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Adventures Among Books

by Andrew Lang · English · Gutenberg #1994 · 440,687 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Adventures Among Books

Author: Andrew Lang


        
Release date: December 1, 1999 [eBook #1994]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1994

Credits: Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS ***






Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS
by Andrew Lang


Contents:

Preface
Adventures Among Books
Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson
Rab's Friend
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Mr. Morris's Poems
Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels
A Scottish Romanticist of 1830
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Smollett
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Paradise of Poets
Paris and Helen
Enchanted Cigarettes
Stories and Story-telling
The Supernatural in Fiction
An Old Scottish Psychical Researcher
The Boy




PREFACE


Of the Essays in this volume "Adventures among Books," and "Rab's
Friend," appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_; and "Recollections of Robert
Louis Stevenson" (to the best of the author's memory) in _The North
American Review_.  The Essay on "Smollett" was in the _Anglo-Saxon_,
which has ceased to appear; and the shorter papers, such as "The
Confessions of Saint Augustine," in a periodical styled _Wit and Wisdom_.
For "The Poems of William Morris" the author has to thank the Editor of
_Longman's Magazine_; for "The Boy," and "Mrs. Radcliffe's Novels," the
Proprietors of _The Cornhill Magazine_; for "Enchanted Cigarettes," and
possibly for "The Supernatural in Fiction," the Proprietors of _The
Idler_.  The portrait, after Sir William Richmond, R.A., was done about
the time when most of the Essays were written--and that was not
yesterday.




CHAPTER I: ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS


I


In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a
veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about
people?  I have often wondered that a _Biographia Literaria_ has so
seldom been attempted--a biography or autobiography of a man in his
relations with other minds.  Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a
work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of
alien disquisitions.  The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the
bookish only do they appeal.  The habit of reading has been praised as a
virtue, and has been denounced as a vice.  In no case, if we except the
perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is
the vice, or the virtue, common.  It is more innocent than opium-eating,
though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises.  I try
to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what
teaching (not much), and what consolations.

In beginning an _autobiographia literaria_, an account of how, and in
what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above
all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of
egotism.  There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows so
much as of his own.  _On n'a que soi_, as the poor girl says in one of M.
Paul Bourget's novels.  In literature, as in love, one can only speak for
himself.  This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the
convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born to
be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library.  Among the
poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's song,
in the "Bride of Lammermoor":--

   "Look not thou on beauty's charming,
   Sit thou still when kings are arming,
   Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
   Speak not when the people listens,
   Stop thine ear against the singer,
   From the red gold keep thy finger,
   Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
   Easy live and quiet die."

The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to
me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten,
probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind
of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the _fallentis semita vitae_.
This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be confessed.

"It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers from the cradle,
some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the gift
given to me by the fairies.  It was probably derived from forebears on
both sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a considerable
collector of books which remained with us and were all tried, persevered
with, or abandoned in turn, by a student who has not blanched before the
_Epigoniad_.

About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process.  I had heard
the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out the
letters and words which compose that classic till I could read it for
myself.  Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been read aloud to me,
in an abbreviated form, no doubt.  I remember the pictures of Robinson
finding the footstep in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and the
parrot.  But, somehow, I have never read "Robinson" since: it is a
pleasure to come.

The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales,
and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy.  At that
time these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece.  I can still
see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across a
burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldier's horse into the stream.  They
did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is more at
home in Fairyland than in his own country.  The sudden appearance of the
White Cat as a queen after her head was cut off, the fiendish malice of
the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs and millet seed
which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the Fairy of the
Desert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly to be
credited, are my first memories of romance.  One story of a White
Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to
secure, probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since.
One never sees those chap books now.  "The White Serpent," in spite of
all research, remains _introuvable_.  It was a lost chance, and Fortune
does not forgive.  Nobody ever interfered with these, or indeed with any
other studies of ours at that time, as long as they were not prosecuted
on Sundays.  "The fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha, and
stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature, read
in a huge old illustrated Bible.  How I advanced from the fairy tales to
Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way--for there must have been
stages--is a thing that memory cannot recover.  A nursery legend tells
that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go from one
to the others, perusing them by turns.  No doubt this was what people
call "desultory reading," but I did not hear the criticism till later,
and then too often for my comfort.  Memory holds a picture, more vivid
than most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by
firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the
piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess.  The Shakespeare
was a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and the
fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music and the
firelight.  At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an
enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it remains
with me, out of all the years.

We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of my
years was six, and in England we found another paradise, a circulating
library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of Shakespeare and
of the "Arabian Nights."  How their stained pages come before the eyes
again--the pleasure and the puzzle of them!  What did the lady in the
Geni's glass box want with the Merchants? what meant all these
conversations between the Fat Knight and _Ford_, in the "Merry Wives"?  It
was delightful, but in parts it was difficult.  Fragments of "The
Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these
readings: _Ferdinand_ and _Miranda_ at chess, _Cleopatra_ cuffing the
messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the _Friar_ and the
_Apothecary_, _Troilus_ on the Ilian walls, a vision of _Cassandra_ in
white muslin with her hair down.  People forbid children to read this or
that.  I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the
magician, Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful
visions, half realised.  In the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink,
only the pure can see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror
children see only what is pure.  Among other books of that time I only
recall a kind of Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem."
Who, indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on
the battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!"  I seem to hear
him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest
"disaster."

We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were,
to know the glories of our birth.  We lived in Scott's country, within
four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it.  I
remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of
hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where our
first fishing-rods were fashioned.  Rummaging among the books, of course,
I found some cheap periodical with verses in it.  The lines began--

   "The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day,
      He spurred his courser on,
   Without stop or stay, down the rocky way
      That leads to Brotherstone."

A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be
neglected.  But they _were_ neglected till we had learned how--

   "The sable score of fingers four
      Remains on that board impressed,
   And for evermore that lady wore
      A covering on her wrist."

We did not know nor ask the poet's name.  Children, probably, say very
little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard
of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the
moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardly
need to be revived by looking at "The Eve of St. John."

Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, how
good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he wore
his heart away for honour's sake.  And we were given the "Lay," and "The
Lady of the Lake."  It was my father who first read "Tam o' Shanter" to
me, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to take
witches and bogies with great seriousness.  It seemed as if Burns were
trifling with a noble subject.  But it was in a summer sunset, beside a
window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren's Cairn,
that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how--

   "The stag at eve had drunk his fill
   Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
   And deep his midnight lair had made
   In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."

Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase,
till--

   "Few were the stragglers, following far,
   That reached the lake of Vennachar,
   And when the Brig of Turk was won,
   The foremost horseman rode alone."

From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in
one's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy's
treasures.  Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth
Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours.
{1}  After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one's
first lessons in history from the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, one
hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie
Stephen, who is not sentimental.  Scott is not an author like another,
but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask
who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame
d'Aulnoy.  Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his
reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh;
at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal arch"--

   "Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
   Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--

just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage
whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at
Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.

Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story was
"Jane Eyre."  This tale was a creepy one for a boy of nine, and Rochester
was a mystery, St. John a bore.  But the lonely little girl in her
despair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation at
school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were not to be forgotten.
They abide in one's recollection with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried a
rusty ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.

I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded my
lessons, and satisfied my teachers--I know I was reading Pinnock's
"History of Rome" for pleasure--till "the wicked day of destiny" came,
and I felt a "call," and underwent a process which may be described as
the opposite of "conversion."  The "call" came from Dickens.  "Pickwick"
was brought into the house.  From that hour it was all over, for five or
six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books.  I read
"Pickwick" in convulsions of mirth.  I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good.
I neglected everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was
understood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither I was now
sent, in Edinburgh.  For there, living a rather lonely small boy in the
house of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels.  The rest is
transport.  A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar,
and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leather
strap urged me to acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition.  But,
for a year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the "Waverleys"
and the "Border Minstrelsy," with Pope, and Prior, and a translation of
Ariosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley,
Longfellow and Mayne Reid, Dumas, and in brief, with every kind of light
literature that I could lay my hands upon.  Carlyle did not escape me; I
vividly remember the helpless rage with which I read of the Flight to
Varennes.  In his work on French novelists, Mr. Saintsbury speaks of a
disagreeable little boy, in a French romance, who found Scott
_assommant_, stunningly stupid.  This was a very odious little boy, it
seems (I have not read his adventures), and he came, as he deserved, to a
bad end.  Other and better boys, I learn, find Scott "slow."
Extraordinary boys!  Perhaps "Ivanhoe" was first favourite of yore; you
cannot beat Front de Boeuf, the assault on his castle, the tournament.  No
other tournament need apply.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, greatly daring, has
attempted to enter the lists, but he is a mere Ralph the Hospitaller.
Next, I think, in order of delight, came "Quentin Durward," especially
the hero of the scar, whose name Thackeray could not remember, Quentin's
uncle.  Then "The Black Dwarf," and Dugald, our dear Rittmeister.  I
could not read "Rob Roy" then, nor later; nay, not till I was forty.  Now
Di Vernon is the lady for me; the queen of fiction, the peerless, the
brave, the tender, and true.

The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more novels,
but, as an observer remarked, "I don't see what is the use of preventing
the boy from reading novels, for he's just reading 'Don Juan' instead."
This was so manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitly
withdrawn, or was permitted to become a dead letter.  They were far more
enjoyable than Byron.  The worst that came of this was the suggestion of
a young friend, whose life had been adventurous--indeed he had served in
the Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks--that I should master the writings of
Edgar Poe.  I do not think that the "Black Cat," and the "Fall of the
House of Usher," and the "Murders in the Rue Morgue," are very good
reading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid.  Many a bad hour they
gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely
buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin.  Of
all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wish
I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously
recommend to children.

I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in
"Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo.  It was not like Lever's
accounts of battles, but it was enchanting.  However, "Vanity Fair" was
under a taboo.  It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself
informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the
table, that he had better read something else.  What harm can the story
do to a child?  He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little
George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy
and unharmed.

Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very
disagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find a
charming library there.  Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and
Thackeray became the chief enchanter.  As Henry Kingsley says, a boy
reads him and thinks he knows all about life.  I do not think that the
mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquis
of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one.  Ethel was a mystery,
and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy Doyle's pictures
of her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossible
waist.  It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive's youth and art,
it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maid
about the lobster.  "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen.  Does
not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the
French sense?"  Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out.  It was worth
while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written by
Dickens and Thackeray.  I got hold of "The Rose and the Ring," I know,
and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp from the press.  King
Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful than Scrooge,
and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck.  One remembers the fairy monarch more
vividly, and the wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sipped
brandy--or was it right Nantes?--still "going on sipping, I am sorry to
say," even after "Valoroso was himself again."

But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the favourite.
The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter Simple and O'Brien
(how good their flight through France is!) with Mesty and Mr. Midshipman
Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's favourite), and with
Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea.  That did
not seem to be one's vocation.  But the story of Pen made one wish to run
away to literature, to the Temple, to streets where Brown, the famous
reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella.  The writing
of poems "up to" pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the
suppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society,
and Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne.  Well, one has run away to
literature since, but where is the matutinal beer?  Where is the back-
kitchen?  Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.?  I have never met
them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated reviewer, is
familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford and Cambridge
Club.  Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale in
the life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond.  But
one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longer
the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew.  They do not give
those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional;
Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg
does not joke any more.  The literary life is very like any other, in
London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of
genius?  Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable as
it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad whom he tempted into the navy
has discovered.  The best part of the existence of a man of letters is
his looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh.

One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend
of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a
graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius.  Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a
Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I
am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years.  While we
were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged through
the Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greek
grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae."  I can never say how much I detested
these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being
attractive.  Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing
to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner.  Then
Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems
arid enough to a school-boy.  I remember reading ahead, in Cowper,
instead of attending to the lesson and the class-work.  His observations
on public schools were not uninteresting, but the whole English school-
work of those days was repugnant.  One's English education was all got
out of school.

As to Greek, for years it seemed a mere vacuous terror; one invented for
one's self all the current arguments against "compulsory Greek."  What
was the use of it, who ever spoke in it, who could find any sense in it,
or any interest?  A language with such cruel superfluities as a middle
voice and a dual; a language whose verbs were so fantastically irregular,
looked like a barbaric survival, a mere plague and torment.  So one
thought till Homer was opened before us.  Elsewhere I have tried to
describe the vivid delight of first reading Homer, delight, by the way,
which St. Augustine failed to appreciate.  Most boys not wholly immersed
in dulness felt it, I think; to myself, for one, Homer was the real
beginning of study.  One had tried him, when one was very young, in Pope,
and had been baffled by Pope, and his artificial manner, his "fairs," and
"swains."  Homer seemed better reading in the absurd "crib" which Mr.
Buckley wrote for Bohn's series.  Hector and Ajax, in that disguise, were
as great favourites as Horatius on the Bridge, or the younger Tarquin.
Scott, by the way, must have made one a furious and consistent
Legitimist.  In reading the "Lays of Ancient Rome," my sympathies were
with the expelled kings, at least with him who fought so well at Lake
Regillus:--

   "Titus, the youngest Tarquin,
      Too good for such a breed."

Where--

   "Valerius struck at Titus,
      And lopped off half his crest;
   But Titus stabbed Valerius
      A span deep in the breast,"--

I find, on the margin of my old copy, in a schoolboy's hand, the words
"Well done, the Jacobites!"  Perhaps my politics have never gone much
beyond this sentiment.  But this is a digression from Homer.  The very
sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most various
music, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were not
understood.  But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full
as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, and
romance.  The "Morte d'Arthur" itself, which about this time fell into
our hands, was not so dear as the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir
Thomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter
haunted chapels where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely
mountain meres the magic boat of Sir Galahad.

After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, the
work at Greek was no longer tedious.  Herodotus was a charming and
humorous story-teller, and, as for Thucydides, his account of the
Sicilian Expedition and its ending was one of the very rare things in
literature which almost, if not quite, brought tears into one's eyes.  Few
passages, indeed, have done that, and they are curiously discrepant.  The
first book that ever made me cry, of which feat I was horribly ashamed,
was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with the death of Eva, Topsy's friend.  Then it
was trying when Colonel Newcome said _Adsum_, and the end of Socrates in
the _Phaedo_ moved one more than seemed becoming--these, and a passage in
the history of Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of the
Athenians in the Syracusan Bay.  I have read these chapters in an old
French version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation of
Thucydides.  Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its pathos;
the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn away by much
handling, by long time, by the many changes of human speech.  "Others
too," says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when--

   "_All was done that men may do_,
   _And all was done in vain_,"--

"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must."  This is the
very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy.  For now all is vain:
courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias,
the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of
that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death.  No play
not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no
modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity
of this ancient history.  Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more
wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.
Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in
the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in
words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph,
hope and despair.  The world, since their day, has but followed in the
same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and
failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the
friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus.  One's
application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy.  Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind
and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and
"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.
Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no
way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence.  The
true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but
there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal
niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.
Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being
"idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which
there is no substitute.  There is a charm in finding ourselves--our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men
severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of
historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal.  Then there
is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure of
despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek."  Doubtless in that
there is great consolation.

It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion of
people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,
and grew in them, and where and when it stopped.  Modern poets whom one
meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all.  Byron's Murray
ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning were
striking their preludes.  Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.
But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are attached to
poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary verse.  How did the
passion come to them?  How long did it stay?  When did the Muse say good-
bye?  To myself, as I have remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott,
for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream of
fairyland and enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness that
one was occupied with poetry.  Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,
who pleased one as more reflective and tenderly sentimental, while the
reflections were not so deep as to be puzzling.  I remember how
"Hiawatha" came out, when one was a boy, and how delightful was the free
forest life, and Minnehaha, and Paupukkeewis, and Nokomis.  One did not
then know that the same charm, with a yet fresher dew upon it, was to
meet one later, in the "Kalewala."  But, at that time, one had no
conscious pleasure in poetic style, except in such ringing verse as
Scott's, and Campbell's in his patriotic pieces.  The pleasure and
enchantment of style first appealed to me, at about the age of fifteen,
when one read for the first time--

   "So all day long the noise of battle rolled
   Among the mountains by the winter sea;
   Until King Arthur's Table, man by man,
   Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord."

Previously one had only heard of Mr. Tennyson as a name.  When a child I
was told that a poet was coming to a house in the Highlands where we
chanced to be, a poet named Tennyson.  "Is he a poet like Sir Walter
Scott?" I remember asking, and was told, "No, he was not like Sir Walter
Scott."  Hearing no more of him, I was prowling among the books in an
ancient house, a rambling old place with a ghost-room, where I found
Tupper, and could not get on with "Proverbial Philosophy."  Next I tried
Tennyson, and instantly a new light of poetry dawned, a new music was
audible, a new god came into my medley of a Pantheon, a god never to be
dethroned.  "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," Shelley says.  I
am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet Lord Tennyson is; use
has made him too familiar.  The same hand has "raised the Table Round
again," that has written the sacred book of friendship, that has lulled
us with the magic of the "Lotus Eaters," and the melody of "Tithonus."  He
has made us move, like his own Prince--

      "Among a world of ghosts,
   And feel ourselves the shadows of a dream."

He has enriched our world with conquests of romance; he has recut and
reset a thousand ancient gems of Greece and Rome; he has roused our
patriotism; he has stirred our pity; there is hardly a human passion but
he has purged it and ennobled it, including "this of love."  Truly, the
Laureate remains the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the
most learned, the most Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity
the lovers of poetry who died before Tennyson came.

Here may end the desultory tale of a desultory bookish boyhood.  It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self.  But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago.  I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced.  For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite
another.  A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and
maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity
and their ambition.

In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons.  But, unlike other Scots of the
pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember
little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single
sentence.  Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast
at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling.  These,
apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life.  But
we were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that
we had not passed through them.  From most children, one trusts,
Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first
absorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism!"

