
+its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
+great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
+happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
+nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
+some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children of
+the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in right
+case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon withal.
+Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here, my
+brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And for
+this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or mandragora
+shall purge it hence away?
+
+Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
+they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
+accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
+course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
+natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription—now
+horizontal, and now vertical—of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
+command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
+cards they have the right to call the game. And so—since we must bow to
+the storm—let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
+Salvation—for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
+matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
+original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
+Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
+heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
+duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
+gipsy’s van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
+paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to the
+pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling
+blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that
+shining highway to the dim land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon:
+where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at night tame
+street lamps there are none—only the hunter’s fires, and the eyes of
+lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is stifled and
+gagged—buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a
+stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when
+’tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who
+was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man,
+i’ faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton: and was
+versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who could have thought
+that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him
+in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack
+calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers
+tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when
+they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American
+Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his
+wonted corner now: quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet—let
+the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr,
+quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to
+the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay,
+truly: and next time he will not be caught.
+
+Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have
+hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have “come tripping
+doon the stair,” rapt by the climbing passion from their
+strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves,
+too—the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are—which of us but
+might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown
+to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What marvel that
+up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one in his ken,
+the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone
+forth on its irresistible appeal!
+
+Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes of
+the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs
+creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the
+windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is
+muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless
+old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk
+and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look,
+still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, ’tis
+ever the old Pegasus—not yet the knacker’s own. “Hard times I’ve been
+having,” he murmurs, as you rub his nose. “These fellows have really no
+seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were wont to await
+it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your English way of
+hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings—well, I may be out of
+date, but we wouldn’t have stood that sort of thing on Helicon.” So he
+hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of date? Well, it
+may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.
+
+But for the Hunter—there he rises—couchant no more. Nay, flung full
+stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his turn,
+then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal ruin,
+all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the Music-hall
+artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall the
+skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the
+whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet—look up! Look up
+and behold him confident, erect, majestic—there on the threshold of the
+sky!
+
+
+
+
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