The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22
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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
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THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME XXII
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ ..........
[Illustration: R. L. S. SPEARING FISH IN THE BOW OF THE SCHOONER
"EQUATOR"]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME TWENTY-TWO
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS
THE PENTLAND RISING
PAGE
I. THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 3
II. THE BEGINNING 6
III. THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 8
IV. RULLION GREEN 13
V. A RECORD OF BLOOD 17
SKETCHES
I. THE SATIRIST 25
II. NUITS BLANCHES 27
III. THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES 30
IV. NURSES 34
V. A CHARACTER 37
COLLEGE PAPERS
I. EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824 41
II. THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY 45
III. DEBATING SOCIETIES 53
IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS 58
V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE 63
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
I. A RETROSPECT 71
II. COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK 80
III. ROADS 90
IV. NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN 97
V. ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 103
VI. AN AUTUMN EFFECT 112
VII. A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY 132
VIII. FOREST NOTES 142
CRITICISMS
I. LORD LYTTON'S "FABLES IN SONG" 171
II. SALVINI'S MACBETH 180
III. BAGSTER'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS" 186
AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND 199
THE CHARITY BAZAAR 213
THE LIGHT-KEEPER 217
ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES 220
ON THE THERMAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS 225
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
I. DAVOS IN WINTER 241
II. HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 244
III. ALPINE DIVERSIONS 248
IV. THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS 252
STEVENSON AT PLAY
INTRODUCTION BY LLOYD OSBOURNE 259
WAR CORRESPONDENCE FROM STEVENSON'S NOTE-BOOK 263
THE DAVOS PRESS
MORAL EMBLEMS, ETC.: FACSIMILES
ADVERTISEMENT OF BLACK CANYON
BLACK CANYON, OR WILD ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST
NOT I, AND OTHER POEMS
MORAL EMBLEMS
ADVERTISEMENT OF MORAL EMBLEMS: EDITION DE LUXE
ADVERTISEMENT OF MORAL EMBLEMS: SECOND COLLECTION
MORAL EMBLEMS: SECOND COLLECTION
A MARTIAL ELEGY FOR SOME LEAD SOLDIERS
ADVERTISEMENT OF THE GRAVER AND THE PEN
THE GRAVER AND THE PEN
MORAL TALES
ROBIN AND BEN; OR, THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY
THE BUILDER'S DOOM
JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS
THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666
A cloud of witnesses ly here, Who for Christ's interest did appear.
_Inscription on Battle-field at Rullion Green._
EDINBURGH
ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 PRINCES STREET
1866
_Facsimile of original Title-page_
THE PENTLAND RISING
I
THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT
"Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
This tomb doth show for what some men did die."
_Monument, Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh_, 1661-1668.[1]
Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies
which followed it. It is, as it were, the evening of the night of
persecution--a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the
noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed. This fact,
of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however, an
additional interest.
The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were "out of measure
increased," says Bishop Burnet, "by the new incumbents who were put in
the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally very mean and
despicable in all respects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard;
they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of them were openly vicious.
They ... were indeed the dreg and refuse of the northern parts. Those of
them who arose above contempt or scandal were men of such violent
tempers that they were as much hated as the others were despised."[2] It
was little to be wondered at, from this account, that the country-folk
refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
ministers in the fields. But this was not to be allowed, and their
persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the
parishioners' names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty
shillings Scots to the name of each absenter. In this way very large
debts were incurred by persons altogether unable to pay. Besides this,
landlords were fined for their tenants' absences, tenants for their
landlords', masters for their servants', servants for their masters',
even though they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance.
And as the curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common
soldier, it may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very
sufficient nor well proven.
When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household
utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to his
wealth, were quartered on the offender. The coarse and drunken privates
filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed
their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed
the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to
destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was
consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home. For all this attention
each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain
sum of money per day--three shillings sterling, according to _Naphtali._
And frequently they were forced to pay quartering money for more men
than were in reality "cessed on them." At that time it was no strange
thing to behold a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and
many others who were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in
some other way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge
from arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands.[3]
One example in particular we may cite:
John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately for
himself, a Nonconformist. First he was fined in four hundred pounds
Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and
ninety-three pounds Scots. He was next obliged to leave his house and
flee from place to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse. His
wife and children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants were
fined till they too were almost ruined. As a final stroke, they drove
away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them.[4] Surely it was time that
something were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such
tyranny.
About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself
Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt. He displayed
some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and
stating that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by
their southern brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter. "He
was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that was very
often," said Bishop Burnet. "He was a learned man, but had always been
in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey orders. He told me he had
no regard to any law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military
way."[5]
This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave
spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame of
insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who
perpetrated it with redoubled force.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Theater of Mortality," p. 10; Edin. 1713.
[2] "History of My Own Times," beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert
Burnet, p. 158.
[3] Wodrow's "Church History," Book II. chap. i. sect. 1.
[4] Crookshank's "Church History," 1751, second ed. p. 202.
[5] Burnet, p. 348.
II
THE BEGINNING
I love no warres, If it must be
I love no jarres, Warre we must see
Nor strife's fire. (So fates conspire),
May discord cease, May we not feel
Let's live in peace: The force of steel:
This I desire. This I desire.
T. JACKSON, 1651.[6]
Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dairy and demanded
the payment of his fines. On the old man's refusing to pay, they forced
a large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh his corn. The
field was a certain distance out of the clachan, and four persons,
disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all night, met
this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers to work
for the ruin of their friend. However, chilled to the bone by their
night on the hills, and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the
village inn to refresh themselves. Suddenly some people rushed into the
room where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about
to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle. This was too much for
them to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of this gross
outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive should be
released. On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in the front room,
high words were given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed
forth from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn
swords. One of the latter, John M'Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and
shot the corporal in the body. The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it
was loaded, to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so
much disturbed that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long
afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.
The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
and the rebellion was commenced.[7]
And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of himself; for,
strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary
composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own
adventures just mentioned, a large number of essays and short
biographies, and a work on war, entitled "Pallas Armata." The following
are some of the shorter pieces: "Magick," "Friendship," "Imprisonment,"
"Anger," "Revenge," "Duells," "Cruelty," "A Defence of some of the
Ceremonies of the English Liturgie--to wit--Bowing at the Name of Jesus,
The frequent repetition of the Lord's Prayer and Good Lord deliver us,
Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Cannonicall Coats," etc. From
what we know of his character we should expect "Anger" and "Cruelty" to
be very full and instructive. But what earthly right he had to meddle
with ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.
Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning
Gray's proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its
character, he paid no attention to it. On the evening of the 14th,
Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he
had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant--a story rendered
singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James
instantly despatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to
Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dairy, and commanded the thirteen or
fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to his
lodging for supplies.
On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse
and 150 foot. Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with a
considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner's
lodging. Though it was between eight and nine o'clock, that worthy,
being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window.
Neilson and some others cried, "You may have fair quarter."
"I need no quarter," replied Sir James; "nor can I be a prisoner, seeing
there is no war declared." On being told, however, that he must either
be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the street in his
night-shirt. Here Gray showed himself very desirous of killing him, but
he was overruled by Corsack. However, he was taken away a prisoner,
Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner naïvely
remarks, "there was good reason for it, for he mounted himself on a
farre better one of mine." A large coffer containing his clothes and
money, together with all his papers, were taken away by the rebels. They
robbed Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his
horse, drank the King's health at the market cross, and then left
Dumfries.[8]
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Fuller's "Historie of the Holy Warre," fourth ed. 1651.
[7] Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17.
[8] Sir J. Turner's "Memoirs," pp. 148-50.
III
THE MARCH OF THE REBELS
"Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
Because with them we signed the Covenant."
_Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton._[9]
On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at
Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this "horrid rebellion." In
the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided--much to the wrath of some
members; and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures were
most energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards round
the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced to take the
oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give in their
names. Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,
trembled--trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him
from his chariot on Magus Muir,--for he knew how he had sold his trust,
how he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunderbolts be
forged. But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was unrelenting,
unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise of pardon,
no inducement to submission. He said, "If you submit not you must die,"
but never added, "If you submit you may live!"[10]
Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At Carsphairn they were
deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected
to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James's money. Who he was
is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently
forgeries--that, and his final flight, appear to indicate that he was an
agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was
heard to say, "That, if he might have his wish, he would have them all
turn rebels and go to arms."[11]
Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.
Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at the
best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits were
paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force. In his
description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,
admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying
souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or
folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He appears,
notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his
cruel "phanaticks," as the following extract sufficiently proves:
"Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and order
given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached by Mr.
Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited me to heare 'that
phanatick sermon' (for soe they merrilie called it). They said that
preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne me, which they
heartilie wished. I answered to them that I was under guards, and that
if they intended to heare that sermon, it was probable I might likewise,
for it was not like my guards wold goe to church and leave me alone at
my lodgeings. Bot to what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be
hard to turne a Turner. Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I
said, if I did not come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine
me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had
exacted from the phanatics."[12]
This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month. The
following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and
certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with
wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this
movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with
impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:
"Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a visite; I
called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse it. It fell
Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one of the most bombastick
graces that ever I heard in my life. He summoned God Almightie very
imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for that was his language). 'And
if,' said he, 'thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for
thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt
not fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to
fight for it. They say,' said he, 'that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are
coming with the King's General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot
a threshing to us.' This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly
and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my thirst."[13]
Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in
some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the
command, would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was
sent either into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to
prevent him from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He
was, at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark,
permitted to behold their evolutions. "I found their horse did consist
of four hundreth and fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and
upwards.... The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and
pistoll, some onlie with suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith
(scythe), forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long." He
admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how they
had attained to it in so short a time.[14]
At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great
wapinshaw, they were charged--awful picture of depravity!--with the
theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while
the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare
opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues--that among a thousand
men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in
the camp? At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief
rebels. In it occurs the following:
"The just sense whereof"--the sufferings of the country--"made us
choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than
to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and
tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery."[15]
The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph
at the head of this chapter seems to refer.
A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to
Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army
stopped. But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet,
of "Horse! horse!" and "Mount the prisoner!" resounded through the
night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest
to toil onwards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the
moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended. Chilled to the bone,
worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they
marched to destruction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from
their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some
house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first,
then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen,
whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves
from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be
descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their
fellow-rebels seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards
through the sinking moss. Those who kept together--a miserable
few--often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging
comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for
assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind,
and the rain, and the darkness--onward to their defeat at Pentland, and
their scaffold at Edinburgh. It was calculated that they lost one half
of their army on that disastrous night-march.
Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from
Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[9] "A Cloud of Witnesses," p. 376.
[10] Wodrow, pp. 19, 20.
[11] "A Hind Let Loose," p. 123.
[12] Turner, p. 163.
[13] Turner, p. 198.
[14] _Ibid._ p. 167.
[15] Wodrow, p. 29.
[16] Turner, Wodrow, and "Church History" by James Kirkton, an outed
minister of the period.
IV
RULLION GREEN
"From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
From Remonstrators with associate bands,
Good Lord, deliver us!"
_Royalist Rhyme_, KIRKTON, p. 127.
Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, and within that
distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered
that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained
winding-sheet.[17] Many thought that this apparition was a portent of
the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising.
On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset.
The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of
the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of
flat marshy ground. On the highest of the two mounds--that nearest the
Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body--was the greater part
of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Barscob and the
Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak,
half-armed infantry. Their position was further strengthened by the
depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion
Burn.
The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich
plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless,
snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance.
To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and
bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot
of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into
blue indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire
hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was
cast over that peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels
awaited their defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow
lifted his head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening
eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his
cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening.
