bNi^* -^.^^^ .♦ J' •% -y^i^/ v^ •^<* O^ ,♦ <.*^ "-^^ "^0 * ,/^^^ THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY EDITED BY WILL D. HOWE PBOF£SSOR OF ENGLISH AT INDIANA UNIVEBS2TV ESSAYS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON The Modern Student's Library Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL By George Meredith. THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS. By William Makepeace Thackeray. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE. By Thomas Hardy. BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. ADAM BEDE. By George Eliot. ENGLISH POETS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. THE RING AND THE BOOK. By Robert Browning. PAST AND PRESENT. By Thomas Carlyle. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. By Jane Austen. THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN. By Sir Walter Scott. THE SCARLET LETTER. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. BUNYAN'S PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. THE ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVEN- SON. NINETEENTH CENTURY LETTERS. THE ESSAYS OF ADDISON AND STEELE. Each small 12mo. 75 cents net. Other volumes in preparation. THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY ESSAYS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS LAMP90N PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT YALB CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON 9> ^^%\^ Copyright, 1892, 1895, 1905, 1918, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS JUL 27 I9i8 ©CI.A501306 A .7C PREFACE The text of the essays in this volume is taken from the Thistle Edition of the works of Stevenson, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, in New York. Every article is com- plete and unabridged; and I have followed, with two ex- ceptions, the chronological order of first publication, the date being given in each instance. I have attempted to make a selection that should illustrate the range of the author's thought and style. Thus I have included essays in formal literary criticism, essays of personal monologue and gossip, and philosophical essays on the greatest themes that can oc- cupy the mind of man. W. L. P. Yalh University, Tuesday, 9 April, 1918. INTRODUCTION Most of the essays in this book were written by an obscure man. The reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson dates from the year 1886, when he pubhshed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; for the remaining eight years of his Hfe his name was known wherever the Enghsh language was spoken. But his dehght in recognition was shadowed by two things — chronic ill- health, and the necessity of living far from the centres of civilisation. After he became a famous novelist, he indulged freely and full}^ his genius as a teller of tales; comparatively few formal essays came from his pen, although this loss is partly made up by the remarkable letters that lent enchant- ment to his distance. Of the twenty-four pieces in this volume, only five were printed after 1886; three of these are reminiscent, and two are frankly didactic. The remaining nineteen, fruit of earlier years, are selected not merely for their display of literary excellence, but because thej^ illustrate his intellectual curi- osity. Some of them are outdoor papers, impressions re- ceived on long, lonely walks; some are essays in literary criticism; some are moral reflections on the human comedy, thoughts on falling in love, on conversation as a fine art, on old age and death; some are meant to stimulate us by the defense of a paradox; one belongs to the caninical works of literature. All reveal the complex, whimsical, humorous, romantic, imaginative, puritanical personality now known everywhere by the formula R. L. S. Stevenson had a literary as well as a moral conscience. During his whole life, he never wrote for publication one slipshod page. He always did his best. In the early years of obscurity, when he knew that his work would be read by only a few, he took as much pains with it as if it had been addressed to an audience of a hundred critics; after his repu- vii viii INTRODUCTION tation was so high that anything bearing his name commanded commercial value, he never permitted himself to become careless or lazy. The article must in every case be worthy of the trade-mark. Furthermore, he never wrote mechanically. The reason why, out of so many aspirants, so few attain unmistakable success is because only a few have sufficient energy to last day in, day out, year after year. The novelty of any under- taking will keep most men and women brisk for a month or so; then routine, which has destroyed so many hopeful be- ginners, changes vigour into mediocrity, and mediocrity into incompetence. The clerk in the book-store gazes at the cus- tomer with lacklustre eye, as if he almost resented being disturbed by a visitor; the professor gets through the class- room hour as though his little body were awearj^ of this great world; the clergjinan reads the prayers like Poll Parrot. But the deadly dullness of mechanical performances, so char- acteristic of the majority of the children of men, changes into newness of life with those happy mortals who rise above the crowd. The clerk greets the customer eagerly, knowing he is to bring together two forces, an author and a reader; the professor strives to make each recitation an event in the lives of his pupils; the clergyman reads the Scripture as though he had just received it from Almighty God, and was giving the audience news of transcendent importance. From the day when Stevenson took a pen in his hand to that December evening in 1894 when he dropped dead amidst the ardours of literary composition, the primal energy never flagged. His spirit embarked upon every new book as upon a glorious adventure — which every book ought to be — and his reverent devotion to art never permitted him to let any- thing pass which he knew to be second-rate. Stevenson made contributions to five distinct branches of literature. He wrote novels, poems, essays, plays, letters. His plays were not successful; every now and then one of them is "revived," but the history of English drama was neither enriched nor changed by his efforts. It is a pity, however, that he could not have lived to see the stage ver- sion of Treasure Island, which, arranged, mounted, and acted INTRODUCTION ix in an admirable manner, proved to be one of the most ap- pealing dramatic performances in the twentieth century- American theatre. Billy Bones, Silver, Pew and the others enchanted thousands of people; and on the boards, as in the printed romance, the earlier scenes were the most im- pressive. While it is true that he could not write an original play, we ought to remember that two of the most interest- ing dramas of recent times came out of his mind — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island. Perhaps more will fol- low. Stevenson can hardly be classed among the English poets, although he wrote much verse. Some of the child poems seem to be permanent; they are known, recited, and sung everywhere; two or three of them have become a part of the English language; but his genius does not shine most brightlj^ in rime and rhythm, for he was essentially a prosa- teiir. In the long list of English letter-writers, he has an un- assailable position. His epistles are not only invaluable to the historian of modern English literature — sparkling with significant comment on contemporary books and au- thors — they are beautiful specimens of the obsolescent art of correspondence. They have an extraordinary charm which time and change cannot take away. Furthermore, they reveal a character so full of courage and charity, that, taking all the letters together, we have one of the great moral books of the nineteenth century. No one can read them without being stimulated. As a novelist, Stevenson is a classic. He is in the front row. He belongs with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith and Hardy. One can scarcely imagine any future period of time when Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, Kid- napped and The Ebb Tide will not be read with zest. His art "greatened and deepened and lengthened" with increas- ing years and experience; had he lived to complete Weir of Hermiston, the world would have possessed not only one more thrilling story, but a new and profound study of human character. X INTRODUCTION I am quite aware that there has been during the last few years what is known as a ''reaction" against Stevenson. There are critics who would now persuade us that after all he was not a great writer or a great artist. These attempts at depreciation need trouble no lover of the essays and novels. We know whom we have believed. Since 1894 the youth of America have been brought up on Stevenson; they are never going to forget the debt. But besides being an almost ideal writer for boys, he remains our refuge and delight through all the voyage of life. The more we grow, the less possible it is to outgrow Stevenson. There are "reactions" against Tennyson, against Dickens, against Stevenson — mere fluc- tuations in the literary stock market. Furthermore it is easier to attract attention by attacking a classic writer than by defending him. As an essayist, Stevenson is again in the first class; no one would have the temerity to make a collection of represen- tative British essays and omit his work. His absence would be conspicuous. We may conveniently if not strictly divide essays into three classes — essays in literary criticism, an art brought to its highest perfection by Sainte-Beuve; philosophical and reflective essays, demanding a union of thought and style, where no one has surpassed Francis Bacon; and the per- sonal essay, a field in which the supreme master is Mon- taigne. It is by no