One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish.  Young men,
especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of
reading."  Distrust a course of reading!  People who really care for
books _read all of them_.  There is no other course.  Let this be a
reply.  No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.



II


People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love.  One may
venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her,
first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake.  They were, and remain, the dearest of all; after boyhood
the bloom is off the literary rye.  The first parcel of these garrulities
ended when the author left school, at about the age of seventeen.  One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as complete as it ever
will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen.
As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first
fine careless rapture."  Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal.
My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys.  Not long
ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but
brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration.

On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews.  That is the oldest of Scotch universities,
and was founded by a papal bull.  St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a
_hospitium_ for pilgrims, a home for old ladies (about 1500), and a
college in the University, was now a kind of cross between a master's
house at school, and, as before 1750, a college.  We had more liberty
than schoolboys, less than English undergraduates.  In the Scotch
universities the men live scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at
St. Andrews, have they begun to dine together in hall.  We had a common
roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket
clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly magazine.  It was only a
manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated.  For the only time in
my life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my
work, and cut out my fine passages.  The editor's duty was to write most
of the magazine--to write essays, reviews (of books by the professors,
very severe), novels, short stories, poems, translations, also to
illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends for "copy" and drawings.  A
deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, to have been the
chief characteristic of the periodical--flippancy and an abundant use of
the supernatural.  These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story,"
which I continue to think a most satisfactory romance.  Inspired by Lord
Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa,
Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus
and Plotinus.

These are really but disappointing writers.  It soon became evident
enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, that
the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur.  Iamblichus
is particularly obscure and tedious.  To any young beginner I would
recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate and gruesome of the
school, for "real deevilry and pleesure," while in the wilderness of
Plotinus there are many beautiful passages and lofty speculations.  Two
winters in the Northern University, with the seamy side of school life
left behind, among the kindest of professors--Mr. Sellar, Mr. Ferrier,
Mr. Shairp--in the society of the warden, Mr. Rhoades, and of many dear
old friends, are the happiest time in my life.  This was true literary
leisure, even if it was not too well employed, and the _religio loci_
should be a liberal education in itself.  We had debating societies--I
hope I am now forgiven for an attack on the character of Sir William
Wallace, _latro quidam_, as the chronicler calls him, "a certain
brigand."  But I am for ever writing about St. Andrews--writing
inaccurately, too, the Scotch critics declare.  "Farewell," we cried,
"dear city of youth and dream," eternally dear and sacred.

Here we first made acquaintance with Mr. Browning, guided to his works by
a parody which a lady wrote in our little magazine.  Mr. Browning was not
a popular poet in 1861.  His admirers were few, a little people, but they
were not then in the later mood of reverence, they did not awfully
question the oracles, as in after years.  They read, they admired, they
applauded, on occasion they mocked, good-humouredly.  The book by which
Mr. Browning was best known was the two green volumes of "Men and Women."
In these, I still think, is the heart of his genius beating most
strenuously and with an immortal vitality.  Perhaps this, for its
compass, is the collection of poetry the most various and rich of modern
English times, almost of any English times.  But just as Mr. Fitzgerald
cared little for what Lord Tennyson wrote after 1842, so I have never
been able to feel quite the same enthusiasm for Mr. Browning's work after
"Men and Women."  He seems to have more influence, though that influence
is vague, on persons who chiefly care for thought, than on those who
chiefly care for poetry.  I have met a lady who had read "The Ring and
the Book" often, the "Lotus Eaters" not once.  Among such students are
Mr. Browning's disciples of the Inner Court: I dwell but in the Court of
the Gentiles.  While we all--all who attempt rhyme--have more or less
consciously imitated the manner of Lord Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne, Mr.
Rossetti, such imitations of Mr. Browning are uncommonly scarce.  He is
lucky enough not to have had the seed of his flower stolen and sown
everywhere till--

   "Once again the people
   Called it but a weed."

The other new poet of these days was Mr. Clough, who has many
undergraduate qualities.  But his peculiar wistful scepticism in religion
had then no influence on such of us as were still happily in the ages of
faith.  Anything like doubt comes less of reading, perhaps, than of the
sudden necessity which, in almost every life, puts belief on her trial,
and cries for an examination of the creeds hitherto held upon authority,
and by dint of use and wont.  In a different way one can hardly care for
Mr. Matthew Arnold, as a boy, till one has come under the influence of
Oxford.  So Mr. Browning was the only poet added to my pantheon at St.
Andrews, though Macaulay then was admitted and appeared to be more the
true model of a prose writer than he seems in the light of later
reflection.  Probably we all have a period of admiring Carlyle almost
exclusively.  College essays, when the essayist cares for his work, are
generally based on one or the other.  Then they recede into the
background.  As for their thought, we cannot for ever remain disciples.
We begin to see how much that looks like thought is really the expression
of temperament, and how individual a thing temperament is, how each of us
must construct his world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer
and a synthesis "in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation
moves."  So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a
"masterless man" swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial
Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about "masters"
of thought like the history of philosophy.  The professor of moral
philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar.  His
lectures on "The History of Greek Philosophy" were an admirable
introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original
authorities, at Oxford.  Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men's ideas
so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had
discovered the secret.  We were physicists with Thales and that
pre-Socratic "company of gallant gentlemen" for whom Sydney Smith
confessed his lack of admiration.  We were now Empedocleans, now
believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle.
In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently
disintegrated him in the next.  "Amurath to Amurath succeeds," as Mr. T.
H. Green used to say at Oxford.  He himself became an Amurath, a sultan
of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered
clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere.  At Oxford, when one went there, one found
Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young
men.  He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
What was it that Mr. Green knew?  Where was the secret?  To a mind
already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from
the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack
of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we
then believed to be Hegelian.  Hegel we knew, not in the original German,
but in lectures and in translations.  Reasoning from these inadequate
premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr.
Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in
evolution, the something within the wheels.  But this was only a personal
impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in
general, merely in the vague popular way.  Mr. Green's pupils could
generally write in his own language, more or less, and could "envisage"
things, as we said then, from his point of view.  To do this was
believed, probably without cause, to be useful in examinations.  For one,
I could never take it much more seriously, never believed that "the
Absolute," as the _Oxford Spectator_ said, had really been "got into a
corner."  The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often
has escaped from that situation.  Somewhere in an old notebook I believe
I have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with
Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table.  Perhaps he was the
last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun with Wycliffe,
among whom Newman's is a famous name, that were successively accepted at
Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the
secret.

      "None the less
   I still came out no wiser than I went."

All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their
hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar
views of theology and philosophy.  Doubtless it was the same with
Socrates, with Buddha.  To be like them, not to believe with them, is the
thing needful.  But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, we see this
clearly, and we persuade ourselves that there is some mystery in these
men's possession, some piece of knowledge, some method of thinking which
will lead us to certainty and to peace.  Alas, their secret is
incommunicable, and there is no more a philosophic than there is a royal
road to the City.

This may seem a digression from Adventures among Books into the Book of
Human Life.  But while much of education is still orally communicated by
lectures and conversations, many thoughts which are to be found in books,
Greek or German, reach us through the hearing.  There are many pupils who
can best be taught in this way; but, for one, if there be aught that is
desirable in a book, I then, as now, preferred, if I could, to go to the
book for it.

Yet it is odd that one remembers so little of one's undergraduate
readings, apart from the constant study of the ancient classics, which
might not be escaped.  Of these the calm wisdom of Aristotle, in moral
thought and in politics, made perhaps the deepest impression.  Probably
politicians are the last people who read Aristotle's "Politics."  The
work is, indeed, apt to disenchant one with political life.  It is
melancholy to see the little Greek states running the regular
round--monarchy, oligarchy, tyranny, democracy in all its degrees, the
"ultimate democracy" of plunder, lawlessness, license of women, children,
and slaves, and then tyranny again, or subjection to some foreign power.
In politics, too, there is no secret of success, of the happy life for
all.  There is no such road to the City, either democratic or royal.  This
is the lesson which Aristotle's "Polities" impresses on us, this and the
impossibility of imposing ideal constitutions on mankind.

"Whate'er is best administered is best."  These are some of the
impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the schools, the more or
less inevitable "curricoolum," as the Scotch gentleman pronounced the
word.  But at Oxford, for most men, the regular work of the schools is
only a small part of the literary education.  People read, in different
degrees, according to their private tastes.  There are always a few men,
at least, who love literary studies for their own sake, regardless of
lectures and of "classes."  In my own time I really believe you could
know nothing which might not "pay" in the schools and prove serviceable
in examinations.  But a good deal depended on being able to use your
knowledge by way of literary illustration.  Perhaps the cleverest of my
own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use his own
special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing answers to
questions in examinations.  Hence his academic success was much below his
deserts.  For my own part, I remember my tutor saying, "Don't write as if
you were writing for a penny paper."  Alas, it was "a prediction, cruel,
smart."  But, "as yet no sin was dreamed."

At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English
and Latin.  This might have been good literary training, but I fear the
essays were not taken very seriously.  The chief object was to make the
late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes.  But nobody ever
succeeded.  He was experienced in trash.  As for what may be called
unacademic literature, there were not many essays in that art.  There
have been very literary generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis "lived
in Oxford as if it had been a great country house;" so Corydon confessed.
Probably many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr.
Swinburne's early works were undergraduate poems.  A later generation
produced "Love in Idleness," a very pleasing volume.  But the gods had
not made us poetical.  In those days I remember picking up, in the Union
Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, "Atalanta in Calydon," by A. C.
Swinburne.  Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name before, signing a
brief tale in _Once a Week_.  "Atalanta" was a revelation; there was a
new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too.  In my own mind
"Atalanta" remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems.  He instantly became the easily parodied model of
undergraduate versifiers.

Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success.  As yet
we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold's verses.  I fell in love with them,
one long vacation, and never fell out of love.  He is not, and cannot be,
the poet of the wide world, but his charm is all the more powerful over
those whom he attracts and subdues.  He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford,
and his "Scholar Gypsy" is our "Lycidas."  At this time he was Professor
of Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just at the hour when wickets were
pitched on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at
his humorous prophecies of England's fate, which are coming all too true.
So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be "cut," that we
abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak.  For the rest
there was no "literary movement" among contemporary undergraduates.  They
read for the schools, and they rowed and played cricket.  We had no
poets, except the stroke of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he
concealed his courtship of the Muse.  Corpus is a small college, but Mr.
Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second on the river.  B. N.
C. was the head boat, and even B. N. C. did Corpus bump.  But the triumph
was brief.  B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the
foaming grape, and bumped Corpus back.  I think they went head next year,
but not that year.  Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was doing
noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.

There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody knew
anybody who wrote in it.  A comic journal was started; I remember the
pride with which when a freshman, I received an invitation to join its
councils as an artist.  I was to do the caricatures of all things.  Now,
methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits of whom I have read.  But the
wits were unutterably disappointing, and the whole thing died early and
not lamented.  Only one piece of academic literature obtained and
deserved success.  This was _The Oxford Spectator_, a most humorous
little periodical, in shape and size like Addison's famous journal.  The
authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry
Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early.  There have been
good periodicals since; many amusing things occur in the _Echoes from the
Oxford Magazine_, but the _Spectator_ was the flower of academic
journals.  "When I look back to my own experience," says the _Spectator_,
"I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon 'the mindful
tablets of my soul.'  And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell
and sound, and sight and thought.  The wonderful scent of the meadow air
just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty
boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set
the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of 'ten seconds more,' all down
from the green barge to the lasher.  And yet that unrivalled moment is
only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure
are concentrated there."

Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure.  Things go
wrong somehow.  Life drops her happy mask.  But this has nothing to do
with books.

About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care to
make.  A man's old self is so far away that he can speak about it and its
adventures almost as if he were speaking about another who is dead.  After
taking one's degree, and beginning to write a little for publication, the
topic has a tendency to become much more personal.  My last undergraduate
literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance.  Accidentally
finding out that I could read French, I naturally betook myself to
Balzac.  If you read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to
learn a good many words.  The literature of France has been much more
popular in England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat
neglected.  There does seem to be something in French poetry which fails
to please "the German paste in our composition."  Mr. Matthew Arnold, a
disciple of Sainte-Beuve, never could appreciate French poetry.  A poet-
critic has even remarked that the French language is nearly incapable of
poetry!  We cannot argue in such matters, where all depends on the taste
and the ear.

Our ancestors, like the author of the "Faery Queen," translated and
admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our own time this taste
seems a modish affectation.  For one, I have ever found an original charm
in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken great delight in Hugo's
amazing variety of music, in the romance of Alfred de Musset, in the
beautiful cameos of Gautier.  What is poetical, if not the "Song of
Roland," the only true national epic since Homer?  What is frank, natural
verse, if not that of the old _Pastourelles_?  Where is there _naivete_
of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in _Aucassin et Nicolette_?  In
the long normally developed literature of France, so variously rich, we
find the nearest analogy to the literature of Greece, though that of
England contains greater masterpieces, and her verse falls more winningly
on the ear.  France has no Shakespeare and no Milton; we have no Moliere
and no "Song of Roland."  One star differs from another in glory, but it
is a fortunate moment when this planet of France swims into our ken.  Many
of our generation saw it first through Mr. Swinburne's telescope, heard
of it in his criticisms, and are grateful to that watcher of the skies,
even if we do not share all his transports.  There then arose at Oxford,
out of old French, and old oak, and old china, a "school" or "movement."
It was aesthetic, and an early purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall
papers.  It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as
they say, to these delights.  But, except one or two of the masters, the
school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own
performances.  There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was
later revived, developed, and gossiped about more than enough.

To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am specially bound in
gratitude--the late Mr. J. F. M'Lennan.  Mr. M'Lennan had the most acute
and ingenious of minds which I have encountered.  His writings on early
marriage and early religion were revelations which led on to others.  The
topic of folklore, and the development of custom and myths, is not
generally attractive, to be sure.  Only a few people seem interested in
that spectacle, so full of surprises--the development of all human
institutions, from fairy tales to democracy.  In beholding it we learn
how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius.  The
natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with
the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from
the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth
into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual.  The
world has been educated, but not as man would have trained and taught it.
"He led us by a way we knew not," led, and is leading us, we know not
whither; we follow in fear.

The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way
behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning
sands.  He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the
race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of
them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable.  But
the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways
to that city whither mankind is wandering, and which it may never win.  We
have a foreboding of a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will,
working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden end.

This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology,
which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull.  It may become the most
attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange
curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by
the pupils in that allegory of Novalis.  I am not likely to regret the
accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness
which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity.  But the poetry
and the significance of them are apt to be hidden by the enormous crowd
of details.  Only late we find the true meaning of what seems like a mass
of fantastic, savage eccentricities.  I very well remember the moment
when it occurred to me, soon after taking my degree, that the usual ideas
about some of these matters were the reverse of the truth, that the
common theory had to be inverted.  The notion was "in the air," it had
already flashed on Mannhardt, probably, but, like the White Knight in
"Alice," I claimed it for "my own invention."

These reminiscences and reflections have now been produced as far as
1872, or thereabouts, and it is not my intention to pursue them further,
nor to speak of any living contemporaries who have not won their way to
the classical.  In writing of friends and teachers at Oxford, I have not
ventured to express gratitude to those who still live, still teach, still
are the wisest and kindest friends of the hurrying generations.  It is a
silence not of thanklessness, but of respect and devotion.  About
others--contemporaries, or juniors by many years--who have instructed,
consoled, strengthened, and amused us, we must also be silent.




CHAPTER II: RECOLLECTIONS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON


   TUSITALA

   We spoke of a rest in a Fairy hill of the north, but he
      Far from the firths of the east and the racing tides of the west
   Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite southern sea,
      Weary and well content, in his grave on the Vaea crest.

   Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
      Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,
   Looks o'er the labour of men in the plain and the hill, and the sails
      Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.

   Winds of the west and the east in the rainy season blow,
      Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,
   Winds of the east and the west as they wander to and fro,
      Bear him the love of the lands he loved, and the long regret.

   Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea,
      Flowed between us, but now that no range of the refluent tides
   Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,
      When only the unbridged stream of the River of Death divides.

Before attempting to give any "reminiscences" of Mr. Stevenson, it is
right to observe that reminiscences of him can best be found in his own
works.  In his essay on "Child's Play," and in his "Child's Garden of
Verse," he gave to the world his vivid recollections of his imaginative
infancy.  In other essays he spoke of his boyhood, his health, his
dreams, his methods of work and study.  "The Silverado Squatters" reveals
part of his experience in America.  The Parisian scenes in "The Wrecker"
are inspired by his sojourn in French Bohemia; his journeys are recorded
in "Travels with a Donkey" and "An Inland Voyage"; while his South Sea
sketches, which appeared in periodicals, deal with his Oceanic
adventures.  He was the most autobiographical of authors, with an egoism
nearly as complete, and to us as delightful, as the egoism of Montaigne.
Thus, the proper sources of information about the author of "Kidnapped"
are in his delightful books.

"John's own John," as Dr. Holmes says, may be very unlike his neighbour's
John; but in the case of Mr. Stevenson, his Louis was very similar to my
Louis; I mean that, as he presents his personality to the world in his
writings, even so did that personality appear to me in our intercourse.
The man I knew was always a boy.