It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was
raised: "The enemy! Here come the enemy!"
Unwilling to believe their own doom--for our insurgents still hoped for
success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on at
Colinton--they called out, "They are some of our own."
"They are too blacke" (_i.e._ numerous), "fie! fie! for ground to draw
up on," cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for his men,
and proving that it was not till after this time that his forces were
finally arranged.[18]
First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent
obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels. An
equal number of Learmont's men met them, and, after a struggle, drove
them back. The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all pursuit,
and Wallace, on perceiving it, despatched a body of foot to occupy both
the burn and some ruined sheep walls on the farther side.
Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the
hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then despatched a mingled
body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost, but they also
were driven back. A third charge produced a still more disastrous
effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men by a
reinforcement.
These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General's ranks,
for several of his men flung down their arms. Urged by such fatal
symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men, and closed
in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of the insurgent
army. In the increasing twilight the burning matches of the firelocks,
shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the approaching army
a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant breathing flame into
the darkness.
Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, "The God of
Jacob! The God of Jacob!" and prayed with uplifted hands for
victory.[19]
But still the Royalist troops closed in.
Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture
him with his own hands. Accordingly he charged forward, presenting his
pistols. Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell's buff coat and
fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar to his age, the
Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by
enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket,
charged his pistol therewith. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is
likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant,
who was killed.[20]
Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped
in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor--tightening, closing,
crushing every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils.
The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and
though, as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general
flight was the result.
But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the
death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the
liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in
the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by
charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and
cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their
winding-sheets!
_Inscription on stone at Rullion Green_
HERE AND NEAR TO THIS PLACE LYES THE REVEREND M^R JOHN CROOKSHANK AND
M^R ANDREW M^CCORMICK MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND ABOUT FIFTY OTHER
TRUE COVENANTED PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR
OWN INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF
REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER 1666.
REV. 12. 11. ERECTED SEPT. 28 1738.
_Back of stone_:
A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
Who for Christ's Interest did appear,
For to restore true Liberty,
O'erturned then by tyranny.
And by proud Prelats who did Rage
Against the Lord's own heritage.
They sacrificed were for the laws
Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
These heroes fought with great renown
By falling got the Martyr's crown.[21]
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Kirkton, p. 244.
[18] Kirkton.
[19] Turner.
[20] Kirkton.
[21] Kirkton.
V
A RECORD OF BLOOD
"They cut his hands ere he was dead,
And after that struck off his head.
His blood under the altar cries
For vengeance on Christ's enemies."
_Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont._[22]
Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on
the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march
of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out. With colours flying, and
with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered Edinburgh. But his
banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners were marched within
his ranks. The old man knew it all. That martial and triumphant strain
was the death-knell of his friends and of their cause, the rust-hued
spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death,
and the prisoners were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle
to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he
lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe;
he would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more
than midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim
to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to
the sea by many a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was spared to
him--he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since
Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers.[23]
When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander
Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. Disliking their
occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it. All the night
through they kept up a continuous series of "alarms and incursions,"
"cries of 'Stand!' 'Give fire!'" etc., which forced the prelate to flee
to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was
denied him at home.[24] Now, however, when all danger to himself was
past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, and scant was the justice
likely to be shown to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate
was by. The prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a part of St. Giles'
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it
spoken, they were amply supplied with food.[25]
Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which had
been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the
miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no
opinion--certainly a suggestive circumstance,--but Lord Lee declared
that this would not interfere with their legal trial; "so to bloody
executions they went."[26] To the number of thirty they were condemned
and executed; while two of them, Hugh M'Kail, a young minister, and
Neilson of Corsack, were tortured with the boots.
The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were
dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; "the
heads of Major M'Culloch and the two Gordons," it was resolved, says
Kirkton, "should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright; the two
Hamiltons and Strong's head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain
Arnot's sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. The armes of all the ten,
because they hade with uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark,
were sent to the people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing
these arms on the top of the prison."[27] Among these was John Neilson,
the Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at Dumfries; in return
for which service Sir James attempted, though without success, to get
the poor man reprieved. One of the condemned died of his wounds between
the day of condemnation and the day of execution. "None of them," says
Kirkton, "would save their life by taking the declaration and renouncing
the Covenant, though it was offered to them.... But never men died in
Scotland so much lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those
in the country. When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they
clasped each other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.
When Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian
experiences, and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm,
and read John iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But
most of all, when Mr. M'Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was
never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street,
or in all the numberless windows in the mercate place." [28]
The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:
"Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the
world's consolations. Farewell to all my friends, whose company hath
been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have done with the light of
the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life, everlasting
love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory. Praise to Him that sits
upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul,
that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and healed
all my diseases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that excel in strength,
ye ministers of His that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my soul!"
[29]
After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the
following words of touching eloquence:
"And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and begin my
intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father
and mother, friends and relations! Farewell the world and all delights!
Farewell meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and stars!--Welcome God and
Father! Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!
Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation! Welcome
glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!"[30]
At Glasgow too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers to
beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears. Hideous
refinement of revenge! Even the last words which drop from the lips of a
dying man--words surely the most sincere and the most unbiassed which
mortal mouth can utter--even these were looked upon as poisoned and as
poisonous. "Drown their last accents," was the cry, "lest they should
lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their
doom!"[31] But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would
think--unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and
fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of
drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the
last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when
the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of
the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.
Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who
fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and
persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike
of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near
Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the
ground; of how it covered the house of their murderer; and of how it
scared him with its lurid glare.
Hear Daniel Defoe:[32]
"If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who can
justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God 'That
oppression makes a wise man mad'? And therefore were there no other
original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of
Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of those
times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated to
all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked in
a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God, or
the laws of the country."
Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the fashion
of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn, the noble
band of Covenanters,--though the bitter laugh at their old-world
religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling
silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife
through all society,--be charitable to what was evil and honest to what
was good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty,
for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two
hundred years ago.
EDINBURGH, 28_th November_ 1866.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] "Cloud of Witnesses," p. 389; Edin. 1765.
[23] Kirkton, p. 247.
[24] Kirkton, p. 254.
[25] _Ibid._ p. 247.
[26] _Ibid._ pp. 247, 248.
[27] _Ibid._ p. 248.
[28] Kirkton, p. 249.
[29] "Naphtali," p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.
[30] Wodrow, p. 59.
[31] Kirkton, p. 246.
[32] Defoe's "History of the Church of Scotland."
SKETCHES
SKETCHES
I
THE SATIRIST
My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight. He was by
habit and repute a satirist. If he did occasionally condemn anything or
anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto escaped,
it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody. While I was
with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook my reverence for
Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of the Almighty Himself,
on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments. Nothing escaped
his blighting censure. At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or
lowered my estimation of a friend. I saw everything with new eyes, and
could only marvel at my former blindness. How was it possible that I had
not before observed A's false hair, B's selfishness, or C's boorish
manners? I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple
of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear
openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast. I half expected
that these miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise
their betters and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the
fate of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have
prevailed upon me to decline. But there was no need for such churlish
virtue. More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in
our gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing
than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in
scorn.
I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,
but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case. To
understand it, let us take a simile. Suppose yourself walking down the
street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of a flask of
vitriol. You would be much diverted with the grimaces and contortions of
his victims; and at the same time you would fear to leave his arm until
his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once among the crowd, you would
run a good chance yourself of baptism with his biting liquor. Now my
companion's vitriol was inexhaustible.
It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being
anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to
criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.
After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go
farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that
things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they
do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue
altogether. He has learnt the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;
but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to
wit, that no man is wholly bad. Like the inmate of a coloured star, he
has eyes for one colour alone. He has a keen scent after evil, but his
nostrils are plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils
before going about the streets of the plague-struck city.
Why does he do this? It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge of
good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow fat
in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house. This was my first thought; but
my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist was wise,
wise in his generation, like the unjust steward. He does not want
light, because the darkness is more pleasant. He does not wish to see
the good, because he is happier without it. I recollect that when I
walked with him, I was in a state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and
Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded
between their lips; and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual
state. He has the forbidden fruit in his waistcoat pocket, and can make
himself a god as often and as long as he likes. He has raised himself
upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of
ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest,
content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily
attained. Yes, certes, much more easily attained. He has not risen by
climbing himself, but by pushing others down. He has grown great in his
own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of
Æsop's frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing glass on
everybody else. And I think altogether that his is a better, a safer,
and a surer recipe than most others.
After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I have been comparing
myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the
comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I
do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me
very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.
II
NUITS BLANCHES
If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke from
his few hours' slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie
awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among the silent
streets. These nights of pain and weariness are graven on my mind; and
so when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I heard or
saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.
Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing came,
save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was made by
Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished fire.
It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the roar and
clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild
career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance and passing
swiftly below the window; yet always returning again from the place
whence first he came, as though, baffled by some higher power, he had
retraced his steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.
As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling of a
carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed within a few
streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen. This,
too, was as a reminiscence.
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the
garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a
lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there
were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well of
the staircase. For what cause I know not, just as it used to be in the
old days that the feverish child might be the better served, a peep of
gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me. But where I was, all was
darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the clock that
came ceaselessly up to my ear.
The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on
the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all
night through, I waited and longed of old. It was my custom, as the
hours dragged on, to repeat the question, "When will the carts come in?"
and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
street that I have heard once more this morning. The road before our
house is a great thoroughfare for early carts. I know not, and I never
have known, what they carry, whence they come, or whither they go. But I
know that, long ere dawn, and for hours together, they stream
continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the
same clink of horses' feet. It was not for nothing that they made the
burthen of my wishes all night through. They are really the first
throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to
hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a
hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the
freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the carters
cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one
another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter
comes up to you through the darkness. There is now an end of mystery and
fear. Like the knocking at the door in _Macbeth_,[33] or the cry of the
watchman in the _Tour de Nesle_, they show that the horrible cæsura is
over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day is breaking and
the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself among the
streets.
In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious
knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had
dreamed myself all night.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] See a short essay of De Quincey's.
III
THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES
It is all very well to talk of death as "a pleasant potion of
immortality"; but the most of us, I suspect, are of "queasy stomachs,"
and find it none of the sweetest.[34] The graveyard may be cloak-room to
Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very ugly and offensive vestibule
in itself, however fair may be the life to which it leads. And though
Enoch and Elias went into the temple through a gate which certainly may
be called Beautiful, the rest of us have to find our way to it through
Ezekiel's low-bowed door and the vault full of creeping things and all
manner of abominable beasts. Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of
mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an
alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else. It was
in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning found me
lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars', thoroughly sick of
the town, the country, and myself.
Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in
hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was
delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some
snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something,
in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's
law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the
very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped
up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such
conversation: the talk of fishmongers running usually on stockfish and
haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches
that positively smell of the graveyard. But on this occasion I was
doomed to disappointment. My two friends were far into the region of
generalities. Their profession was forgotten in their electorship.
Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of gravedigging. "Na, na,"
said the one, "ye're a' wrang." "The English and Irish Churches,"
answered the other, in a tone as if he had made the remark before, and
it had been called in question--"The English and Irish Churches have
_impoverished_ the country."
"Such are the results of education," thought I as I passed beside them
and came fairly among the tombs. Here, at least, there were no
commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning's leader, to distract or
offend me. The old shabby church showed, as usual, its quaint extent of
roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the
fire of thirty years ago. A chill dank mist lay over all. The Old
Greyfriars' churchyard was in perfection that morning, and one could go
round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar
interruption. On this stone the Covenant was signed. In that vault, as
the story goes, John Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil. From
that window Burke the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs,
and perhaps o' nights let himself down over the sill to rob some
new-made grave. Certainly he would have a selection here. The very walks
have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is
uneven, because (as I was once quaintly told) "when the wood rots it
stands to reason the soil should fall in," which, from the law of
gravitation, is certainly beyond denial. But it is round the boundary
that there are the finest tombs. The whole irregular space is, as it
were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death's-heads and
scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and Latin
mottoes--rich in them to such an extent that their proper space has run
over, and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns and
ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.
