*^ 9?.*-o" ^^0^ ^^ ^/'o. ■ft ri^ V ' 4T^\iMWh/lfB * ^Ss -C 0, °^ Q. ' , X /A ° ^^^,<^ "<>.V v^ % V -^<^^^ ^^^ ':;i*0' 0^ v' /\ THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF THE WORKS OF |ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE ART OF WRITING THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION OF STEVENSON'S WORKS NOVELS AND ROMANCES TREASURE ISLAND PRINCE OTTO KIDNAPPED THE BLACK ARROW THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE THE WRONG BOX THE WRECKER DAVID BALFOUR THE EBB-TIDE WEIR OF HERMISTON ST. IVES SHORTER STORIES NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS THE DYNAMITER THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS ESSArS, TRAf^ELS, AND SKETCHES AN INLAND VOYAGE TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY VIRGINIBUS PUERISQ^UE FAMILIAR STUDIES THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, fonra/nin^ THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS IN THE SOUTH SEAS ACROSS THE PLAINS ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE ART OF WRITING POEMS COMPLETE POEMS Twenty-five volumes. Sold singly or in sets Per vol.. Cloth, $1.00; Lim/> Leather, $I.3S "'*■ Charles Scribner's Sons, New York BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN FHE ART OF WRITING »l BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1905 ytJRARY of ■'sosiKrafjssS: r«o Sopies rstwawyj OCT. a? »yu5 / -i ? ^ i^^ OOPY 8. g I iiwrTfTirii [^"m ' "~rrz ? A°l Capyrighl, igo; Bv Charles Scribner's Sons \) ,^# (\b THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. cal god rather than a mere king. And now you iii ly ask yourself where he is, and look round for j*\ tiges of my late lord, and in all the country- i64 FOREST NOTES side there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion. At the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chan- ticleers and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There is a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade; but no spring shall revive the honour of the place. Old women of the people, little children of the people, saunter and gambol in the walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough-horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables. The dial-hand on the clock waits for some better hour. Out on the plain, where hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold, which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night with empty bellies and cold feet. And perhaps, as he raises his head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along the sea-like level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no unsimilar place in his affections. If the chateau was my lord's the forest was my lord the king's ; neither of them for this poor Jacques. If he thought to eke out his meagre FOREST NOTES 165 way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of fif- teen sols ; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to market. And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample it down. My lord has a new horn from England. He has laid out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder. The hounds have been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Mesmer, or St. Hubert in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a specialty of the health of hunting-dogs. In the grey dawn the game was turned and the branch broken by our best piqueur. A rare day's hunting lies before us. Wind a jolly flourish, sound the bim-aUcr with all your lungs. Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman i66 FOREST NOTES sweep across his field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not been. If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in favour with my lord ; who knows but his son may become the last and least among the servants at his lord- ship's kennel — one of the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds ? ^ For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison. In these dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pennons drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame. It was but an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers. Often there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the 1 " Deux poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la miit avec les chiens." See Champollion-Figeac's Z«//> ^/ Charles d'Orlcans, i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, iliid. 96. FOREST NOTES 167 old divisions of field from field. And yet, as times went, when the wolves entered at night into de- populated Paris, and perhaps De Retz was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers. Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble by old association. These woods have rung to the horns of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards. They have seen St. Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt ; Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train ; and Peter of Russia following his first stag. And so they are still haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore. And this dis- tinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs. Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some significant and dramatic situation. It was hence that Guise and his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris. Here, booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside a w^oodland cross. Here, on his way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate farewell to his sol- diers. And here, after Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful regiments burned that memorial of so much toil i68 FOREST NOTES and glory on the Grand Master's table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes the remnants of the Host. II IN THE SEASON Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the bornage stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small and very quiet village. There is but one street, and that, not long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the door-steps. As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where artists lodge. To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on into the court you will find as many more, some in the billiard-room over absinthe and a match of corks, some without over a last cigar and a vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from the dovecote; Hortense is drawing water from the well ; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can see the white-capped cook over the fur- nace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-manger. " Edmond, encore un ver- FOREST NOTES 169 mouth," cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought, " tm double, s'il vous plait." "Where are you working?" asks one in pure white linen from top to toe. " At the Carre- four de I'Epine," returns the other in corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way). " I couldn't do a thing to it. I ran out of white. Where were you ? " "I was n't working, I was looking for motives." Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about some new- comer with outstretched hands ; perhaps the " cor- respondence " has come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner. " A table, Messieurs ! " cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the first tureen of soup. And im- mediately the company begins to settle down about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round with sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit. There 's the big picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his legs, and his legs — well, his legs in stockings. And here is the little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from the dessert. And under all these works of art so much eating goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabber- ing in French and English, that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the door. One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete at Fleury, and another how well So-and-so would sing of an evening; and here are a third and lyo FOREST NOTES fourth making plans for the whole future of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most difficult and admirable ! A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns him- self to digestion. A seventh has just dropped in, and calls for soup. Number eight, meanwhile, has left the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano under powerful and uncertain fingers. Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat. Perhaps we go along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance is organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful jockeying, to the light of the three or four candles and a lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures, get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine. Or sometimes — suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every vine-leaf on the wall — sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel. The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long alley, and up through devious foot- FOREST NOTES 171 paths among rocks and pine-trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there a spacious outlook over moonht woods, these two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimble- fuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling a good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Per- haps some one of the party will not heed the sum- mons, but chooses out some by-way of his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die finally out, and still walks on in the strange coolness and silence and between the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knoll over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, 172 FOREST NOTES and away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his childhood passed between the sun and iiowers. Ill IDLE HOURS The vvoods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be understood until you can com- pare them with the woods by day. The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds like the weeds in sub- marine currents, all these set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a fore- land or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these noc- turnal solitudes is not to be felt fully without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun's light ; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves. And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window — for there are no blinds or shutters to keep him FOREST NOTES 173 out — and the room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed wahs, shines all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze awhile longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the partitions : Thiers, with wily profile ; local celebrities, pipe in hand ; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets off for what he calls his " motive." And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a little following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong only nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting. They would like to-be under the trees all day. But they cannot go alone. They require a pretext. And so they take the passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe. With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth and wagging stunted tail. Their good-humour is not to be ex- hausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all they will do is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out with you, to you 174 FOREST NOTES they will remain faithful, and with you return : although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass. The forest — a strange thing for an Englishman — is very destitute of birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows gives up an incense of song, and every valley wan- dered through by a streamlet rings and rever- berates from side to side with a profusion of clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be re- gretted on its own account only. For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants swarm in the hot sand; moscjuitos drone their nasal drone ; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light ; and even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious 'of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things between the trees. Nor are insects the only evil creatures that haunt the forest. For you may plump into a cave among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked viper slither across the road. Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a friend: "I say, just keep you where you are, ■will you? You make the jolliest motive." And you reply: " Well, I don't mind, if I may smoke." FO REST NOTES 175 And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree ; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wand goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light. But you know it is going forward ; and, out of emulation with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in words. Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin of lo^v hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers — looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain — are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten 176 FOREST NOTES yew-trees ! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and not see. Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades em- barked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in incon- gruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest savour. " You can get up now," says the painter ; " I 'm at the background." And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretch- ing farther into the open. A cool air comes along the highways, and the scents awaken. The fir- trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the sum- mer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland FOREST NOTES 177 winds. One side of the long- avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees the west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain. IV A PLEASURE PARTY As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go in force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered a large waggonette from Lejosne's. It has been waiting for near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t' other hurried over his toilette and coffee ; but now it is filled from end to end with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and amid much applause from round the inn door off we rattle at a spanking trot. The way lies through the forest, up hill and down dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning sunshine. The English get down at all the ascents and walk on ahead for exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this, and keep coyly underneath the tilt. As we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some one will be always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe. Before we get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly 178 FOREST N OTES peddle with a case of merchandise ; and it is " Des- prez, leave me some malachite green " ; " Desprez, leave me so much canvas " ; " Desprez, leave me this, or leave me that"; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with grave face and many salutations. The next interruption is more im- portant. For some time back we have had the sound of cannon in our ears ; and now, a little past Franchard, we find a mounted trooper holding a led horse, who brings the waggonette to a stand. The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it appears ; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the un- gainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the Doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too facile sentry. His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified and in- sinuating. It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all languages from French to Patagonian. He has not come home from perilous journeys to be thwarted by a corporal of horse. And so we soon see the soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart. " En voitnre, Messieurs, Mesdames," sings the Doctor ; and on we go again at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us, and discretion prevails not a little over FOREST NOTES 179 valour in some timorous spirits of the party. At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who will send us back. At any moment we may encounter a flying shell, which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez. Grez — for that is our destination — has been highly recommended for its beauty. " // y a de rcau," people have said, with an emphasis, as if that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am rather led to think it does. And Grez, when we get there, is indeed a place worthy of some praise. It lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church. The inn garden descends in terraces to the river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed with rushes and em- bellished with a green arbour. On the opposite bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with willows and poplars. And between the two lies the river, clear and deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies. Water-plants cluster about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half- way up upon the piers in green luxuriance. They catch the dipped oar with long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of their leaves. And the river wanders hither and thither among the islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy. You may watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the yellow deal. And you can hear a i8o FOREST NOTES splashing and a prattle of voices from the shed under the old kirk, where the village women wash and wash all day among the fish and water-lilies. It seems as if linen washed there should be specially- cool and sweet. We have come here for the river. And no sooner have we all bathed than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding under the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies. Some one sings ; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean over the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below, and the shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own head protruded, glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream. At last, the day declin- ing — all silent and happy, and up to the knees in the wet lilies — we punt slowly back again to the landing-place beside the bridge. There is a wish for solitude on all. One hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette ; another goes a walk in the coun- try with Cocardon ; a third inspects the church. And it is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes round from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse once more into a jolly fellowship. Half the party are to return to-night with the waggonette ; and some of the others, loath to break up good company, will go with them a bit of the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte. It is dark in the waggonette, and not so merry as it might have been. The coachman loses the road. So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent FOREST NOTES i«i success. Some sing, but the rest are too weary to applaud; and it seems as if tlie festival were fairly at an end — " Nous avons fait la noce, Rentrons a nos foyers ! " And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and taken our places in the court at Mother Antonine's. There is punch on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in summer weather. The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a background of complete and solid darkness. It is all picturesque enough ; but the fact is, we are aweary. We yawn ; we are out of the vein ; we have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for pleasure's sake, let 's make an end on 't. When here comes striding into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank ; and in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather suggest a ner- vous crisis than a desire to please. We are as merry as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to all the good folk going farther. Then, as we are far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with i82 FOREST NOTES furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by a wood fire in a me- diaeval chimney. And then we plod back through the darkness to the inn beside the river. How quick bright things come to confusion ! When we arise next morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yester- day's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dis- mally enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the drip- ping house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green and golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about Gez have a trick of their own. They go on for awhile among clumps of willows and patches of vine, and then, suddenly and without any warn- ing, cease and determine in some miry hollow or upon some bald know ; and you have a short period of hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came! So we draw about the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or go to the billiard-room for a match at corks ; and by one consent a messenger is sent over for the waggonette — Grez shall be left to-morrow. To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for exercise, and let their knap- sacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say they are neither of them French ; for, of all English phrases, the phrase " for exercise " is the least FORESTNOTES 183 comprehensible across the Straits of Dover. All goes well for awhile with the pedestrians. The wet woods are full of scents in the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a guard-house, they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter of their good host at Barbizon. And so there they are hospitably received by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some prints of love-afifairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on awhile somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears and the rain beginning to fall. The ways grow wider and sandier ; here and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-shore ; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no more. One begins to look at the other doubtfully. " I am sure we should keep more to the right," says one ; and the other is just as certain they should hold to the left. And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls " sheer and strong and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their boots. They leave the track and try across country with a gambler's despera- tion, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go i84 FOREST NOTES scrambling from boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the can- non in the distance. And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner. THE WOODS IN SPRING I THINK you will like the forest best in the sharp early springtime, when it is just beginning to re- awaken, and innumerable violets peep from among the fallen leaves ; when two or three people at most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on the court. There is less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mush- rooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English FOREST NOTES 185 picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns ; or you may be told by an agitated peasant that the Vi- comte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes since, " a fund de train, monsieur, et avec douze piquciirs." If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little rud- dier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn green ; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow- white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow- white branches yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs. And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown heather. It is all rather cold and unhomely. It has not the perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes of sunlight set in purple heather. The loveliness of the woods in March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type. It is made sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness. It has a sting i86 FOREST NOTES like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as men acquire a taste for olives. And the wonderful clear, pure air wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune — or, rather, to an old tune ; for you remem- ber in your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest. It is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voices calling you farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's donkey, in a maze of pleasure. Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches, barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand. Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of under- wood ; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying and calling. On the sward of the Bois d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and the sound of the axe is rarely still. But strangest of all, and in appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts of young wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with years and the rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and FO REST NOTES 187 yellow butterflies are sown and carried away again by the light air — like thistledown. The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that there are mo- ments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear. You listen and listen for some noise to break the silence, till you grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain ; your sense of your own identity is troubled ; your brain reels, like that of some gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles ; and should you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as any- thing of yours, but as a feature of the scene around you. Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always unbroken. You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train ; sometimes with a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves. And some- times, close at hand, the branches move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart. Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe. From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by ; and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear, not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places. Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs ; scared deer flit past you through the fringes i88 FOREST NOTES of the wood ; then a man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, where you sit perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague excitement and a vague hope ; for who knows whither the chase may lead ? and even to have seen a single picjueur, or spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night. Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few people in the forest, in the early spring, save wood-cutters plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gather- ing wood for the fire. You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight : the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake. That is the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique. It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a key- bugle played with much hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green pine- tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of FOREST NOTES 189 naked boulders. He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at the fire. The eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. Two or three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets. And the whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them ! My friend watched for a long time, he says ; but all held their peace ; not one spoke or smiled ; only the dragoon kept choosing out single notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and made strange movements the while with his flexible eye- brows. They took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the aw- ful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels. It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery ; it may be they were automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that this is all another chapter of Heine's " Gods in Exile "; that the upright old I90 FOREST NOTES man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove, and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or Mars. VI MORALITY Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men. Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen to spread abroad its fame. Half the famous writers of modern France have had their word to say about Fontainebleau. Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger. George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger, the brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each of these has done something to the eternal praise and memory of these woods. Even at the very worst of times, even when the picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty. It was in 1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his His- torical Description of the Palace, Town, and For- est of Fontainebleau. And very droll it is to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what was then permissible. The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abbe, " sont admirees avec sur- prise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient aussitot avec Horace : Ut mihi devio rupes et vacuum nemus mirari libet." The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak. Horace, at FOREST NOTES 191 any rate, was classical. For the rest, however, the ':. Abbe Hkes places where many alleys meet ; or •■ which, like the Belle-Etoile, are kept up " by a special gardener," and admires at the Table du Roi pthe labours of the Grand Master of Woods and Waters, the Sieur de la Falure, " qui a fait faire ice magnifiqiie cndroit." But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that I emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully Khanges and renews a weary spirit. Disappointed [men, sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand I Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for 'jconsolation. Hither perplexed folk have retired [out of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window 'jon some night of masquerade, and here found quiet and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom. It is the great moral spa ; this forest without a fountain is itself the great fountain of Juventius. It is the best place in the world to bring an old sorrow that has been a long while your friend and enemy; and if, like Bcranger's, your gaiety has ?run away from home and left open the door for sorrow to come in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find the truant hid. With every hour you change. The air penetrates through your clothes, and nestles to your living body. You love exercise and slumber, long fast- ling and full meals. You forget all your scru- ples and live awhile in peace and freedom, and for the moment only. For here, all is absent that 192 FOREST NOTES can stimulate to moral feeling. Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry ; but you see them framed in the forests, like figures on a painted canvas ; and for you, they are not people in any living and kindly sense. You forget the grim con- trariety of interests. You forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in unchivalrous con- tention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes on either hand for the defeated. Life is simple enough, it seems, and the veiy idea of sacrifice be- comes like a mad fancy out of a last night's dream. Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible. You become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air, where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affec- tions. When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round world. You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot. You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags, into the enchanted East. You may cross the Black Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own reflections in the Rhine or Danube. You may pass the spinal cord of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea. You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns. You may be awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the robin in the hedge. For you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten road ; the j FOREST NOTES 193 wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked. Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the lane ; inn after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine ; river by river receive your body in the sultry noon. Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should compass you about ; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way. You may see from afar off what it will come to in the end — the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of human sympa- thy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast. And yet it will seem well — and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem the best — to break all the network bound about your feet by birth and old companion- ship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town and country, until the hour of the great dissolvent. Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by itself, and forest life owns small kin- ship with life in the dismal land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter into their notion of a place. If the sea, for instance, lie just across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change. And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness is for much in the effect produced. You reckon up the miles that 13 194 FOREST NOTES lie between you and intrusion. You may walk before you all day long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers. And there is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion. When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boy- hood near Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar: " Cccsar inihi hoc donavit." It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten ages, and following an antiquity with hound and horn. And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many cen- turies this stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge. If the extent of solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunters' hounds and horses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of human years? Here, also, crash his arrows ; here, in the farthest glade, sounds the gallop of the pale horse. But he does not hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small : and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too miQ-ht live on into later "enerations and astonish FOREST NOTES 195 men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success. For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all the impudences of the brawling world reach you no more. You may count your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone wood-cutter, or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heaA'ens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if perchance you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together, like an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory chimney defined against the pale horizon — it is for you, as for the staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and harness from the furrow of the glebe. Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there in the old times ; and, sure enough, there is a world out yonder where men strive together with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute. So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination. A faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars ; a lesrend as of some dead religion. VIII A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE LE MONASTIER is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire, the ancient Velay. ^ As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin ; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church of some architec- tural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and several vicars. It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the diligence in winter. The road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end to end in a single narrow street ; there you may see the fountain w^here women fill their pitchers ; there also some old houses with carved doors and pediments and ornamental work in iron. For Mo- nastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital, where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter ; and there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely penitent, who found means to ruin himself by high living in this village on the hills. He certainly has claims to be considered the most remarkable spend- thrift on record. How he set about it, in a place IN FRANCE 197 where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats ; and so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France. Not until the latter had got into the train was the work of Richelieu complete. It is a people of lace-makers. The women sit in the streets by groups of five or six ; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from one group to an- other. Now and then you will hear one woman clattering off prayers for the edification of the others at their work. They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon about the head, and sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap ; and so they give the street colour and brightness and a foreign air. Awhile ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district with the lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn five francs a day ; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in London. Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever and industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago. The tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer. The women bravely squandered their gains, kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to sweet- hearting and a merry life. From week's end to week's end it was one continuous gala in Monas- 198 A MOUNTAIN TOWN tier; people spent the day in the wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the buiirrccs up to ten at night. Now these dancing days are over. " // n'y phis de jeimcsse," said Victor, the gargon. I hear of no great advance in what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourrcc with its rambling', sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a custom of the past. Only on the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum dis- creetly rattling in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company singing the measure while the others dance. I am sorry at the change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence so much .mountain merriment in France. The lace-makers themselves have not entirely for- given our countrywomen ; and I think they take a special pleasure in the legend of the northern cjuarter of the town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were arrested and driven l>ack by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on the wall. From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of revival ; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets ; and pickpockets have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the occasion. Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wnne-shops. of which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town. Sunday wear for the men is a green tail-coat of some coarse I N F R A N C E 199 sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit to match. I have nexer set eyes on such degrading raiment. Here it clings, there bulges; and the human Ijody, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock. An- other piece of Sunday business with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for advice. It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going. I have seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before, wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a canonical day for consultation ; such was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to conform. Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite concessions rather than in speed. Each will wait an hour or two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe. The Courricr (such is the name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon on the return voy- age, and arrive at Monastier in good time for a six o'clock dinner. But the driver dares not disoblige his customers. He will postpone his departure again and again, hour after hour ; and I have known the sun to go down on his delay. These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's fancies, rather than the hands of a me- chanical clock, as marking the advance of the 200 A MOUNTAIN TOWN abstraction, time, makes a more humourous busi- ness of stage-coaching than we are used to see it. As far as the eye can reach, one swelHng Hne of hilltop rises and falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see new and farther ranges behind these. Many little rivers run from all sides in cliffy valleys ; and one of them, a few miles from Monastier, bears the great name of Loire. The mean level of the country is a little more than three thousand feet above the sea, which makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome. There is little timber except pines, and the greater part of the country lies in moorland pasture. The country is wild and tumbled rather than commanding ; an upland rather than a moun- tain district ; and the most striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies low beside the rivers. There, indeed, you will find many corners that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his grave by a Swiss streamlet, where Nature is at her freshest, and looks as young as on the seventh morning. Such a place is the course of the Ga- zeille, where it w^aters the common of Monastier and thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds singing ; a place for lovers to frequent. The name of the river was perhaps sug- gested by the sound of its passage over the stones ; for it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell asleep. On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, al- though not so noble as the best in Scotland ; and I N F R A N C E 20I by an odd coincidence, the population is, in its way, as Scottish as the country. They have abrupt, uncouth, Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, with an " Ou'st-cc que z'OHS al!c::;F" only translatable into the Lowland " Whaur ye gaun? " They keep the Scottish Sab- bath. There is no labour done on that day but to drive in and out the various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling in the meadows. The lace-makers have disappeared from the street. Not to attend mass would involve social degradation ; and you may find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of Catholic Monthly Visitor on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes. I remember one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the baby, gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer. One strapping lass stood with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in devoutly. Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some straw, to represent the worldly element. Again, this people is eager to proselytise ; and the postmaster's daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until she grew quite flushed. I have heard the reverse process going on between a Scotswoman and a French girl ; and the arguments in the two cases were identical. Each apostle based her claim on the superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the busi- ness with a threat of hell-fire. " Pes bong prcfres 202 A MOUNTAIN TOWN id," said the Presbyterian, " bong prctrcs en Ecossc." And the postmaster's daughter, taking up the same weapon, phed me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the bayonet. We are a hope- ful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our good. One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart. And I call it cheerful, for faith is a more support- ing quality than imagination. Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders. And here also, the young men ha\-e a tendency to emigrate. It is certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or across the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a fortune of at least 40,000 francs. The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adven- ture and the desire to rise in life, and leave their homespun elders grumbling and wondering over the event. Once, at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these disappointed parents : a drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it take wing and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an apothecary in Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny in his pocket. And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous life ! I thought he might as well have stayed at home ; but you never can tell wherein a man's life consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure : one to drink, anotlier I N F R A N C E 203 to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, he could conceive no reason for the lad's behaviour. "I had always bread for him," he said; " he ran away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude." But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring-, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. " This comes from America," he cried, " six thousand leagues away ! " And the wine-shop audience looked upon it with a certain thrill. I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country. Oust-cc que vous allczf was changed for me into Quoi, vous rcntrcz au Monastic}' cc soir? and in the town itself every ur- chin seemed to know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it. There was one par- ticular group of lace-makers who brought out a chair for me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to gossip. They were filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion, the dress of the w^omen, and were never weary of seeing the Queen's head on English postage-stamps or seeking for French words in English Journals. The language, in particular, filled them wdth surprise. " Do they speak patois in England? " I was once asked ; and when I told them not, " Ah, then, French? " said they. 204 A MOUNTAIN TOWN " No, no," I said, " not French." " Then," they conckuled, " they speak patois." You must obviously either speak French or patois. Talk of the force of logic — here it was in all its weakness. I gave up the point, but pro- ceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I was met with a new mortification. Of all patois they declared that mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a faint and slightly disagreeable bewilderment. " Bread," which sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing mono- syllable in England, was the word that most de- lighted these good ladies of Monastier ; it seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick ; and they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for winter evenings. I have tried it since then wnth every sort of accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour. They were of all ages : children at their first web of lace, a stripling girl with a bashful but en- couraging play of eyes, solid married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and some falling towards decrepitude. One and all were pleasant and natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity when that was called for by the subject of our talk. Life, since tlie fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more I N F R A N C E 205 serious air. The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one of the grand- mothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humourous twinkle in her eye that were eminently Scottish. But the rest used me with a certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely human. Nothing would put them at their ease but the irre- sistible gaiety of my native tongue. Between the old lady and myself I think there was a real attach- ment. She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial. It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the last. " No, no," she would say, " that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than that. We must try again." When I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a some- what touching manner. We should not meet again, she said ; it was a long farewell, and she was sorry. But life is so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows ? I have said good-bye to people for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see them yet again. One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the oldest, and with hardly an ex- ception. In spite of their piety, they could twang 2o6 A MOUNTAIN TOWN off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman of this neigh- bourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided patois like a weakness, com- monly addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it and took my departure. It is true she had a right to be angry ; for here was her son, a hulking fel- low, visibly the worse for drink before the day was well begun. But it was strange to hear her un- wearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed un- noticed ; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised the ear. The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my principal companion. He was generally intelligent, and could have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics ; but it was his specialty to ha^•e a generous taste in eat- ing. This was what was most indigenous in the man ; it was here he was an artist ; and I found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthu- siasm and special knowledge are the great social 1 N F R A N C E 207 qualities, and what they are about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether second- ary question. I used to accompany the Conductor on his pro- fessional rounds, and grew to believe myself an expert in the business. I thought I could make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure off the wayside with any living engineer in France. Gondet was one of the places we visited together ; and Laussonne, where I met the apothe- cary's father, was another. There, at Laussonne, George Sand spent a day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis dc Villcmcr; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child run- ning about the inn kitchen, and who still remem- bers her with a sort of reverence. It appears that he spoke French imperfectly ; for this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and when- ever he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in patois, she w^ould make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her memory. The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy ; and it would be curious to know if she after- wards employed it in her works. The peasants, who knew nothing of letters and had never so much as heard of local colour, could not ex- plain her chattering with this backward child ; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far from beautiful : the most famous man- killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian swineherds ! On my first engineering excursion, which lay up 2o8 A MOUNTAIN TOWN by Crouzials towards Mount Mezenc and the bor- ders of Ardeche, I began an improving acquaint- ance with the foreman road-mender. He was in great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he called " the gallantry " of paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop. On the whole, he was a man of great weather- wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper. But I am afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a company of bourgeois ct dames qui fjisaient la manege aire des chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches' Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming from Pradellcs with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him ; and at length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca. I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some amusement. The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing than formerly. " C'est diffi- cile," he added, " a expliquer." When we were well up on the moors and the I N F R A N C E 209 Conductor was trying some road-metal with the gauge — "Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing? " We hstened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears. " It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he. For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to pasture on these grassy plateaux. Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one spinning with a distaft', an- other seated on a wall and intently making lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out her arms, like a person swim- ming, to keep us at a distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our intentions. The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up tlie information in despair. A tale of old law- lessness may yet be read in these uncouth timidities. The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses are snowed up, and way- farers lost in a flurry within hail of their own fire- side. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine- shop ; and even thus equipped he takes the road v/ith terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without 14 2IO A MOUNTAIN TOWN work or diversion. The father may carve a rude piece of furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets in again, and along with it the labours of the field. It is not for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain habitations. A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable in such a life. . . . IX RANDOM MEMORIES: "ROSA QUO LOCORUM" I THROUGH what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the conscious- ness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it should be not only interesting but instruc- tive to inquire. A matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind of childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes in a library. The child is conscious of an interest, not in literature, but in life. A taste for the precise, the adroit, or the comely in the use of words, comes late ; but long before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress-rehearsal of experience. He is first conscious of this material — I had almost said this practical — preoccupation ; it does not follow that it really came the first. I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that would seem to imply a prior stage. " The Lord is gone up with a shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet " — memorial version, I know not where to find the text — rings 212 RANDOM MEMORIES still in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps Avith something of my nurse's accent. There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words them- selves were what I cherished. I had about the same time, and under the same influence — that of my dear nurse — a favourite author : it is possible the reader has not heard of him — the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne. My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched ; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day : " Beliind the hills o£ Naplitali The sun went slowly clown, Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree, A tinge of golden brown." There is imagery here, and I set it on one side. The other — it is but a verse — - not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood : "Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her":^ I may say, without flippancy, that He was nothing to me either, since I had no ray of a guess of what He was about ; yet the verse, from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued to haunt me. 1 "Jehovah Tsidkenu," translated in the Authorised Version as "The Lord our Righteousness" (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. i6). "ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 213 I have said that I should set a passage distin- guished by obvious and pleasing imagery, however faint ; for the child thinks much in images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond their value. Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous psalm, " The Lord is my shepherd " : and from the places employed in its illustration, which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied by my father, I am able to date it before the seventh year of my age, although it was probably earlier in fact. The " pastures green " were represented by a certain suburban stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith : the place is long ago built up ; no pastures now, no stubble- fields ; only a maze of little streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children. Here, in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant ; and close by the sheep in which I was incarnated — as if for greater security — rustled the skirts of my nurse. " Death's dark vale " was a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery : a formidable yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid, — in measure as they love all experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind), utterly alone in that uncanny passage : on the one side of me a rude, knobby shepherd's staff, such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a 214 RANDOM MEMORIES billiard-cue appeared to accompany my progress : the staff sturdily upright, the billiard-cue inclined confidentially, like one whispering, towards my ear. I was aware — I will never tell you how — that the presence of these articles afforded me encourage- ment. The third and last of my pictures illustrated the words : " My table Thou hast furnished In presence of my foes : My head Thou dost with oil anoint, And my cup overflows " : and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an authentic shoe-horn ; the summer-house was part of the green court of a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows. The picture ap- pears arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The summer-house and court were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the imps conveyed from Bagster's Pil- grim's Progress; the bearded and robed figure from any one of a thousand Bible pictures ; and the shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, w^iere it figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to me as a jest by my father. It was shown me for a jest, remark ; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted "ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 215 it in earnest. Children are all classes ; a bottle would have seemed an intermediary too trivial — that divine refreshment of whose meaning I had no guess ; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe- horn with delight, even as, a little later, I should have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, breaker, or any word that might have appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean associa- tions. In this string of pictures I believe the gist of the psalm to have consisted ; I believe it had no more to say to me ; and the result was consolatory. I would go to sleep dwelling with rest fulness upon these images ; they passed before me, besides,, to an appropriate music ; for I had already singled out from that rude psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all, not growing old, not disgraced by its association with long Sunday tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion thought : " In pastures green Thou leadest me, The quiet waters by." The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these pleased me, it was unconsciously ; I listened for news of the great vacant world upon whose edge I stood ; I listened for delightful plots that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in 2i6 RANDOM MEMORIES durance, Robinson Crusoe; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work (rather gruesome and bloody for a child, but very picturesque) called Paul Bloke; these are the three strongest impressions I remember : The Szuiss Family Robinson came next, longo intervallo. At these I played, conjured up their scenes, and delighted to hear them re- hearsed unto seventy times seven. I am not sure but what Paul Blake came after I could read. It seems connected with a visit to the country, and an experience unforgetable. The day had been warm ; H and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road ; then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly sweetness in the air. Somehow my play- mate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas say, but I was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked. How often since then it has befallen me to be happy even so ; but that was the first time : the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall ; for it was then that I knew I loved reading. II To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and dangerous step. With not a few, I think a large proportion of their pleasure "ROSA QUO LOCO RUM" 217 then comes to an end ; *' the malady of not mark- ing " overtakes them ; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately period. Non ragioniam of these. But to all the step is dan- gerous ; it involves coming of age ; it is even a kind of second weaning. In the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books of childhood. In the future we are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone, like pioneers ; and the choice of what we are to read is in our own hands thenceforward. For instance, in the pas- sages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my old nurse ; they were of her choice, and she imix)sed them on my infancy, reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own ; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on assonances and alliterations. I know very well my mother must have been all the while trying to educate my taste upon more secular authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these earliest volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne. I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in " Bingen on the Rhine," " A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers," or in " The Soldier's Funeral," in the declaration of which I was held to have surpassed myself. 2i8 RANDOM MEMORIES " Robert's voice," said the master on this memo- rable occasion, " is not strong, but impressive " : an opinion which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me for years in conse- quence. I am sure one should not be so deliciously tickled by the humourous pieces : "What, crusty? cries Will, in a taking, Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking? " I think this quip would leave us cold. The " Isles of Greece " seem rather tawdry too ; but on the " Address to the Ocean," or on " The Dying Glad- iator," " time has writ no wrinkle." " 'T is the morn, but dim and dark ; Whither flies the silent lark? " — does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these lines in the Fourth Reader; and " surprised with joy, impatient as the wind," he plunged into the sequel ? And there was another piece, this time in prose, which none can have for- gotten ; many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsid- erable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London. But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out for himself, as he rummages the book-shelves, is the real test and pleasure. My father's library was a spot of some austerity: the proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divin- "ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 219 ity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The Parent's Assistant, Rob Roy, IV aver ley, and Guy Manner- ing, the Voyages of Captain Woods Rogers, Ful- ler's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's Mare au Diable (how came it in that grave as- sembly!), Ainsworth's Tozver of London, and four old volumes of Punch — these were the chief ex- ceptions. In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos ; and I remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed with a famous name ; to me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy, with whom of course I w^as acquainted from the Tales of a Grandfather; time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off ; and I shall never forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice. " The worthy Dr. Lightfoot " — " mistrysted with a bogle " — " a wheen green trash " — " Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her " : from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say ; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, 220 RANDOM MEMORIES I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about my path ; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half asleep into the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book concluded ; Helen and her sons shocked even the little school-boy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was read- ing ; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or saw Rash- leigh dying in the chair. When I think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others ; they seem but shadows and impos- tors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened ; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are always the most real. And yet I had read before this Guy Manncring, and some of IVavcrlcy, with no such delig-hted sense of truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or to the same degree. One cir- cumstance is suspicious : my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I w^as ten. Rob Roy, Guy Manncring, and Rcdgmintlct first; then, a little lower. Tlic For- tunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf, Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein: the rest nowhere; such I "ROSA QUO LOCORUM" 221 was the verdict of the boy. Since then The Anti- quary, St. Roiian's Well, Kcuihvorth, and Tlic Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale; perhaps IvanJioe and Anne of Geierstein have gone a trifle down ; Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted world of Rob Roy; I think more of the letters in Red gauntlet, and Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece, of realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the same ; I could not finish TJic Pirate when I was a child, I have never finished it yet ; Peveril of the Peak dropped half-way through from my school-boy hands, and though I have since waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was cjuite without enjoy- ment. There is something disquieting in these considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part of the Book of Snobs: does that mean that I was right when I was a child, or does it mean that I have ne\'er grown since then, that the child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sin- syne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . . X THE IDEAL HOUSE TWO things are necessary in any neigh- bourhood where we propose to spend a Hfe : a desert and some Hving water. There are many parts of the earth's surface which offer the necessary combination of a cer- tain wildness with a kindly variety. A great prospect is desirable, but the want may be other- wise suppHed ; even greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and eye measure differently. Bold rocks near at hand are more inspiriting than distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a fine forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew-trees noble moun- tains. A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and there upon a knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of Provence over- grown with rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma, are places where the mind is never weary. Forests, being more enclosed, are not at first sight so attractive, but they exercise a spell ; they must, however, be diversified with either heath or rock, and are hardly to be considered perfect without conifers. Even sand-hills, with THE IDEAL HOUSE 223 their intricate plan, and their gulls and rabbits, will stand well for the necessary desert. The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea. A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood ; its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the distance of one notable object from another; and a lively burn gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool, with answerable changes both of song and colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred miles. The fish, too, make a more considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in the shadow takes the ear. A stream should, besides, be nar- row enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once shut out of Eden. The quan- tity of water need be of no concern, for the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty inches. Let us approve the singer of " Shallow rivers, by whose fall Melodious birds sing madrigals." If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard with a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small havens and dwarf headlands ; if possible a few islets ; and as a first necessity, rocks reaching out into deep water. Such a rock on a calm day is a better sta- tion than the top of Teneriffe or Chimborazo. In short, both for the desert and the water, the con- junction of many near and bold details is bold 224 THE IDEAL HOUSE scenery for the imagination and keeps the mind ahve. Given these two prime luxuries, tlie nature of the countr}^ where we are to hve is, I had almost said, indifferent ; after that, inside the garden, we can construct a country of our own. Several old trees, a considerable variety of level, several well- grown hedges to divide our garden into provinces, a good extent of old well-set turf, and thickets of shrubs and evergreens to be cut into and cleared at the new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to be sought for in your chosen land. Nothing is more delightful than a succession of small lawns, opening one out of the other through tall hedges ; these have all the charm of the old bowling-green repeated, do not require the labour of many trim- mers, and afford a series of changes. You must have much lawn against the early summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, the year's morning frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the period of their blossoming. Haw- thorn is another of the spring's ingredients ; but it is even best to have a rough public lane at one side of your enclosure, which, at the right season, shall become an avenue of bloom and odour. The old flowers are the best and should grow carelessly in corners. Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect, and to tend, not repair, that neglect ; it will thus have a smack of nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot over- take. The gardener should be an idler, and have THE IDEAL HOUSE 225 a gross partiality to the kitchen plots; an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden land- scape ; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded apple- orchard reaching to the stream, completes your miniature domain ; but this is perhaps best en- tered through a door in the high fruit-wall; so that you close the door behind you on your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, when you go down to watch the apples falling in the pool. It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. Nor must the ear be forgotten : without birds, a garden is a prison-yard. There is a garden near Marseilles on a steep hillside, walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be ra\'ished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing: some score of cag'es being set out there to sun their occupants. This is a heavenly sur- prise to any passer-by ; but the price paid, to keep so many ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will make the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-lover. There is only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-d'Argent. I once had two of these pig- mies in captivity ; and in the quiet, bare house upon a silent street where I was then living, their song, which was not much louder than a bee's, but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good- 15 226 THE IDEAL HOUSE humour. I put the cage upon my table wlien I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and kept it by my head at night : the first thing in the morning these inacstrini would pipe up. But these, even if you can pardon their imprisonment, are for the house. In the garden the wild birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and yet a little farther, tree-tops populous with rooks. Your house should not command much outlook ; it should be set deep and green, though upon ris- ing ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll, for the sake of drainage. Yet it must be open to the east, or you will miss the sunrise; sunset occur- ring so much later, you can go up a few steps and look the other way. A house of more than two stories is a mere barrack ; indeed the ideal is of one storey, raised upon cellars. If the rooms are large, the house may be small : a single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more palatial than a castleful of cabinets and cupboards. Yet size in a house, and some extent and intricacy of cor- ridor, is certainly delightful to the flesh. The reception-room should be, if possible, a place ()f many recesses, which are " petty retiring-places for conference"; but it must have one long wall with a divan : for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of cushions, is as full of diversion as to travel. The eating-room, in the French mode, should be ad Jioc: unfurnished, but with a buffet. THE IDEAL HOUSE 227 tlie table, necessary chairs, one or two of Cana- letto's etchings, and a tile fireplace for the winter. In neither of these public places should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of books ; but the passages may be one library from end to end, and the stair, if there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very brightly carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by the way of landing, to a windowed recess with a fireplace; this window, almost alone in the house, should command a handsome prospect. Husband and wife must each possess a studio ; on the woman's sanctuary I hesi- tate to dwell, and turn to the man's. The walls are shelved waist-high for books, and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the wall. Above are prints, a large map of the neighbour- hood, a Corot and a Claude or two. The room is very spacious, and the five tables and two chairs are but as islands. One table is for actual work ; one close by for references in use ; one, very large, for MSS. or proofs that wait their turn; one kept clear for an occasion ; and the fifth is the map table, groaning under a collection of large-scale maps and charts. Of all books these are the least w^earisome to read and the richest in matter ; the course of roads and rivers, the contour-lines and the forests in the maps — the reefs, soundings, anchors, sailing-marks, and little pilot-pictures in the charts — and, in both, the bead-roll of names, make them of all printed matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy the fancy. The chair in which you write is very low and easy, and backed 228 THE IDE AL H O USE into a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; close at the other, if you are a little inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering into song. Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with bright marble, is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a capacious boiler. The whole loft of the house from end to end niakes one undivided chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments; a carpenter's bench ; and a spared corner for photography, while at the far end a space is kept for playing soldiers. Two boxes contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and foot ; two others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-rules and the three colours of chalk, witli which you lay down, or, after a day's play, re- fresh the outlines of the country; red or white for the two kinds of road (according as they nre suitable or not for the passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the obstructing rivers. Here I foresee that you may pass much happy time: against a good adversary a game may well con- tinue for a month ; for with armies so consider- able three moves will occupy an hour. It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the operations in the character of army corrcsDondent. THE IDEAL HOUSE 229 I have left to the last the little room for winter evening's. This should be furnished in warm posi- tive colours, and sofas and floor thick with rich furs. The hearth, where you burn wood of aro- matic quality on silver dogs, tiled round with Bible pictures ; the seats deep and easy ; a single Titian in a gold frame ; a white bust or so upon a bracket ; a rack for the journals of the week ; a table for the books of the year ; and close in a corner the three shelves full of eternal books that never weary : Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open at Cannosiiie and the other at Fantasia) ; the Ara- bian Nights, and kindred stories, in Weber's sol- emn volumes; Borrow's Bible in Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Gny Manncring and Rob Roy, Monte Crista and the Vicomte de Brage- lonne, immortal Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials. The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the High- lands, or the Newgate Calendar . . . XI HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS THERE has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut np together in some basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the intermi- nable and unchanging surf — idle among spiritless idlers ; not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change. These were certainly beautiful places to live in, and the cli- mate was wooing in its softness. Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were not cer- tain whether you were being wooed ; and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death. There was a lack of a manly element ; the air was not reactive ; you might write bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve. And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these appreciations. The invalid is now asked to lodge HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 231 on wintry Alps ; a ruder air shall medicine him ; the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den. For even Winter has his " dear domestic cave," and in those places v/here he may be said to dwell for ever tempers his austerities. Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental railroad of America must re- member tlie joy with which he perceived, after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy moun- tain summits along the southern sky. It is among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest livelihood. There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew his life. Instead of the bath chair, the spade ; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room — these are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors, none but an invalid can know. Res- ignation, the cowardice that apes a kind of cour- age and that lives in the very air of health resorts, is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect. The man can open the door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all and not merely an invalid. But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains. We 232 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS cannot all of us go farming in Colorado ; and there is yet a middle term, which combines the medical benefits of the new system with the moral draw- backs of the old. Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on his window. The mere fact is tonic to his nerves. His choice of a place of winter- ing has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill. He came for that, he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought. A long straight reach of valley, wall-like moun- tains upon either hand that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley ; a village of hotels ; a world of black and white — black pine-woods, clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd ; add a few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skat- ing on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the hotel — and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium. A certain furious river runs curving down the val- ley; its pace never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it ; and its unchanging, sense- less hurry is strangely tedious to witness. It is a HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 233 river that a man could grow to hate. Day after day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley. From end to end the snow re- verberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal. Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour. It were hard to fancy a more engaging feature in a landscape ; perhaps it is harder to believe that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the incontinent stream whose course it follows. By noon the sky is ar- rayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour — mild and pale and melting in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of purple blue. What with this darkness of heaven and the intoler- able lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos. An English painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that " the values were all wrong." Had he got among the Alps on a bright day he might have lost his reason. And even to any one who has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the specta- cles of representative art, the scene has a character of insanity. The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eyes ; the neighbouring dull- coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand ; the nigh slopes, which are black with pine- trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere. Here there are none of those delicate 234 HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and hght by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely. A glaring piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition ; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically try- ing, and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile: such is the winter daytime in the Alps. With the approach of evening all is changed. A mountain will sud- denly intercept the sun ; a shadow fall upon the valley ; in ten minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees ; the peaks that are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts ; and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours. The latest gold leaps from the last mountain. Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house, be- tween fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow. But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally exempt from changes. The clouds gather, black as ink ; the wind bursts rudely in ; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snowflakes flutter down in blinding disarray ; daily HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS 235 the mail comes in later from the top of the pass ; people peer through their windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn ; and when at last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to wal- lowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men. Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain valley. Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently rec- ognises the empire of the Fohn. XII DAVOS IN WINTER A MOUNTAIN valley has, at the best, a cer- tain prison-like effect on the imagination, .- but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind. The roads in- deed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodg- ing up the hill ; but to these the health-seeker is rigidly confined. There are for him no cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the w-ood. His walks are cut and dry. In five or six different directions he can push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits ; never deviating from the line laid down for him and be- holding at each repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of the road. This, of itself, would be a little trying to the patience in the course of months ; but to this is added, by the heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an almost unbroken identity of colour. Snow, it is true, is not merely white. The' sun touches it wdth roseate and golden lights. Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with DAVOS IN WINTER 237 wonderful depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still water, and has watery tones of blue. But, when all is said, these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the earth's face. Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian days — the path across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods. And scents here are as rare as colours. Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of frost. Sounds, too, are absent : not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all ; you work all winter through to no other ac- companiment but the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow. It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the wood. Nor is that all ; for about the health resort the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys 238 DAVOS IN WINTER trying to learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture to fancy, not quite hap- pily, pursuing love's young dream. You may per- haps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about. Alas ! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption — and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest inspi- ration fled. Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly over- taking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you in an opposite direction. It may annoy you to take your walks and seats in public view. Alas ! there is no help for it among the Alps. There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill ; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna road ; no nook upon St. Mar- tin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rose- mary and the sea-pines and the sea. For this publicity there is no cure, and no alle- viation ; but the storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure, chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes. When sun and storm contend togetlier — when the thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden daylight — there w' ill be start- ling rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits. A sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great DAVOS IN WINTER 239 mountain shoulder will be designed in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like a constellation, and alone " in the unapparent." You may think you know the figure of these hills ; but when they are thus revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth — meteors we should rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a moment and return no more. Other variations are more lasting, as when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine-trees stand each stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen. You may drive through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still ex- cept the jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some untrodden northern terri- tory — Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska. Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morn- ing; totter down-stairs in a state of somnambu- lism ; take the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room ; and find yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill. The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day. To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still half 240 DAVOS IN WINTER confounded with the greyness of the western heaven — these will seem to repay you for the discom- forts of that early start ; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find your- self upon the farther side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with such an- other long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another senseless water-course bickering along the foot. You have had your moment ; but you have not changed the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap ; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can change only one for another. XIII ALPINE DIVERSIONS THERE will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanatorium. The place is half English, to be sure, the -local sheet appear- ing in double column, text and translation ; but it still remains half German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors able, as you will be told, to act. This last you will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to German ; and though at the beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job. There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races : the German element seek- ing, in the interest of their actors, to raise a mys- terious item, the Kiir-taxc, which figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills ; the English ele- ment stoutly resisting. Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, t able aux-vw ants, and even balls enliven the evenings ; a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation ; Christmas and New Year are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks carol and i6 242 ALPINE DIVERSIONS revolve imtnnefully enough through the figures of a singing quadrihe. A magazine chib suppHes you with everything, from the Quarterly to the Sunday at Home. Grand tournaments are organ- ised at chess, draughts, bilhards, and whist. Once and again wandering artists drop into our moun- tain valley, coming you know not whence, going you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or soli- tary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at dinner-time with songs and a collec- tion. They are all of them good to see ; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the senti- ment of the open road ; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our mountain prison. Some of them, too, are wel- come as the flowers in May for their own sake ; some of them may have a human voice ; some may have that magic which transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin. From that grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a differ- ence rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that bewails and praises the des- tiny of man at the touch of the true virtuoso. Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly ALPINE DIVERSIONS 243 than here, ini Sclincc der Alpcn. A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one who knows the way to the heart of a viohn, are things that, in this in- variable sameness of the snows and frosty air, sur- prise you like an adventure. It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with which they greet the dinner-time performers. Singing- which they would hear with real enthu- siasm — possibly with tears — from a corner of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered by an unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door. Of skating little need be said ; in so snowy a climate the rinks must be intelligently maiiaged ; their mismanagement will lead to many days of vexation and some petty cjuarrciling, but when all goes well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotchman may re- member the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurJic; he may re- niember this contrivance, laden with boys, as, labo- riously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot ; he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and 244 ALPINE DIVERSIONS neglected lesson. The toboggan is to the hiirlie what the sled is to the carriage ; it is a hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist. The correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit hindforemost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back. A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical to use the feet. If the weight be heavy and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth ; and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not only judgment but desperate exertion. On a very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to be called enjoyment ; the head goes, the world van- ishes ; your blind steed bounds below your weight ; you reach the foot, with all the breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though you had just been subjected to a railway accident. Another element of joyful horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan being tied to another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only the first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to put up their feet and follow their leader, with heart in mouth, down the mad de- scent. This, particularly if the track begins with a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to somersaults. There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some miles in length, others but a few ALPINE DIVERSIONS 245 yards, and yet, like some short rivers, furious in their brevity. AU degrees of skiU and courage and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood. But perhaps the true way to toboggan is alone and at night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing- space, alone with snow and pine woods, cold, silent, and solemn to the heart. Then you push off ; the toboggan fetches way ; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine-trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious effort ; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glitter- ing valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet ; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the night with close-shut teeth and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmos- phere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet. XIV THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS TO any one who should come from a southern sanatorium to the Alps, the row of sunburned faces round the table would present the first surprise. He would begin by look- ing for the invalids, and he would lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark of sickness on his face. The plump sun- shine from above and its strong reverberation from below colour the skin like an Indian climate ; the treatment, which consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters. But although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of the climate on himself. In many ways it is a trying business to reside upon the Alps : the stomach is exercised, the appetite often languishes; the liver may at times rebel ; and because you have come so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you shall recover. But one thing is undeniable — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delisrht in his existence which can THE ALPS 247 nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no hap- pier, but he is sting-ingly alive. It does not, per- haps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is fun. There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimula- tion of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every morning', see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you ; you cast your shoe over the hilltops ; your ears and your heart sing ; in the words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit " on the wings of all the winds " to " come flying all abroad." Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed ; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body ; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied ; you weary before you have well begun ; and though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn. It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of 248 THE STIMULATION Alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent im- provements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts ; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be transient. The brightness — heaven and earth conspiring to be bright — the levity and quiet of the air ; the odd stirring silence — more stirring than a tumult ; the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape : all have their part in the effect and on the memory, " tous vons tapent siir la tcte " ; and yet when you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel — delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than an invalid can bear. There is a cer- tain wine of France known in England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse. It is more than probable that in its noble natural condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the Mus- keteers. Now, if the reader has ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in ques- tion, and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That O F T H E A L P S 249 also is a mode, we need not say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong- sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insub- stantial meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts. The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways. A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to that climate. People utter their judgments with a cannonade of syllables ; a big word is as good as a meal to them ; and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At first he cannot write at all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pres- sure of business, and the brain, left without nourish- ment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some power of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be positively offensive in hot weather. Pie writes it in good faith and with a sense of inspira- tion ; it is only when he comes to read what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. . This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept ; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame. He is not. perhaps. 250 THE ALPS alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day, when the spring re- turns, he shall go down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections and more modest language. But here, in the meantime, there seems to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract ; and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower. Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain ? It is a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for break- fast in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair — exhilaration, night- mares, pomp of tongue and all. But, on the other liand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects are strangely similar ; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these parts ; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else. ESSAYS IN THE ART OF WRITING I ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE THERE is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface ; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, psy- chology itself, when pushed to any nicety, dis- covers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. * And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the propor- tion of our ignorance ; and those conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This igno- rance at least is largely irremediable. We shall never leatn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too 254 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be stated but never can wholly be explained ; nay, on the principle laid down in Hudibras, that " Still the less they understand, The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known character, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most distasteful business : taking down the pic- ture from the wall and looking on the back ; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces. I. Choice of Words. — The art of literature stands apart from among its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange freshness and immicdiacy of address to the public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay ; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to desien the palace of his STYLE IN LITERATURE 255 art. Nor is this all ; for since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour : no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a defi- nite conventional import. Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversa- tionalist, is the apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the passions. But though this form of merit is with- out doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally present in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm, is different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or Fielding. Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in C^rlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in Macaulay, apt enough to con- vey his meaning, harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished ele- ments in a general effect. But the first class of 256 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle ; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne : it certainly lies not in the choice of words ; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole. What is that point ? 2. The Web. — Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes : those arts, like sculpture, paint- ing, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of this distinction, obeys principles apart ; yet both may claim a common ground of ex- istence, and it may be said with sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern,, it may be, of colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical fig- ures, or imitative lines ; but still a pattern. That is the plane on which these sisters meet ; it is by this that they are arts ; and if it be well they should at times forget their childish origin, addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary function of their life, STYLE IN LITERATURE 257 to make a pattern, it is still imperative that the pat- tern shall be made. Music and literature, the two temporal arts, con- trive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his mean- ing, involving it around itself ; so that each sen- tence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of sus- pended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should be ob- served this knot or hitch; so that (however deli- cately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antith- esis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself ; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound ; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various ; to interest, to disap- point, to surprise, and yet still to gratify ; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness. 17 258 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacri- ficed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illumi- nate the argument ; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the laws of verse ; and the cJicz'illc, I should perhaps explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we judge the strength and fit- ness of the first. Style is synthetic ; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more views of the sub- ject in hand ; combines, implicates, and contrasts them ; and while, in one sense, he was merely seek- ing an occasion for the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of two sentences in the space of one. In the change from STYLE IN LITERATURE 259 the successive shallow statements of the old chron- icler to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and afiinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost ; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler ; but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively ; or if obtru- sively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind ; and it is by the means of such de- signed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most perspicuously bound into one. The web, then, or the pattern : a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant tex- ture : that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read. 26o TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF for the interest of the fact or fable, in which this qiiahty is poorly represented, but still it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention Cicero; and since Mr. An- thony Trollope is dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless " criticism of life " ; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most in- tricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and of good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace. Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in verse also the implica- tion of the logical texture is a crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think that here was a death-blow to all I have been saying ; and far from that, it is but a new illustra- tion of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical ; it may be merely alliterative ; it may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular re- currence of the rhyme ; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what prin- ciple the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention ; it may have no inherent beauty ; all that we have a right to ask of any prosody is, STYLE IN LITERATURE 261 that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and that what it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes that it is much easier for men of equal facility to write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for in prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the difficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence, again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true versifier : such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as versifier merely, not as poet. These not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose ; they not only fill up the pat- tern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit ; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now con- trast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the sounding line concludes ; a little further on, the well-knit sen- tence ; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant- effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two ; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony. Or 262 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF if you prefer to return to the juggler, behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the spectators, juggling with three oranges instead of two. Thus it is : added difficulty, added beauty ; and the pattern, with every fresh element, becom- ing more interesting in itself. Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition ; something is lost as well as something gained; and there remains plainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with the best verse, a certain broad distinction of method in the web. Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sen- tence floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sen- tence turns upon a pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear remarks and is singly gratified by this return and balance ; while in verse it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable passages is hard ; for either the versifier is hugely the superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his more delicate enterprise, he fails" to be as widely his inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same writer, one who was ambidexter ; let us take, for instance. Rumour's Prologue to the Second Part of Henry IV., a fine flourish of elo- quence in Shakespeare's second manner, and set it side by side with Falstaff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene i. ; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken throughout by Rosalind and Orlando ; compare, for example, the first speech of all, Orlan- do's speech to Adam, with what passage it shall STYLE IN LITERATURE 263 please you to select — the Seven Ages from the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as Othello's farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if you have an ear for that class of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose ; a compacter fitting of the parts ; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throb- bing pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take from those who have little, the little that they have ; the merits of prose are inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but an independent. 3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way back, I used a word which still awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was to be comely ; but what is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material points, literature, being a representative art, must look for analogies to painting and the like; but in what is technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must seek for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the secret of the beauty of a verse ; how much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yet to please? The little that we know of verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly inter- 264 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF esting in the present connection. We have been accustomed to describe the heroic hne as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious school- boy, we have heard our own description put in practice. " All night I the drekd | less kn | gel un | pursued," ^ goes the school-boy ; but though we close our ears, we cling to our definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses : "All night I the dreadless | angel | unpursued." Four groups, each practically uttered as one word : the first, in this case, an iamb ; the second, an am- phibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our school-boy, with no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had trium- phantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others.. What had seemed to be one thing it noAV appears is two ; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read in fours. But, again, four is not necessary. We do not, in- deed, find verses in six groups, because there is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we do not 1 Milton. STYLE IN LITERATURE 265 find verses of two, because one of the main dis- tinctions of verse from prose resides in the com- parative shortness of the group ; but it is even common to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number; because five is the number of the feet ; and if five were chosen, the two pat- terns would coincide, and that opposition which is the Hfe of verse would instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and make so brave an architecture in the verse ; for the polysyllable is a group of Nature's mak- ing. If but some Roman would return from Hades (Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the voice these thundering verses should be uttered — ''Ant Laccdccmoniuin Tarentum," for a case in point — I feel as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of human verses. But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or sup- posed to be ; by the mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a question of ele- gance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so ; and I am certain that for choice no two of them should scan the same. The singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis can carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, but part to this variety of scansion in the groups. The groups which, like the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall uniam- bically ; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so happen that we never utter one iambic 266 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF foot. And yet to this neglect of the original beat there is a limit. "Athens, tlie eye of Greece, mother of arts,"^ is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it scarcely can be said to indicate the Ijeat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no other measure to the ear. But begin " Mother Athens, eye of Greece," or merely " Mother Athens," and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. The ec- centric scansion of the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought ; but if we destroy the original mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of pros- ody to have one common purpose : to keep alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously fol- lowed ; to keep them notably apart, though still coincident ; and to balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader, that neither shall be un- perceived and neither signally prevail. The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than 1 Milton. STYLE IN LITERATURE 267 the group in verse ; so that not only is there a greater interval of continuous sound between the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more readily to word by a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the strict analogue of the group, and successive phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will ; but it must not be metrical. It may be an3^thing, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may very w'ell pass and not dis- turb the somewhat larger stride of the prose style ; but one following another will produce an instant impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines delivered with the measured utter- ance of verse would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the more summary enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant vision, these niceties of differ- ence are lost. A whole verse is uttered as one phrase ; and the ear is soon wearied by a succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less har- monious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh vari- ety of movement on a larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than a fresh difficulty ; but such is the 268 TECHxNICAL ELEMENTS OF inherently rhythmical strain of the English lan- guage, that the bad writer — and must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood, Cap- tain Reid ? — the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be pertinently asked. Why bad ? And I suppose it might be enough to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than the movement of the nobler prose ; and it is just into this weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar density and mass, consequent on the near- ness of the pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still following after the swift gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract those effects of counterpoint and opposition which I have referred to as the final grace and jus- tification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in particular. 