   "Sing me a song of the lad that is gone,"

he wrote about Prince Charlie, but in his own case the lad was never
"gone."  Like Keats and Shelley, he was, and he looked, of the immortally
young.  He and I were at school together, but I was an elderly boy of
seventeen, when he was lost in the crowd of "gytes," as the members of
the lowest form are called.  Like all Scotch people, we had a vague
family connection; a great-uncle of his, I fancy, married an aunt of my
own, called for her beauty, "The Flower of Ettrick."  So we had both
heard; but these things were before our day.  A lady of my kindred
remembers carrying Stevenson about when he was "a rather peevish baby,"
and I have seen a beautiful photograph of him, like one of Raffael's
children, taken when his years were three or four.  But I never had heard
of his existence till, in 1873, I think, I was at Mentone, in the
interests of my health.  Here I met Mr. Sidney Colvin, now of the British
Museum, and, with Mr. Colvin, Stevenson.  He looked as, in my eyes, he
always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth
oval face, brown hair worn at greater length than is common, large lucid
eyes, but whether blue or brown I cannot remember, if brown, certainly
light brown.  On appealing to the authority of a lady, I learn that brown
_was_ the hue.  His colour was a trifle hectic, as is not unusual at
Mentone, but he seemed, under his big blue cloak, to be of slender, yet
agile frame.  He was like nobody else whom I ever met.  There was a sort
of uncommon celerity in changing expression, in thought and speech.  His
cloak and Tyrolese hat (he would admit the innocent impeachment) were
decidedly dear to him.  On the frontier of Italy, why should he not do as
the Italians do?  It would have been well for me if I could have imitated
the wearing of the cloak!

I shall not deny that my first impression was not wholly favourable.
"Here," I thought, "is one of your aesthetic young men, though a very
clever one."  What the talk was about, I do not remember; probably of
books.  Mr. Stevenson afterwards told me that I had spoken of Monsieur
Paul de St. Victor, as a fine writer, but added that "he was not a
British sportsman."  Mr. Stevenson himself, to my surprise, was unable to
walk beyond a very short distance, and, as it soon appeared, he thought
his thread of life was nearly spun.  He had just written his essay,
"Ordered South," the first of his published works, for his "Pentland
Rising" pamphlet was unknown, a boy's performance.  On reading "Ordered
South," I saw, at once, that here was a new writer, a writer indeed; one
who could do what none of us, _nous autres_, could rival, or approach.  I
was instantly "sealed of the Tribe of Louis," an admirer, a devotee, a
fanatic, if you please.  At least my taste has never altered.  From this
essay it is plain enough that the author (as is so common in youth, but
with better reason than many have) thought himself doomed.  Most of us
have gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown such
a wise and gay acceptance of the apparently inevitable?  We parted; I
remember little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of
encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much more of
life than his senior will ever do.  For he ran forth to embrace life like
a lover: _his_ motto was never Lucy Ashton's--

   "Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
   Easy live and quiet die."

Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford.  I make no hand of
reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said, with one
exception, which is not going to be published.  I heard of him, writing
essays in the _Portfolio_ and the _Cornhill_, those delightful views of
life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid, so wise, so exquisite,
which all should know.  How we looked for "R. L. S." at the end of an
article, and how devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young
one!

About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received a
brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, in his
essay on his old college magazine, he called "Glasgow Brown."  What his
real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never knew.  G.
B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper.  Would I contribute?  G. B.
came to see me.  Mr. Stevenson has described him, _not_ as I would have
described him: like Mr. Bill Sikes's dog, I have the Christian
peculiarity of not liking dogs "as are not of my breed."  G. B.'s paper,
_London_, was to start next week.  He had no writer of political leading
articles.  Would I do a "leader"?  But I was _not_ in favour of Lord
Lytton's Afghan policy.  How could I do a Tory leader?  Well, I did a
neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes!  I found
presently some other scribes for G. B.

What a paper that was!  I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of gold,
in handfuls of bank-notes.  Nobody ever read _London_, or advertised in
it, or heard of it.  It was full of the most wonderfully clever verses in
old French forms.  They were (it afterwards appeared) by Mr. W. E.
Henley.  Mr. Stevenson himself astonished and delighted the public of
_London_ (that is, the contributors) by his "New Arabian Nights."  Nobody
knew about them but ourselves, a fortunate few.  Poor G. B. died and Mr.
Henley became the editor.  I may not name the contributors, the flower of
the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new race.  But one lion, a
distinguished and learned lion, said already that fiction, not essay, was
Mr. Stevenson's field.  Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say
whether I would be more sorry to lose _Virginibus Puerisque_ and "Studies
of Men and Books," or "Treasure Island" and "Catriona."  With the decease
of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, _London_ struggled
and disappeared.

Mr. Stevenson was in town, now and again, at the old Saville Club, in
Saville Row, which had the tiniest and blackest of smoking-rooms.  Here,
or somewhere, he spoke to me of an idea of a tale, a Man who was Two Men.
I said "'William Wilson' by Edgar Poe," and declared that it would never
do.  But his "Brownies," in a vision of the night, showed him a central
scene, and he wrote "Jekyll and Hyde."  My "friend of these days and of
all days," Mr. Charles Longman, sent me the manuscript.  In a very
commonplace London drawing-room, at 10.30 P.M., I began to read it.
Arriving at the place where Utterson the lawyer, and the butler wait
outside the Doctor's room, I threw down the manuscript and fled in a
hurry.  I had no taste for solitude any more.  The story won its great
success, partly by dint of the moral (whatever that may be), more by its
terrible, lucid, visionary power.  I remember Mr. Stevenson telling me,
at this time, that he was doing some "regular crawlers," for this purist
had a boyish habit of slang, and I _think_ it was he who called Julius
Caesar "the howlingest cheese who ever lived."  One of the "crawlers" was
"Thrawn Janet"; after "Wandering Willie's Tale" (but certainly _after_
it), to my taste, it seems the most wonderful story of the "supernatural"
in our language.

Mr. Stevenson had an infinite pleasure in Boisgobey, Montepin, and, of
course, Gaboriau.  There was nothing of the "cultured person" about him.
Concerning a novel dear to culture, he said that he would die by my side,
in the last ditch, proclaiming it the worst fiction in the world.  I make
haste to add that I have only known two men of letters as free as Mr.
Stevenson, not only from literary jealousy, but from the writer's
natural, if exaggerated, distaste for work which, though in his own line,
is very different in aim and method from his own.  I do not remember
another case in which he dispraised any book.  I do remember his
observations on a novel then and now very popular, but not to his taste,
nor, indeed, by any means, impeccable, though stirring; his censure and
praise were both just.  From his occasional fine efforts, the author of
this romance, he said, should have cleared away acres of brushwood, of
ineffectual matter.  It was so, no doubt, as the writer spoken of would
be ready to acknowledge.  But he was an improviser of genius, and Mr.
Stevenson was a conscious artist.

Of course we did by no means always agree in literary estimates; no two
people do.  But when certain works--in his line in one way--were stupidly
set up as rivals of his, the person who was most irritated was not he,
but his equally magnanimous contemporary.  There was no thought of
rivalry or competition in either mind.  The younger romancists who arose
after Mr. Stevenson went to Samoa were his friends by correspondence;
from them, who never saw his face, I hear of his sympathy and
encouragement.  Every writer knows the special temptations of his tribe:
they were temptations not even felt, I do believe, by Mr. Stevenson.  His
heart was far too high, his nature was in every way as generous as his
hand was open.  It is in thinking of these things that one feels afresh
the greatness of the world's loss; for "a good heart is much more than
style," writes one who knew him only by way of letters.

It is a trivial reminiscence that we once plotted a Boisgobesque story
together.  There was a prisoner in a Muscovite dungeon.

"We'll extract information from him," I said.

"How?"

"With corkscrews."

But the mere suggestion of such a process was terribly distasteful to
him; not that I really meant to go to these extreme lengths.  We never,
of course, could really have worked together; and, his maladies
increasing, he became more and more a wanderer, living at Bournemouth, at
Davos, in the Grisons, finally, as all know, in Samoa.  Thus, though we
corresponded, not unfrequently, I never was of the inner circle of his
friends.  Among men there were school or college companions, or
companions of Paris or Fontainebleau, cousins, like Mr. R. A. M.
Stevenson, or a stray senior, like Mr. Sidney Colvin.  From some of them,
or from Mr. Stevenson himself, I have heard tales of "the wild Prince and
Poins."  That he and a friend travelled utterly without baggage, buying a
shirt where a shirt was needed, is a fact, and the incident is used in
"The Wrecker."  Legend says that once he and a friend _did_ possess a
bag, and also, nobody ever knew why, a large bottle of scent.  But there
was no room for the bottle in the bag, so Mr. Stevenson spilled the whole
contents over the other man's head, taking him unawares, that nothing
might be wasted.  I think the tale of the endless staircase, in "The
Wrecker," is founded on fact, so are the stories of the _atelier_, which
I have heard Mr. Stevenson narrate at the Oxford and Cambridge Club.  For
a nocturnal adventure, in the manner of the "New Arabian Nights," a
learned critic already spoken of must be consulted.  It is not my story.
In Paris, at a cafe, I remember that Mr. Stevenson heard a Frenchman say
the English were cowards.  He got up and slapped the man's face.

"_Monsieur, vous m'avez frappe_!" said the Gaul.

"_A ce qu'il parait_," said the Scot, and there it ended.  He also told
me that years ago he was present at a play, I forget what play, in Paris,
where the moral hero exposes a woman "with a history."  He got up and
went out, saying to himself:

"What a play! what a people!"

"_Ah, Monsieur, vous etes bien jeune_!" said an old French gentleman.

Like a right Scot, Mr. Stevenson was fond of "our auld ally of France,"
to whom our country and our exiled kings owed so much.

I rather vaguely remember another anecdote.  He missed his train from
Edinburgh to London, and his sole portable property was a return ticket,
a meerschaum pipe, and a volume of Mr. Swinburne's poems.  The last he
found unmarketable; the pipe, I think, he made merchandise of, but
somehow his provender for the day's journey consisted in one bath bun,
which he could not finish.

These trivial tales illustrate a period in his life and adventures which
I only know by rumour.  Our own acquaintance was, to a great degree,
literary and bookish.  Perhaps it began "with a slight aversion," but it
seemed, like madeira, to be ripened and improved by his long sea voyage;
and the news of his death taught me, at least, the true nature of the
affection which he was destined to win.  Indeed, our acquaintance was
like the friendship of a wild singing bird and of a punctual,
domesticated barn-door fowl, laying its daily "article" for the breakfast-
table of the citizens.  He often wrote to me from Samoa, sometimes with
news of native manners and folklore.  He sent me a devil-box, the "luck"
of some strange island, which he bought at a great price.  After parting
with its "luck," or fetish (a shell in a curious wooden box), the island
was unfortunate, and was ravaged by measles.

I occasionally sent out books needed for Mr. Stevenson's studies, of
which more will be said.  But I must make it plain that, in the body, we
met but rarely.  His really intimate friends were Mr. Colvin and Mr.
Baxter (who managed the practical side of his literary business between
them); Mr. Henley (in partnership with whom he wrote several plays); his
cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson; and, among other _literati_, Mr. Gosse,
Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury, Mr Walter Pollock, knew him well.  The
best portrait of Mr. Stevenson that I know is by Sir. W. B. Richmond,
R.A., and is in that gentleman's collection of contemporaries, with the
effigies of Mr. Holman Hunt, Mr. William Morris, Mr. Browning, and
others.  It is unfinished, owing to an illness which stopped the
sittings, and does not show the subject at his best, physically speaking.
There is also a brilliant, slight sketch, almost a caricature, by Mr.
Sargent.  It represents Mr. Stevenson walking about the room in
conversation.

The people I have named, or some of them, knew Mr. Stevenson more
intimately than I can boast of doing.  Unlike each other, opposites in a
dozen ways, we always were united by the love of letters, and of
Scotland, our dear country.  He was a patriot, yet he spoke his mind
quite freely about Burns, about that apparent want of heart in the poet's
amours, which our countrymen do not care to hear mentioned.  Well,
perhaps, for some reasons, it had to be mentioned once, and so no more of
it.

Mr. Stevenson possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of
making other men fall in love with him.  I mean that he excited a
passionate admiration and affection, so much so that I verily believe
some men were jealous of other men's place in his liking.  I once met a
stranger who, having become acquainted with him, spoke of him with a
touching fondness and pride, his fancy reposing, as it seemed, in a fond
contemplation of so much genius and charm.  What was so taking in him?
and how is one to analyse that dazzling surface of pleasantry, that
changeful shining humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness; beneath which beat
the most kind and tolerant of hearts?

People were fond of him, and people were proud of him: his achievements,
as it were, sensibly raised their pleasure in the world, and, to them,
became parts of themselves.  They warmed their hands at that centre of
light and heat.  It is not every success which has these beneficent
results.  We see the successful sneered at, decried, insulted, even when
success is deserved.  Very little of all this, hardly aught of all this,
I think, came in Mr. Stevenson's way.  After the beginning (when the
praises of his earliest admirers were irritating to dull scribes) he
found the critics fairly kind, I believe, and often enthusiastic.  He was
so much his own severest critic that he probably paid little heed to
professional reviewers.  In addition to his "Rathillet," and other MSS.
which he destroyed, he once, in the Highlands, long ago, lost a
portmanteau with a batch of his writings.  Alas, that he should have lost
or burned anything!  "King's chaff," says our country proverb, "is better
than other folk's corn."

I have remembered very little, or very little that I can write, and about
our last meeting, when he was so near death, in appearance, and so full
of courage--how can I speak?  His courage was a strong rock, not to be
taken or subdued.  When unable to utter a single word, his pencilled
remarks to his attendants were pithy and extremely characteristic.  This
courage and spiritual vitality made one hope that he would, if he desired
it, live as long as Voltaire, that reed among oaks.  There were of
course, in so rare a combination of characteristics, some which were not
equally to the liking of all.  He was highly original in costume, but, as
his photographs are familiar, the point does not need elucidation.  Life
was a drama to him, and he delighted, like his own British admirals, to
do things with a certain air.  He observed himself, I used to think, as
he observed others, and "saw himself" in every part he played.  There was
nothing of the _cabotin_ in this self-consciousness; it was the
unextinguished childish passion for "playing at things" which remained
with him.  I have a theory that all children possess genius, and that it
dies out in the generality of mortals, abiding only with people whose
genius the world is forced to recognise.  Mr. Stevenson illustrates, and
perhaps partly suggested, this private philosophy of mine.

I have said very little; I have no skill in reminiscences, no art to
bring the living aspect of the man before those who never knew him.  I
faintly seem to see the eager face, the light nervous figure, the fingers
busy with rolling cigarettes; Mr. Stevenson talking, listening, often
rising from his seat, standing, walking to and fro, always full of vivid
intelligence, wearing a mysterious smile.  I remember one pleasant dark
afternoon, when he told me many tales of strange adventures, narratives
which he had heard about a murderous lonely inn, somewhere in the States.
He was as good to hear as to read.  I do not recollect much of that
delight in discussion, in controversy, which he shows in his essay on
conversation, where he describes, I believe, Mr. Henley as "Burley," and
Mr. Symonds as "Opalstein."  He had great pleasure in the talk of the
late Professor Fleeming Jenkin, which was both various and copious.  But
in these _noctes coenaeque deum_ I was never a partaker.  In many topics,
such as angling, golf, cricket, whereon I am willingly diffuse, Mr.
Stevenson took no interest.  He was very fond of boating and sailing in
every kind; he hazarded his health by long expeditions among the fairy
isles of ocean, but he "was not a British sportsman," though for his
measure of strength a good pedestrian, a friend of the open air, and of
all who live and toil therein.

As to his literary likings, they appear in his own confessions.  He
revelled in Dickens, but, about Thackeray--well, I would rather have
talked to somebody else!  To my amazement, he was of those (I think) who
find Thackeray "cynical."  "He takes you into a garden, and then pelts
you with"--horrid things!  Mr. Stevenson, on the other hand, had a free
admiration of Mr. George Meredith.  He did not so easily forgive the
_longueus_ and lazinesses of Scott, as a Scot should do.  He read French
much; Greek only in translations.

Literature was, of course, his first love, but he was actually an
advocate at the Scottish Bar, and, as such, had his name on a brazen door-
plate.  Once he was a competitor for a Chair of Modern History in
Edinburgh University; he knew the romantic side of Scottish history very
well.  In his novel, "Catriona," the character of James Mohr Macgregor is
wonderfully divined.  Once I read some unpublished letters of Catriona's
unworthy father, written when he was selling himself as a spy (and lying
as he spied) to the Hanoverian usurper.  Mr. Stevenson might have written
these letters for James Mohr; they might be extracts from "Catriona."

In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a forgotten romance of
Prince Charles's hidden years, and longed that Mr. Stevenson should
retell it.  There was a treasure, an authentic treasure; there were real
spies, a real assassin; a real, or reported, rescue of a lovely girl from
a fire at Strasbourg, by the Prince.  The tale was to begin _sur le pont
d'Avignon_: a young Scotch exile watching the Rhone, thinking how much of
it he could cover with a salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or Beauly.  To
him enter another shady tramping exile, Blairthwaite, a murderer.  And so
it was to run on, as the author's fancy might lead him, with Alan Breck
and the Master for characters.  At last, in unpublished MSS. I found an
actual Master of Ballantrae, a Highland chief--noble, majestically
handsome--and a paid spy of England!  All these papers I sent out to
Samoa, too late.  The novel was to have been dedicated to me, and that
chance of immortality is gone, with so much else.

Mr. Stevenson's last letters to myself were full of his concern for a
common friend of ours, who was very ill.  Depressed himself, Mr.
Stevenson wrote to this gentleman--why should I not mention Mr. James
Payn?--with consoling gaiety.  I attributed his depression to any cause
but his own health, of which he rarely spoke.  He lamented the
"ill-staged fifth act of life"; he, at least, had no long hopeless years
of diminished force to bear.

I have known no man in whom the pre-eminently manly virtues of kindness,
courage, sympathy, generosity, helpfulness, were more beautifully
conspicuous than in Mr. Stevenson, no man so much loved--it is not too
strong a word--by so many and such various people.  He was as unique in
character as in literary genius.