These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid
dwelling-houses, and every here and there a clothes-pole projects
between two monuments its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red.
With a grim irony they recall the banners in the Invalides, banners as
appropriate perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these
others above the dust of armies. Why they put things out to dry on that
particular morning it was hard to imagine. The grass was grey with drops
of rain, the headstones black with moisture. Yet, in despite of weather
and common-sense, there they hung between the tombs; and beyond them I
could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole families
were born and fed, and slept and died. At one a girl sat singing merrily
with her back to the graveyard; and from another came the shrill tones
of a scolding woman. Every here and there was a town garden full of
sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside upon the window-seat. But
you do not grasp the full connection between these houses of the dead
and the living, the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid
houses, till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface
of the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its
wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall
monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back. It startles you
to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the tomb.
A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones
that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had
taught me to expect little from Greyfriars' sextons, and I passed him by
in silence. A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof eyed me
curiously. A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened on strange
meats, slipped past me. A little boy at a window put his finger to his
nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon my dignity, and turned
grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the
shadow of vaults.
Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the
other younger, with a child in her arms. Both had faces eaten with
famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of
degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress
is lost. As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious friend
or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell glass over
it, as is the custom. The effect of that ring of dull yellow among so
many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant than it is in
modern cemeteries, where every second mound can boast a similar coronal;
and here, where it was the exception and not the rule, I could even
fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering were the tears of
those who laid it where it was. As the two women came up to it, one of
them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked long and silently through
the clouded shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating
to and fro to lull the muling baby. I was struck a great way off with
something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and haggard
women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to hear what they
were saying. Surely on them the spirit of death and decay had descended;
I had no education to dread here: should I not have a chance of seeing
nature? Alas! a pawnbroker could not have been more practical and
commonplace, for this was what the kneeling woman said to the woman
upright--this and nothing more: "Eh, what extravagance!"
O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed--wonderful, but
wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity. Thy men are more like
numerals than men. They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their
professions written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in
Shakespeare's theatre. The precepts of economy have pierced into the
lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a
respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism
among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia. For lo! thy very gravediggers
talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the
cost of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.
Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates
again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all whom
I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green mounds
and blackened headstones.
FOOTNOTES:
[34] "Religio Medici," Part ii.
[35] "Duchess of Malfi."
IV
NURSES
I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
death. It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking forth
upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow blankets, and
with long lines of underclothing fluttering between the battered posts.
There were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by one of "her
children," and there were flowers in the window, and a sickly canary
withered into consumption in an ornamental cage. The bed, with its
checked coverlid, was in a closet. A great Bible lay on the table; and
her drawers were full of "scones," which it was her pleasure to give to
young visitors such as I was then.
You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and the
cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that died, were
all indications of the want that ate into her heart. I think I know a
little of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure as if I had seen
her, that she sat many an hour in silent tears, with the big Bible open
before her clouded eyes.
If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that had
linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched suddenly
through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn gradually
off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike! She
had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance--repugnance which
no man can conquer--towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty of the
earlier stage. She had spent her best and happiest years in tending,
watching, and learning to love like a mother this child, with which she
has no connection and to which she has no tie. Perhaps she refused some
sweetheart (such things have been), or put him off and off, until he
lost heart and turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving this
creature that had wound itself about her heart. And the end of it
all,--her month's warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the
life to vain regret. Or, worse still, to see the child gradually
forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect and neglect on the
plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning to treat her as a
servant whom he had treated a few years before as a mother. She sees the
Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness and love unutterable in her
heart she had bought for him years ago out of her slender savings,
neglected for some newer gift of his father, lying in dust in the
lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and the act applauded for its
unfeeling charity. Little wonder if she becomes hurt and angry, and
attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her old power back again. We are not
all patient Grizzels, by good fortune, but the most of us human beings
with feelings and tempers of our own.
And so in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely
and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of
thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the
children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she
gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late
charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short
visit. How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them on her
lonely bed! How unsatisfactory their realisation, when the forgetful
child, half wondering, checks with every word and action the outpouring
of her maternal love! How bitter and restless the memories that they
leave behind! And for the rest, what else has she?--to watch them with
eager eyes as they go to school, to sit in church where she can see them
every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed in the street, or
deliberately cut because the great man or the great woman are with
friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise the old woman that
loved them.
When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!
Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark, with
the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit upon the
table.
And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers--mothers in
everything but the travail and the thanks. It is for this that they have
remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household servant.
It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart, and have no
fireside or offspring of their own.
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can
be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest
feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as long as you
need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end? This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing
if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to
those who share their toil and have no part in their reward.
V
A CHARACTER
The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat. So
far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes, you
can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure
depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of
Hell for its own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching an
omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing at
my side as though he would cough his soul out; and turning round, I saw
him stopping under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round him and
his whole face convulsed. It seemed as if he could not live long; and so
the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished my cigar up
and down the lighted streets.
He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness. He is dumb;
but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps I should say,
his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into the service of
corruption. Look at him, and he will sign to you with his bloated head,
and when you go to him in answer to the sign, thinking perhaps that the
poor dumb man has lost his way, you will see what he writes upon his
slate. He haunts the doors of schools, and shows such inscriptions as
these to the innocent children that come out. He hangs about
picture-galleries, and makes the noblest pictures the text for some
silent homily of vice. His industry is a lesson to ourselves. Is it not
wonderful how he can triumph over his infirmities and do such an amount
of harm without a tongue? Wonderful industry--strange, fruitless,
pleasureless toil? Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see
his disinterested and laborious service? Ah, but the devil knows better
than this: he knows that this man is penetrated with the love of evil
and that all his pleasure is shut up in wickedness: he recognises him,
perhaps, as a fit type for mankind of his satanic self, and watches over
his effigy as we might watch over a favourite likeness. As the business
man comes to love the toil, which he only looked upon at first as a
ladder towards other desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the
dumb man has felt the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before
the eyes of sin. It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is
hideous and loathsome; for even vice has her Hörsel and her devotees,
who love her for her own sake.
COLLEGE PAPERS
COLLEGE PAPERS
I
EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824
On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the _Lapsus
Linguæ; or, the College Tatler_; and on the 7th the first number
appeared. On Friday the 2nd of April "_Mr. Tatler_ became speechless."
Its history was not all one success; for the editor (who applies to
himself the words of Iago, "I am nothing if I am not critical")
over-stepped the bounds of caution, and found himself seriously
embroiled with the powers that were. There appeared in No. XVI. a most
bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared to
Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very prettily censured for
publishing only the first volume of a class-book, and making all
purchasers pay for both. Sir John Leslie took up the matter angrily,
visited Carfrae the publisher, and threatened him with an action, till
he was forced to turn the hapless _Lapsus_ out of doors. The maltreated
periodical found shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and NO.
XVII. was duly issued from the new office. NO. XVII. beheld _Mr.
Tatler's_ humiliation, in which, with fulsome apology and not very
credible assurances of respect and admiration, he disclaims the article
in question, and advertises a new issue of NO. XVI. with all
objectionable matter omitted. This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in
a later advertisement, "a new and improved edition." This was the only
remarkable adventure of _Mr. Tatler's_ brief existence; unless we
consider as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation of
_Blackwood_, and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on the
impiety of the same dull effusion. He laments the near approach of his
end in pathetic terms. "How shall we summon up sufficient courage," says
he, "to look for the last time on our beloved little devil and his
inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able to pass No. 14 Infirmary
Street and feel that all its attractions are over? How shall we bid
farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long greatcoat, wooden
leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative at the gate of
_Alma Mater?_" But alas! he had no choice: _Mr. Tatler_, whose career,
he says himself, had been successful, passed peacefully away, and has
ever since dumbly implored "the bringing home of bell and burial."
_Alter et idem_. A very different affair was the _Lapsus Linguæ_ from
the _Edinburgh University Magazine_. The two prospectuses alone, laid
side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the repeal of the
paper duty. The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1823-4 was almost
wholly dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses,
and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song. But
_Mr. Tatler_ was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages
afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it
then was. The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their
hats in the class-room. There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and "Carriage Entrance" was posted above the main arch, on what the
writer pleases to call "coarse, unclassic boards." The benches of the
"Speculative" then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the
"Dialectic" is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which
it is pointedly said that "nothing else could conveniently be made of
them." However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that
they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the taste of session
1823-4, which found enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted
cheese at Ambrose's, or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull's.
Duelling was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell
to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat
would be the result. Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
were in every one's mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted
Byron's poetry and Scott's novels, informed the ladies of his belief in
phrenology. In the present day he would dilate on "Red as a rose is
she," and then mention that he attends Old Greyfriars', as a tacit claim
to intellectual superiority. I do not know that the advance is much.
But _Mr. Tatler's_ best performances were three short papers in which he
hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the "_Divinity_," the
"_Medical_," and the "_Law_" of session 1823-4. The fact that there was
no notice of the "_Arts_" seems to suggest that they stood in the same
intermediate position as they do now--the epitome of student-kind. _Mr.
Tatler's_ satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown
superannuated in _all_ its limbs. His descriptions may limp at some
points, but there are certain broad traits that apply equally well to
session 1870-71. He shows us the _Divinity_ of the period--tall, pale,
and slender--his collar greasy, and his coat bare about the seams--"his
white neckcloth serving four days, and regularly turned the
third,"--"the rim of his hat deficient in wool,"--and "a weighty volume
of theology under his arm." He was the man to buy cheap "a snuff-box, or
a dozen of pencils, or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred
quills," at any of the public sale-rooms. He was noted for cheap
purchases, and for exceeding the legal tender in halfpence. He haunted
"the darkest and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery." He was to be
seen issuing from "aerial lodging-houses." Withal, says mine author,
"there were many good points about him: he paid his landlady's bill,
read his Bible, went twice to church on Sunday, seldom swore, was not
often tipsy, and bought the _Lapsus Linguæ_."
The _Medical_, again, "wore a white greatcoat, and consequently talked
loud"--(there is something very delicious in that _consequently_). He
wore his hat on one side. He was active, volatile, and went to the top
of Arthur's Seat on the Sunday forenoon. He was as quiet in a debating
society as he was loud in the streets. He was reckless and imprudent:
yesterday he insisted on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and
claret was claret then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and
to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of
the _Lapsus_.
The student of _Law_, again, was a learned man. "He had turned over the
leaves of Justinian's 'Institutes,' and knew that they were written in
Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of 'Blackstone's
Commentaries,' and _argal_ (as the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ says) he was
not a person to be laughed at." He attended the Parliament House in the
character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the
celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative
or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.
Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.
"If a _Charlie_ should find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and
venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel
come to judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts
of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue. The magistrate
listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of guineas."
Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine. Barclay,
Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Café, the
Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us. An hour's reading in these old
pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is similar and so
much that is different; the follies and amusements are so like our own,
and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one
pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment. The muddy quadrangle
is thick with living students; but in our eyes it swarms also with the
phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats of 1824. Two races meet:
races alike and diverse. Two performances are played before our eyes;
but the change seems merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.
Plot and passion are the same. It is the fall of the spun shilling
whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.
In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of
the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail--whether we
or the readers of the _Lapsus_ stand higher in the balance.