4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a great deal of talk about rhythm — and naturally ; for in our canorous language rhythm is always at the door. But it must not be forgotten that in some STYLE IN LITERATURE 269 languages this element is almost, if not quite, ex- tinct, and that in our own it is probably decaying. The even speech of many educated Americans sounds the note of danger. I should see it go with something as bitter as despair, but I should not be desperate. As in verse no element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose also, other sorts of beauty will arise and take the place and play the part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the expected beat in verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more lawless melody, patent as they are to English hearing, are already silent in the ears of our next neighbours ; for in France the oratori- cal accent and the pattern of the web have almost or altogether succeeded to their places ; and the French prose writer would be astounded at the labours of his brother across the Channel, and how a good quarter of his toil, above all invita Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. So wonderfully far apart have races wandered in spirit, and so hard it is to understand the literature next door ! Yet French prose is distinctly better than Eng- lish ; and French verse, above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French is easily distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is then another element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis : the contents of the phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase i'n music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another ; and the art of rightly using these 270 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF concordances is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration ; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sen- tence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated ; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may fol- low the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you ; find it, perhaps, denied awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melt- ing away into another. And you will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses : a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive " unheard melodies " ; and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there are asso- nances and alliterations; that where an author is running the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A ; and that where he is running a particular consonant, he will not im- probably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or l^ears a different value. Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a pat- tern, to speak grossly, of letters — which makes STYLE IN LITERATURE 271 the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very deli- cate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps most excellent and winning (I say perhaps) ; but at times again the elements of this literal melody stand more boldly forward and usurp the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a matter of con- science to select examples ; and as I cannot very well ask the reader to help me, I shall do the next best by giving him the reason or the history of each selection. The two first, one in prose, one in verse, I chose without previous analysis, simply as engaging passages that had long re-echoed in my ear. " I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." ^ Down to " virtue," the current S and R are both announced and repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that almost inseparable group PVF is given entire.^ The next phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself, both S and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four phrases, from " that never " down to " run for," the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight repeti- 1 Milton. 2 As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English exam- ples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms a chief atlornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all too Roman freedom of the sense : " Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae pallio- lata vagatur." 272 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF tion of the F and V, the whole matter turns, ahnost too obtrusively, on S and R ; first S coming to the front, and then R. In the concluding phrase all these favourite letters, and even the flat A, a timid preference for which is just perceptible, are dis- carded at a blow and in a bundle ; and to make the break more obvious, every word ends with a dental, and all but one with T, for which we have been cautiously prepared since the beginning. The sin- gular dignity of the first clause, and this hammer- stroke of the last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair to own that S and R are used a little coarsely. " In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (KANDL) A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR) Down to a sunless sea." ^ (N DLS) Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the lines ; and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem. But there are fiulher niceties. In lines two and four, the current S is most delicately varied with Z. In line three, the current flat A is twice varied with the open A, already suggested in line two, and both times (" where " and " sacred ") in conjunction with the current R. In the same line F and V (a harmony in themselves, even when shorn of their comrade P) are admiraljly contrasted. And in line four there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was an- 1 Coleridge. STYLE IN LITERATURE 273 nounced in line two. I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said. My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an example of the poet's colour sense. Now, I do not think literature has anything to do with colour, or poets anyway the better of such a sense ; and I instantly attacked this passage, since " purple " was the word that had so pleased the writer of the article, to see if there might not be some literary reason for its use. It will be seen that I succeeded amply ; and I am bound to say I think the passage exceptional in Shakespeare — excep- tional, indeed, in literature ; but it Vv^as not I who chose it. " The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe BURNt oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold, PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that *per The wiNds were love-sick with them." ^ It may be asked why I have put the F of " per- fumed " in capitals ; and I reply, because this change from P to F is the completion of that from- B to P, already so adroitly carried out. Indeed, the whole passage is a monument of curious in- genuity; and it seems scarce worth while to indi- cate the subsidiary S, L, and W. In the same article, a second passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an example of his colour sense : " A mole cinque-spotted Hke the crimson drops I' the bottom of a cowslip." ^ 1 Antony and Cleopatra. ^ Cymbcline. 18 274 TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyse at length : I leave it to the reader. But before I turn my back on Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure, and for a very model of every technical art : " But in the wind and tempest of her frown, \V. P. V.^ F. (st) (ow) Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W. P. F. (st) (ow) L. Puffing at all, winnows the light away; W. P. F. L. And what hath mass and matter by itself W. F. L. M. A. Lies rich in virtue and unmingled."^ V. L. M. From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some curiosity to a player of the big drum — Macaulay. I had in hand the two-volume edi- tion, and I opened at the beginning of the second volume. Here was what I read : "The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the degree of the maladministration which has produced them. It is therefore not strange that the government of Scotland, having been during many years greatly more corrupt than the government of England, should have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement against the last king of the house of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland destruc- tive. The English complained not of the law, but of the violation of the law." This was plain-sailing enough ; it was our old friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a body; but as I read on, and turned the page, and still found PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess my mind misgave me utterly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it must be the nature of the English * The V is in " of." 2 Troilus and Cressida. \ STYLE IN LITERATURE 275 tongue. In a kind of despair, I turned half-way through the volume; and coming upon his lord- ship dealing with General Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here, with eluci- dative spelling, was my reward : " Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on in- Kreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The recent viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great chie/s who had brought siKs or Se7/en hundred /"ighting men into the /"ield did not think it /air that they should be out7^oted by gentlemen from. Ireland, and yrom the Low Kountries, who bore indeed King James's Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains without Kompanies." A moment of FV in all this world of K's ! It was not the English langtiage, then, that was an instrument of one string, but Macaulay that was an incomparable dauber. It was probably from this barbaric love of re- peating the same sound, rather than from any design of clearness, that he acquired his irritating habit of repeating words ; I say the one rather than the other, because such a trick of the ear is deeper-seated and more original in man than any logical consideration. Few writers, indeed, are probably conscious of the length to which they push this melody of letters. One, writing very diligently, and only concerned about the meaning of his words and the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into amazement by the eager 276 TECHNICAL .ELEMENTS OF triumph with which he cancelled one expression to substitute another. Neither changed the sense ; both being monosyllables, neither could affect the scansion; and it was only by looking back on what he had already written that the mystery was solved : the second word contained an open A, and for nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel to the death. In practice, I should add, the ear is not always so exacting ; and ordinary writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves with avoiding what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occa- sion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two together, with a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand how constant is this preoccupation of good writers, even where its results are least obtrusive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of incongruous con- sonants only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to be articulated by the powers of man. Conclusion. — We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical : peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pat- tern, feet and groups, logic and metre — harmoni- ous in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language STYLE IN LITERATURE 277 into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth ; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods — but this particularly binding in the case of prose : and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words. We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it ; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. II A NOTE ON REALISM STYLE is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simu- lated. But the just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the elision of the use- less, the accentuation of tlie important, and the pres- ervation of a uniform character from end to end — these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out ; whether some particular fact be organically necessary or purely ornamental ; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design ; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional dis- guise : are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the high- A NOTE ON REALISM 279 ways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound. In literature (from which I must draw my in- stances) the great change of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott ; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and ex- pressed a more ample contemplation of the condi- tions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and deco- rative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from these extremities ; they begin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation ; after the suc- cinct, the dignified, and the poetic ; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story — once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable — begin to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a par- ticular ability of hand ; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the unquestion- able force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes. To afiford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly inter- ests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of 28o A NOTE ON REALISM detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere fcux-dc-joic of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard bab- bling of audible colours and visible sounds. This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of the fact which under- lies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All repre- sentative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic and ideal ; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon the larger, more various, and more romantic art of yore. A photographic ex- actitude in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion ; but even in the ablest hands it tells us no more — I think it even tells us less — than Moliere, wield- ing his artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the con- ditions of man's nature and the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page of literature calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that Troiliis mid Cressida which Shake- speare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy. A NOTE ON REALISM 281 This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards nut in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you will be none the less veracious ; but if you be weak, you run the risk of being tedious and inexpressive ; and if you be very strong and honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece. A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas ! that in- communicable product of the human mind, a per- fected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his whole design. The engendering idea of some works is stylistic ; a technical preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of life. And with these the execution is but play ; for the stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully foregone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, which we have learnt to ad- mire, with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson ; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth 282 A NOTE ON REALISM of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write Esmond than Inanity Fair, since, in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of the plan ; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the case is excep- tional. Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the author's mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one of extreme per- plexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort once for all ; and, having' formed a style, adhere to it through life. But those of a higher order cannot rest content with a process which, as they continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of the whole forces of their mind ; and the chang- ing views which accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment when execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that the ideal and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for the direction of the work. Marble, paint, and A NOTE ON REALISM 283 language, the pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordina- tion. It is the work and it is a great part of the delight of any artist to contend with these unruly tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his will. Given these means, so laughably inadequate, and given the interest, the intensity, and the mul- tiplicity of the actual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, the artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in every case and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much and omit more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven exclusively of such. There, any fact that is registered is contrived a double or a treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place, and a pillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such a picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to ac- centuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of distance, and to strike the note of the selected sentiment ; nothing would be allowed in such a stoiy that did not, at the same time, expedite the progress of the fable, build up the characters, and strike home the moral or the philosophical de- sign. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so far 284 A NOTE ON REALISM from building the fabric of our works exclusively with these, we are thrown into a rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a score of them, to be the plums of our confection. And hence, in order that the canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other details must be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title ; many without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds towards completion, too often — I had almost written al- ways — loses in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descrip- tive eloquence or slipshod talk. But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particulars which we know we can describe; and hence those most of all which, having been described very often, have grown to be conven- tionally treated in the practice of our art. These we choose, as the mason chooses the acanthus to adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the accustomed hand. The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship, and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art. To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give expression to facts which have not yet been A NOTE ON REALISM 285 adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is to run a little upon the danger of extreme self-love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the artist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists, and consider any fact as wel- come to admission if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork ; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of art — charm. A little further, and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity to art. We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the inter- val with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neg- lect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a convention ; he shall have all fiery, all hot- pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers under facts ; but he comes in the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thor- 286 A NOTE ON REALISM oughness, steadily to communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of the idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion. We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is conceived with honesty and ex- ecuted with communicative ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new creation ; yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do the intel- lectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always hold- ing back the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dig- nified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design. Ill THE MORALITY OF THE PRO- FESSION OF LETTERS THE profession of letters has been lately debated in the public prints; and it has been debated, to put the matter mildly, from a point of view that was calculated to sur- prise high-minded men, and bring a general con- tempt on books and reading. Some time ago, in particular, a lively, pleasant, popular writer ^ de- voted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, to a very encouraging view of the profession. We may be glad that his experience is so cheering, and we may hope that all others, who deserve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded ; but I do not think we need be at all glad to have this question, so important to the public and ourselves, debated solely on the ground of money. The salary in any business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question. That you should con- tinue to exist is a matter for your own considera- tion ; but that your business should be first honest, and second useful, are points in which honour and morality are concerned. If the writer to whom I 1 Mr. James Payn. 288 MORALITY OF THE refer succeeds in persuading a number of young persons to adopt this way of life with an eye set singly on the livelihood, we must expect them in their works to follow profit only, and we must expect in consequence, if he will pardon me the epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty litera- ture. Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment, and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he has adequately de- served. But the truth is, he does not, or did not when he first embraced it, regard his profession from this purely mercenary side. He went into it. I shall venture to say, if not with any noble design, at least in the ardour of a first love; and he enjoyed its practice long before he paused to calculate the wage. The other day an author was complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally good for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of a commercial traveller, that as the book was not briskly selling he did not give a copper farthing for its merit. It must not be sup- posed that the person to whom this answer was addressed received it as a profession of faith; he knew, on the other hand, that it was only a whiff of irritation ; just as we know, when a respectable writer talks of literature as a way of life, like shoe-making, but not so useful, that he is only de- bating one aspect of a question, and is still clearly conscious of a dozen others more important in themselves and more central to the matter in hand. But while those who treat literature in this penny- PROFESSION OF LETTERS 289 wise and virtue-foolish spirit are themselves truly in possession of a better light, it does not follow that the treatment is decent or improving^, whether for themselves or others. To treat all subjects in the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. If he be well paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, the neglect of it the more disgraceful. And per- haps there is no subject on which a man should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life ; which is his tool to earn or serve with ; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone even to force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it would be better if the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old, honest English books were closed, than that esu- rient book-makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, a famous race. Better that our serene temples were deserted than filled with trafficking and jug- gling priests. There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: the first is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the industry selected. Literature, like any other art, is singularly inter- esting to the artist ; and, in a degree peculiar to 19 290 MORALITY OF THE itself among the arts, it is useful to mankind. These are the sufficient justifications for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life. I shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxu- riously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer our- selves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philoso- pher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind. Now Nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for his life ; by-and-by, when he learns more gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than he knew ; that if he earns little, he is earning it amply; that if he receives a small w^age, he is in a position to do consideraljle services ; that it is in his power, in some small measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend the truth. So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, that it should combine pleasure PROFESSION OF LETTERS 291 and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, Hke fiddling, and useful, like good preaching. This is to speak of literature at its highest ; and with the four great elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be cowardly to consider it at first in any lesser as- pect. But while we cannot follow these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigor- ous, very original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest sort of literary work, we have it in our power either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to please ; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine days' curipsit}^ of our contemporaries ; or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall have to deal with that re- markable art of words which, because it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and power- fully to the minds of men ; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these branches, to build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, taken together, form the efficient educational me- dium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The copious Corinthian baseness of the American 292 MORALITY OF THE reporter or the Parisian cJironiqucr, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill ; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand ; they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit ; on all, they supply some pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rare utterances of good men ; the sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small vol- umes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have spoken of the American and the French, not because they are so much baser, but so much more read- able, than the English ; their evil is done more effectively, in America for the masses, in France for the few that care to read ; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily neglected, truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an important officer ; yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of poli- tics each; on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true ; but one of the things that we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth ; and I cannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any great success. PROFESSION OF LETTERS 293 so long as some of us practise and the rest openly approve of public falsehood. There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. In every department of literature, though so low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of importance to the education and comfort of man- kind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are based upon two things : first, upon the original preferences of our soul ; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the medium of books or papers, and even he who can- not read learning from the same source at second- hand and by the report of him who can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or igno- rance of good and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster ; nor take this world for a hell ; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend ; he 294 MORALITY OF THE must be taiiglit what is without him, that he mny be kind to others. It can never be wrong to teh him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weav- ing- as he goes his theory of hfe, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct ; and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by educational sup- pressions, that he must win his way to shame or glory. In one W'Ord, it must always be foul to tell what is false ; and it can never be safe to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the fact which somebody w^as wanting, for one man's meat is another man's poison, and I have known a person who was cheered by the perusal of Candid e. Every fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set together ; and none that comes directly in a writer's path but has some nice re- lations, unperceivable by him, to the totality and l)earing of the subject under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more necessary than (Others, and it is with these that literature must first bestir itself. They are not hard to distin- guish, nature once more easily leading us ; for the necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those which are most interesting to the natural mind of man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in morality, and those, on the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are alone vital in importance, seiz- ing by their interest, or useful to communicate. So PROFESSION OF LETTERS 295 far as the writer merely narrates, he should prin- cipally tell of these. He should tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the present, to move us with instances ; he should tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours. So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it do so if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the records of the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to some contempo- rary. There is not a juncture in to-day's affairs but some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has an office, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may unveil injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word : in all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondar}'- cjuality wdiich must presuppose the first ; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make failure conspicuous. But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, in- difference, or admiration, and by each of these the 296 MORALITY OF THE story will be transformed to something else. The newspapers that told of the return of our repre- sentatives from Berlin, even if they had not dif- fered as to the facts, would have sufficiently differed by their spirits; so that the one description would have been a second ovation, and the other a pro- longed insult. The subject makes but a trifling part of any piece of literature, and the view of the writer is itself a fact more important because less disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not only inodifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far larger proportion of the field of literature, the health or disease of the writer's mind or momentary humour forms not only the leading feature of his work, but is, at bottom, the only thing he can communicate to others. In all works of art, widely speaking', it is first of all the author's attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life. An author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow faith can- not, if he would, express the whole or even many of the sides of this various existence ; for, his own life being maim, some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the small- ness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian religion ; and hence we find equal PROFESSION OF LETTERS 297 although unsimilar limitation in works inspired by the spirit of the tlesh or the despicable taste for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader of the minds of men ; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything but .prejudice should find a voice through him ; he should see the good in all things ; where he has ex^en a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent ; and he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy.^ The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are a thousand different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is upper- most, some literature tends to be deposited. Is this to be allowed ? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than rigorists would fancy. It were to be desired that all literary work, and chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent impulses, whether grave or laughing, humourous, romantic, or religious. Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman ; and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a masterpiece 1 A footnote, at least, is clue to the admirable example set before all young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to preserve, not only in that, but in every branch of literary work. 298 MORALITY OF THE although we gird against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults, but merits. There is no book perfect, even in design ; but there are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only religious poetry on earth ; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature ; I am only quoting" that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, v/hen I accuse him of a bad heart ; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was purely creative, he could give us works like Cannosinc or Faiitasio, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to ha\'e been found again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism ; and behold ! the book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated and electrified by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, even should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness ; but an ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this can be no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, who must take dieir business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it. Man is imperfect ; yet, in his literature, he must PROFESSION OF LETTERS 299 express himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being immoral : it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment ; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn ; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental ; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites ; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Par- tiality is immorality ; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial ; the work of one proving dank and depressing ; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilepti- cally sensual ; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In litera- ture as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as pos- sible ; and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly. It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years ; for in the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must pre- cede any beginning; and if you meditate a work 300 MORALITY OF THE of art, you should first long roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should first have thought upon the cjuestion under all conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this nearness of examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that makes the practice of the art a prolonged and noble education for the writer. There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or pleasing impres- sions is a service to the public. It is even a service to be thankfully proud of having rendered. The slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater. Our fine old sea- captain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Ozmi or Nezvton Forstcr. To please is to serve ; and so far from its being dif- ficult to instruct while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other. Some part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was con- ceived with any force is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies. Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every cntrc-Hlct, is des- tined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour, how- ever transiently, their thoughts. When any sub- ject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginning its PROFESSION OF LETTERS 301 discussion in a dignified and human spirit ; and if there were enough who did so in our pubhc press, neither the pubhc nor the Parhament would find it in their minds to ch^op to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting, some- thing ertcouraging, were it only to a single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to stumble on some- thing that a dull person shall be able to compre- hend ; and for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a mark- ing epoch in his education. Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. And so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to our trade, it should not be from any reason of a higher wage, but because it was a trade which w^as useful in a very great and in a very high degree ; which every honest tradesman could make more serviceable to mankind in his single strength ; which was difficult to do well and possible to do better every year ; which called for scrupulous thought on the part of all who practised it, and hence became a perpetual education to their nobler natures ; and which, pay it as you please, in the large majority of the best cases will still be underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves. IV THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW HISTORY is much decried ; it is a tissue of errors, we are told no doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders with gratification. Yet the worst histo- rian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day ; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of expe- rience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an in- sidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments ; so that what ap- pears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of Laputa. It is for this reason in particular that we are all becoming Socialists with- out knowing it ; by which I would not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 303 Jericho, but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of Enghshmen and Enghsh legisla- tion. A little while ago, and we were still for liberty ; " Crowd a few more thousands on the bench of Government," w^e seemed to cry ; " keep her head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port." This is over; laisscr-fairc declines in favour ; our legislation grows authoritative, growls philanthropical, bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, w'ho now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that ; but one thing it is beyond doubt : it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it. Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new altars. Like all other principles, she has been proved to be self -exclusive in the long run. She has taken wages besides (like all other virtues) and dutifully served AI amnion ; so that many things we were accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours' poverty. A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or ship- owners may imply for operatives, tenants, or sea- men, and we not unnaturally begin to turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny. Freedom, to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free ; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the 304 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill fed, ill clad, ill taught, ill housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine. So much, in other men's affairs, we have begun to see clearly ; we have begun to despair of virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors. The landlord has long shaken his head over the manu- facturer ; those who do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the ship-owner; the pro- fessions look askance upon the retail traders and have even started their co-operative stores to ruin them ; and from out the smoke-wreaths of Birming- ham a finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord. Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not per- ceive the conclusion, that our whole estate is some- what damnable. Thus, piece by piece, each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away the branch on which some other interest is seated, do we apply in detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not per- ceive that we are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large. A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible ; and if Socialisn; be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grandchildren will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers ; but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 305 bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undis- turbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my conception of his character, he might rest from his troubhng and look on : the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and dis- solve. That great servile war, the Armageddon of money and numbers, to which we looked for- ward when young, becomes more and more un- likely ; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men im- mersed in political tactics and dead to political results. The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of Commons ; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution (if it proceed) will fall to be decided ; so that the state of Parliamem; is not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the future. Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. We may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish obstruction — a bitter trial, which it sup- ports with notable good-humour. But the excuse is merely local ; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and France ; and what are we to say of these ? President Cleveland's letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popu- lar government in every land ; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs 3o6 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in few words, is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with decency ; we cannot trust our consciences ; and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours, pretty much at random, and say to these : " Be ye our conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous and happy, world without end. Amen." And who can look twice at the British Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task? I am not advancing this as an argument against Socialism : once again, nothing is further from my mind. There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one should make it welcome. But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion of what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our new polity will be designed and adminis- tered (to put it courteously) with something short of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a human parliament ; and the one thing that will not very hugely change is human nature. The Anar- chists think otherwise, from which it is only plain that they have not carried to the study of history the lamp of human sympathy. Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon- load of laws, what head-marks must we look for DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 307 in the life? We chafe a good deal at that excellent thing, the income tax, because it brings into our affairs the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official. The official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many of us. I would not willingly have to do with even a police constable in any other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember in my dreams the eye-glass of a certain attache at a certain embassy — an eye-glass that was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked ; and my next most disagreeable remem- brance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among working-folk, and what my neighbours accepted at the postman's hands — nay, what I took from him myself — it is still distasteful to recall. The bour- geois, residing in the upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl ; but about the income tax, as I have said, or perhaps about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs. In every contact with authority, with their employer, with the police, with the School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in office ; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be appreciated. Well, 3o8 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW this golden age of which we are speaking will be tlie golden age of officials. In all our concerns it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine. It is likely these gentlemen will be pe- riodically elected; they will therefore have their turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men's conditions. The laws they will have to administer will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is to regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parlia- ment. So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling to the blood — ser- vitude to many and changing masters — and for all the slights that accompany the rule of Jack in office. And if the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a thing in most respects not much to be regretted, but, as a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invalu- able — the newspaper. For the independent jour- nal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with millionaires and railway- bonds and all the abuses and glories of to-day ; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered. State railways may be good things, and so may State bakeries ; but a State newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials. But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime would perhaps be less, for some of the DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 309 motives of crime we may suppose would pass away. But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be more contraventions. We see already new sins springing up like mustard — School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins — none of which I would be thought to except against in particular, but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the beginning. If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion multiplied. Take the case of work alone. Man is an idle animal. He is at least as intelligent as the ant ; but generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the ant's example. Of those who are found truly indefatigable in busi- ness, some are misers ; some are the practisers of delightful industries, like gardening; some are stu- dents, artists, inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by successive hopes ; and the rest are those who live by games of skill or hazard — financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and the like. But in unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity, no man is continually sedulous. Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering. Society will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be pur- 3IO DAY AFTER TO-MORROW poseful and the soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip will be in the overseer's hand, and not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question of each man doing his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will be forgotten. To dock the skulker's food is not enough ; many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the whip will be in the overseer's hand ; and his own sense of justice and the superintendence of a chaotic popular assem- bly will be the only checks on its employment. Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be loved by. Dr. Fell the inspector. It is admitted by private sol- diers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to be combated ; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the sergeant can no longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we shall see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector. This for the unfortunate. But with the fortu- nate also, even those whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well. It is concluded that in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially sound, the level of comfort will be high. It does not follow : there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 311 besides ; and it is possible that the men of the rich- est ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But sup- pose they do not ; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly ; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new condi- tions, the whole enterprise to be financially sound — a vaulting supposition — and all the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort : we have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or if it be what man will even deign to accept for a continuance. It is certain that man loves to eat ; it is not certain that he loves that only or that best. He is supposed to love comfort ; it is not a love, at least, that he is faithful to. He is supposed to love happiness ; it is my contention that he rather loves excitement. Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals. He does not think so when he is hungry, but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry. It would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotus-eaters, it was always afternoon ; and food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important, drops in our es- teem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite of living. That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor in all ages ; yet it has a com- mon base ; what he seeks and what he must have is that which will seize and hold his attention. Regular meals and weather-proof lodgings will not 312 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW do this long. Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities. Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of a life. These are enviable natures ; people shut in the house by sickness often bitterly envy them ; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes : his feet itch for physical adventure ; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs ; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles : these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry, " Catch me here again ! " and sure enough you catch them there again — perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as Robinson Crusoe; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety ; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitudes but one of health ; and there he yawns. If the people in the next villa took DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 313 pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxy- genated and his views of the world brighter. If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should have his skirts pinned to the wall by a javelin, it would not occur to him — at least for several hours — to ask if life were worth living; and if such peril were a daily matter, he would ask it nevermore; he would have other things to think about, he would be living indeed — not lying in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull. The aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown — whether we explore Africa or only toss for half- pence — that is what I conceive men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to exclude from men's existences. Of all forms of the aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working-men — the danger of misery from want of work — is the least inspiriting : it does not whip the blood, it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive ; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching them, it does truly season the men's lives. Of those who fail, I do not speak — despair should be sacred ; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest : a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor ; and it is not from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear com- plaints of the unworthiness of life. Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this new state of life, they would also lose a certain 314 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW something, which would not be missed in the begin- ning, but would be missed progressively, and pro- gressively lamented. Soon there would be a look- ing back : there would be tales of the old world humming in young men's ears, tales of the tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant. And in the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap — with its regular meals, regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded — the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth. This may seem a shal- low observation ; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface. Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleas- ures on which they will be likely to fall back : the pleasures of intrigue and of sedition. In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound. I am no economist, only a writer of fiction ; but even as such, I know one thing that bears on the economic question — I know the imperfection of man's faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count some rugged elements of common-sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have said upon this matter all that I could wish to say. and condemned beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious that they are right ; they may be right also in predicting a period of communal independence, and they may DAY AFTER TO-MORROW 315 even be right in thinking that desirable. But the rise of communes is none the less the end of eco- nomic equality, just when we were told it was begin- ning. Communes will not be all equal in extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population ; nor will the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune ; it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market. And all the more dan- gerous that the sovereign power should be small. Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness ; national losses are so un- equally shared that one part of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic ; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress ; even the secretary, who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse ; and thus a business differ- ence between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the arbitrament of 3i6 DAY AFTER TO-MORROW blows. So that the estabhshment of the communal system will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heartburnings of economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne on both ; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At least this will not be dull ; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a ven- geance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of mili- tary powers and the foundation of new empires. V BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLU- ENCED ME THE Editor ^ has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the ques- tion put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if pos- sible, be kept ; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who entrapped me. The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must after- wards discover to be inexact ; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. 1 Of the British Weekly. 3i8 BOOKS WHICH HAVE They repeat, .they rearrange, they clarify the les- sons of life ; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change — that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. ^ To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy ; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me ; nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expres- sion. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan — the elderly DAr- tagnan of the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name INFLUENCED ME 319 the Pilgrim's Progress, a book that breathes of every, beautiful and vakiable emotion. But of works of art httle can be said ; their in- fluence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature ; they mould by contact ; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influ- ential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps grow- ing, for it is a book not easily outlived : the Essais of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of per- sons of to-day ; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an an- tique strain ; they will have their " linen decencies " and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason ; and (again if they have any gift of read- ing) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries. The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gos- pel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a cer- tain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the 320 BOOKS WHICH HAVE Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent. I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank — I believe it is so with all good books except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part- truths and part-conveniences which is the contem- porary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old ; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who. cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. Close upon the back of my discovery of Whit- man, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How mucli of his vast structure will INFLUENCED ME 321 bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful ; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveli- ness, but with most of its essentials ; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great impor- tance for me when it first fell into my hands — a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe ; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of Wcrthcr, and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish in- quisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained ! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this effect, but in the originals,, not in 322 BOOKS WHICH HAVE the pages, of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential iden- tity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognise their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses ; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them for my- self ; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hys- terical conception of the great Roman Empire. This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there ex- pressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings — those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thencefor- INFLUENCED ME 323 ward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue. Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every- one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy^^a sight of the stars, " the silence that is in the lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson ; you need not — Mill did not — agree with any one of his beliefs ; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers : a dogma learned is only a new error — the old one was perhaps as good ; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art ; it is them- selves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate. I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not great art ; we can all be angry with our neigh- bour ; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And The Egoist is a satire ; so much must be allowed ; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to 324 BOOKS WHICH HAVE last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. " This is too bad of you," he cried. " Willoughby is me! " " No, my dear fellow," said the author; " he is all of us." I have read The Egoist five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote — I think Willoughby an un- manly but a very serviceable exposure of myself. I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper " On the Spirit of Obligations " was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Talcs of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws — a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very com- mon, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment — a free grace, I find I must call it — by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. INFLUENCED ME 325 He may hold dogmas ; he may hold them passion- ately ; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading" of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers ; he will never be a reader. And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in w^ith its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books ; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food ; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support ; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law ; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled 326 BOOKS strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service ; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written. VI THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE" I WAS walking one night in the veranda of a small house in which I lived, outside the ham- let of Saranac. It was winter ; the night was very dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders : a few lights appeared, scat- tered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phtmtoni Ship. " Come," said I to my engine, " let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation ; a story that shall have the same large features and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring." I was here brought up with a reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton, and Virgil, 328 GENESIS OF THE profited by the choice of a famiHar and legendary subject; so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar belief to be the centrepiece of my own meditated fiction. In the course of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singu- lar case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour. On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below zero, the brain works with much vivacity ; and the next moment I had seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the strin- gent cold of the Canadian border. Here then, almost before I had begun my story, I had two countries, two of the ends of the earth involved : and thus though the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands; and this decided me to consider further of its possibilities. The man who should thus be buried was the first question: a good man, whose return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian picture and was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and malce this final restoration from the pit of death, in MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 329 the icy American wilderness, the last and grimmest of the series. I need not tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in the most interesting moment of an author's life; the hours that followed that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone, per- haps had less enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is my usual helper in these times of parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to hear me relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies. And while I was groping for the fable and the characters required, behold, I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot. nine years old. Was there ever a more complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution, or perhaps I should rather say (in stagevk'right phrase) the Curtain or final Tableau of a story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and Strathardle, conceived in the High- land rain, in the blend of the smell of heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole cor- respondence and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far away it was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual tragic situation of the men of Durisdeer. My story was now world-wide enough : Scot- land, India, and America being all obligatory 330 GENESIS OF THE scenes. But of these India was strange to me ex- cept in books ; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my cUib in London, equally civilised and (to all seeing) equally occi- dental with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness ; and I believe this first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It was at first intended that he should be Scottish, and I was then filled with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my own Alan Breck. Presently, how- ever, it began to occur to me it would be like my Master to curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen ; and that an Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in India with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep with my Master : in the original idea of this story con- ceived in Scotland, this companion had been besides intended to be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it was then meant) he was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a very bad Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I to evade Barry Lyndon ? The wretch besieged me, offering his services ; he gave me ex- cellent references; he proved that he was highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to disguise his MASTER OF BALLANTRAE 331 ancient livery with a little lace and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking" with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn : I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary moral sim- plicity — almost vacancy ; plastic to any influence, the creature of his admirations : and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of for- tune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in place of entering into competition with the Master, would afford a slight though a distinct relief. I know not if I have done him well, though his moral dissertations always highly entertained me : but I own I have been sur- prised to find that he reminded some critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . . i' ^ .^' .<^ ^^ 'o .K^' .^ \V 'O, ^ , X ~* \ V ^ ,•.%. .^ ^o"^ "^AO^ .' ^ % ^ "^/.pN :i^o^ -^ .^ ^ ^-^ .\^ ... 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