CHAPTER III: RAB'S FRIEND


To say what ought to be said concerning Dr. John Brown, a man should have
known him well and long, and should remember much of that old generation
of Scotchmen to whom the author of "Rab and his Friends" belonged.  But
that generation has departed.  One by one these wits and scholars of the
North, these _epigoni_ who were not, indeed, of the heroes, but who had
seen and remembered Scott and Wilson, have passed away.  Aytoun and
Carlyle and Dr. Burton, and last, Dr. Brown, are gone.  Sir Theodore
Martin alone is left.  In her memoir of Dr. Burton--the historian of
Scotland, and author of "The Book-hunter"--Mrs. Burton remarks that, in
her husband's later days, only Dr. John Brown and Professor Blackie
remained of all her husband's ancient friends and coevals, of all who
remembered Lockhart, and Hogg, and their times.  But many are left who
knew Dr. Brown far better and more intimately than the author of this
notice.  I can hardly say when I first became acquainted with him,
probably it was in my childhood.  Ever since I was a boy, certainly, I
used to see him at intervals, especially in the Christmas vacations.  But
he seldom moved from Edinburgh, except in summer, which he frequently
passed in the country house of certain friends of his, whose affection
made much of the happiness of his latest years, and whose unfailing
kindness attended him in his dying hours.  Living always in Scotland, Dr.
Brown was seen but rarely by his friends who resided in England.  Thus,
though Dr. Brown's sweetness of disposition and charm of manner, his
humour, and his unfailing sympathy and encouragement, made one feel
toward him as to a familiar friend, yet, of his actual life I saw but
little, and have few reminiscences to contribute.  One can only speak of
that singular geniality of his, that temper of goodness and natural
tolerance and affection, which, as Scotsmen best know, is not universal
among the Scots.  Our race does not need to pray, like the mechanic in
the story, that Providence will give us "a good conceit of ourselves."
But we must acknowledge that the Scotch temper is critical if not
captious, argumentative, inclined to look at the seamy side of men and of
their performances, and to dwell on imperfections rather than on merits
and virtues.  An example of these blemishes of the Scotch disposition,
carried to an extreme degree in the nature of a man of genius, is offered
to the world in the writings and "Reminiscences" of Mr. Carlyle.

Now, Dr. John Brown was at the opposite pole of feeling.  He had no
mawkish toleration of things and people intolerable, but he preferred not
to turn his mind that way.  His thoughts were with the good, the wise,
the modest, the learned, the brave of times past, and he was eager to
catch a reflection of their qualities in the characters of the living, of
all with whom he came into contact.  He was, for example, almost
optimistic in his estimate of the work of young people in art or
literature.  From everything that was beautiful or good, from a summer
day by the Tweed, or from the eyes of a child, or from the humorous
saying of a friend, or from treasured memories of old Scotch worthies,
from recollections of his own childhood, from experience of the stoical
heroism of the poor, he seemed to extract matter for pleasant thoughts of
men and the world, and nourishment for his own great and gentle nature.  I
have never known any man to whom other men seemed so dear--men dead, and
men living.  He gave his genius to knowing them, and to making them
better known, and his unselfishness thus became not only a great personal
virtue, but a great literary charm.  When you met him, he had some "good
story" or some story of goodness to tell--for both came alike to him, and
his humour was as unfailing as his kindness.  There was in his face a
singular charm, blended, as it were, of the expressions of mirth and of
patience.  Being most sensitive to pain, as well as to pleasure, he was
an exception to that rule of Rochefoucauld's--"_nous avons tous assez de
force pour supporter les maux d'autrui_." {2}

He did not bear easily the misfortunes of others, and the evils of his
own lot were heavy enough.  They saddened him; but neither illness, nor
his poignant anxiety for others, could sour a nature so unselfish.  He
appeared not to have lost that anodyne and consolation of religious hope,
which had been the strength of his forefathers, and was his best
inheritance from a remarkable race of Scotsmen.  Wherever he came, he was
welcome; people felt glad when they had encountered him in the
streets--the streets of Edinburgh, where almost every one knows every one
by sight--and he was at least as joyously received by the children and
the dogs as by the grown-up people of every family.  A friend has kindly
shown me a letter in which it is told how Dr. Brown's love of dogs, his
interest in a half-blind old Dandy which was attached to him, was evinced
in the very last hours of his life.  But enough has been said, in general
terms, about the character of "the beloved physician," as Dr. Brown was
called in Edinburgh, and a brief account may be given, in some detail, of
his life and ways.

Dr. John Brown was born in Biggar, one of the gray, slaty-looking little
towns in the pastoral moorlands of southern Scotland.  These towns have
no great beauty that they should be admired by strangers, but the
natives, as Scott said to Washington Irving, are attached to their "gray
hills," and to the Tweed, so beautiful where man's greed does not pollute
it, that the Border people are all in love with it, as Tyro, in Homer,
loved the divine Enipeus.  We hold it "far the fairest of the floods that
run upon the earth."  How dear the border scenery was to Dr. John Brown,
and how well he knew and could express its legendary magic, its charm
woven of countless ancient spells, the music of old ballads, the sorcery
of old stories, may be understood by readers of his essay on "Minchmoor."
{3}  The father of Dr. Brown was the third in a lineage of ministers of
the sect called Seceders.  To explain who the Seceders were, it would be
necessary to explore the sinking morasses of Scotch ecclesiastical
history.  The minister was proud of being not only a "Seceder" but a
"Burgher."  He inherited, to be brief, the traditions of a most
spiritually-minded and most spirited set of men, too much bent, it may
appear to us, on establishing delicate distinctions of opinions, but
certainly most true to themselves and to their own ideals of liberty and
of faith.  Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy, who
taught himself Greek that he might read the New Testament; who walked
twenty-four miles--leaving his folded sheep in the night--to buy the
precious volume in St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a teacher of
much repute among his own people.  Of Dr. Brown's father, he himself
wrote a most touching and beautiful account in his "Letter to John
Cairns, D.D."  This essay contains, perhaps, the very finest passages
that the author ever penned.  His sayings about his own childhood remind
one of the manner of Lamb, without that curious fantastic touch which is
of the essence of Lamb's style.  The following lines, for example, are a
revelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, with
almost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:--

   "Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is above
   them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its 'red
   sodgers' and lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is
   about three feet high_, and they are more often stooping than gazing
   up.  I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings
   of the rooms in the manse at Biggar."

I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like in
so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomena
of the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes--the "queer
things" of their low-lying world.  In this essay on his father, Dr. Brown
has written lines about a child's first knowledge of death, which seem as
noteworthy as Steele's famous passage about his father's death and his
own half-conscious grief and anger.  Dr. Brown describes a Scottish
funeral--the funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of a
boy of five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months--

   "leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding
   horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . .
   Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers,
   was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the
   unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often
   enough seen since.  My father took the one at the head, and also
   another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he
   had caused to be placed there, and unrolling it, put it into my hand.
   I twisted it firmly round my fingers, and awaited the result; the
   burial men with their real ropes lowered the coffin, and when it
   rested at the bottom it was too far down for me to see it.  The grave
   was made very deep, as he used afterwards to tell us, that it might
   hold us all.  My father first and abruptly let his cord drop, followed
   by the rest.  This was too much.  I now saw what was meant, and held
   on and fixed my fist and feet, and I believe my father had some
   difficulty in forcing open my small fingers; he let the little black
   cord drop, and I remember, in my misery and anger, seeing its open end
   disappearing in the gloom." {4}

The man who wrote this, and many another passage as true and tender,
might surely have been famous in fiction, if he had turned his powers
that way.  He had imagination, humour, pathos; he was always studying and
observing life; his last volume, especially, is like a collection of
fragments that might have gone toward making a work, in some ways not
inferior to the romances of Scott.  When the third volume of Essays was
published, in the spring of his last year, a reviewer, who apparently had
no personal knowledge of Dr. Brown, asked why he did not write a novel.
He was by that time over seventy years of age, and, though none guessed
it, within a few weeks of his death.  What he might have done, had he
given himself to literature only, it is impossible to guess.  But he
caused so much happiness, and did so much good, in that gentle profession
of healing which he chose, and which brought him near to many who needed
consolation more than physic, that we need not forget his deliberate
choice.  Literature had only his _horae subsecivae_, as he said:
_Subseciva quaedam tempora quae ego perire non patior_, as Cicero writes,
"shreds and waste ends of time, which I suffer not to be lost."

The kind of life which Dr. Brown's father and his people lived at Biggar,
the austere life of work, and of thought intensely bent on the real aim
of existence, on God, on the destiny of the soul, is perhaps rare now,
even in rural Scotland.  We are less obedient than of old to the motto of
that ring found on Magus Moor, where Archbishop Shairp was murdered,
_Remember upon Dethe_.  If any reader has not yet made the acquaintance
of Dr. Brown's works, one might counsel him to begin with the "Letter to
John Cairns, D.D.," the fragment of biography and autobiography, the
description of the fountainheads from which the genius of the author
flowed.  In his early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a
man who, from his son's affectionate description, seems to have confined
a fiery and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and Burgher
theology.  When the father received a call to the "Rose Street Secession
Church," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that ancient Scottish
seminary, the High School--the school where Scott was taught not much
Latin and no Greek worth mentioning.  Scott was still alive and strong in
those days, and Dr. Brown describes how he and his school companions
would take off their hats to the Shirra as he passed in the streets.

"Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had you
met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store farmer,
come of gentle blood--'a stout, blunt carle,' as he says of himself, with
the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills--a large, sunny,
out-of-door air all about him.  On his broad and stooping shoulders was
set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best
known in all the world."  Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street.  I
do not know whether the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantly
in the direction of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of making
pilgrimage to Castle Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's "dear
old friend,"--his dog Camp.  Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy days, one knows
little--days when "Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from
the High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only
lovers and boys know how or why."  Concerning the doctor's character, he
has left it on record that he liked a dog-fight.  "'A dog-fight,' shouted
Bob, and was off, and so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it might
not be over before we were up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts,
not Walton) says they 'delight' in it, and for the best of all reasons;
and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight.  This is a
very different thing from a love of making dogs fight."  And this was the
most famous of all dog-fights--since the old Irish Brehons settled the
laws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be done if a child
interfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man--for this was the
dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced to his historian.

Six years passed after this battle, and Dr. Brown was a medical student
and a clerk at Minto Hospital.  How he renewed his acquaintance there,
and in what sad circumstances, with Rab and his friends, it is
superfluous to tell, for every one who reads at all has read that story,
and most readers not without tears.  As a medical student in Edinburgh,
Dr. Brown made the friendship of Mr. Syme, the famous surgeon--a
friendship only closed by death.  I only saw them once together, a very
long time ago, and then from the point of view of a patient.  These
occasions are not agreeable, and patients, like the old cock which did
not crow when plucked, are apt to be "very much absorbed"; but Dr.
Brown's attitude toward the man whom he regarded with the reverence of a
disciple, as well as with the affection of a friend, was very remarkable.

When his studies were over, Dr. Brown practised for a year as assistant
to a surgeon in Chatham.  It must have been when he was at Chatham that a
curious event occurred.  Many years later, Charles Dickens was in
Edinburgh, reading his stories in public, and was dining with some
Edinburgh people.  Dickens began to speak about the panic which the
cholera had caused in England: how ill some people had behaved.  As a
contrast, he mentioned that, at Chatham, one poor woman had died,
deserted by every one except a young physician.  Some one, however,
ventured to open the door, and found the woman dead, and the young doctor
asleep, overcome with the fatigue that mastered him on his patient's
death, but quite untouched by the general panic.  "Why, that was Dr. John
Brown," one of the guests observed; and it seems that, thus early in his
career, the doctor had been setting an example of the courage and charity
of his profession.  After a year spent in Chatham, he returned to
Edinburgh, where he spent the rest of his life, busy partly with his art
of healing, partly with literature.  He lived in Rutland Street, near the
railway station, by which Edinburgh is approached from the west, and
close to Princes Street, the chief street of the town, separated by a
green valley, once a loch, from the high Castle Rock.  It was the room in
which his friends were accustomed to see Dr. Brown, and a room full of
interest it was.  In his long life, the doctor had gathered round him
many curious relics of artists and men of letters; a drawing of a dog by
Turner I remember particularly, and a copy of "Don Juan," in the first
edition, with Byron's manuscript notes.  Dr. Brown had a great love and
knowledge of art and of artists, from Turner to Leech; and he had very
many friends among men of letters, such as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Thackeray.
Dr. Brown himself was a clever designer of rapid little grotesques, rough
sketches of dogs and men.  One or two of them are engraved in the little
paper-covered booklets in which some of his essays were separately
published--booklets which he was used to present to people who came to
see him and who were interested in all that he did.  I remember some
vivacious grotesques which he drew for one of my brothers when we were
schoolboys.  These little things were carefully treasured by boys who
knew Dr. Brown, and found him friendly, and capable of sustaining a
conversation on the points of a Dandy Dinmont terrier and other mysteries
important to youth.  He was a bibliophile--a taste which he inherited
from his father, who "began collecting books when he was twelve, and was
collecting to his last hours."

The last time I ever saw Dr. Brown, a year before his death, he was kind
enough to lend me one of the rarest of his treasures, "Poems," by Mr.
Ruskin.  Probably Mr. Ruskin had presented the book to his old friend; in
no other way were it easy to procure writings which the author withdrew
from publication, if, indeed, they ever were, properly speaking,
published.  Thus Dr. Brown was all things to all men, and to all boys.  He
"had a word for every one," as poor people say, and a word to the point,
for he was as much at home with the shepherd on the hills, or with the
angler between Hollylea and Clovenfords, as with the dusty book-hunter,
or the doggy young Border yeoman, or the child who asked him to "draw her
a picture," or the friend of genius famous through all the world,
Thackeray, when he "spoke, as he seldom did, of divine things."

Three volumes of essays are all that Dr. Brown has left in the way of
compositions: a light, but imperishable literary baggage.  His studies
are usually derived from personal experience, which he reproduced with
singular geniality and simplicity, or they are drawn from the tradition
of the elders, the reminiscences of long-lived Scotch people, who,
themselves, had listened attentively to those who went before them.  Since
Scott, these ancient ladies with wonderful memories have had no such
attentive listener or appreciative reporter as Dr. Brown.  His paper
called "Mystifications," a narrative of the pranks of Miss Stirling
Graham, is a brief, vivid record of the clever and quaint society of
Scotland sixty years ago.  Scotland, or at least Scottish society, is now
only English society--a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes even
a little duller.  But old people of position spoke the old Scotch tongue
sixty years ago, and were full of wonderful genealogies, full of
reminiscences of the "'45," and the adventures of the Jacobites.  The
very last echoes of that ancient world are dying now from memory, like
the wide reverberations of that gun which Miss Nelly MacWilliam heard on
the day when Prince Charles landed, and which resounded strangely all
through Scotland.

The children of this generation, one fears, will hardly hear of these old
raids and duels, risings and rebellions, by oral tradition handed down,
unbroken, through aunts and grandmothers.  Scott reaped a full, late
harvest of the memories of clannish and feudal Scotland; Dr. Brown came
as a later gleaner, and gathered these stirring tales of "A Jacobite
Family" which are published in the last volume of his essays.  When he
was an observer, not a hearer only, Dr. Brown chiefly studied and best
wrote of the following topics: passages and characters of humour and
pathos which he encountered in his life and profession; children, dogs,
Border scenery, and fellow-workers in life and science.  Under one or
other of these categories all his best compositions might be arranged.
The most famous and most exquisite of all his works in the first class is
the unrivalled "Rab and his Friends"--a study of the stoicism and
tenderness of the Lowland character worthy of Scott.  In a minor way the
little paper on "Jeems," the door-keeper in a Dissenting house of the
Lord, is interesting to Scotch people, though it must seem a rather
curious revelation to all others.  "Her last Half-crown" is another study
of the honesty that survived in a starving and outcast Scotch girl, when
all other virtues, as we commonly reckon virtue, had gone before her
character to some place where, let us hope, they may rejoin her; for if
we are to suffer for the vices which have abandoned us, may we not get
some credit for the virtues that we have abandoned, but that once were
ours, in some heaven paved with bad resolutions unfulfilled?  "The Black
Dwarf's Bones" is a sketch of the misshapen creature from whom Scott
borrowed the character that gives a name to one of his minor Border
stories.  The real Black Dwarf (David Ritchie he was called among men)
was fond of poetry, but hated Burns.  He was polite to the fair, but
classed mankind at large with his favourite aversions: ghosts, fairies,
and robbers.  There was this of human about the Black Dwarf, that "he
hated folk that are aye gaun to dee, and never do't."  The village
beauties were wont to come to him for a Judgment of Paris on their
charms, and he presented each with a flower, which was of a fixed value
in his standard of things beautiful.  One kind of rose, the prize of the
most fair, he only gave thrice.  Paris could not have done his dooms more
courteously, and, if he had but made judicious use of rose, lily, and
lotus, as prizes, he might have pleased all the three Goddesses; Troy
still might be standing, and the lofty house of King Priam.

Among Dr. Brown's papers on children, that called "Pet Marjorie" holds
the highest place.  Perhaps certain passages are "wrote too
sentimentally," as Marjorie Fleming herself remarked about the practice
of many authors.  But it was difficult to be perfectly composed when
speaking of this wonderful fairy-like little girl, whose affection was as
warm as her humour and genius were precocious.  "Infant phenomena" are
seldom agreeable, but Marjorie was so humorous, so quick-tempered, so
kind, that we cease to regard her as an intellectual "phenomenon."  Her
memory remains sweet and blossoming in its dust, like that of little
Penelope Boothby, the child in the mob cap whom Sir Joshua painted, and
who died very soon after she was thus made Immortal.