II
THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY
We have now reached the difficult portion of our task. _Mr. Tatler_, for
all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about the
students of a former day; but for the iron to touch our sacred selves,
for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities, let
such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or
the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark
quadrangle. We confess that this idea alarms us. We enter a protest. We
bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace. We hope, moreover, that
having thus made you secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we
be dull, and set that down to caution which you might before have
charged to the account of stupidity.
The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions
which are the best salt of life. All the fine old professional flavour
in language has evaporated. Your very gravedigger has forgotten his
avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over
Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration
of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition
of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed
down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not
attempt to join _Mr. Tatler_ in his simple division of students into
_Law_, _Divinity_, and _Medical_. Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands
over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in _Love
for Love_) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying:
"Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!" A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
influence the followers of individual branches of study. The _Divinity_,
for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present
day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is
fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox
bolus. Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher,
although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority.
Others again (and this we think the worst method), finding German
grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of
independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold
the others without being laughed at.
Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more
distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed
down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more
featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has
descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions
of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on
a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre. And in the midst of
all this weary sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of
every face. No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear
winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the church
bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered smoke
of the city. He will not break Sunday to so little purpose. He no longer
finds pleasure in the mere output of his surplus energy. He husbands his
strength, and lays out walks, and reading, and amusement with deep
consideration, so that he may get as much work and pleasure out of his
body as he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such
flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.
See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three
minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit
that, if we have not made it "an habitation of dragons," we have at
least transformed it into "a court for owls." Solemnity broods heavily
over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth of
merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment. You might as well try
"To move wild laughter in the throat of death"
as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.
The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,
debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books. A reserved
rivalry sunders them. Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,
others are already inhabitants of that land
"Where entity and quiddity,
Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly--
Where Truth in person does appear
Like words congealed in northern air."
But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies--no pedantic
love of this subject or that lights up their eyes--science and learning
are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced
and which they solemnly pursue. "Labour's pale priests," their lips seem
incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of
professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre fingers.
They walk like Saul among the asses.
The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different from the
stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their
element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour,
which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on
their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume
their perfunctory march along Princes Street. Flirtation is to them a
great social duty, a painful obligation, which they perform on every
occasion in the same chill official manner, and with the same
commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater than
they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in
a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would
as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy
modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our
Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!
Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,
is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse
seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have
surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see
gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with
each other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins
of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their
items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress
for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their
own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they
hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their
bashful spirits take enlargement under the consciousness of brotherhood.
There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as
steady-going and systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.
Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful to
those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet in the
"College Anthem" have beguiled so many weary hours and added a pleasant
variety to the strain of close attention. But even these are too
evidently professional in their antics. They go about cogitating puns
and inventing tricks. It is their vocation, Hal. They are the gratuitous
jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown when he leaves the stage,
their merriment too often sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty,
and they pass forth by the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating
fresh gambols for the morrow.
This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by too
many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to
think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced. We feel
inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of _University feeling_
which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.
Academical interests are so few and far between--students, as students,
have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry--there is such an
entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college
friendships, that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so
poor a plight. Our system is full of anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he
was a shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his
memory for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let
there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this
shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
ourselves and the College bettered. Let it be a sufficient reason for
intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches. Let the great
A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he
can say, "That fellow is a student." Once this could be brought about,
we think you would find the whole heart of the University beat faster.
We think you would find a fusion among the students, a growth of common
feelings, an increasing sympathy between class and class, whose
influence (in such a heterogeneous company as ours) might be of
incalculable value in all branches of politics and social progress. It
would do more than this. If we could find some method of making the
University a real mother to her sons--something beyond a building of
class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes--we
should strike a death-blow at the constrained and unnatural attitude of
our Society. At present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering
of individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them
into little knots and coteries. Our last snowball riot read us a plain
lesson on our condition. There was no party spirit--no unity of
interests. A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the
College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached
their destination the feeble inspiration had died out in many, and their
numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed strange gods in the direction
of Drummond Street, and others slunk back to meek good-boyism at the
feet of the Professors. The same is visible in better things. As you
send a man to an English University that he may have his prejudices
rubbed off, you might send him to Edinburgh that he may have them
ingrained--rendered indelible--fostered by sympathy into living
principles of his spirit. And the reason of it is quite plain. From this
absence of University feeling it comes that a man's friendships are
always the direct and immediate results of these very prejudices. A
common weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a
mutual vice is the readiest introduction. The studious associate with
the studious alone--the dandies with the dandies. There is nothing to
force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day
more wedded to their own original opinions and affections. They see
through the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments, all real
catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened into
one position--becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere, that it
shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air that
circulates in the general field of mankind.
Specialism in Society then, is, we think, one cause of our present
state. Specialism in study is another. We doubt whether this has ever
been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much
worse now than it was. Formerly, when a man became a specialist, it was
out of affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand devotion he left
all the world of Science to follow his true love; and he contrived to
find that strange pedantic interest which inspired the man who
"Settled _Hoti's_ business--let it be--
Properly based _Oun_--
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _D_
Dead from the waist down."
Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the saving
clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of
choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-of-all-Trades;
and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws
his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold--John the
Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we
hold that it is _not_ the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind
becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one "punctual spot" of knowledge.
A rank unhealthy soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself
above others in his one little branch--in the classification of
toadstools, or Carthaginian history--he waxes great in his own eyes and
looks down on others. Having all his sympathies educated in one way,
they die out in every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow,
and intolerant bigot. Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is
a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this
that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject
until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a general interest
in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in
one.
In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are apostles
of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being, as we
should, true men and _loving_ students. Of course both of these could be
corrected by the students themselves; but this is nothing to the
purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of
alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and wider
sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say something upon this
head.
One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be when we
grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on restrictions and
acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till he
looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We
please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We would
fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end in another; and
that when we _are_ in fact the octogenarians that we _seem_ at present,
there shall be no merrier men on earth. It is pleasant to picture us,
sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our
evening cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.
III
DEBATING SOCIETIES
A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment. You do not
often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room
with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance
little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully
ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot
Question--oldest of dialectic nightmares--is often found astride of a
somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of
_general-utility_ men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and
they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the
"Princess's," which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in
Peru, a haunt of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish
borders. There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively
discussion. Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members;
and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit
shamefully down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you begin to
find your level and value others rightly. Even then, even when failure
has damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be laughed
at in the deportment of your rivals.
Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after
eloquence. They are of those who "pursue with eagerness the phantoms of
hope," and who, since they expect that "the deficiencies of last
sentence will be supplied by the next," have been recommended by Dr.
Samuel Johnson to "attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia." They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing
damps them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch
forth into another with unabated vigour. They have all the manner of an
orator. From the tone of their voice, you would expect a splendid
period--and lo! a string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out
with stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the art (learned
from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a
single syllable--of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by
lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never
cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted all their
ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused to
perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting
for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's son in the
dung-hole, after
"His throat was kit unto the nekké bone,"
in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,
and give him renewed and clearer utterance.
These men may have something to say, if they could only say it--indeed
they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing
to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that
makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to
cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery.
They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a
torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same
dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark
with the same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.
After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few
other varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,
whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who
votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an air
of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises,
emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever attempting
to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men who ride
pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family have none,
identify themselves with some well-known statesman, use his opinions,
and lend him their patronage on all occasions. This is a dangerous plan,
and serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a
speech.
But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence
by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high
enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a
fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never
disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us
into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of
Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind
friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of
applause. _Amis lecteurs_, this is a painful topic. It is possible that
we too, we, the "potent, grave, and reverend" editor, may have suffered
these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.
Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.
In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any
student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives
should repay him an hundredfold for them all. The life of the debating
society is a handy antidote to the life of the class-room and
quadrangle. Nothing could be conceived more excellent as a weapon
against many of those _peccant humours_ that we have been railing
against in the jeremiad of our last "College Paper"--particularly in the
field of intellect. It is a sad sight to see our heather-scented
students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College with determined
views--_roués_ in speculation--having gauged the vanity of philosophy or
learned to shun it as the middle-man of heresy--a company of determined,
deliberate opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.
What have such men to do with study? If their minds are made up
irrevocably, why burn the "studious lamp" in search of further
confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a
certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in
groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive,
keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He
should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being
taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the
claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this
museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul
that we insist on their utility. If we could once prevail on our
students to feel no shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any
subject, if we could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad to
have his _opinionette_ on every topic, we should have gone a far way
towards bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of thinkers;
and this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to perform.
We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with
them. We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through, and
then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment. We find men of
talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely different
from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves. But the best
means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk
are most inclined to condemn,--I mean the law of _obliged speeches_.
Your senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the
negative, just as suits his best convenience. This tends to the most
perfect liberality. It is no good hearing the arguments of an opponent,
for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if you do take the
trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious search for weaknesses.
This is proved, I fear, in every debate; when you hear each speaker
arguing out his own prepared _spécialité_ (he never intended speaking,
of course, until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own
_coached-up_ subject without the least attention to what has gone
before, as utterly at sea about the drift of his adversary's speech as
Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste, and merely linking his own
prelection to the last by a few flippant criticisms. Now, as the rule
stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are
forced, by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to
elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself; and what a
fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!
How many new difficulties take form before your eyes? how many
superannuated arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of
your enforced eclecticism!
Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend also to
foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men. This
last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement of
our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we devote
a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a _clique._ Friends
propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society
degenerates into a sort of family party. You may confirm old
acquaintances, but you can rarely make new ones. You find yourself in
the atmosphere of your own daily intercourse. Now, this is an
unfortunate circumstance, which it seems to me might readily be
rectified. Our Principal has shown himself so friendly towards all
College improvements that I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised
a certain suggestion, which is not a new one with me, and which must
often have been proposed and canvassed heretofore--I mean, a real
_University Debating Society_, patronised by the Senatus, presided over
by the Professors, to which every one might gain ready admittance on
sight of his matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a
necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might have another
object for attendance besides the mere desire to save his fines: to wit,
the chance of drawing on himself the favourable consideration of his
teachers. This would be merely following in the good tendency, which
has been so noticeable during all this session, to increase and multiply
student societies and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a matter of
much difficulty. The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the
class-rooms at first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the
library, might be the place of meeting. There would be no want of
attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to
speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the
other, in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may
do the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might end,
perhaps, by rivalling the "Union" at Cambridge or the "Union" at Oxford.
IV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS[36]
It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society
by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius,--that our climate
is essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the
walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and
respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island
pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.
A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a
person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his
study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella
that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the
acknowledged index of social position.
Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering
after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind. To the
superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account for
his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the hard
labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could have
supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful _constitutional_ arm in
arm with the nude Friday. No, it was not this: the memory of a vanished
respectability called for some outward manifestation, and the result
was--an umbrella. A pious castaway might have rigged up a belfry and
solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe
was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine
an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under
adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very
foremost badge of modern civilisation--the Urim and Thummim of
respectability. Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the most
natural manner. Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were first
introduced into this country, what manner of men would use them, and
what class would adhere to the useless but ornamental cane. The first,
without doubt, would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their
health, or the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the second, it is
equally plain, would include the fop, the fool, and the Bobadil. Any one
acquainted with the growth of Society, and knowing out of what small
seeds of cause are produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions
of intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily
welfare, and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word, all
those homely and solid virtues implied in the term RESPECTABILITY. Not
that the umbrella's costliness has nothing to do with its great
influence. Its possession, besides symbolising (as we have already
indicated) the change from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling in tents,
implies a certain comfortable provision of fortune. It is not every one
that can expose twenty-six shillings' worth of property to so many
chances of loss and theft. So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed,
that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really
well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise. They have a
qualification standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake
in the common-weal below their arm. One who bears with him an
umbrella--such a complicated structure of whalebone, of silk, and of
cane, that it becomes a very microcosm of modern industry--is
necessarily a man of peace. A half-crown cane may be applied to an
offender's head on a very moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty
shilling silk is a possession too precious to be adventured in the shock
of war.