accident that two out of the three leaders are men of France. French literature has a longer list of great prose writers than any other, the French language is peculiarly adapted to the form of WTitten prose, and the French intellect is almost instinctively critical. Before he was thirty years old, Stevenson had tried his hand at all three varieties of the essay; and in two of them he has won what looks like permanent fame. His purely lit- erary criticism is the least important part of his work; and yet it is by no means without distinction. His courageous defense of romance as opposed to realism is adequately rep- resented in this volume by three essays, published in 1882, 1883, and 1884. The dates are significant, for at that time Realism was enthroned, with scarcely a sign of revolt. INTRODUCTION xi Stevenson not only led a revolt, he started a revolution; and although he had only a few years to live, he lived long enough to see the tyrant cast out, and the new order estab- lished. He could not have accomplished this, had he not been able by sheer creative genius to illustrate his precepts by splendid examples of original romance. The Romantic Revival of 1884-1904 owed more to Stevenson than to any other man, and if that had been his only achievement, it would have earned him a place in the history of English literature. In addition to these polemical writings, the reader will find three formal essays in literary criticism — Walt Whitman, Thoreau, and Pepys. The first, originally called The Gospel According to Walt Whitman, is still the best criticism of his work that I have read; while the other two are full of subtle appreciations. Still, we do not go to Stevenson for the ap- praisal of books and authors; we can find that elsewhere. As a philosopher, Stevenson wrote two masterpieces — /Es Triplex and Pulvis et Umbra, of which the former is the better. It is indeed the best essay he ever wrote; and anyone who thinks it displays cleverness rather than genius should du two things. First, he should reread it; second, he should remember it was published when the author was only twenty- seven years old. Stevenson walked in the valley of the shadow of death and feared no evil. Young poets and romancers iove to dwell on thoughts of death and the grave, but their reflections are usuall}^ largel}'' composed of self-pity; a form of indulgence which is dangerously near cowardice. Now just as Stevenson's unconquerable optimism was based on chronic physical suffering, so his knightly attitude toward death was based on the constant proximity of the pale con- queror. He lived with death as with a familiar. At every meal, on every walk, and in the long watches of the night, he was aware of his company; but he showed no fear. The reflections on old age and death in ^s Triplex are composed of observation and experience; they are sincere. There is something in this essay for every man and woman in the world; and the solemn grandeur of the theme is harmonised ill a prose music full of dignity and beauty. There is a noble xii INTRODUCTION elevation in the language that is as satisfying to our love of art as the core of thought is nourishing to our spirit. Let us remember also that as Stevenson was not afraid of denth. neither was he afraid of life. Stevenson was a great talker, a master of conversation; and good talk is one of the highest forms of pleasure known to cultivated men and women. Stevenson pondered much over this form of art, as he did over other forms; and his two essays on Talk and Talkers furnish excellent suggestions with concrete human examples. The "personal essay" is glorified talk, where subjects that would be trivial with some conversationalists, and subjects that would be oppressively dull in the mouths of others, are made respectively charming and impressive by Stevenson. No one has ever equalled Montaigne as a talker from the printed page; it is enough to say that anything whatever that interested him is certain to interest us, if only he will tell us about it. Other great "personal" essayists are Sir TJiomas Browne and Charles Lamb, while the ever-living Anatomy of Melancholy is a gi- gantic personal essay. Today the personal essay" has in- vaded l^e field of poetry, and many of our modern versifiers write in the conversational and confidential style. Steven- son composed some pieces where he is thinking out loud in beautiful prose; the four parts of Virginibits Piierisque, Crabbed Age and Youth, and above all, An Apology for Idlers^ represent him in his happiest moods. Nothing perhaps is more interesting than a paradox brilliantly supported, and few things more fruitful to readers who are fit. Thus, An Apology for Idlers contains not only flashes of rich humour, it has a challenge to all of us who are strenuous and serious; which means that every "successful" American ought to read this essa5^ For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Stevenson, in his every-day life and conduct, was unselfish : that is, he was thinking of the comfort and convenience of others rather than of his own security. When he lay sick in bed, and an active small boy entered the room, instead of re- garding the child as an intolerable nuisance, he was sorry that INTRODUCTION xiii he himself could not be an acceptable play-mate; he felt sure that the boy was bored by the horizontal gentleman who wasn't up to anything. And in Stevenson's writings the ethical element of unselfishness is ever present; when he addresses himself to us, as he does in the personal essays, he is not thinking of our own personal gain so much as of our capacity to increase the happiness of those with whom we live. The aim of An Apology for Idlers is to make men and women more interesting, not in what they do, but in what the}' are; for he understood quite well that those who have an interesting personality are a domestic and com- munal blessing. It is not enough to be a successful lawyer or merchant; it is perhaps more important to be a successful husband or father or friend. Strange that a young Scot should have been able to make so many new observations on a theme so old as Life. But that is always the wonder of genius; one can understand how a violinist, born with supple fingers and perfect ears, can master the technique of his instrument at an early age; but where and how did the youth learn to interpret Beetho- ven? William Lyon Phelps. CONTENTS PAGE ORDERED SOUTH (1874) 1 ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES (1874) . 14 WALKING TOURS (1876) 23 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE I (1876) . '^*^^' . . . 33 II (1881) 46 III ON FALLING IN LOVE (1877) 56 IV TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE (1879) 66 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS (1877) 76 ^^S TRIPLEX (1878) 87 WALT WHITMAN (1878) 97 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH (1878) 124 HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1880) 138 SAMUEL PEPYS (1881) * . . . . 168 TALK AND TALKERS (1882) 195 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE (1882) 220 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS (1883) 235 A NOTE ON REALISM (1883) . 246 XV xvi CONTENTS PAGE A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE (1884) 253 s^^'SneLD MORTALITY (1884) 267 THE MANSE (1887) 277 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE (1887) 285 BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME (1887) . 294 "^ THE LANTERN BEARERS (1888) 302 PULVIS ET UMBRA (1888) 316 ESSAYS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON STEVENSON'S ESSAYS ORDERED SOUTH (1874) By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beauti- ful. Often, too, they are places we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever afterward in pious memory; and we please our- selves with the fancy that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall. We shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleas- ant excursions, interrupted of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of some valley into which we have j ust looked down for a moment before we lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have lain awake at night, and agree- ably tantalized ourselves with the thought of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the bar- riers that confined our recollections. The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I dare say the sici man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to 1 2 ORDERED SOUTH regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility, and so he can enjo}^ the faint autumnal splendor of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable bre.vity and simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some Olym- pian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave their hands to the express ; but for the most part, it is an interruption too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal-boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to over- throw the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages,, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, ORDERED SOUTH 3 at unfrequented stations ; they make haste up the poplar alley that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the long train sweep away into the golden distance. Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment, for some- times the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a color, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly au- dible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own — an estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession. Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and every- body goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were coming home after a weary ab- sence, instead of travelling hourly farther abroad. It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to under- stand the change that has befallen him. Everything 4 ORDERED SOUTH about him is as he had remembered, or as he had an- ticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the railvray, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He recog- nizes with his intelligence that this thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to con- fess that it is not beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognize that this phleg- matic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes burdened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and alive. He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigors of the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery ORDERED SOUTH 5 of the frost upon his window-panes at morning, the re- luctant descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of which these yearnings are made is of the flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets toward afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note of the northeaster on days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substi- tute themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which he had pleased himself awhile before. He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in the sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anj^where, and no nakedness, and no hun- ger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with him ! For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and awakened by many such ; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of delight" comes 6 ORDERED SOUTH often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days together, in the very home-land of the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one ; and on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendor of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake-side. x\nd if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into color so rich and odor so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive garden ; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint color that is always characteristic of the dress of these south- ern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell our- selves that we are the richer by one more beautiful ex- perience. Or it may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation — as he changes the position of his sunshade — of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive yards themselves. Even the color is indeterminate and con- tinually shifting: now you would say it was green, now gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud ORDERED SOUTH 7 on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness ; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provoca- tions; and their recollection may be most vivid of the statelj^ gait of women carrying burdens on their heads ; of tropical effects with canes and naked rock and sun- light; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy- looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the em- purpled hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening. There go many elements, without doubt, to the mak- ing of one such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some attitude of com- plete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? And not only a change of posture — a snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a trav- elling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's body — not one of the least of these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure we feel. And if the external conditions are thus varied and 8 ORDERED SOUTH subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from be- ginning to end, because the world is in his heart ; and so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from begin- ning to end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us forever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and makes out of certain colors, certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relat- ing in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were ; because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I re- peat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long ORDERED SOUTH 9 run, than those who have credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness of such a one comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonize the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare mo- ments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life. It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccesible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully ; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the re- strictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's activity is all about 10 ORDERED SOUTH him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered cor- ner; and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of interest^ such as a man may feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night. In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men, there is no inliarmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of tlie grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infini- tesimal gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower ; and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from tlie passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach as this ; not to hale us forth with vio- lence, but to persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that ap- proaches as life that withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably night- fall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a ORDERED SOUTH 11 twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay. And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly. The sight of children has a significance for him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely, and to look upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of personal pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this prox- imity of death. He knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows the ploughman up the face of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not live to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought home with gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought or the com- ing of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful for a fam- ine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested hopes for man- kind and a better future which have been the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labors. He has not deceived himself; he has known from the beginning that he fol- lowed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it was reserved for others 12 ORDERED SOUTH to enter joyfully into possession of the land. And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter about him, and slopes toward extinction, these unfaded visions accom- pany his sad decline, and follow him, with friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than these generous aspirations move him now ; and so life is car- ried forward beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his hands grope already on the face of the impassable. Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends ; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life, be- yond the power of bodily dissolution to undo.^ In a thousand ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no more, and found no better con- solation than the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our identity — ORDERED SOUTH 13 that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware — or the diligent service of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and honorable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverishments, till their life and influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and Death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow. Note. — To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of quahfication ; for this is one of the points on which a shghtly greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom: A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from partic- ular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love. As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's action in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in the particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that would have been little; but he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world; his is a painful situation; he has no calling; no obvious utility; no ties, but to his parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a pro- longed existence, we outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. Eitner we become so callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or else — and this, thank God, in the ma- jority of cases — ^we so collect about us the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no longer the question of our right to be. And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view ex- pressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to punish. These 14 ON THE ENJOYMENT duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done already. To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more — there it is that death and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only business in this world, Mhich was so fitfully pursued, and which is noM' so ineffectively to end? ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES (1874) It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio as to an "austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as "healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery, it must be under- stood, is something more than a mere walk before break- OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 15 fast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in some unsightly neighborhood, and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardor and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art of seeing Nature more favorably. We learn to live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious. We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit. The traveller, as Brantome quaintly tells us, ''fait des discours en soi pour se soutenir en chemin" ; and into these discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing. Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humors as through differently colored glasses. We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the result, if we can but surrender our- selves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and fol- lows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty ; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others. And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place with some attraction of ro- mance. We may learn to go far afield for associations, and handle them lightly when we have found them. Some- 16 ON THE ENJOYMENT times an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations^ by a reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill. Dick Turpin has been my lay figure for many an English lane. And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly be the Tros- sachs for most tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures^ and brought them thither with minds rightly pre- pared for the impression. There is half the battle in this preparation. For instance: I have rarely been able to visits in the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own Highlands. I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not readily pleased without trees. I understand that there are some phases of men- tal trouble that harmonize well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to cliarm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul ; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humor for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in consequence. Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should have all manner of pleasures, and take many clear and beau- tiful images away with me when I left. When we can- not think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times to- gether, over the changeful current of a stream. We come down to the sermon in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape. We begin to peep and botanize, we take an interest in birds and OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 17 insects, we find many things beautiful in miniature. The reader will recollect the little summer scene in Wuther- ing Heights — the one warm scene, perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel — and the great feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sun- shine: this is in the spirit of which I now speak. And, lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter of which I shall presently have more to say. ^ With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the paradox that any place is good enough I to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those t]iighly favored, that we can pass a few hours agreeably. For, if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the neighborhood. Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about uninteresting corners. We forget to some degree the superior loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and justification. Looking back the other day on some recollections of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped more nearly with my inclination. The country to which I refer was a level and treeless plateau, over which the winds cut like a whip. For miles on miles it was the same. A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far up as ever I had the heart to follow it. There were roads, certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed to you from the beginning: there was nothing left to* fancy, noth- 18 ON THE ENJOYMENT ing to expect^ nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely looking homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the reso- nant wires in the keen sea-wind. To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it still bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Haw- thorne liked to put it, ''taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, colored like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue trans- parent air; but this was of another description — this was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold. It seemed to be always blowing on that coast. In- deed, this had passed into the speech of the inhabi- tants, and they saluted each other when they met with "Breezy, breezy," instead of the customary "Fine day" of farther south. These continual winds were not like the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the country after a shower. They were of the bitter, hard, persistent sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the eyes sore. Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper time and place. It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses of shadow. And what a power they have over the color of the world ! How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and make them shudder and whiten like a single willow ! OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 19 There is nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is calm, the foliage is colored like foliage 'in a gale. There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses and walls. But the wind was never- theless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter. The reader knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat him- self down behind a dyke on a hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow sur- prise, that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the "Prelude," has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way with as good effect: "Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length, Escaped as from an enemy, we turn Abruptly into some sequester'd nook. Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud!" I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape. He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathe- dral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathe- dral, the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued at last 20 ON THE ENJOYMENT into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town. At that elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and dur- ing his long ascent; and so j^ou may judge of his sur- prise when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the Place far below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as they walked. There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this little experieAce of my fellow-traveller's. The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only above other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's ! This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write. The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found. Be- tween the black worm-eaten headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flicker- ing from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi- detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 21 their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway. There is some- thing in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for ourselves some pale figure of wliat life then was. Not %o when we are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a contrary im- pression, and association is turned against itself. I remember walking thither three afternoons in succes- sion, my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter. The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy," was seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pygmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and en- mity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes ; and yet there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, un- 22 ON THE ENJOYMENT concerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things ; it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing. The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place one learned to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one could fancy) with relief. On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise. The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been satu- rated all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my sur- roundings and give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating to myself — "Mon coeur est \m liith suspendu, Sitot qn'on le louche, il resonne." OF UNPLEASANT PLACES 23 I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time ; and for that very cause I repeat them here. For all I knovi^, they may serve to complete the impres- sion in the mind of the reader, as they were certainly a part of it for me. And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude. "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." There, in the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression of peace. I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in that little corner, was all alive and friendly to me. So, wherever a man is, he will find something to please and pacify him: in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women, and see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, there