It is superfluous to quote from the essay on Marjorie Fleming; every one
knows about her and her studies: "Isabella is teaching me to make simme
colings, nots of interrigations, peorids, commoes, &c."  Here is a
Shakespearian criticism, of which few will deny the correctness:
"'Macbeth' is a pretty composition, but awful one."  Again, "I never read
sermons of any kind, but I read novelettes and my Bible."  "'Tom Jones'
and Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' are both excellent, and much
spoke of by both sex, particularly by the men."  Her Calvinistic belief
in "_unquestionable_ fire and brimston" is unhesitating, but the young
theologian appears to have substituted "unquestionable" for
"unquenchable."  There is something humorous in the alteration, as if
Marjorie refused to be put off with an "excellent family substitute" for
fire and brimstone, and demanded the "unquestionable" article, no other
being genuine, please observe trade mark.

Among Dr. Brown's contributions to the humorous study of dogs, "Rab," of
course, holds the same place as Marjorie among his sketches of children.
But if his "Queen Mary's Child Garden," the description of the little
garden in which Mary Stuart did _not_ play when a child, is second to
"Marjorie," so "Our Dogs" is a good second to "Rab."  Perhaps Dr. Brown
never wrote anything more mirthful than his description of the sudden
birth of the virtue of courage in Toby, a comic but cowardly mongrel, a
cur of low degree.

   "Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens
   before his own and the neighbouring doors.  Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors
   off, a bulky, choleric, red-faced man--_torvo vultu_--was, by law of
   contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby
   into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his
   eye.  One day, his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone,
   and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been
   planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick
   Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged
   covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling
   nose, when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon
   him, like the Assyrian, with a terrific _gowl_.  I watched them.
   Instantly Toby made at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than
   Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there
   is reason to believe, in his own lobby.  Toby contented himself with
   proclaiming his victory at the door, and, returning, finished his bone-
   planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass
   door, glared at him.  From this moment Toby was an altered dog.  Pluck
   at first sight was lord of all . . . That very evening he paid a visit
   to Leo, next door's dog, a big tyrannical bully and coward . . . To
   him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked
   about, as much as to say, 'Come on, Macduff'; but Macduff did not come
   on."

This story is one of the most amazing examples of instant change of
character on record, and disproves the sceptical remark that "no one was
ever converted, except prize-fighters, and colonels in the army."  I am
sorry to say that Dr. Brown was too fond of dogs to be very much attached
to cats.  I never heard him say anything against cats, or, indeed,
against anybody; but there are passages in his writings which tend to
show that, when young and thoughtless, he was not far from regarding cats
as "the higher vermin."  He tells a story of a Ghazi puss, so to speak, a
victorious cat, which, entrenched in a drain, defeated three dogs with
severe loss, and finally escaped unharmed from her enemies.  Dr. Brown's
family gloried in the possession of a Dandy Dinmont named John Pym, whose
cousin (Auld Pepper) belonged to one of my brothers.  Dr. Brown was much
interested in Pepper, a dog whose family pride was only matched by that
of the mother of Candide, and, at one time, threatened to result in the
extinction of this branch of the House of Pepper.  Dr. Brown had
remarked, and my own observations confirm it, that when a Dandy is not
game, his apparent lack of courage arises "from kindness of heart."

Among Dr. Brown's landscapes, as one may call his descriptions of
scenery, and of the ancient historical associations with Scotch scenery,
"Minchmoor" is the most important.  He had always been a great lover of
the Tweed.  The walk which he commemorates in "Minchmoor" was taken, if I
am not mistaken, in company with Principal Shairp, Professor of Poetry in
the University of Oxford, and author of one of the most beautiful of
Tweedside songs, a modern "Bush aboon Traquair:"--

      "And what saw ye there,
      At the bush aboon Traquair;
   Or what did ye hear that was worth your heed?
      I heard the cushie croon
      Thro' the gowden afternoon,
   And the Quair burn singing doon to the vale o' Tweed."

There is in the country of Scott no pleasanter walk than that which Dr.
Brown took in the summer afternoon.  Within a few miles, many places
famous in history and ballad may be visited: the road by which Montrose's
men fled from Philiphaugh fight; Traquair House, with the bears on its
gates, as on the portals of the Baron of Bradwardine; Williamhope, where
Scott and Mungo Park, the African explorer, parted and went their several
ways.  From the crest of the road you see all the Border hills, the
Maiden Paps, the Eildons cloven in three, the Dunion, the Windburg, and
so to the distant Cheviots, and Smailholm Tower, where Scott lay when a
child, and clapped his hands at the flashes of the lightning, _haud sine
Dis animosus infans_, like Horace.

From the crest of the hill you follow Dr. Brown into the valley of
Yarrow, and the deep black pools, now called the "dowie dens," and so,
"through the pomp of cultivated nature," as Wordsworth says, to the
railway at Selkirk, passing the plain where Janet won back Tamlane from
the queen of the fairies.  All this country was familiar to Dr. Brown,
and on one of the last occasions when I met him, he was living at
Hollylea, on the Tweed, just above Ashestiel, Scott's home while he was
happy and prosperous, before he had the unhappy thought of building
Abbotsford.  At the time I speak of, Dr. Brown had long ceased to write,
and his health suffered from attacks of melancholy, in which the world
seemed very dark to him.  I have been allowed to read some letters which
he wrote in one of these intervals of depression.  With his habitual
unselfishness, he kept his melancholy to himself, and, though he did not
care for society at such times, he said nothing of his own condition that
could distress his correspondent.  In the last year of his life,
everything around him seemed to brighten: he was unusually well, he even
returned to his literary work, and saw his last volume of collected
essays through the press.  They were most favourably received, and the
last letters which I had from him spoke of the pleasure which this
success gave him.  Three editions of his book ("John Leech, and Other
Essays") were published in some six weeks.  All seemed to go well, and
one might even have hoped that, with renewed strength, he would take up
his pen again.  But his strength was less than we had hoped.  A cold
settled on his lungs, and, in spite of the most affectionate nursing, he
grew rapidly weaker.  He had little suffering at the end, and his mind
remained unclouded.  No man of letters could be more widely regretted,
for he was the friend of all who read his books, as, even to people who
only met him once or twice in life, he seemed to become dear and
familiar.

In one of his very latest writings, "On Thackeray's Death," Dr. Brown
told people (what some of them needed, and still need to be told) how
good, kind, and thoughtful for others was our great writer--our greatest
master of fiction, I venture to think, since Scott.  Some of the lines
Dr. Brown wrote of Thackerary might be applied to himself: "He looked
always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost
infantile face"--a face very pale, and yet radiant, in his last years,
and mildly lit up with eyes full of kindness, and softened by sorrow.  In
his last year, Mr. Swinburne wrote to Dr. Brown this sonnet, in which
there seems something of the poet's prophetic gift, and a voice sounds as
of a welcome home:--

   "Beyond the north wind lay the land of old,
      Where men dwelt blithe and blameless, clothed and fed
      With joy's bright raiment, and with love's sweet bread,--
   The whitest flock of earth's maternal fold,
   None there might wear about his brows enrolled
      A light of lovelier fame than rings your head,
      Whose lovesome love of children and the dead
   All men give thanks for; I, far off, behold
      A dear dead hand that links us, and a light
      The blithest and benignest of the night,--
         The night of death's sweet sleep, wherein may be
      A star to show your spirit in present sight
         Some happier isle in the Elysian sea
         Where Rab may lick the hand of Marjorie."




CHAPTER IV: OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES


Never but once did I enjoy the privilege of meeting the author of "Elsie
Venner"--Oliver Wendell Holmes.  It was at a dinner given by Mr. Lowell,
and of conversation with Dr. Holmes I had very little.  He struck me as
being wonderfully erect, active, and vivacious for his great age.  He
spoke (perhaps I should not chronicle this impression)--he spoke much,
and freely, but rather as if he were wound up to speak, so to say--wound
up, I mean, by a sense of duty to himself and kindness to strangers, who
were naturally curious about so well-known a man.  In his aspect there
was a certain dryness, and, altogether, his vivacity, his ceaselessness,
and a kind of equability of tone in his voice, reminded me of what Homer
says concerning the old men around Priam, above the gate of Troy, how
they "chirped like cicalas on a summer day."  About the matter of his
talk I remember nothing, only the manner remains with me, and mine may
have been a false impression, or the manner may have been accidental, and
of the moment: or, again, a manner appropriate for conversation with
strangers, each coming up one after the other, to view respectfully so
great a lion.  Among his friends and intimates he was probably a
different man, with a tone other and more reposeful.

He had a long, weary task before him, then, to talk his way, ever
courteous, alert, attentive, through part of a London season.  Yet, when
it was all over, he seems to have enjoyed it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience.  He did not affect me, for that one
time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did--Mr. Lowell, whom I
knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind, learned,
friendly, and delightfully natural.

Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried to
make a sort of photographic "snap-shot" at him, in a single casual
moment, one of myriads of such moments.  Turning to Dr. Holmes's popular,
as distinct from his professional writings, one is reminded, as one often
is, of the change which seems to come over some books as the reader grows
older.  Many books are to one now what they always were; some, like the
Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow better on every fresh reading.
There are books which filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their novelty, their
strangeness, freshness, greatness.  Thus Homer, and the best novels of
Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of--well, of all the real poets, moved this astonishment of
admiration, and being read again, they move it still.  On a different
level, one may say as much about books so unlike each other, as those of
Poe and of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.

There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of wonder,
when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer.  I am not much
surprised to find Charles Kingsley's novels among them.

In the case of Dr. Holmes's books, I am very sensible of this
disenchanting effect of time and experience.  "The Professor at the
Breakfast Table" and the novels came into my hands when I was very young,
in "green, unknowing youth."  They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies
of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their
depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance.
Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to
be pitied, I hope, rather than blamed, if I cannot, like the wise thrush--

      "Recapture
   The first fine careless rapture."

By this time, of course, one understands many of the constituents of Dr.
Holmes's genius, the social, historical, ancestral, and professional
elements thereof.  Now, it is the business of criticism to search out and
illustrate these antecedents, and it seems a very odd and unlucky thing,
that the results of this knowledge when acquired, should sometimes be a
partial disenchantment.  But we are not disenchanted at all by this kind
of science, when the author whom we are examining is a great natural
genius, like Shakespeare or Shelley, Keats or Scott.  Such natures bring
to the world far more than they receive, as far as our means of knowing
what they receive are concerned.  The wind of the spirit that is not of
this earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through their words,
and thoughts, and deeds.  They are not mere combinations, however deft
and subtle, of _known_ atoms.  They must continually delight, and
continually surprise; custom cannot stale them; like the heaven-born Laws
in Sophocles, age can never lull them to sleep.  Their works, when they
are authors, never lose hold on our fancy and our interest.

As far as my own feelings and admiration can inform me, Dr. Holmes,
though a most interesting and amiable and kindly man and writer, was not
of this class.  As an essayist, a delineator of men and morals, an
unassuming philosopher, with a light, friendly wit, he certainly does not
hold one as, for example, Addison does.  The old _Spectator_ makes me
smile, pleases, tickles, diverts me now, even more than when I lay on the
grass and read it by Tweedside, as a boy, when the trout were sluggish,
in the early afternoon.  It is only a personal fact that Dr. Holmes, read
in the same old seasons, with so much pleasure and admiration and
surprise, no longer affects me in the old way.  Carlyle, on the other
hand, in his "Frederick," which used to seem rather long, now entertains
me far more than ever.  But I am well aware that this is a mere
subjective estimate; that Dr. Holmes may really be as great a genius as I
was wont to think him, for criticism is only a part of our impressions.
The opinion of mature experience, as a rule, ought to be sounder than
that of youth; in this case I cannot but think that it is sounder.

Dr. Holmes was a New Englander, and born in what he calls "the Brahmin
caste," the class which, in England, before the sailing of the _May
Flower_, and ever since, had always been literary and highly educated.  "I
like books; I was born and bred among them," he says, "and have the easy
feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among
horses."  He is fond of books, and, above all, of old books--strange, old
medical works, for example--full of portents and prodigies, such as those
of Wierus.

New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady
maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was,
naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.
These men--Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor, Prescott, Hawthorne, and so many
others--had all received the same sort of education as Europeans of
letters used to receive.  They had not started as printers' devils, or
newspaper reporters, or playwrights for the stage, but were academic.  It
does not matter much how a genius begins--as a rural butcher, or an
apothecary, or a clerk of a Writer to the Signet.  Still, the New
Englanders were academic and classical.  New England has, by this time,
established a tradition of its literary origin and character.  Her
children are sons of the Puritans, with their independence, their
narrowness, their appreciation of comfort, their hardiness in doing
without it, their singular scruples of conscience, their sense of the
awfulness of sin, their accessibility to superstition.  We can read of
the later New Englanders in the making, among the works of Cotton Mather,
his father Increase Mather, and the witch-burning, periwig-hating,
doctrinal Judge Sewall, who so manfully confessed and atoned for his
mistake about the Salem witches.  These men, or many of them, were deeply-
learned Calvinists, according to the standard of their day, a day lasting
from, say, the Restoration to 1730.  Cotton Mather, in particular, is
erudite, literary--nay, full of literary vanity--mystical, visionary,
credulous to an amusing degree.

But he is really as British as Baxter, or his Scottish correspondent and
counterpart, Wodrow.  The sons or grandsons of these men gained the War
of Independence.  Of this they are naturally proud, and the circumstance
is not infrequently mentioned in Dr. Holmes's works.  Their democracy is
not roaring modern democracy, but that of the cultivated middle classes.
Their stern Calvinism slackened into many "isms," but left a kind of
religiosity behind it.  One of Dr. Holmes's mouthpieces sums up his whole
creed in the two words _Pater Noster_.  All these hereditary influences
are consciously made conspicuous in Dr. Holmes's writings, as in
Hawthorne's.  In Hawthorne you see the old horror of sin, the old terror
of conscience, the old dread of witchcraft, the old concern about
conduct, converted into aesthetic sources of literary pleasure, of
literary effects.

As a physician and a man of science, Dr. Holmes added abundant knowledge
of the new sort; and apt, unexpected bits of science made popular,
analogies and illustrations afforded by science are frequent in his
works.  Thus, in "Elsie Venner," and in "The Guardian Angel," "heredity"
is his theme.  He is always brooding over the thought that each of us is
so much made up of earlier people, our ancestors, who bequeath to us so
many disagreeable things--vice, madness, disease, emotions, tricks of
gesture.  No doubt these things are bequeathed, but all in such new
proportions and relations, that each of us is himself and nobody else,
and therefore had better make up his mind to _be_ himself, and for
himself responsible.

All this doctrine of heredity, still so dimly understood, Dr. Holmes
derives from science.  But, in passing through his mind, that of a New
Englander conscious of New England's past, science takes a stain of
romance and superstition.  Elsie Venner, through an experience of her
mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from
common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna.  The fantasy
has its setting in a commonplace New England environment, and thus
recalls a Hawthorne less subtle and concentrated, but much more humorous.
The heroine of the "Guardian Angel," again, exposes a character in
layers, as it were, each stratum of consciousness being inherited from a
different ancestor--among others, a red Indian.  She has many
personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on
hysterics and nervous diseases.  These stories are "fairy tales of
science," by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch
of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches.  The
"blend" is singular enough, and not without its originality of
fascination.

Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative
pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster.  I must
quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as
peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the
abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter
Scott.  Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.

"I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighbourhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a series of marks
called the 'Devil's footsteps.'  These were patches of sand in the
pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the
'dewberry,' as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more
Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare
and blasted.  The second was a mark in one of the public buildings near
my home,--the college dormitory named after a Colonial Governor.  I do
not think many persons are aware of the existence of this mark,--little
having been said about the story in print, as it was considered very
desirable, for the sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the north-
west corner, and on the level of the third or fourth storey, there are
signs of a breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be
mistaken.  A considerable portion of that corner must have been carried
away, from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair, and I do not
care to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to the
building there could be no question; and the zigzag line, where the
mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly visible.

"The queer burnt spots, called the 'Devil's footsteps,' had never
attracted attention before this time, though there is no evidence that
they had not existed previously, except that of the late Miss M., a
'Goody,' so called, who was positive on the subject, but had a strange
horror of referring to an affair of which she was thought to know
something . . . I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little boy of
impressible nature to go up to bed in an old gambrel-roofed house, with
untenanted locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly garret,--with
'Devil's footsteps' in the fields behind the house, and in front of it
the patched dormitory, where the unexplained occurrence had taken place
which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one
of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a
dreadful season of mental conflict, took to religion, and became renowned
for his ascetic sanctity."

It is a pity that Dr. Holmes does not give the whole story, instead of
hinting at it, for a similar tale is told at Brazenose College, and
elsewhere.  Now take, along with Dr. Holmes's confession to a grain of
superstition, this remark on, and explanation of, the curious
coincidences which thrust themselves on the notice of most people.

"Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commonstable.  Young fellows
being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre fare of the
evening meal, it was a trick of some of the boys to impale a slice of
meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the fork, holding it, beneath
the table, so that they could get it at tea-time.  The dragons that
guarded this table of the Hesperides found out the trick at last, and
kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--they knew where to find one, if
it was not in its place.  Now the odd thing was, that, after waiting so
many years to hear of this College trick, I should hear it mentioned a
_second time_ within the same twenty-four hours by a College youth of the
present generation.  Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and
to every person, often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these
twinned facts or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.

"I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it as
an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a furrow of
subsoil in it.  The explanation is, of course, that in a great many
thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these instantly arrest our
attention.  Now we shall probably never have the least idea of the
enormous number of impressions which pass through our consciousness,
until in some future life we see the photographic record of our thoughts
and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.

"Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads, and
saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you had been
waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is it possible
that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of all I have been
saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?  Listen, then.  The
number of these living elements in our bodies illustrates the
incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of our thoughts
accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of; these coincidences in
the world of thought illustrate those which we constantly observe in the
world of outward events."

Now for the anecdote--one of Mark Twain's.