These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came to
their present high estate. But the true Umbrella-Philosopher meets with
far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual
who carries them: indeed, they are far more capable of betraying his
trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready made, and all our
power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during the
first three or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from a
whole shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser's disposition.
An undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the practised
Umbrella-Philosopher. O you who lisp, and amble, and change the fashion
of your countenances--you who conceal all these, how little do you think
that you left a proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand--that even
now, as you shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in
its ivory handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from
the exposed gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the
hidden hypocrisy of the "_dickey_"! But alas! even the umbrella is no
certain criterion. The falsity and the folly of the human race have
degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and while some
umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly
characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays his
real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen
directly opposite to the person's disposition. A mendacious umbrella is
a sign of great moral degradation. Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself
below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his religious friends
armed with the decent and reputable gingham. May it not be said of the
bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets
"with a lie in their right hand"?
The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social scale
of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great bulk of their
subjects from having any at all, which was certainly a bad thing. We
should be sorry to believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool--the
idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have
originated in a nobody,--and we have accordingly taken exceeding pains
to find out the reason of this harsh restriction. We think we have
succeeded; but, while admiring the principle at which he aimed, and
while cordially recognising in the Siamese potentate the only man before
ourselves who had taken a real grasp of the umbrella, we must be allowed
to point out how unphilosophically the great man acted in this
particular. His object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy persons
from bearing the sacred symbol of domestic virtues. We cannot excuse his
limiting these virtues to the circle of his court. We must only remember
that such was the feeling of the age in which he lived. Liberalism had
not yet raised the war-cry of the working classes. But here was his
mistake: it was a needless regulation. Except in a very few cases of
hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature
_umbrellarians_, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet
have failed--have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella
after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally,
with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle,
and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives. This
is the most remarkable fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet
we challenge the candid reader to call it in question. Now, as there
cannot be any _moral selection_ in a mere dead piece of furniture--as
the umbrella cannot be supposed to have an affinity for individual men
equal and reciprocal to that which men certainly feel toward individual
umbrellas,--we took the trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to
whether there was any possible physical explanation of the phenomenon.
He was unable to supply a plausible theory, or even hypothesis; but we
extract from his letter the following interesting passage relative to
the physical peculiarities of umbrellas: "Not the least important, and
by far the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it
displays in affecting the atmospheric strata. There is no fact in
meteorology better established--indeed, it is almost the only one on
which meteorologists are agreed--than that the carriage of an umbrella
produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous
vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in the form of rain.
No theory," my friend continues, "competent to explain this hygrometric
law has been given (as far as I am aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher,
Tait, Buchan, or any other writer; nor do I pretend to supply the
defect. I venture, however, to throw out the conjecture that it will be
ultimately found to belong to the same class of natural laws as that
agreeable to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered
surface downwards."
But it is time to draw to a close. We could expatiate much longer upon
this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished these
few desultory remarks--slender contributions towards a subject which has
fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better
understood by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers of
to-day. If, however, we have awakened in any rational mind an interest
in the symbolism of umbrellas--in any generous heart a more complete
sympathy with the dumb companion of his daily walk,--or in any grasping
spirit a pure notion of respectability strong enough to make him expend
his six-and-twenty shillings--we shall have deserved well of the world,
to say nothing of the many industrious persons employed in the
manufacture of the article.
FOOTNOTE:
[36] "This paper was written in collaboration with James Walter
Ferrier, and if reprinted this is to be stated, though his principal
collaboration was to lie back in an easy-chair and laugh."--[R. L. S.,
_Oct_. 25, 1894.]
V
THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE
"How many Cæsars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names, have
been rendered worthy of them? And how many are there, who might have
done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits
been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into nothing?"--"Tristram
Shandy," vol. i. chap. xix.
Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey merchant. To
the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed out
the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life--who
seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
of name into the abysses of social failure. Solomon possibly had his eye
on some such theory when he said that "a good name is better than
precious ointment"; and perhaps we may trace a similar spirit in the
compilers of the English Catechism, and the affectionate interest with
which they linger round the catechumen's name at the very threshold of
their work. But, be these as they may, I think no one can censure me for
appending, in pursuance of the expressed wish of his son, the Turkey
merchant's name to his system, and pronouncing, without further
preface, a short epitome of the "Shandean Philosophy of Nomenclature."
To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt from the
very cradle. As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I hailed
Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows; and
the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I found a
freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one of my
numerous _prænomina_. Look at the delight with which two children find
they have the same name. They are friends from that moment forth; they
have a bond of union stronger than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats. This
feeling, I own, wears off in later life. Our names lose their freshness
and interest, become trite and indifferent. But this, dear reader, is
merely one of the sad effects of those "shades of the prison-house"
which come gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it
affords no weapon against the philosophy of names.
In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which
careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will
have been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible
power the whole course of your earthly fortunes. But the last name,
overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition of
success. Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited nicknames;
and if the _sobriquet_ were applicable to the ancestor, it is most
likely applicable to the descendant also. You would not expect to find
Mr. M'Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M'Lumpha excelling as a professor of
dancing. Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names,
independent of whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look
what a pull _Cromwell_ had over _Pym_--the one name full of a resonant
imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree.
Who would expect eloquence from _Pym_--who would read poems by
_Pym_--who would bow to the opinion of _Pym_? He might have been a
dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only
wonder that he succeeded as he did. Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon
the roll of men who have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the
most unfavourable appellations. But even these have suffered; and, had
they been more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and
the other have shared the laurels with Isaiah. In this matter we must
not forget that all our great poets have borne great names. Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--what a
constellation of lordly words! Not a single common-place name among
them--not a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that
one would stop and look at on a door-plate. Now, imagine if _Pepys_ had
tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would
that word have made upon the list! The thing was impossible. In the
first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have held him
down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from rising
above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him altogether from
attempting verse. Next, the book-sellers would refuse to publish, and
the world to read them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation.
And now, before I close this section, I must say one word as to
_punnable_ names, names that stand alone, that have a significance and
life apart from him that bears them. These are the bitterest of all. One
friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life under the weight of
this misfortune; for it is an awful thing when a man's name is a joke,
when he cannot be mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even
the intimation of his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a
home.
So much for people who are badly named. Now for people who are _too_
well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a
false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under the
fame of some of the great ones of the past. A man, for instance, called
William Shakespeare could never dare to write plays. He is thrown into
too humbling an apposition with the author of _Hamlet._ His own name
coming after is such an anti-climax. "The plays of William Shakespeare"?
says the reader--"O no! The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill," and
he throws the book aside. In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John
Milton Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town,
has never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has
excelled upon the tight-rope. A marked example of triumph over this is
the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the face of the matter, I
should have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the
last-named gentleman, and confine his ambition to the sawdust. But Mr.
Rossetti has triumphed. He has even dared to translate from his mighty
name-father; and the voice of fame supports him in his boldness.
Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter. A lifetime of
comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation. So
here, if it please you, we shall let it rest. Slight as these notes have
been, I would that the great founder of the system had been alive to see
them. How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive eloquence
would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and
sympathy would not the editor have received before the month was out!
Alas, the thing was not to be. Walter Shandy died and was duly buried,
while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his
fellow-countrymen. But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a
paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all
depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly
and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush
blindfold to the christening. In these days there shall be written a
"Godfather's Assistant," in shape of a dictionary of names, with their
concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be scattered
broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of every one
eligible for god-fathership, until such a thing as a vicious or untoward
appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
NOTES AND ESSAYS CHIEFLY OF THE ROAD
I
A RETROSPECT
(_A Fragment: written at Dunoon, 1870_)
If there is anything that delights me in Hazlitt, beyond the charm of
style and the unconscious portrait of a vain and powerful spirit, which
his works present, it is the loving and tender way in which he returns
again to the memory of the past. These little recollections of bygone
happiness were too much a part of the man to be carelessly or poorly
told. The imaginary landscapes and visions of the most ecstatic dreamer
can never rival such recollections, told simply perhaps, but still told
(as they could not fail to be) with precision, delicacy, and evident
delight. They are too much loved by the author not to be palated by the
reader. But beyond the mere felicity of pencil, the nature of the piece
could never fail to move my heart. When I read his essay "On the Past
and Future," every word seemed to be something I had said myself. I
could have thought he had been eavesdropping at the doors of my heart,
so entire was the coincidence between his writing and my thought. It is
a sign perhaps of a somewhat vain disposition. The future is nothing;
but the past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present thoughts,
the mould of my present disposition. It is not in vain that I return to
the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has left some stamp
upon me or put some fetter on my boasted free-will. In the past is my
present fate; and in the past also is my real life. It is not the past
only, but the past that has been many years in that tense. The doings
and actions of last year are as uninteresting and vague to me as the
blank gulf of the future, the _tabula rasa_ that may never be anything
else. I remember a confused hotch-potch of unconnected events, a "chaos
without form, and void"; but nothing salient or striking rises from the
dead level of "flat, stale, and unprofitable" generality. When we are
looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it is only when
it comes back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can disentangle the
main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just so with what is
lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be distinct; and the
canvas is too large for the eye to encompass. But this is no more the
case when our recollections have been strained long enough through the
hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen of so much thought,
the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. All that is worthless has been
sieved and sifted out of them. Nothing remains but the brightest lights
and the darkest shadows. When we see a mountain country near at hand,
the spurs and haunches crowd up in eager rivalry, and the whole range
seems to have shrugged its shoulders to its ears, till we cannot tell
the higher from the lower: but when we are far off, these lesser
prominences are melted back into the bosom of the rest, or have set
behind the round horizon of the plain, and the highest peaks stand forth
in lone and sovereign dignity against the sky. It is just the same with
our recollections. We require to draw back and shade our eyes before the
picture dawns upon us in full breadth and outline. Late years are still
in limbo to us; but the more distant past is all that we possess in
life, the corn already harvested and stored for ever in the grange of
memory. The doings of to-day at some future time will gain the required
offing; I shall learn to love the things of my adolescence, as Hazlitt
loved them, and as I love already the recollections of my childhood.
They will gather interest with every year. They will ripen in forgotten
corners of my memory; and some day I shall waken and find them vested
with new glory and new pleasantness.
It is for stirring the chords of memory, then, that I love Hazlitt's
essays, and for the same reason (I remember) he himself threw in his
allegiance to Rousseau, saying of him, what was so true of his own
writings: "He seems to gather up the past moments of his being like
drops of honey-dew to distil some precious liquor from them; his
alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and
piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy
that strewed his earliest years." How true are these words when applied
to himself! and how much I thank him that it was so! All my childhood is
a golden age to me. I have no recollection of bad weather. Except one or
two storms where grandeur had impressed itself on my mind, the whole
time seems steeped in sunshine. "_Et ego in Arcadia vixi_" would be no
empty boast upon my grave. If I desire to live long, it is that I may
have the more to look back upon. Even to one, like the unhappy Duchess,
"Acquainted with sad misery
As the tamed galley-slave is with his oar,"
and seeing over the night of troubles no "lily-wristed morn" of hope
appear, a retrospect of even chequered and doubtful happiness in the
past may sweeten the bitterness of present tears. And here I may be
excused if I quote a passage from an unpublished drama (the unpublished
is perennial, I fancy) which the author believed was not all devoid of
the flavour of our elder dramatists. However this may be, it expresses
better than I could some further thoughts on this same subject. The
heroine is taken by a minister to the grave, where already some have
been recently buried, and where her sister's lover is destined to
rejoin them on the following day.[37]
* * * * *
What led me to the consideration of this subject, and what has made me
take up my pen to-night, is the rather strange coincidence of two very
different accidents--a prophecy of my future and a return into my past.
No later than yesterday, seated in the coffee-room here, there came into
the tap of the hotel a poor mad Highland woman. The noise of her
strained, thin voice brought me out to see her. I could conceive that
she had been pretty once, but that was many years ago. She was now
withered and fallen-looking. Her hair was thin and straggling, her dress
poor and scanty. Her moods changed as rapidly as a weathercock before a
thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that
gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back
upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a
wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere
inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated
phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action.
She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the
drawing of the claymore," with a lofty disregard of cause or
common-sense; and she broke out suddenly, with uplifted hands and eyes,
into ecstatic "Heaven bless hims!" and "Heaven forgive hims!" She had
been a camp-follower in her younger days, and she was never tired of
expatiating on the gallantry, the fame, and the beauty of the 42nd
Highlanders. Her patriotism knew no bounds, and her prolixity was much
on the same scale. This Witch of Endor offered to tell my fortune, with
much dignity and proper oracular enunciation. But on my holding forth my
hand a somewhat ludicrous incident occurred. "Na, na," she said; "wait
till I have a draw of my pipe." Down she sat in the corner, puffing
vigorously and regaling the lady behind the counter with conversation
more remarkable for stinging satire than prophetic dignity. The person
in question had "mair weeg than hair on her head" (did not the chignon
plead guilty at these words?)--"wad be better if she had less
tongue"--and would come at last to the grave, a goal which, in a few
words, she invested with "warning circumstance" enough to make a Stoic
shudder. Suddenly, in the midst of this, she rose up and beckoned me to
approach. The oracles of my Highland sorceress had no claim to
consideration except in the matter of obscurity. In "question hard and
sentence intricate" she beat the priests of Delphi; in bold, unvarnished
falsity (as regards the past) even spirit-rapping was a child to her.
All that I could gather may be thus summed up shortly: that I was to
visit America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much
upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach,
I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone
relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first
was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of
Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact
that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The
second, in the middle of such nonsense, had a touch of the tragic. She
suddenly looked at me with an eager glance, and dropped my hand saying,
in what were tones of misery or a very good affectation of them, "Black
eyes!" A moment after she was at work again. It is as well to mention
that I have not black eyes.[38]
This incident, strangely blended of the pathetic and the ludicrous, set
my mind at work upon the future; but I could find little interest in the
study. Even the predictions of my sibyl failed to allure me, nor could
life's prospect charm and detain my attention like its retrospect.
Not far from Dunoon is Rosemore, a house in which I had spent a week or
so in my very distant childhood, how distant I have no idea; and one may
easily conceive how I looked forward to revisiting this place and so
renewing contact with my former self. I was under necessity to be early
up, and under necessity also, in the teeth of a bitter spring
north-easter, to clothe myself warmly on the morning of my long-promised
excursion. The day was as bright as it was cold. Vast irregular masses
of white and purple cumulus drifted rapidly over the sky. The great
hills, brown with the bloomless heather, were here and there buried in
blue shadows, and streaked here and there with sharp stripes of sun. The
new-fired larches were green in the glens; and "pale primroses" hid
themselves in mossy hollows and under hawthorn roots. All these things
were new to me; for I had noticed none of these beauties in my younger
days, neither the larch woods, nor the winding road edged in between
field and flood, nor the broad, ruffled bosom of the hill-surrounded
loch. It was, above all, the height of these hills that astonished me. I
remembered the existence of hills, certainly, but the picture in my
memory was low, featureless, and uninteresting. They seemed to have kept
pace with me in my growth, but to a gigantic scale; and the villas that
I remembered as half-way up the slope seemed to have been left behind
like myself, and now only ringed their mighty feet, white among the
newly kindled woods. As I felt myself on the road at last that I had
been dreaming for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy
took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could
let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence. I asked my
way from every one, and took good care to let them all know, before
they left me, what my object was, and how many years had elapsed since
my last visit. I wonder what the good folk thought of me and my
communications.
At last, however, after much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my
peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the
opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit
against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that
inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M---- and I found
"elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? Is
that little turfed slope the huge and perilous green bank down which I
counted it a feat, and the gardener a sin, to run? Are these two squares
of stone, some two feet high, the pedestals on which I walked with such
a penetrating sense of dizzy elevation, and which I had expected to find
on a level with my eyes? Ay, the place is no more like what I expected
than this bleak April day is like the glorious September with which it
is incorporated in my memory. I look at the gardener, disappointment in
my face, and tell him that the place seems sorrily shrunken from the
high estate that it had held in my remembrance, and he returns, with
quiet laughter, by asking me how long it is since I was there. I tell
him, and he remembers me. Ah! I say, I was a great nuisance, I believe.
But no, my good gardener will plead guilty to having kept no record of
my evil-doings, and I find myself much softened toward the place and
willing to take a kinder view and pardon its shortcomings for the sake
of the gardener and his pretended recollection of myself. And it is just
at this stage (to complete my re-establishment) that I see a little
boy--the gardener's grandchild--just about the same age and the same
height that I must have been in the days when I was here last. My first
feeling is one of almost anger, to see him playing on the gravel where I
had played before, as if he had usurped something of my identity; but
next moment I feel a softening and a sort of rising and qualm of the
throat, accompanied by a pricking heat in the eye balls. I hastily join
conversation with the child, and inwardly felicitate myself that the
gardener is opportunely gone for the key of the house. But the child is
a sort of homily to me. He is perfectly quiet and resigned, an
unconscious hermit. I ask him jocularly if he gets as much abused as I
used to do for running down the bank; but the child's perfect
seriousness of answer staggers me--"O no, grandpapa doesn't allow
it--why should he?" I feel caught: I stand abashed at the reproof; I
must not expose my childishness again to this youthful disciplinarian,
and so I ask him very stately what he is going to be--a good serious
practical question, out of delicacy for his parts. He answers that he is
going to be a missionary to China, and tells me how a missionary once
took him on his knee and told him about missionary work, and asked him
if he, too, would not like to become one, to which the child had simply
answered in the affirmative. The child is altogether so different from
what I have been, is so absolutely complementary to what I now am, that
I turn away not a little abashed from the conversation, for there is
always something painful in sudden contact with the good qualities that
we do not possess. Just then the grandfather returns; and I go with him
to the summer-house, where I used to learn my Catechism, to the wall on
which M----and I thought it no small exploit to walk upon, and all the
other places that I remembered.
In fine, the matter being ended, I turn and go my way home to the hotel,
where, in the cold afternoon, I write these notes with the table and
chair drawn as near the fire as the rug and the French polish will
permit.
One other thing I may as well make a note of, and that is how there
arises that strange contradiction of the hills being higher than I had
expected and everything near at hand being so ridiculously smaller. This
is a question I think easily answered: the very terms of the problem
suggest the solution. To everything near at hand I applied my own
stature, as a sort of natural unit of measurement, so that I had no
actual image of their dimensions but their ratio to myself; so, of
course, as one term of the proportion changed, the other changed
likewise, and as my own height increased my notion of things near at
hand became equally expanded. But the hills, mark you, were out of my
reach: I could not apply myself to them: I had an actual, instead of a
proportional eidolon of their magnitude; so that, of course (my eye
being larger and flatter nowadays, and so the image presented to me then
being in sober earnest smaller than the image presented to me now), I
found the hills nearly as much too great as I had found the other things
too small.
* * * * *
[_Added the next morning_.]--He who indulges habitually in the
intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps
a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a
more intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite possible, and even
comparatively easy, so to enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the
realities of life may seem but as the white snow-shower in the street,
that only gives a relish to the swept hearth and lively fire within. By
such means I have forgotten hunger, I have sometimes eased pain, and I
have invariably changed into the most pleasant hours of the day those
very vacant and idle seasons which would otherwise have hung most
heavily upon my hand. But all this is attained by the undue prominence
of purely imaginative joys, and consequently the weakening and almost
the destruction of reality. This is buying at too great a price. There
are seasons when the imagination becomes somehow tranced and surfeited,
as it is with me this morning; and then upon what can we fall back? The
very faculty that we have fostered and trusted has failed us in the hour
of trial; and we have so blunted and enfeebled our appetite for the
others that they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as though a
farmer should plant all his fields in potatoes, instead of varying them
with grain and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, lose all his
harvest, while his neighbours, perhaps, may balance the profit and the
loss. Do not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk about all
pleasures seeming stale. To me, at least, the edge of almost everything
is put on by imagination; and even nature, in these days when the fancy
is drugged and useless, wants half the charm it has in better moments. I
can no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a highwayman riding
down the lane. The fiat of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant,
unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition and no aim: a mental
drunkard the morning after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a more
subtle opium in my own mind than any apothecary's drug; but it has a
sting of its own, and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the other.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] The quotation here promised from one of the author's own early
dramatic efforts (a tragedy of Semiramis) is not supplied in the
MS.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
[38] "The old pythoness was right," adds the author in a note appended
to his MS. in 1887; "I have been happy: I did go to America (am even
going again--unless----): and I have been twice and once upon the
deep." The seafaring part of the prophecy remained to be fulfilled
on a far more extended scale in his Pacific voyages of
1888-90.--[SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE.]
II
COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
(_A Fragment_: 1871)
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle, I
may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between any
of my little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them. I cannot
describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has been
before me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections
to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except
the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by
a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way
I ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or
if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find
out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full
length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This process of
incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat afraid that
I have made this mistake with the present journey. Like a bad
daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely lost; I can tell you
nothing about the beginning and nothing about the end; but the doings of
some fifty or sixty hours about the middle remain quite distinct and
definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or
the one spot on an old picture that has been restored by the dexterous
hand of the cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister, called
upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that the
rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the first two or
three pages away; he gravely explained to the congregation how he found
himself situated; "And now," said he, "let us just begin where the rats
have left off." I must follow the divine's example, and take up the
thread of my discourse where it first distinctly issues from the limbo
of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,--as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so separated
their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor
steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and all the king's
men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration
of another century or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime,
in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had
been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in
a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and
voices of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the
spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to
grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill--a
great, gaunt promontory of building,--half on dry ground and half arched
over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders, and crept through
between the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden
enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard within its privet
hedge. I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in
fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society
of parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read the
name of Smethurst, and the designation of "Canadian Felt Hat
Manufacturers." There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and I
could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees. The water was
dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with a little mist
of flying insects. There were some amorous ducks, also, whose
love-making reminded me of what I had seen a little farther down. But
the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I was perpetually haunted
with the terror of a return of the tic that had been playing such ruin
in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn, and supper,
and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my
intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to
Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by
that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to
introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own
pleasures. I can excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical
heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to
justify by present argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.