Some years ago, Mark Twain published in _Harper's Magazine_ an article on
"Mental Telegraphy."  He illustrated his meaning by a story of how he
once wrote a long letter on a complicated subject, which had popped into
his head between asleep and awake, to a friend on the other side of
America.  He did not send the letter, but, by return of post, received
one from his friend.  "Now, I'll tell you what he is going to say," said
Mark Twain, read his own unsent epistle aloud, and then, opening his
friend's despatch, proved that they were essentially identical.  This is
what he calls "Mental Telegraphy"; others call it "Telepathy," and the
term is merely descriptive.

Now, on his own showing, in our second extract, Dr. Holmes should have
explained coincidences like this as purely the work of chance, and I
rather incline to think that he would have been right.  But Mark Twain,
in his article on "Mental Telegraphy," cites Dr. Holmes for a story of
how he once, after dinner, as his letters came in, felt constrained to
tell, _a propos des bottes_, the story of the last challenge to judicial
combat in England (1817).  He then opened a newspaper directed to him
from England, the _Sporting Times_, and therein his eyes lighted on an
account of this very affair--Abraham Thornton's challenge to battle when
he was accused of murder, in 1817.  According to Mark Twain, Dr. Holmes
was disposed to accept "Mental Telegraphy" rather than mere chance as the
cause of this coincidence.  Yet the anecdote of the challenge seems to
have been a favourite of his.  It occurs in, "The Professor," in the
fifth section.  Perhaps he told it pretty frequently; probably that is
why the printed version was sent to him; still, he was a little staggered
by the coincidence.  There was enough of Cotton Mather in the man of
science to give him pause.

The form of Dr. Holmes's best known books, the set concerned with the
breakfast-table and "Over the Teacups," is not very fortunate.  Much
conversation at breakfast is a weariness of the flesh.  We want to eat
what is necessary, and then to go about our work or play.  If American
citizens in a boarding-house could endure these long palavers, they must
have been very unlike the hasty feeders caricatured in "Martin
Chuzzlewit."  Macaulay may have monologuised thus at his breakfast
parties in the Albany; but breakfast parties are obsolete--an
unregrettable parcel of things lost.  The monologues, or dialogues, were
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but they have had a
vitality and a vogue far beyond those of the magazine _causerie_.  Some
of their popularity they may owe to the description of the other
boarders, and to the kind of novel which connects the fortunes of these
personages.  But it is impossible for an Englishman to know whether these
American types are exactly drawn or not.  Their fortunes do not strongly
interest one, though the "Sculpin"--the patriotic, deformed Bostonian,
with his great-great-grandmother's ring (she was hanged for a witch)--is
a very original and singular creation.  The real interest lies in the
wit, wisdom, and learning.  The wit, now and then, seems to-day rather in
the nature of a "goak."  One might give examples, but to do so seems ill-
natured and ungrateful.

There are some very perishable puns.  The learning is not so _recherche_
as it appeared when we knew nothing of Cotton Mather and Robert Calef,
the author of a book against the persecution of witches.  Calef, of
course, was in the right, but I cannot forgive him for refusing to see a
lady, known to Mr. Mather, who floated about in the air.  That she did so
was no good reason for hanging or burning a number of parishioners; but,
did she float, and, if so, how?  Mr. Calef said it would be a miracle, so
he declined to view the performance.  His logic was thin, though of a
familiar description.  Of all old things, at all events, Dr. Holmes was
fond.  He found America scarcely aired, new and raw, devoid of history
and of associations.  "The Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to
the piers of the Pons AElius, even more full of meaning than my
well-beloved Charles, eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge."  No
doubt this is a common sentiment among Americans.

Occasionally, like Hawthorne, they sigh for an historical atmosphere, and
then, when they come to Europe and get it, they do not like it, and think
Schenectady, New York, "a better place."  It is not easy to understand
what ailed Hawthorne with Europe; he was extremely caustic in his
writings about that continent, and discontented.  Our matrons were so
stout and placid that they irritated him.  Indeed, they are a little
heavy in hand, still there are examples of agreeable slimness, even in
this poor old country.  Fond as he was of the historical past, Mr. Holmes
remained loyal to the historical present.  He was not one of those
Americans who are always censuring England, and always hankering after
her.  He had none of that irritable feeling, which made a great
contemporary of his angrily declare that _he_ could endure to hear "Ye
Mariners of England" sung, because of his own country's successes, some
time ago.  They were gallant and conspicuous victories of the American
frigates; we do not grudge them.  A fair fight should leave no rancour,
above all in the victors, and Dr. Holmes's withers would have been
unwrung by Campbell's ditty.

He visited England in youth, and fifty years later.  On the anniversary
of the American defeat at Bunker's Hill (June 17), Dr. Holmes got his
degree in the _old_ Cambridge.  He received degrees at Edinburgh and at
Oxford, in his "Hundred Days in Europe" he says very little about these
historic cities.  The men at Oxford asked, "Did he come in the 'One Hoss
Shay'?" the name of his most familiar poem in the lighter vein.  The
whole visit to England pleased and wearied him.  He likened it to the
_shass caffy_ of Mr. Henry Foker--the fillip at the end of the long
banquet of life.  He went to see the Derby, for he was fond of horses, of
racing, and, in a sportsmanlike way, of boxing.  He had the great
boldness once, _audax juventa_, to write a song in praise of that
comfortable creature--wine.  The prudery of many Americans about the
juice of the grape is a thing very astonishing to a temperate Briton.  An
admirable author, who wrote an account of the old convivial days of an
American city, found that reputable magazines could not accept such a
degrading historical record.  There was no nonsense about Dr. Holmes.  His
poems were mainly "occasional" verses for friendly meetings; or humorous,
like the celebrated "One Horse Shay."  Of his serious verses, the
"Nautilus" is probably too familiar to need quotation; a noble fancy is
nobly and tunefully "moralised."  Pleasing, cultivated, and so forth, are
adjectives not dear to poets.  To say "sublime," or "magical," or
"strenuous," of Dr. Holmes's muse, would be to exaggerate.  How far he
maintained his scholarship, I am not certain; but it is odd that, in his
preface to "The Guardian Angel," he should quote from "Jonathan Edwards
the younger," a story for which he might have cited Aristotle.

Were I to choose one character out of Dr. Holmes's creations as my
favourite, it would be "a frequent correspondent of his," and of mine--the
immortal Gifted Hopkins.  Never was minor poet more kindly and genially
portrayed.  And if one had to pick out three of his books, as the best
worth reading, they would be "The Professor," "Elsie Venner," and "The
Guardian Angel."  They have not the impeccable art and distinction of
"The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter," but they
combine fantasy with living human interest, and with humour.  With Sir
Thomas Browne, and Dr. John Brown, and--may we not add Dr. Weir
Mitchell?--Dr. Holmes excellently represents the physician in humane
letters.  He has left a blameless and most amiable memory, unspotted by
the world.  His works are full of the savour of his native soil,
naturally, without straining after "Americanism;" and they are national,
not local or provincial.  He crossed the great gulf of years, between the
central age of American literary production--the time of Hawthorne and
Poe--to our own time, and, like Nestor, he reigned among the third
generation.  As far as the world knows, the shadow of a literary quarrel
never fell on him; he was without envy or jealousy, incurious of his own
place, never vain, petulant, or severe.  He was even too good-humoured,
and the worst thing I have heard of him is that he could never say "no"
to an autograph hunter.




CHAPTER V: MR. MORRIS'S POEMS


"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you have convinced me that
no man can be a poet."  The study of Mr. William Morris's poems, in the
new collected edition, {5} has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no
middle-aged man, can be a critic.  I read Mr. Morris's poems (thanks to
the knightly honours conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no
ambiguity as to 'Mr. Morris'), but it is not the book only that I read.
The scroll of my youth is unfolded.  I see the dear place where first I
perused "The Blue Closet"; the old faces of old friends flock around me;
old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and revive.  St. Andrews,
Oxford, come before the mind's eye, with

      "Many a place
      That's in sad case
   Where joy was wont afore, oh!"

as Minstrel Burne sings.  These voices, faces, landscapes mingle with the
music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us certain
hours passed in the paradise of youth.  A reviewer who finds himself in
this case may as well frankly confess that he can no more criticise Mr.
Morris dispassionately than he could criticise his old self and the
friends whom he shall never see again, till he meets them

   "Beyond the sphere of time,
      And sin, and grief's control,
   Serene in changeless prime
      Of body and of soul."

To write of one's own "adventures among books" may be to provide
anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, but, at least, it
is to write historically.  We know how books have affected, and do affect
ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions and
revived sensations.  To judge books dispassionately and impersonally, is
much more difficult--indeed, it is practically impossible, for our own
tastes and experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts, do what
we will.  However, the effort must be made, for to say that, at a certain
age, in certain circumstances, an individual took much pleasure in "The
Life and Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is certainly
not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."

There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the
nineteenth century.  The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott,
and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats.  By 1822 the blossoming time was
over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr.
Tennyson and Mr. Browning.  It broke forth again, in 1842 and did not
practically cease till England's greatest laureate sang of the "Crossing
of the Bar."  But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and
Mr. Browning rather later, in "Bells and Pomegranates" ("Men and Women"),
the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris's "Defence of Guenevere,"
and flowered till Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" appeared in 1865,
followed by his poems of 1866.  Mr. Rossetti's book of 1870 belonged, in
date of composition, mainly to this period.

In 1858, when "The Defence of Guenevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have
been but a year or two from his undergraduateship.  Every one has heard
enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon,
and the others of the old _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, where Mr.
Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried.  Why should they not be
revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams?  As literature, I
prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The
Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!"  Mr. Morris and his friends were
active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic
revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part.  This
revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more
"earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial,
restoration by Scott.  The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of
Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no
less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems.  The
fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period."  In "The
Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose
narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and
Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise."  In the early book the rugged
style of Mr. Browning has left a mark.  There are cockney rhymes, too,
such as "short" rhyming to "thought."  But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's
early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it.  In the
first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:--

   "Listen: suppose your time were come to die,
   And you were quite alone and very weak;
   Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily

   "The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
   Of river through your broad lands running well:
   Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

   "'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
   Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
   I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

   "'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
   Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
   At foot of your familiar bed to see

   "A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
   Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
   Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

   "Showing him well, and making his commands
   Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
   Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

   "And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue,
   Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
   No man could tell the better of the two.

   "After a shivering half-hour you said,
   'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.'
   Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

   "And cry to all good men that loved you well,
   'Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.'"

There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the
_bizarrerie_ of a new thing in beauty.  How far it is really beautiful
how can I tell?  How can I discount the "personal bias"?  Only I know
that it is unforgettable.  Again (Galahad speaks):--

         "I saw
   One sitting on the altar as a throne,
      Whose face no man could say he did not know,
   And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,
      With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow."

Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.

Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially
sympathetic period--the gloom and sad sunset glory of the late fourteenth
century, the age of Froissart and wicked, wasteful wars.  To Froissart it
all seemed one magnificent pageant of knightly and kingly fortunes; he
only murmurs a "great pity" for the death of a knight or the massacre of
a town.  It is rather the pity of it that Mr. Morris sees: the hearts
broken in a corner, as in "Sir Peter Harpedon's End," or beside "The
Haystack in the Floods."  Here is a picture like life of what befell a
hundred times.  Lady Alice de la Barde hears of the death of her knight:--

   "ALICE

         "Can you talk faster, sir?
   Get over all this quicker? fix your eyes
   On mine, I pray you, and whate'er you see
   Still go on talking fast, unless I fall,
   Or bid you stop.

   "SQUIRE

         "I pray your pardon then,
   And looking in your eyes, fair lady, say
   I am unhappy that your knight is dead.
   Take heart, and listen! let me tell you all.
   We were five thousand goodly men-at-arms,
   And scant five hundred had he in that hold;
   His rotten sandstone walls were wet with rain,
   And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit;
   Yet for three days about the barriers there
   The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,
   And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;
   But still amid the crash of falling walls,
   And roar of bombards, rattle of hard bolts,
   The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out
   St. George's banner, and the seven swords,
   And still they cried, 'St. George Guienne,' until
   Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old,
   And our rush came, and cut them from the keep."

The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in "Geffray Teste
Noire" is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal ball,
rather than like a picture suggested by printed words.  "Shameful Death"
has the same enchanted kind of presentment.  We look through a "magic
casement opening on the foam" of the old waves of war.  Poems of a pure
fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind" and "The
Blue Closet."  Each only lives in fantasy.  Motives, and facts, and
"story" are unimportant and out of view.  The pictures arise distinct,
unsummoned, spontaneous, like the faces and places which are flashed on
our eyes between sleeping and waking.  Fantastic, too, but with more of a
recognisable human setting, is "Golden Wings," which to a slight degree
reminds one of Theophile Gautier's _Chateau de Souvenir_.

   "The apples now grow green and sour
      Upon the mouldering castle wall,
      Before they ripen there they fall:
   There are no banners on the tower,

   The draggled swans most eagerly eat
      The green weeds trailing in the moat;
      Inside the rotting leaky boat
   You see a slain man's stiffen'd feet."

These, with "The Sailing of the Sword," are my own old favourites.  There
was nothing like them before, nor will be again, for Mr. Morris, after
several years of silence, abandoned his early manner.  No doubt it was
not a manner to persevere in, but happily, in a mood and a moment never
to be re-born or return, Mr. Morris did fill a fresh page in English
poetry with these imperishable fantasies.  They were absolutely neglected
by "the reading public," but they found a few staunch friends.  Indeed, I
think of "Guenevere" as FitzGerald did of Tennyson's poems before 1842.
But this, of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious,
estimate.  Criticism may aver that the influence of Mr. Rossetti was
strong on Mr. Morris before 1858.  Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris
first (as the world read the "Lay" before "Christabel"), and my own
preference is for Mr. Morris.

It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, in
1866 or 1867, "The Life and Death of Jason."  Young men who had read
"Guenevere" hastened to purchase it, and, of course, found themselves in
contact with something very unlike their old favourite.  Mr. Morris had
told a classical tale in decasyllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort,
and he regarded the heroic age from a mediaeval point of view; at all
events, not from an historical and archaeological point of view.  It was
natural in Mr. Morris to "envisage" the Greek heroic age in this way, but
it would not be natural in most other writers.  The poem is not much
shorter than the "Odyssey," and long narrative poems had been out of
fashion since "The Lord of the Isles" (1814).

All this was a little disconcerting.  We read "Jason," and read it with
pleasure, but without much of the more essential pleasure which comes
from magic and distinction of style.  The peculiar qualities of Keats,
and Tennyson, and Virgil are not among the gifts of Mr. Morris.  As
people say of Scott in his long poems, so it may be said of Mr.
Morris--that he does not furnish many quotations, does not glitter in
"jewels five words long."

In "Jason" he entered on his long career as a narrator; a poet retelling
the immortal primeval stories of the human race.  In one guise or another
the legend of Jason is the most widely distributed of romances; the North
American Indians have it, and the Samoans and the Samoyeds, as well as
all Indo-European peoples.  This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at
greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, and in the "Orphica," Mr. Morris
took up and handled in a single and objective way.  His art was always
pictorial, but, in "Jason" and later, he described more, and was less
apt, as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable
way.

In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the "Earthly
Paradise": that vast collection of the world's old tales retold.  One
might almost conjecture that "Jason" had originally been intended for a
part of the "Earthly Paradise," and had outgrown its limits.  The tone is
much the same, though the "criticism of life" is less formally and
explicitly stated.

For Mr. Morris came at last to a "criticism of life."  It would not have
satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris!  The
burden of these long narrative poems is _vanitas vanitatum_: the
fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream
"rounded by a sleep."  The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as
beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art.  The hideousness of
modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he
was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many
arts and crafts in which he was a master.  His narrative poems are,
indeed, part of his industry in this field.  He was not born to slay
monsters, he says, "the idle singer of an empty day."  Later, he set
about slaying monsters, like Jason, or unlike Jason, scattering dragon's
teeth to raise forces which he could not lay, and could not direct.

I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say this much
only to prove that Mr. Morris's "criticism of life," and prolonged,
wistful dwelling on the thought of death, ceased to satisfy himself.  His
own later part, as a poet and an ally of Socialism, proved this to be
true.  It seems to follow that the peculiarly level, lifeless, decorative
effect of his narratives, which remind us rather of glorious tapestries
than of pictures, was no longer wholly satisfactory to himself.  There is
plenty of charmed and delightful reading--"Jason" and the "Earthly
Paradise" are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we do miss a
strenuous rendering of action and passion.  These Mr. Morris had rendered
in "The Defence of Guinevere": now he gave us something different,
something beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic vigour.
Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary writer of
epic, in an age of Criticism.  He dealt with the tale of "Jason," and
conceivably he may have borrowed from older minstrels.  But the Medea of
Apollonius Rhodius, in her love, her tenderness, her regret for home, in
all her maiden words and ways, is undeniably a character more living,
more human, more passionate, and more sympathetic, than the Medea of Mr.
Morris.  I could almost wish that he had closely followed that classical
original, the first true love story in literature.  In the same way I
prefer Apollonius's spell for soothing the dragon, as much terser and
more somniferous than the spell put by Mr. Morris into the lips of Medea.
Scholars will find it pleasant to compare these passages of the
Alexandrine and of the London poets.  As a brick out of the vast palace
of "Jason" we may select the song of the Nereid to Hylas--Mr. Morris is
always happy with his Nymphs and Nereids:--

      "I know a little garden-close
   Set thick with lily and with rose,
   Where I would wander if I might
   From dewy dawn to dewy night,
   And have one with me wandering.
      And though within it no birds sing,
   And though no pillared house is there,
   And though the apple boughs are bare
   Of fruit and blossom, would to God,
   Her feet upon the green grass trod,
   And I beheld them as before.
      There comes a murmur from the shore,
   And in the place two fair streams are,
   Drawn from the purple hills afar,
   Drawn down unto the restless sea;
   The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee,
   The shore no ship has ever seen,
   Still beaten by the billows green,
   Whose murmur comes unceasingly
   Unto the place for which I cry.
      For which I cry both day and night,
   For which I let slip all delight,
   That maketh me both deaf and blind,
   Careless to win, unskilled to find,
   And quick to lose what all men seek.
      Yet tottering as I am, and weak,
   Still have I left a little breath
   To seek within the jaws of death
   An entrance to that happy place,
   To seek the unforgotten face
   Once seen, once kissed, once rest from me
   Anigh the murmuring of the sea."