If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland
parks and woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or
two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward,
and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to
establish them as principles. This is not the general rule, however, and
accordingly the waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to
hear the route that I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to
Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in
vain that I put up a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was
in vain that I said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that
there was "nothing to see there"--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave
way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to
leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a place with "nothing to
see"; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant, vague
picture of the town and all its surroundings. I might have dodged
happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle and in
and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person in a
strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to make set
habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up
the same road that I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the
hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put to
await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he looked
something like the typical Jew old-clothesman. As I drew near, he came
sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so curious an expression
on his face that I instinctively prepared myself to apologise for some
unwitting trespass. His first question rather confirmed me in this
belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me going up this way last
night; and after having answered in the affirmative, I waited in some
alarm for the rest of my indictment. But the good man's heart was full
of peace; and he stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about
fishing, and walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright
shallow stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats aside to
go along the water-side and show me where the large trout commonly lay,
underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much disappointed, for my
sake, that there were none visible just then. Then he wandered off on to
another tack, and stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in
the hot sunshine, trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if
not me, some friend of mine--merely, I believe, out of a desire that we
should feel more friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he
made a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best
writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the
sense, and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that he had
little things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to
recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now
died out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and
active. Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river
above the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be
able to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great
pleasure from the recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will
forego present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing "a reminiscence" for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker found in
making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish
luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little embarkation,
and seen me safely shoved off into mid-stream, he ran away back to his
hats with the air of a man who had only just recollected that he had
anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very nice
punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting moored to
an overhanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was bound in
gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish its
recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself and
his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation. In
order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself for
having failed to enjoy this treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
town in time for dinner. As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with
admiration; a look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the
smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from the
Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men. I cannot be very
grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence. I
find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence, full
of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers, quite a
hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow, so that
what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly
corners of my life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and
contentment.
ANOTHER
I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp. After I had
forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the high
road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the top of a
long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom. An Irish
beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came up to ask
for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy of her
life. Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband from her
after many years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving her
destitute, with the little girl upon her hands. She seemed quite hopeful
and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her
husband's earnings, she made no pretence of despair at the loss of his
affection; some day she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see
her duly righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received. While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man, with
a high white hat and darkish clothes. He came up the hill at a rapid
pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half salutation.
Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a business-like way
whether she had anything to do, whether she were a Catholic or a
Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth; and then, after a few
kind words and some sweeties to the child, he despatched the mother with
some tracts about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman's Bible. I was
a little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was still a young man, and
had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he tackled me with great
solemnity. I could make fun of what he said, for I do not think it was
very wise; but the subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting
light, so I shall only say that he related to me his own conversion,
which had been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency
of a gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave them to
me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.
LAST OF SMETHURST
That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick,
and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes.
This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually
putting his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they
saw _him_ coming. At last, when the train was already in motion, there
was a commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear to our
carriage door. _He_ had arrived. In the hurry I could just see
Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay pipes into my
companion's outstretched hand, and hear him crying his farewells after
us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating pace. I said
something about its being a close run, and the broad man, already
engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of
his own stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had
good-naturedly gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.
I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had been
very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the hatter's merits
that lasted some time and left us quite good friends at its conclusion.
The topic was productive of goodwill. We exchanged tobacco and talked
about the season, and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel
at Keswick and sup in company. As he had some business in the town which
would occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the
time and go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
wonders.
The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
from the far end of the lake. The sky was covered with flying scud; and,
as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow and
moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water. I had to hold my
hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go back in
disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium. A sudden
and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and at the same
time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight, which leaped
into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in the prettiest
flutter and disorder. It was as though they had sprung out of the
ground. I accosted them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and
requested to be told the names of all manner of hills and woods and
places that I did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while
and had an amusing little talk. The wind, too, made himself of the
party, brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do
to repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her. They were just
high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak to a
gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a nervous
consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a considerable
zest to our most innocent interview. They were as much discomposed and
fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked baron proposing to elope
with the whole trio; but they showed no inclination to go away, and I
had managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and on to more
promising subjects, when a young man was descried coming along the path
from the direction of Keswick. Now whether he was the young man of one
of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or indeed the brother of
all, I do not know; but they incontinently said that they must be going,
and went away up the path with friendly salutations. I need not say that
I found the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water in
the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller. In the smoking-room
there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an ulster coat, who had
got the best place and was monopolising most of the talk; and, as I came
in, a whisper came round to me from both sides, that this was the
manager of a London theatre. The presence of such a man was a great
event for Keswick, and I must own that the manager showed himself equal
to his position. He had a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced
poem after poem, written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and
nothing could be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant
extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with one
little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation. The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the elbows
with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of that great man
settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as noticeably the second
person in the smoking-room as he was the first. For a young man, this
was a position of some distinction, I think you will admit....
III
ROADS
(1873)
No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,
over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study
himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the
dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary
and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery. But what is thus
admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called) natural
beauties: no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces
of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or
degrade the palate. We are not at all sure, however, that moderation,
and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
nature is not to be found in one of those countries where there is no
stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of orderly
and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we can
patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in us, all of
them together, the subdued note of the landscape. It is in scenery such
as this that we find ourselves in the right temper to seek out small
sequestered loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations
of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the
harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of
nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural
voluptuary,"--not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not
to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to
teach himself some new beauty--to experience some new vague and tranquil
sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who "have
pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent," as
Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of
himself; it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to
enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and
long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante. A man must
have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it. It is
no youngling enthusiasm on hill-tops that can possess itself of the last
essence of beauty. Probably most people's heads are growing bare before
they can see all in a landscape that they have the capability of seeing;
and, even then, it will be only for one little moment of consummation
before the faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of
the windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight. Thus the study
of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with system. Every
gratification should be rolled long under the tongue, and we should be
always eager to analyse and compare, in order that we may be able to
give some plausible reason for our admirations. True, it is difficult to
put even approximately into words the kind of feelings thus called into
play. There is a dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual
refining upon vague sensation. The analysis of such satisfactions lends
itself very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid influence,
even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of his sentences.
And yet there is much that makes the attempt attractive; for any
expression, however imperfect, once given to a cherished feeling, seems
a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we take in it. A common sentiment
is one of those great goods that make life palatable and ever new. The
knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even
if they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,
will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.
Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have recommended
to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape. In those homely and
placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief many
things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by a sort
of loving repetition; such as the wonderful life-giving speed of
windmill sails above the stationary country; the occurrence and
recurrence of the same church tower at the end of one long vista after
another; and, conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the
character and variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way.
Not only near at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it adapts
itself to the interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when
he sees a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in
the afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening
that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it. He may leave the
river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road he has
always with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will find in
that sufficient company. From its subtle windings and changes of level
there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps the attention
ever alert and cheerful. Every sensitive adjustment to the contour of
the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct with life and
an exquisite sense of balance and beauty. The road rolls upon the easy
slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea. The
very margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have something
of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and wilfulness. You
might think for a whole summer's day (and not have thought it any nearer
an end by evening) what concourse and succession of circumstances has
produced the least of these deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in
this that we should look for the secret of their interest. A footpath
across a meadow--in all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in
all the _grata protervitas_ of its varying direction--will always be
more to us than a railroad well engineered through a difficult
country.[39] No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem
to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of
cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a
sort of free will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband
of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to
the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, as we write,
some miles of fine wide highway laid out with conscious æsthetic
artifice through a broken and richly cultivated tract of country. It is
said that the engineer had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he
laid them down. And the result is striking. One splendid satisfying
sweep passes with easy transition into another, and there is nothing to
trouble or dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the
road. And yet there is something wanting. There is here no saving
imperfection, none of these secondary curves and little trepidations of
direction that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along
with them. One feels at once that this road has not grown like a natural
road, but has been laboriously made to pattern; and that, while a model
may be academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and
cold. The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself
and the road he travels. We have all seen ways that have wandered into
heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes like a
trodden serpent: here we too must plod forward at a dull, laborious
pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of mind and the
expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the roadway. Such a
phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps resolve with a little
trouble. We might reflect that the present road had been developed out
of a track spontaneously followed by generations of primitive wayfarers;
and might see in its expression a testimony that those generations had
been affected at the same ground, one after another, in the same manner
as we are affected to-day. Or we might carry the reflection further, and
remind ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of small
undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the direct way
wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some promise of a
wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may permanently bias and
deform the straight path over the meadow; whereas, where the soil is
heavy, one is preoccupied with the labour of mere progression, and goes
with a bowed head heavily and unobservantly forward. Reason, however,
will not carry us the whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in
situations where it is very hard to imagine any possible explanation;
and indeed, if we drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open
vehicle, we shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest. We
feel the sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner;
after a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
precipitately down the other side, and we find It difficult to avoid
attributing something headlong, a sort of _abandon_, to the road itself.
The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk in
even a commonplace or dreary country-side. Something that we have seen
from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from us, as we wander
through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation of seeing it
again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw nearer we
impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a beating
heart. It is through these prolongations of expectancy, this succession
of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a
few hours' walk. It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of
the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen,
and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of
distant view before it allows us finally to approach the hoped-for
destination.
In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with
the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of
saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways
and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls "the cheerful voice of the
public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But out of the great
network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the
city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly
as much choice on the score of company as on the score of beauty or easy
travel. On some we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk
pass us by so thickly that we lose the sense of their number. But on
others, about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us, the
growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage and
salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps a great
while to come. Such encounters have a wistful interest that can hardly
be understood by the dweller in places more populous. We remember
standing beside a countryman once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in
a city that was more than ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed
stunned and bewildered by the continual passage of different faces; and
after a long pause, during which he appeared to search for some suitable
expression, he said timidly that there seemed to be a _great deal of
meeting thereabouts_. The phrase is significant. It is the expression of
town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways. A
meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the streets
was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of such "meetings."
And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
minds by a road. In real nature as well as in old landscapes, beneath
that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is plunged and
saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with the vague sense
of desire up to the green limit of the horizon. Travel is brought home
to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in
the distance. _Sehnsucht_--the passion for what is ever beyond--is
livingly expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs
the uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is brought to
us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this wavering line of
junction. There is a passionate paragraph in Werther that strikes the
very key. "When I came hither," he writes, "how the beautiful valley
invited me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!
There the wood--ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the
mountain summits--ah, that I might look down from them over the broad
country! the interlinked hills! the secret valleys! O, to lose myself
among their mysteries! I hurried into the midst, and came back without
finding aught I hoped for. Alas! the distance is like the future. A vast
whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling alike
plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender
our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one
single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition,
when _there_ is changed to _here_, all is afterwards as it was before,
and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our soul thirsts
after a still ebbing elixir." It is to this wandering and uneasy spirit
of anticipation that roads minister. Every little vista, every little
glimpse that we have of what lies before us, gives the impatient
imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the body and already plunge
into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from the hilltop the plain
beyond it, and wander in the windings of the valleys that are still far
in front. The road is already there--we shall not be long behind. It is
as if we were marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far
before, heard the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some
friendly and jubilant city. Would not every man, through all the long
miles of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
FOOTNOTE:
[39] Compare Blake, in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "Improvement
makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement,
are roads of Genius."
IV
NOTES ON THE MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN
(1874)
I wish to direct the reader's attention to a certain quality in the
movements of children when young, which is somehow lovable in them,
although it would be even unpleasant in any grown person. Their
movements are not graceful, but they fall short of grace by something so
sweetly humorous that we only admire them the more. The imperfection is
so pretty and pathetic, and it gives so great a promise of something
different in the future, that it attracts us more than many forms of
beauty. They have something of the merit of a rough sketch by a master,
in which we pardon what is wanting or excessive for the sake of the very
bluntness and directness of the thing. It gives us pleasure to see the
beginning of gracious impulses and the springs of harmonious movement
laid bare to us with innocent simplicity.
One night some ladies formed a sort of impromptu dancing-school in the
drawing-room of an hotel in France. One of the ladies led the ring, and
I can recall her as a model of accomplished, cultured movement. Two
little girls, about eight years old, were the pupils; that is an age of
great interest in girls, when natural grace comes to its consummation of
justice and purity, with little admixture of that other grace of
forethought and discipline that will shortly supersede it altogether. In
these two, particularly, the rhythm was sometimes broken by an excess of
energy, as though the pleasure of the music in their light bodies could
endure no longer the restraint of regulated dance. So that, between
these and the lady, there was not only some beginning of the very
contrast I wish to insist upon, but matter enough to set one thinking a
long while on the beauty of motion. I do not know that, here in England,
we have any good opportunity of seeing what that is; the generation of
British dancing men and women are certainly more remarkable for other
qualities than for grace: they are, many of them, very conscientious
artists, and give quite a serious regard to the technical parts of their
performance; but the spectacle, somehow, is not often beautiful, and
strikes no note of pleasure. If I had seen no more, therefore, this
evening might have remained in my memory as a rare experience. But the
best part of it was yet to come. For after the others had desisted, the
musician still continued to play, and a little button between two and
three years old came out into the cleared space and began to figure
before us as the music prompted. I had an opportunity of seeing her, not
on this night only, but on many subsequent nights; and the wonder and
comical admiration she inspired was only deepened as time went on. She
had an admirable musical ear; and each new melody, as it struck in her a
new humour, suggested wonderful combinations and variations of movement.
Now it would be a dance with which she would suit the music, now rather
an appropriate pantomime, and now a mere string of disconnected
attitudes. But whatever she did, she did it with the same verve and
gusto. The spirit of the air seemed to have entered into her, and to
possess her like a passion; and you could see her struggling to find
expression for the beauty that was in her against the inefficacy of the
dull, half-informed body. Though her footing was uneven, and her
gestures often ludicrously helpless, still the spectacle was not merely
amusing; and though subtle inspirations of movement miscarried in
tottering travesty, you could still see that they had been inspirations;
you could still see that she had set her heart on realising something
just and beautiful, and that, by the discipline of these abortive
efforts, she was making for herself in the future a quick, supple, and
obedient body. It was grace in the making. She was not to be daunted by
any merriment of people looking on critically; the music said something
to her, and her whole spirit was intent on what the music said: she must
carry out its suggestions, she must do her best to translate its
language into that other dialect of the modulated body into which it can
be translated most easily and fully.
Just the other day I was witness to a second scene, in which the motive
was something similar; only this time with quite common children, and in
the familiar neighbourhood of Hampstead. A little congregation had
formed itself in the lane underneath my window, and was busy over a
skipping-rope. There were two sisters, from seven to nine perhaps, with
dark faces and dark hair, and slim, lithe, little figures clad in lilac
frocks. The elder of these two was mistress of the art of skipping. She
was just and adroit in every movement; the rope passed over her black
head and under her scarlet-stockinged legs with a precision and
regularity that was like machinery; but there was nothing mechanical in
the infinite variety and sweetness of her inclinations, and the
spontaneous agile flexure of her lean waist and hips. There was one
variation favourite with her, in which she crossed her hands before her
with a motion not unlike that of weaving, which was admirably intricate
and complete. And when the two took the rope together and whirled in and
out with occasional interruptions, there was something Italian in the
type of both--in the length of nose, in the slimness and accuracy of the
shapes--and something gay and harmonious in the double movement, that
added to the whole scene a southern element, and took me over sea and
land into distant and beautiful places. Nor was this impression lessened
when the elder girl took in her arms a fair-headed baby, while the
others held the rope for her, turned and gyrated, and went in and out
over it lightly, with a quiet regularity that seemed as if it might go
on for ever. Somehow, incongruous as was the occupation, she reminded me
of Italian Madonnas. And now, as before in the hotel drawing-room, the
humorous element was to be introduced; only this time it was in broad
farce. The funniest little girl, with a mottled complexion and a big,
damaged nose, and looking for all the world like any dirty, broken-nosed
doll in a nursery lumber-room, came forward to take her turn. While the
others swung the rope for her as gently as it could be done--a mere
mockery of movement--and playfully taunted her timidity, she passaged
backwards and forwards in a pretty flutter of indecision, putting up her
shoulders and laughing with the embarrassed laughter of children by the
water's edge, eager to bathe and yet fearful. There never was anything
at once so droll and so pathetic. One did not know whether to laugh or
to cry. And when at last she had made an end of all her deprecations and
drawings back, and summoned up heart enough to straddle over the rope,
one leg at a time, it was a sight to see her ruffle herself up like a
peacock and go away down the lane with her damaged nose, seeming to
think discretion the better part of valour, and rather uneasy lest they
should ask her to repeat the exploit. Much as I had enjoyed the grace of
the older girls, it was now just as it had been before in France, and
the clumsiness of the child seemed to have a significance and a sort of
beauty of its own, quite above this grace of the others in power to
affect the heart. I had looked on with a certain sense of balance and
completion at the silent, rapid, masterly evolutions of the eldest; I
had been pleased by these in the way of satisfaction. But when little
broken-nose began her pantomime of indecision I grew excited. There was
something quite fresh and poignant in the delight I took in her
imperfect movements. I remember, for instance, that I moved my own
shoulders, as if to imitate her; really, I suppose, with an inarticulate
wish to help her out.
Now, there are many reasons why this gracelessness of young children
should be pretty and sympathetic to us. And, first, there is an interest
as of battle. It is in travail and laughable _fiasco_ that the young
school their bodies to beautiful expression, as they school their minds.
We seem, in watching them, to divine antagonists pitted one against the
other; and, as in other wars, so in this war of the intelligence against
the unwilling body, we do not wish to see even the cause of progress
triumph without some honourable toil; and we are so sure of the ultimate
result, that it pleases us to linger in pathetic sympathy over these
reverses of the early campaign, just as we do over the troubles that
environ the heroine of a novel on her way to the happy ending. Again,
people are very ready to disown the pleasure they take in a thing
merely because it is big, as an Alp, or merely because it is little, as
a little child; and yet this pleasure is surely as legitimate as
another. There is much of it here; we have an irrational indulgence for
small folk; we ask but little where there is so little to ask it of; we
cannot overcome our astonishment that they should be able to move at
all, and are interested in their movements somewhat as we are interested
in the movements of a puppet. And again, there is a prolongation of
expectancy when, as in these movements of children, we are kept
continually on the very point of attainment and ever turned away and
tantalised by some humorous imperfection. This is altogether absent in
the secure and accomplished movements of persons more fully grown. The
tight-rope walker does not walk so freely or so well as any one else can
walk upon a good road; and yet we like to watch him for the mere sake of
the difficulty; we like to see his vacillations; we like this last so
much even, that I am told a really artistic tight-rope walker must feign
to be troubled in his balance, even if he is not so really. And again,
we have in these baby efforts an assurance of spontaneity that we do not
have often. We know this at least certainly, that the child tries to
dance for its own pleasure, and not for any by-end of ostentation and
conformity. If we did not know it we should see it. There is a
sincerity, a directness, an impulsive truth, about their free gestures
that shows throughout all imperfection, and it is to us as a
reminiscence of primitive festivals and the Golden Age. Lastly, there is
in the sentiment much of a simple human compassion for creatures more
helpless than ourselves. One nearly ready to die is pathetic; and so is
one scarcely ready to live. In view of their future, our heart is
softened to these clumsy little ones. They will be more adroit when they
are not so happy.
Unfortunately, then, this character that so much delights us is not one
that can be preserved by any plastic art. It turns, as we have seen,
upon consideration not really æsthetic. Art may deal with the slim
freedom of a few years later; but with this fettered impulse, with these
stammering motions, she is powerless to do more than stereotype what is
ungraceful, and, in the doing of it, lose all pathos and humanity. So
these humorous little ones must go away into the limbo of beautiful
things that are not beautiful for art, there to wait a more perfect age
before they sit for their portraits.
V
ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
(1874)
It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we
have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side
after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few
months ago some words were said in the _Portfolio_ as to an "austere
regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as
"healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the test, so to
speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be
understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet
the appetite. For when we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood,
and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we
see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the
ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we
perfect ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably. We learn
to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against
all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each
place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantôme quaintly tells us,
"_fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin_"; and into these
discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by
the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the
scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road; and
the man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a
clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the
thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as
through differently-coloured glasses. We are ourselves a term in the
equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at
will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we
are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable
sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of
beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere
character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even
where there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most
obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction
of romance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle
them lightly when we have found them. Sometimes an old print comes to
our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque
imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.
Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. And I
suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if
a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly prepared
for the impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For
instance: I have rarely been able to visit, in the proper spirit, the
wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I am happier where it
is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. I
understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise
well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing
power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and
put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way
of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am
sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before
Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an
unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour for this
sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. Still, even
here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should
have all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful images
away with me when I left. When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy
with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put
our head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together,
over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in
stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We
begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we
find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the
little summer scene in "Wuthering Heights"--the one warm scene, perhaps,
in all that powerful, miserable novel--and the great feature that is
made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine: this is in
the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors;
interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, than the
shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter of which I
shall presently have more to say.
With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is
only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours
agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the
neighbourhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about
uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness
of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which
is its own reward and justification. Looking back the other day on some
recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to
such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done
more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years
in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination.
The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau over which
the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river,
indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley
of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart
to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty
or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of
surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:
there was nothing left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by
the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here
and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts
and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had
learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean,
it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested
contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as
Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering
of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie
fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sun-burnt
plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue
transparent air; but this was of another description--this was the
nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and
was ashamed and cold.
It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. Indeed, this had passed
into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other when
they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of
farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze,
that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and
serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you
the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of
the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and
respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have
their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them
brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the
colour of the world! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their
passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow! There is
nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all
its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and
their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is
calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale. There was nothing,
however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no
trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or
those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was nevertheless an
occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the
pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader
knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself down
behind a dyke on a hill-side, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly
through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with
warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise,
that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful
passage of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling
struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the
great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with
as good effect:
"Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!"
I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must have
been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had
gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral
somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished
marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued
at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. At that
elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in the lower
strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the
church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise
when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into
the "Place" far below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats
and leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to
my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my
fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church top, with the blue sky and a few
tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened
buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but how much
more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only above
other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a golden zone
like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the
time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that
any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten
headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the
wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds
look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the
sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb
the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my
memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting
men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between
their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood
in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at
night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter
wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct
for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself. I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy," was seemingly
quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter
that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and
ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these
by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that
the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.
It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I
have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by
previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual
distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet
there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea
looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment
and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something
transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a
cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things;
it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And
on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came
very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments
in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that
great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing.
The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley
speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place one learned
to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.
On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.
The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped
the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all
day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the
breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines
of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and
give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating
to myself--
"Mon coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche, il résonne."
I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may serve to
complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were
certainly a part of it for me.
And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out
of the strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty
North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the
sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all
alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something
to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men
and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird
singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country,
there is no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in
the right spirit, and he will surely find.
VI
AN AUTUMN EFFECT
(1875)
"Nous ne décrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforçons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous en
avons reçue."--M. ANDRÉ THEURIET, "L'Automne dans les Bois," _Revue
des Deux Mondes_, 1st Oct. 1874, p. 562.[40]
A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave
upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and
dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the quick foot.
Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them
for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone
before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season can
steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows,
shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things,
and belie what they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the
landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before the
effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long scroll of
continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the prevailing
sentiment of the season, the weather, and the landscape, and certain to
be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious processes
of thought. So that we who have only looked at a country over our
shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will have a conception of it far
more memorable and articulate than a man who has lived there all his
life from a child upwards, and had his impression of to-day modified by
that of to-morrow, and belied by that of the day after, till at length
the stable characteristics of the country are all blotted out from him
behind the confusion of variable effect.
I began my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns his
back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows only
by the vague report of others. Such an one has not surrendered his will
and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a railway. He
may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where ways meet, follow
vague preferences freely and go the low road or the high, choose the
shadow or the sunshine, suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that
turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road that lies open
before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some
city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon. In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy, without a
pang of reproving conscience
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