"Jason" is, practically, a very long tale from the "Earthly Paradise," as
the "Earthly Paradise" is an immense treasure of shorter tales in the
manner of "Jason."  Mr. Morris reverted for an hour to his fourteenth
century, a period when London was "clean."  This is a poetic license;
many a plague found mediaeval London abominably dirty!  A Celt himself,
no doubt, with the Celt's proverbial way of being _impossibilium
cupitor_, Mr. Morris was in full sympathy with his Breton Squire, who, in
the reign of Edward III., sets forth to seek the Earthly Paradise, and
the land where Death never comes.  Much more dramatic, I venture to
think, than any passage of "Jason," is that where the dreamy seekers of
dreamland, Breton and Northman, encounter the stout King Edward III.,
whose kingdom is of this world.  Action and fantasy are met, and the
wanderers explain the nature of their quest.  One of them speaks of death
in many a form, and of the flight from death:--

      "His words nigh made me weep, but while he spoke
   I noted how a mocking smile just broke
   The thin line of the Prince's lips, and he
   Who carried the afore-named armoury
   Puffed out his wind-beat cheeks and whistled low:
   But the King smiled, and said, 'Can it be so?
   I know not, and ye twain are such as find
   The things whereto old kings must needs be blind.
   For you the world is wide--but not for me,
   Who once had dreams of one great victory
   Wherein that world lay vanquished by my throne,
   And now, the victor in so many an one,
   Find that in Asia Alexander died
   And will not live again; the world is wide
   For you I say,--for me a narrow space
   Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.
      Poor man, why should I stay thee? live thy fill
   Of that fair life, wherein thou seest no ill
   But fear of that fair rest I hope to win
   One day, when I have purged me of my sin.
      Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king
   Shall be remembered but by this one thing,
   That on the morn before ye crossed the sea
   Ye gave and took in common talk with me;
   But with this ring keep memory with the morn,
   O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn
   Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.'"

All this encounter is a passage of high invention.  The adventures in
Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find
Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not
remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl.  The tale of the wanderers was
Mr. Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race,
fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the
Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland.  The whole performance is
astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks
of Parnassus are to be climbed.  Once more literature has a narrator, on
the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir
Walter.  Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a
pageant reflected in a fairy mirror.  But Mr. Morris has said himself,
about his poem, what I am trying to say:--

      "Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;
   Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere,
   Though still the less we knew of its intent;
   The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
   Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair,
   Hung round about a little room, where play
   Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."

Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy with
the heroic sagas of Iceland.  He had rendered one into verse, in "The
Earthly Paradise," above all, "Grettir the Strong" and "The Volsunga" he
had done into English prose.  His next great poem was "The Story of
Sigurd," a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the
Tale of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world.  Mr. Morris took the
form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of its
savage origin--the version of the "Volsunga," not the German shape of the
"Nibelungenlied."  He showed extraordinary skill, especially in making
human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf
Andvari's Hoard.

   "It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old,
   And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall,
   And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call,
   And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be
   wrought.
   Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought,
   And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail,
   And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.

   "But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net,
   And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways
   wet;
   And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left alive
   That hath cunning to match man's cunning or might with his might to
   strive.

   "And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of
   ease?
   Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future
   sees;
   And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;
   And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's
   desire;
   And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never
   done;
   And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is
   won.

   "Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;
   Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.
   But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:
   We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our will
   Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;
   For belike no fixed semblance we had in the days of old,
   Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must take
   That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make."

But when we turn to the passage of the _eclaircissement_ between Sigurd
and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most _modern_ moment in the ancient
tragedy, the moment where the clouds of savage fancy scatter in the light
of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, I prefer the simple,
brief prose of Mr. Morris's translation of the "Volsunga" to his rather
periphrastic paraphrase.  Every student of poetry may make the comparison
for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better.
Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but
prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the "Odyssey," or the
last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the
"Volsunga."  All these are the work of men who were war-smiths as well as
song-smiths.  Here is a passage from the "murder grim and great":--

   "So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on
   high,
   But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry
   From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel
   Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel
   Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn,
   While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne
   When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black,
   And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack?
   So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East
   As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast,
   There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his
   edges stopped;
   He smote and the dead were thrust from him; a hand with its shield he
   lopped;
   There met him Atli's marshal, and his arm at the shoulder he shred;
   Three swords were upreared against him of the best of the kin of the
   dead;
   And he struck off a head to the rightward, and his sword through a
   throat he thrust,
   But the third stroke fell on his helm-crest, and he stooped to the
   ruddy dust,
   And uprose as the ancient Giant, and both his hands were wet:
   Red then was the world to his eyen, as his hand to the labour he set;
   Swords shook and fell in his pathway, huge bodies leapt and fell;
   Harsh grided shield and war-helm like the tempest-smitten bell,
   And the war-cries ran together, and no man his brother knew,
   And the dead men loaded the living, as he went the war-wood through;
   And man 'gainst man was huddled, till no sword rose to smite,
   And clear stood the glorious Hogni in an island of the fight,
   And there ran a river of death 'twixt the Niblung and his foes,
   And therefrom the terror of men and the wrath of the Gods arose."

I admit that this does not affect me as does the figure of Odysseus
raining his darts of doom, or the courtesy of Roland when the blinded
Oliver smites him by mischance, and, indeed, the Keeping of the Stair by
Umslopogaas appeals to me more vigorously as a strenuous picture of war.
To be just to Mr. Morris, let us give his rendering of part of the
Slaying of the Wooers, from his translation of the "Odyssey":--

   "And e'en as the word he uttered, he drew his keen sword out
   Brazen, on each side shearing, and with a fearful shout
   Rushed on him; but Odysseus that very while let fly
   And smote him with the arrow in the breast, the pap hard by,
   And drove the swift shaft to the liver, and adown to the ground fell
   the sword
   From out of his hand, and doubled he hung above the board,
   And staggered; and whirling he fell, and the meat was scattered
   around,
   And the double cup moreover, and his forehead smote the ground;
   And his heart was wrung with torment, and with both feet spurning he
   smote
   The high-seat; and over his eyen did the cloud of darkness float.

   "And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword
   And fell on, making his onrush 'gainst Odysseus the glorious lord,
   If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent,
   And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sent
   Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out,
   And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead
   smote."

There is no need to say more of Mr. Morris's "Odysseus."  Close to the
letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the surge and thunder
of Homer?  Apparently we must accent the penultimate in "Amphinomus" if
the line is to scan.  I select a passage of peaceful beauty from Book
V.:--

   "But all about that cavern there grew a blossoming wood,
   Of alder and of poplar and of cypress savouring good;
   And fowl therein wing-spreading were wont to roost and be,
   For owls were there and falcons, and long-tongued crows of the sea,
   And deeds of the sea they deal with and thereof they have a care
   But round the hollow cavern there spread and flourished fair
   A vine of garden breeding, and in its grapes was glad;
   And four wells of the white water their heads together had,
   And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get;
   And soft were the meadows blooming with parsley and violet.
   Yea, if thither indeed had come e'en one of the Deathless, e'en he
   Had wondered and gladdened his heart with all that was there to see.
   And there in sooth stood wondering the Flitter, the Argus-bane.
   But when o'er all these matters in his soul he had marvelled amain,
   Then into the wide cave went he, and Calypso, Godhead's Grace,
   Failed nowise there to know him as she looked upon his face;
   For never unknown to each other are the Deathless Gods, though they
   Apart from one another may be dwelling far away.
   But Odysseus the mighty-hearted within he met not there,
   Who on the beach sat weeping, as oft he was wont to wear
   His soul with grief and groaning, and weeping; yea, and he
   As the tears he was pouring downward yet gazed o'er the untilled sea."

This is close enough to the Greek, but

   "_And flowing on in order four ways they thence did get_"

is not precisely musical.  Why is Hermes "The Flitter"?  But I have often
ventured to remonstrate against these archaistic peculiarities, which to
some extent mar our pleasure in Mr. Morris's translations.  In his
version of the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out of place.
The "AEneid" is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a
translation of Ennius.  Thus the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical
translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and
(what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet.  But his
acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a
strain of the philologist, and his English in the "Odyssey," still more
in the "AEneid," is occasionally more _archaic_ than the Greek of 900
B.C.  So at least it seems to a reader not unversed in attempts to fit
the classical poets with an English rendering.  But the true test is in
the appreciation of the lovers of poetry in general.

To them, as to all who desire the restoration of beauty in modern life,
Mr. Morris has been a benefactor almost without example.  Indeed, were
adequate knowledge mine, Mr. Morris's poetry should have been criticised
as only a part of the vast industry of his life in many crafts and many
arts.  His place in English life and literature is unique as it is
honourable.  He did what he desired to do--he made vast additions to
simple and stainless pleasures.




CHAPTER VI: MRS. RADCLIFFE'S NOVELS


Does any one now read Mrs. Radcliffe, or am I the only wanderer in her
windy corridors, listening timidly to groans and hollow voices, and
shielding the flame of a lamp, which, I fear, will presently flicker out,
and leave me in darkness?  People know the name of "The Mysteries of
Udolpho;" they know that boys would say to Thackeray, at school, "Old
fellow, draw us Vivaldi in the Inquisition."  But have they penetrated
into the chill galleries of the Castle of Udolpho?  Have they shuddered
for Vivaldi in face of the sable-clad and masked Inquisition?  Certainly
Mrs. Radcliffe, within the memory of man, has been extremely popular.  The
thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works of the
Enchantress belongs to a public library.  It is quite the dirtiest,
greasiest, most dog's-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection.
Many of the books have remained, during the last hundred years, uncut,
even to this day, and I have had to apply the paper knife to many an
author, from Alciphron (1790) to Mr. Max Muller, and Dr. Birkbeck Hill's
edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson."  But Mrs. Radcliffe has been
read diligently, and copiously annotated.

This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of Evelina,
he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole.  Just when King Romance
seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, "The
Castle of Otranto," in 1764.  In that very year was born Anne Ward, who,
in 1787, married William Radcliffe, Esq., M.A., Oxon.  In 1789 she
published "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne."  The scene, she tells us,
is laid in "the most romantic part of the Highlands, the north-east coast
of Scotland."  On castles, anywhere, she doted.  Walpole, not Smollett or
Miss Burney, inspired her with a passion for these homes of old romance.
But the north-east coast of Scotland is hardly part of the Highlands at
all, and is far from being very romantic.  The period is "the dark ages"
in general.  Yet the captive Earl, when "the sweet tranquillity of
evening threw an air of tender melancholy over his mind . . . composed
the following sonnet, which (having committed it to paper) he the next
evening dropped upon the terrace.  He had the pleasure to observe that
the paper was taken up by the ladies, who immediately retired into the
castle."  These were not the manners of the local Mackays, of the
Sinclairs, and of "the small but fierce clan of Gunn," in the dark ages.

But this was Mrs. Radcliffe's way.  She delighted in descriptions of
scenery, the more romantic the better, and usually drawn entirely from
her inner consciousness.  Her heroines write sonnets (which never but
once _are_ sonnets) and other lyrics, on every occasion.  With his usual
generosity Scott praised her landscape and her lyrics, but, indeed, they
are, as Sir Walter said of Mrs. Hemans, "too poetical," and probably they
were skipped, even by her contemporary devotees.  "The Castles of Athlin
and Dunbayne" frankly do not permit themselves to be read, and it was not
till 1790, with "A Sicilian Romance," that Mrs. Radcliffe "found
herself," and her public.  After reading, with breathless haste, through,
"A Sicilian Romance," and "The Romance of the Forest," in a single day,
it would ill become me to speak lightly of Mrs. Radcliffe.  Like
Catherine Morland, I love this lady's tender yet terrific fancy.

Mrs. Radcliffe does not always keep on her highest level, but we must
remember that her last romance, "The Italian," is by far her best.  She
had been feeling her way to this pitch of excellence, and, when she had
attained to it, she published no more.  The reason is uncertain.  She
became a Woman's Rights woman, and wrote "The Female Advocate," not a
novel!  Scott thinks that she may have been annoyed by her imitators, or
by her critics, against whom he defends her in an admirable passage, to
be cited later.  Meanwhile let us follow Mrs. Radcliffe in her upward
course.

The "Sicilian Romance" appeared in 1790, when the author's age was twenty-
six.  The book has a treble attraction, for it contains the germ of
"Northanger Abbey," and the germ of "Jane Eyre," and--the germ of Byron!
Like "Joseph Andrews," "Northanger Abbey" began as a parody (of Mrs.
Radcliffe) and developed into a real novel of character.  So too Byron's
gloomy scowling adventurers, with their darkling past, are mere
repetitions in rhyme of Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni.  This is so obvious
that, when discussing Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni, Scott adds, in a note,
parallel passages from Byron's "Giaour."  Sir Walter did not mean to
mock, he merely compared two kindred spirits.  "The noble poet" "kept on
the business still," and broke into octosyllabics, borrowed from Scott,
his descriptions of miscreants borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe.

"A Sicilian Romance" has its scene in the palace of Ferdinand, fifth
Marquis of Mazzini, on the northern coast of Sicily.  The time is about
1580, but there is nothing in the manners or costume to indicate that, or
any other period.  Such "local colour" was unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, as
to Clara Reeve.  In Horace Walpole, however, a character goes so far in
the mediaeval way as to say "by my halidome."

The Marquis Mazzini had one son and two daughters by his first amiable
consort, supposed to be long dead when the story opens.  The son is the
original of Henry Tilney in "Northanger Abbey," and in General Tilney
does Catherine Morland recognise a modern Marquis of Mazzini.  But the
Marquis's wife, to be sure, is _not_ dead; like the first Mrs. Rochester
she is concealed about the back premises, and, as in "Jane Eyre," it is
her movements, and those of her gaolers, that produce mystery, and make
the reader suppose that "the place is haunted."  It is, of course, only
the mystery and the "machinery" of Mrs. Radcliffe that Miss Bronte
adapted.  These passages in "Jane Eyre" have been censured, but it is not
easy to see how the novel could do without them.  Mrs. Radcliffe's tale
entirely depends on its machinery.  Her wicked Marquis, having secretly
immured Number One, has now a new and beautiful Number Two, whose
character does not bear inspection.  This domestic position, as Number
Two, we know, was declined by the austere virtue of Jane Eyre.

"Phenomena" begin in the first chapter of "A Sicilian Romance,"
mysterious lights wander about uninhabited parts of the castle, and are
vainly investigated by young Ferdinand, son of the Marquis.  This
Hippolytus the Chaste, loved all in vain by the reigning Marchioness, is
adored by, and adores, her stepdaughter, Julia.  Jealousy and revenge are
clearly indicated.  But, in chasing mysterious lights and figures through
mouldering towers, Ferdinand gets into the very undesirable position of
David Balfour, when he climbs, in the dark, the broken turret stair in
his uncle's house of Shaws (in "Kidnapped").  Here is a _fourth_ author
indebted to Mrs. Radcliffe: her disciples are Miss Austen, Byron, Miss
Bronte, and Mr. Louis Stevenson!  Ferdinand "began the ascent.  He had
not proceeded very far, when the stones of a step which his foot had just
quitted gave way, and, dragging with them those adjoining, formed a chasm
in the staircase that terrified even Ferdinand, who was left tottering on
the suspended half of the steps, in momentary expectation of falling to
the bottom with the stone on which he rested.  In the terror which this
occasioned, he attempted to save himself by catching at a kind of beam
which suspended over the stairs, when the lamp dropped from his hand, and
he was left in total darkness."

Can anything be more "amazing horrid," above all as there are mysterious
figures in and about the tower?  Mrs. Radcliffe's lamps always fall, or
are blown out, in the nick of time, an expedient already used by Clara
Reeve in that very mild but once popular ghost story, "The Old English
Baron" (1777).  All authors have such favourite devices, and I wonder how
many fights Mr. Stanley Weyman's heroes have fought, from the cellar to
their favourite tilting ground, the roof of a strange house!

Ferdinand hung on to the beam for an hour, when the ladies came with a
light, and he scrambled back to solid earth.  In his next nocturnal
research, "a sullen groan arose from beneath where he stood," and when he
tried to force a door (there are scores of such weird doors in Mrs.
Radcliffe) "a groan was repeated, more hollow and dreadful than the
first.  His courage forsook him"--and no wonder!  Of course he could not
know that the author of the groans was, in fact, his long-lost mother,
immured by his father, the wicked Marquis.  We need not follow the
narrative through the darkling crimes and crumbling galleries of this
terrible castle on the north coast of Sicily.  Everybody is always
"gazing in silent terror," and all the locks are rusty.  "A savage and
dexterous banditti" play a prominent part, and the imprisoned Ferdinand
"did not hesitate to believe that the moans he heard came from the
restless spirit of the murdered della Campo."  No working hypothesis
could seem more plausible, but it was erroneous.  Mrs. Radcliffe does not
deal in a single avowed ghost.  She finally explains away, by normal
causes, everything that she does not forget to explain.  At the most, she
indulges herself in a premonitory dream.  On this point she is true to
common sense, without quite adopting the philosophy of David Hume.  "I do
not say that spirits have appeared," she remarks, "but if several
discreet unprejudiced persons were to assure me that they had seen one--I
should not be bold or proud enough to reply, it is impossible!"  But Hume
_was_ bold and proud enough: he went further than Mrs. Radcliffe.

Scott censures Mrs. Radcliffe's employment of explanations.  He is in
favour of "boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery," or of
leaving the matter in the vague, as in the appearance of the wraith of
the dying Alice to Ravenswood.  But, in Mrs. Radcliffe's day, common
sense was so tyrannical, that the poor lady's romances would have been
excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of
her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures.  The ghost-hunt
in the castle finally brings Julia to a door, whose bolts, "strengthened
by desperation, she forced back."  There was a middle-aged lady in the
room, who, after steadily gazing on Julia, "suddenly exclaimed, 'My
daughter!' and fainted away."  Julia being about seventeen, and Madame
Mazzini, her mamma, having been immured for fifteen years, we observe, in
this recognition, the force of the maternal instinct.

The wicked Marquis was poisoned by the partner of his iniquities, who
anon stabbed herself with a poniard.  The virtuous Julia marries the
chaste Hippolytus, and, says the author, "in reviewing this story, we
perceive a singular and striking instance of moral retribution."

We also remark the futility of locking up an inconvenient wife, fabled to
be defunct, in one's own country house.  Had Mr. Rochester, in "Jane
Eyre," studied the "Sicilian Romance," he would have shunned an obsolete
system, inconvenient at best, and apt, in the long run, to be disastrous.

In the "Romance of the Forest" (1791), Mrs. Radcliffe remained true to
Mr. Stanley Weyman's favourite period, the end of the sixteenth century.
But there are no historical characters or costumes in the story, and all
the persons, as far as language and dress go, might have been alive in
1791.

The story runs thus: one de la Motte, who appears to have fallen from
dissipation to swindling, is, on the first page, discovered flying from
Paris and the law, with his wife, in a carriage.  Lost in the dark on a
moor, he follows a light, and enters an old lonely house.  He is seized
by ruffians, locked in, and expects to be murdered, which he knows that
he cannot stand, for he is timid by nature.  In fact, a ruffian puts a
pistol to La Motte's breast with one hand, while with the other he drags
along a beautiful girl of eighteen.  "Swear that you will convey this
girl where I may never see her more," exclaims the bully, and La Motte,
with the young lady, is taken back to his carriage.  "If you return
within an hour you will be welcomed with a brace of bullets," is the
ruffian's parting threat.

So La Motte, Madame La Motte, and the beautiful girl drive away, La
Motte's one desire being to find a retreat safe from the police of an
offended justice.

Is this not a very original, striking, and affecting situation;
provocative, too, of the utmost curiosity?  A fugitive from justice, in a
strange, small, dark, ancient house, is seized, threatened, and presented
with a young and lovely female stranger.  In this opening we recognise
the hand of a master genius.  There _must_ be an explanation of
proceedings so highly unconventional, and what can the reason be?  The
reader is _empoigne_ in the first page, and eagerly follows the flight of
La Motte, also of Peter, his coachman, an attached, comic, and familiar
domestic.  After a few days, the party observe, in the recesses of a
gloomy forest, the remains of a Gothic abbey.  They enter; by the light
of a flickering lamp they penetrate "horrible recesses," discover a room
handsomely provided with a trapdoor, and determine to reside in a
dwelling so congenial, though, as La Motte judiciously remarks, "not in
all respects strictly Gothic."  After a few days, La Motte finds that
somebody is inquiring for him in the nearest town.  He seeks for a hiding-
place, and explores the chambers under the trapdoor.  Here he finds, in a
large chest--what do you suppose he finds?  It was a human skeleton!  Yet
in this awful vicinity he and his wife, with Adeline (the fair stranger)
conceal themselves.  The brave Adeline, when footsteps are heard, and a
figure is beheld in the upper rooms, accosts the stranger.  His keen eye
presently detects the practicable trapdoor, he raises it, and the
cowering La Motte recognises in the dreaded visitor--his own son, who had
sought him out of filial affection.

Already Madame La Motte has become jealous of Adeline, especially as her
husband is oddly melancholy, and apt to withdraw into a glade, where he
mysteriously disappears into the recesses of a genuine Gothic sepulchre.
This, to the watchful eyes of a wife, is proof of faithlessness on the
part of a husband.  As the son, Louis, really falls in love with Adeline,
Madame La Motte becomes doubly unkind to her, and Adeline now composes
quantities of poems to Night, to Sunset, to the Nocturnal Gale, and so
on.

In this uncomfortable situation, two strangers arrive in a terrific
thunderstorm.  One is young, the other is a Marquis.  On seeing this
nobleman, "La Motte's limbs trembled, and a ghastly paleness overspread
his countenance.  The Marquis was little less agitated," and was, at
first, decidedly hostile.  La Motte implored forgiveness--for what?--and
the Marquis (who, in fact, owned the Abbey, and had a shooting lodge not
far off) was mollified.  They all became rather friendly, and Adeline
asked La Motte about the stories of hauntings, and a murder said to have
been, at some time, committed in the Abbey.  La Motte said that the
Marquis could have no connection with such fables; still, there _was_ the
skeleton.

Meanwhile, Adeline had conceived a flame for Theodore, the young officer
who accompanied his colonel, the Marquis, on their first visit to the
family.  Theodore, who returned her passion, had vaguely warned her of an
impending danger, and then had failed to keep tryst with her, one
evening, and had mysteriously disappeared.  Then unhappy Adeline dreamed
about a prisoner, a dying man, a coffin, a voice from the coffin, and the
appearance within it of the dying man, amidst torrents of blood.  The
chamber in which she saw these visions was most vividly represented.  Next
day the Marquis came to dinner, and, _though reluctantly_, consented to
pass the night: Adeline, therefore, was put in a new bedroom.  Disturbed
by the wind shaking the mouldering tapestry, she found a concealed door
behind the arras and a suite of rooms, _one of which was the chamber of
her dream_!  On the floor lay a rusty dagger!  The bedstead, being
touched, crumbled, and disclosed a small roll of manuscripts.  They were
not washing bills, like those discovered by Catherine Morland in
"Northanger Abbey."  Returning to her own chamber, Adeline heard the
Marquis professing to La Motte a passion for herself.  Conceive her
horror!  Silence then reigned, till all was sudden noise and confusion;
the Marquis flying in terror from his room, and insisting on instant
departure.  His emotion was powerfully displayed.

What had occurred?  Mrs. Radcliffe does not say, but horror, whether
caused by a conscience ill at ease, or by events of a terrific and
supernatural kind, is plainly indicated.  In daylight, the Marquis
audaciously pressed his unholy suit, and even offered marriage, a hollow
mockery, for he was well known to be already a married man.  The scenes
of Adeline's flight, capture, retention in an elegant villa of the
licentious noble, renewed flight, rescue by Theodore, with Theodore's
arrest, and wounding of the tyrannical Marquis, are all of breathless
interest.  Mrs. Radcliffe excels in narratives of romantic escapes, a
topic always thrilling when well handled.  Adeline herself is carried
back to the Abbey, but La Motte, who had rather not be a villain if he
could avoid it, enables her again to secure her freedom.  He is clearly
in the power of the Marquis, and his life has been unscrupulous, but he
retains traces of better things.  Adeline is now secretly conveyed to a
peaceful valley in Savoy, the home of the honest Peter (the coachman),
who accompanies her.  Here she learns to know and value the family of La
Luc, the kindred of her Theodore (by a romantic coincidence), and, in the
adorable scenery of Savoy, she throws many a ballad to the Moon.

La Motte, on the discovery of Adeline's flight, was cast into prison by
the revengeful Marquis, for, in fact, soon after settling in the Abbey,
it had occurred to La Motte to commence highwayman.  His very first
victim had been the Marquis, and, during his mysterious retreats to a
tomb in a glade in the forest, he had, in short, been contemplating his
booty, jewels which he could not convert into ready money.  Consequently,
when the Marquis first entered the Abbey, La Motte had every reason for
alarm, and only pacified the vindictive aristocrat by yielding to his
cruel schemes against the virtue of Adeline.

Happily for La Motte, a witness appeared at his trial, who cast a lurid
light on the character of the Marquis.  That villain, to be plain, had
murdered his elder brother (the skeleton of the Abbey), and had been
anxious to murder, it was added, his own natural daughter--that is,
Adeline!  His hired felons, however, placed her in a convent, and, later
(rather than kill her, on which the Marquis insisted), simply thrust her
into the hands of La Motte, who happened to pass by that way, as we saw
in the opening of this romance.  Thus, in making love to Adeline, his
daughter, the Marquis was, unconsciously, in an awkward position.  On
further examination of evidence, however, things proved otherwise.
Adeline was _not_ the natural daughter of the Marquis, but his niece, the
legitimate daughter and heiress of his brother (the skeleton of the
Abbey).  The MS. found by Adeline in the room of the rusty dagger added
documentary evidence, for it was a narrative of the sufferings of her
father (later the skeleton), written by him in the Abbey where he was
imprisoned and stabbed, and where his bones were discovered by La Motte.
The hasty nocturnal flight of the Marquis from the Abbey is thus
accounted for: he had probably been the victim of a terrific
hallucination representing his murdered brother; whether it was veridical
or merely subjective Mrs. Radcliffe does not decide.  Rather than face
the outraged justice of his country, the Marquis, after these
revelations, took poison.  La Motte was banished; and Adeline, now
mistress of the Abbey, removed the paternal skeleton to "the vault of his
ancestors."  Theodore and Adeline were united, and virtuously resided in
a villa on the beautiful banks of the Lake of Geneva.

Such is the "Romance of the Forest," a fiction in which character is
subordinate to plot and incident.  There is an attempt at character
drawing in La Motte, and in his wife; the hero and heroine are not
distinguishable from Julia and Hippolytus.  But Mrs. Radcliffe does not
aim at psychological niceties, and we must not blame her for withholding
what it was no part of her purpose to give.  "The Romance of the Forest"
was, so far, infinitely the most thrilling of modern English works of
fiction.  "Every reader felt the force," says Scott, "from the sage in
his study, to the family group in middle life," and nobody felt it more
than Scott himself, then a young gentleman of nineteen, who, when asked
how his time was employed, answered, "I read no Civil Law."  He did read
Mrs. Radcliffe, and, in "The Betrothed," followed her example in the
story of the haunted chamber where the heroine faces the spectre attached
to her ancient family.

"The Mysteries of Udolpho," Mrs. Radcliffe's next and most celebrated
work, is not (in the judgment of this reader, at least) her masterpiece.
The booksellers paid her what Scott, erroneously, calls "the
unprecedented sum of 500 pounds" for the romance, and they must have made
a profitable bargain.  "The public," says Scott, "rushed upon it with all
the eagerness of curiosity, and rose from it with unsated appetite."  I
arise with a thoroughly sated appetite from the "Mysteries of Udolpho."
The book, as Sir Walter saw, is "The Romance of the Forest" raised to a
higher power.  We have a similar and similarly situated heroine, cruelly
detached from her young man, and immured in a howling wilderness of a
brigand castle in the Apennines.  In place of the Marquis is a miscreant
on a larger and more ferocious scale.  The usual mysteries of voices,
lights, secret passages, and innumerable doors are provided regardless of
economy.  The great question, which I shall not answer, is, _what did the
Black Veil conceal_?  _Not_ "the bones of Laurentina," as Catherine
Morland supposed.

Here is Emily's adventure with the veil.  "She paused again, and then,
with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall--perceiving
that what it had concealed was no picture, and before she could leave the
chamber she dropped senseless on the floor.  When she recovered her
recollection, . . . horror occupied her mind."  Countless mysteries
coagulate around this veil, and the reader is apt to be disappointed when
the awful curtain is withdrawn.  But he has enjoyed, for several hundred
pages, the pleasures of anticipation.  A pedantic censor may remark that,
while the date of the story is 1580, all the virtuous people live in an
idyllic fashion, like creatures of Rousseau, existing solely for
landscape and the affections, writing poetry on Nature, animate and
inanimate, including the common Bat, and drawing in water colours.  In
those elegant avocations began, and in these, after an interval of
adventures "amazing horrid," concluded the career of Emily.

Mrs. Radcliffe keeps the many entangled threads of her complex web well
in hand, and incidents which puzzle you at the beginning fall naturally
into place before the end.  The character of the heroine's silly, vain,
unkind, and unreasonable aunt is vividly designed (that Emily should
mistake the corse of a moustached bandit for that of her aunt is an
incident hard to defend).  Valancourt is not an ordinary spotless hero,
but sows his wild oats, and reaps the usual harvest; and Annette is a
good sample of the usual _soubrette_.  When one has said that the
landscapes and bandits of this romance are worthy of Poussin and Salvator
Rosa, from whom they were probably translated into words, not much
remains to be added.  Sir Walter, after repeated perusals, considered
"Udolpho" "a step beyond Mrs. Radcliffe's former work, high as that had
justly advanced her."  But he admits that "persons of no mean judgment"
preferred "The Romance of the Forest."  With these amateurs I would be
ranked.  The ingenuity and originality of the "Romance" are greater: our
friend the skeleton is better than that Thing which was behind the Black
Veil, the escapes of Adeline are more thrilling than the escape of Emily,
and the "Romance" is not nearly so long, not nearly so prolix as
"Udolpho."

The roof and crown of Mrs. Radcliffe's work is "The Italian" (1797), for
which she received 800 pounds. {6}  The scene is Naples, the date about
1764; the topic is the thwarted loves of Vivaldi and Ellena; the villain
is the admirable Schedoni, the prototype of Byron's lurid characters.

"The Italian" is an excellent novel.  The Prelude, "the dark and vaulted
gateway," is not unworthy of Hawthorne, who, I suspect, had studied Mrs.
Radcliffe.  The theme is more like a theme of this world than usual.  The
parents of a young noble might well try to prevent him from marrying an
unknown and penniless girl.  The Marchese Vivaldi only adopts the
ordinary paternal measures; the Marchesa, and her confessor the
dark-souled Schedoni, go farther--as far as assassination.  The casuistry
by which Schedoni brings the lady to this pass, while representing her as
the originator of the scheme, is really subtle, and the scenes between
the pair show an extraordinary advance on Mrs. Radcliffe's earlier art.
The mysterious Monk who counteracts Schedoni remains an unsolved mystery
to me, but of that I do not complain.  He is as good as the Dweller in
the Catacombs who haunts Miriam in Hawthorne's "Marble Faun."  The
Inquisition, its cells, and its tribunals are coloured

      "As when some great painter dips
   His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse."

The comic valet, Paulo, who insists on being locked up in the dungeons of
the Inquisition merely because his master is there, reminds one of Samuel
Weller, he is a Neapolitan Samivel.  The escapes are Mrs. Radcliffe's
most exciting escapes, and to say that is to say a good deal.  Poetry is
not written, or not often, by the heroine.  The scene in which Schedoni
has his dagger raised to murder Ellena, when he discovers that she is his
daughter, "is of a new, grand, and powerful character" (Scott), while it
is even more satisfactory to learn later that Ellena was _not_ Schedoni's
daughter after all.

Why Mrs. Radcliffe, having reached such a pitch of success, never again
published a novel, remains more mysterious than any of her Mysteries.
Scott justly remarks that her censors attacked her "by showing that she
does not possess the excellences proper to a style of composition totally
different from that which she has attempted."  This is the usual way of
reviewers.  Tales that fascinated Scott, Fox, and Sheridan, "which
possess charms for the learned and unlearned, the grave and gay, the
gentleman and clown," do not deserve to be dismissed with a sneer by
people who have never read them.  Following Horace Walpole in some
degree, Mrs. Radcliffe paved the way for Scott, Byron, Maturin, Lewis,
and Charlotte Bronte, just as Miss Burney filled the gap between Smollett
and Miss Austen.  Mrs. Radcliffe, in short, kept the Lamp of Romance
burning much more steadily than the lamps which, in her novels, are
always blown out, in the moment of excited apprehension, by the night
wind walking in the dank corridors of haunted abbeys.  But mark the
cruelty of an intellectual parent!  Horace Walpole was Mrs. Radcliffe's
father in the spirit.  Yet, on September 4, 1794, he wrote to Lady
Ossory: "I have read some of the descriptive verbose tales, of which your
Ladyship says I was the patriarch by several mothers" (Miss Reeve and
Mrs. Radcliffe?).  "All I can say for myself is that I do not think my
concubines have produced issue more natural for excluding the aid of
anything marvellous."




CHAPTER VII: A SCOTTISH ROMANTICIST OF 1830


The finding of a rare book that you have wanted long is one of the
happier moments in life.  Whatever we may think of life when we
contemplate it as a whole, it is a delight to discover what one has
sought for years, especially if the book be a book which you really want
to read, and not a thing whose value is given by the fashion of
collecting.  Perhaps nobody ever collected before

   THE
   DEATH-WAKE, OR LUNACY
   A NECROMAUNT

   In Three Chimeras

   BY THOMAS T. STODDART.

   "Is't like that lead contains her?--
   It were too gross
   To rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave."--
   _Shakespeare_.

   EDINBURGH:
   Printed for HENRY CONSTABLE, Edinburgh,
   And HURST, CHANCE, & CO., London.

   MDCCCXXXI.

This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as
will be shown.  But first of the author.  Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was
born in 1810.  He died in 1880.  Through all his pilgrimage of
three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the
Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod.  He
"was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are
you doing now."  He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish
fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within
hearing of the Tweed.  His memoir, published by his daughter, in
"Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo
fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_.

But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the
old angling sage, that we have to do.  Miss Stoddart has discreetly
republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being
classical in their way.  Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:--

   "Two desires toss about
      The poet's feverish blood,
   One drives him to the world without,
      And one to solitude."

The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fishing.  He began with
poetry.  "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal
tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and
with no meaner tool.  Every other dramatic form he despised."  It is
curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at
these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile
Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and
with much the same romantic tastes.  Stoddart had, luckily, another love
besides the Muse.  "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in
gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge."  Finally, the
rod and midge prevailed.

   "Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing,
   Mouse body and laverock wing."

But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he wrote
and published the 

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