is no country without some amenity — let him only look for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find. WALKING TOURS (1876) It must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humors — of the hope and spirit with which the march begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the 24. WALKING TOURS evening's rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on^ or takes it off, with more delight. The excitement of the departure puts him in key for that of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain. It is this that so few can understand; they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an hour; they do not play off the one against the other, prepare all day for the evening, and all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is here that your over- walker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against those who drink their cura9oa in liqueur glasses, when he himself can swill it in a brown John. He will not believe that the flavor is more delicate in the smaller dose. He "will not believe that to walk this uncon- scionable distance is merely to stupefy and brutalize himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening of the temperate walker ! He has nothing left of man but a physical need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be savorless and disenchanted. It is the fate of such a one to take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes farther and fares worse. Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you ; and because you must have your WALKING TOURS 25 own pace_, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take color from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Haz- litt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the coun- try/' — which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he can- not surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes comprehension. During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly toward his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge and, like Chris- tian on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it soon acquires a property of easi- ness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a shake, and fall at once into your stride. And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the best. Of course, if he will keep thinking of his anxieties, if he will open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-arm with the hag — why, wher- ever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy. And so much the more shame to himself ! There are perhaps thirty men set- ting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty. 26 WALKING TOURS It would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of dark- ness, one after another of these wayfarers, some sum- mer morning, for the first few miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses ; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon- flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from tim£ to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conduct- ing the most impassioned interviews, by the w^ay. A little farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him, supposing him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of your troubadour, or the un- feigned alarm o-f your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as he went like a cliild. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they sang — and sang very ill — and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the inaus23icious peasant plumped into their arms from round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is Haz- litt's own confession, from his essay On Going a Jour- WALKING TOURS 27 ney, which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it: "Give me the clear blue sky over my head/' says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner — and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." Bravo ! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish that in the first person.^ But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pre- tend to be as dull and foolish as our neighbors. It was not so with Hazlitt. And notice how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple stock- ings, who walk their iifty miles a day: three hours' march is his ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the epicure ! Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in the great master's practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leap- ing and running. Both of these hurry the respiration; they both shake up the brain out of its glorious open- air confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thouglit from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralizes and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and laugh- ingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in a morning doze ; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and 28 WALKING TOURS trifle in a thousand ways with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please ; the great barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his own private thought ! In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one extreme toward the other. He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more peaceful. A man does not make so many articles toward the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical well- being, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still content. Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if the WALKING TOURS 29 millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live forever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot de- prive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life — he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his busi- ness habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free. But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked 30 WALKING TOURS as those that follow a good day's march; the flavor of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a book — and you will never do so save by fits and starts — you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special favor. "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new Heldise, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket- book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for Tristram Shandy I can pledge a fair experience. If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of any- WALKING TOURS 31 thing else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curi- osity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humors develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale. Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "haj^py thinking." It is a phrase that may well per- plex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realize, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without dis- content, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts — namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate, — to remember the faces of w^omen without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sym- pathy, and yet content to remain where and what you are — is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and 32 WALKING TOURS to dwell with happiness? After all^ it is not they who carry flags, but they who. look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humor of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistijies perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end. You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of con- tent ; when suddenly the mood changes, the weather- cock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the infinite. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE I (1876) With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are what we call marrying men. Merciitio, as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron. would have come to the same end in the long run. Even I ago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in Lear, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humor or for a broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George Sand's French version oi As You Like It (and I think I can promise you will like it but little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as Or- lando marries Rosalind. At least there seems to have been much less hesita- tion over marriage in Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there was was of a laughing sort, and not much mpre serious, one way or the other, than that of Panurge.. In modern comedies the heroes are mostly _of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as much in earnest, and not one-quarter so confident. And I take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is. They know they are only human after all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to keep their liberty; but if that may not be, why, God's will be done ! "What, 33 34 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE are you afraid of marriage?" asks Cecile, in Maitre Guer'in. "Oh, mon Dieu, non !" replies Arthur; "I should take chloroform." They look forward to mar- riage much in the same way as they prepare themselves for death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Per- haps, and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, INIaxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous mari- ons tons !" Every marriage was like another gray hair on his head; and the jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years and fair round belly. The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of men are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a situation in China, and be- come no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships forever. The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and for- get. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate — a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 35 bright eyes — he may be left, in a montli, destitute of all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or three, you stake your happiness on one life onl}^ But still, as the bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies ; it is not every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who share a cell in the Bastille, or are thrown together on an uninhabited island, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and humors, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first years be- comes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into one. But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but w^hen Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified. The air of the* fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to* every- thing else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak with- out constraint; vou will not wake him. It is not for 36 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women, there is less of this danger. Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and usefulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit. It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this would seem to show, even for women, some narrowing influence in comfortable married life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife. I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passably successful, and so few come to open fail- ure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate their choice. I see women marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and men dwelling in con- tentment with noisy scullions, or taking into their lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the world along with you. But love is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for such lukewarm preference. It is not here, anyway, that I-,ove employs his golden shafts ; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign here and, revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And you have only to look these happy couples in the face, to see they have never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their days. When you see VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 37 a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your affec- tions upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase "high passion." Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some poor fellow, is dying of his wife's love. "What a pity!" he exclaims; "you know' I could so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his loves. "I like it well enough as long as her sisters are there'," said this amorous swain; "but I don't know what to do' when we're alone." Once more: A married lady was debating the subject with another lady. "You know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of marriage, if he is nothing else, your hus- band is always an old friend." "I have many old friends," returned the. other, "but I prefer them to be nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might yrefer that also !" There is a common note in these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether it was so always ; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother William anent her friend. Miss Gay. It is" so charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases. "The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your disposition really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical instru- ment with judgment. She has an easy politeness in her manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good 38 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a gen- erous disposition. As to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William's wife." That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal ac- complishments after the style of the copy-book, with about as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all speed, to church. To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suit- able for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment. Like other violent excite- ments, it throws up not only what is best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting when they a^e in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows eilough in the everj'day affairs and humors of the world. How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so well? One is almost tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could "pull it through" with anybody. But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recog- nized by the police, there must be degrees in the free- VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 39 dom and sympathy realized, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should this principle be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found in the Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the bans on the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and in all this most critical matter, has common-sense, has wisdom, never a word to say? In the absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between friends : even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and maidens. In all that concerns eating and drinking, comj^any, climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be souglit for. It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no conse- quence. Certainly it is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, than with another who shares all their favorite hobbies and is melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you should hang your heaHT She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and wearisoilie to read. . And not long ago I was able to lay by my lan- tern in content, for I found the honest man. He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not much of a judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night. 40 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE How strong, supple^ and living the ship seems upon the billows ! With what a dip and rake she shears the fly- ing sea ! I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful, but courage that is rare. And what have we in place .^ How many, who think no otherwiser than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics ! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunt- ing sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine. Sometimes, alas ! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting. The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathema- ticians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each under- stood the word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the life VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 41 of man. Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discolored all* experience to its own shade. How would you have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind .^ Now this is where there should be community between man and wife. They should be agreed on their catchword in ''facts of religion/' or "facts of science," or "society, my dear" ; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain upon the mind. "About as much religion as my William likes," in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budgett, the wife of the successful mer- chant ! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end. A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily together, they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a woman, and it will not much mat- ter although she is talented in nothing else. She must know her metier de femme, and have a fine touch for the affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings 42 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE of the day and hour, than that she should speak with the tongues of men and angels; for awhile together by the hre, happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room/' many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better sound- ing in the world's ears. You could read Kant by your- self, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You can forgive people' who do not fol- low you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way toward a dissolution of the marriage. I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so much as understand the meaning of the word politics, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence — the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns — and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank in- terest in things for their own sake, and enduring aston- ishment at the most common. She is not to be deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder her- self crazy over the human eyebrow*. Now in a world where most of us walk very contentedly in the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions — earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 43 mid-air at a seance, and the like — a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will own I think if, a better sort of mind than goes necessarily with the clearest views on public business. It will wash. It will find something to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas* I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes^ although my companion on the other side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the franchise or the ballot. The question of professions_, in as far as they regard" marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because so much of the labor, after your picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labor which offers a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into good-humor. Alas ! in letters there is nothing of this sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they are be- side the mark, and the first law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the Helo'ise for dilettante ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insani-' ties. It would be well for all of the genus irritabih thus to add something of skilled labor to intangible 4i VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE brain-work. To find the right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satis- faction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter j3erfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally certain he has found a right tone or a right color, or made a dexterous stroke with his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tran- quillizing influence" of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, and prosaic. A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a mar- riage of love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men who fish, botanize, work with the turning- lathe, or gather sea-weeds, will make admirable hus- bands; and a little amateur painting in water-color shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable women manufac- ture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shy- ness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilizing. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 45 Michekt calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for loung- ing and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness. These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him more when lie differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and de- cisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realized, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamor for- ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses. 46 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE II (1881) Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our exist- ence. From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it im- probable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, con- duct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various ex- cellences in my own person, and go marching down to posterity with divine honors. There is nothing so mon- strous but we can believe it of ourselves. About our- selves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in a delicious vagueness from our boy- hood up. No one will have forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die temporarily !" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here we recognize the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased — well, when.^- — not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty- five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that Arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilization, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 47 individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honored, and Lord Chancellor of Eng- land. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grand- father William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood. The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in ques- tions of conduct. There is a character in the Pilgrim's Progress, one Mr. Linger-after-Lust, with whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms ; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after eighty years of con- trary experience, will believe it possible to continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft. Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable turning-point in our career. Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A drunk- ard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged in the end. By such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is stinging. But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sancti- monious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man un- changed. This is a hard saying, and has an air of para- 48 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE dox. For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury forever many aching preoc- cupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar com- pany through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind of love, rather than* the bless- ing and active; it is approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him if he cannot be good and fortu- nate and happy within such august circumvallations. And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your experi- ence has not, we may dare to say, been more encour- aging than Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have seen and desired the good that you were not able to ac- complish; like them, you have done the evil that you loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, according to your habit of body, remembering, with dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to with- draw entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for your misdemeanors, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that 3^ou were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made aM^are of what was beautiful and amia- ble, wise and kind, in the other part of your behavior; and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the contra- diction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognized I VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 49 that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career. Granted;, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree: — we can never agree to have you marry. What ! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to con- join with it the management of some one else's? Be- cause you have been unfaithful in a very little, you pro- pose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife's also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take things on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all thr.t your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blind- fold, drag her after you to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate ! If she were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how 50 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than yourself ! Times are changed with him who marries ; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support. Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might surely hap- pen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time, because they were not what you had meant; but how vrill they annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace ! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particu- larly realizing; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience ; you would recognize your failures with a nod, and so, good-day. But the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mindjs eye upon uncomely pas- sages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely her to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to think you better than you are. You may think you had a conscience, and believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife.^ Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and stood by their VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 51 bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought and sold, or where tiiey piped and wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside of- man. These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you will — but how harrowingly taught ! — when the woman you respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife. To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good. And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single virtue ; for in marriage there are' two ideals to be realized. A girl, it is true, has always lived in a glass house among reproving relatives, whose word was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judg- ments and take the key submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how swiftly she can change her tune into the husband's. Her morality has been, too often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy and freedom, his moral judgments have been passed in some accordance with his nature. His sins were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this com- parative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdic- tions. It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make 52 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE a bull for once) my wife. For her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honor bright and abstain from base capitulations.^ How are you to put aside love's plead- ings ? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn sud- denly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in mar- ried life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for awhile continue to accept these change- lings with a gross complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees forever. Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs above the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman myself, I dare say I should hold the reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other of these camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side of man; and the most mas- culine and direct of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of personation. Alas ! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 53 and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life, which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough in- fidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine of the ex- cellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties ; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours. But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but prin- cipally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionately widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. 54 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE What should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most* serious con- tract, and setting out ujoon life's journej'^ with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing vice; what is to her the mere common-sense of tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men and women who shall succeed to their places and per- plexities. And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to us. The noblest pas- sage in one of the noblest books of this century, is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero,* With- out some such manly note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril that a man may march the more warily. And the true conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on appre- hensions, and embrace that shining and courageous vir- * Brownini:»''s The King and the Book. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 55 tue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man, Hope lives on ignorance ; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowl- edge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learned humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honor. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself — erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; /but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lejsson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never real- ized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, per- fect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each 56 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console. Ill ox FALLING IN LOVE (1877) "Lord, what fools these mortals be !" There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety in- deed, but with little that is either startling or incense; they form together no more than a sort of background, or running accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friends and acquaintances under the in- fluence of love. He may sometimes look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But it is a subject in which neither intuition nor the be- havior of others will help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a well- known French theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in his cenacle. It was objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon he arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 57 until he considered that he had supplied the defect. "Now/' he remarked^ on entering, "now I am in a po- sition to continue the discussion." Perhaps he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the story indicates right thinking, and may .serve as an apologue to readers of this essay. When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy dis- likes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days ; and he recognizes capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the exist- ence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as super- natural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beauti- ful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centerpoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile ; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-a-one in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I can- not think what the women mean. It might be very 58 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life_, and step forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten change- lings who call themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love — no, nor read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune to be a man. There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every one to fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaif in love/ I do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for a passage or two in Rob Roy, would give me very much the same effect. These are great names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, healthy, high-strung, and generous natures, of whom the reverse might have been expected. As for the in- numerable army of anaemic and tailorish persons who occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any such situ- ation as a love-affair. A wet rag goes safely by the fire ; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some unfavorable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 59 do there cease and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of time. And then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty times, will continue im- perturbably declaring, amid the astonished consideration of men and angels, until he has a favorable answer. I dare say, if one were a woman, one would like to marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should run out to meet love wnth open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleas- ure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman's. This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and 60 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully fore- went these advantages. He joined himself to the fol- lowing of what, in the old mythology of love, was pret- tily called nonchaloirj and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash of that fear with which honest people regard serious interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course of life among certain selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and irregu- larly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must have lived his past life between sleep or waking, or with the preoccupied attention of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But it is not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has been done already, and that to admiration. In Adelaide^ in Tennyson's Maud, and in some of Heine's songs, you get the abso- lute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love ; although they tell me some German critics are of a different opinion, probably the same who would have us think JMercutio a dull fel- low. Poor Antony was in love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, in Les Miserahles, is also a genuine .case in his own way, and worth observation. A good many of George Sand's people are thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George Meredith's. Alto- gether, there is plenty to read on the subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has the requisite VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 61 chords to set in vibration, a young man may occasion- ally enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of the City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illusions. One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not quite see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life — in lying down to sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be — the lover begins to regard his happiness as bene- ficial for the rest of the world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable star, does not re-echo among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the same taste, when- people find a great to-do in their own breasts, they imagine it must have some influence in their neigh- borhood. The presence of the two lovers is so enchant- ing: to each other that it seems as if it must be the best thing possible for everybody else. They are half in- clined to fancy it is because of them and their love that the sky is blue and the sun shines. x\nd certainly the weather is usually fine w^hile people are courting. . . . In point of fact, although the happy man feels very kindly toward others of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the magnifico in his demeanor. If people grow presuming and self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some sus- picion of a strut ; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance 62 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and very gen- erously, as if they were so many Joan of Arcs; but this does not come out in their behavior ; and they treat tliem to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after having bemused myself over Daniel Deronda, I have given up trying to understand what they like. If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, would serve at least to keep love gen- erous and great-hearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other lovers are hugely inter- ested. They strike the nicest balance between pity and approval, when they see people ajDing the greatness of their own sentiments. It is an understood thing in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman and the singing chambermaid. As people are generally cast for the leading parts in their own imagi- nations, the reader can apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going wrong;. In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep- seated as their own, but they like dearly to see it going forward. And love, considered as a spectacle^^ must have attractions for many who are not of the confra- ternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the novelists ; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy. For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 63 and you may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you will^ but you cannot help some emotion when you read of well-disputed battles^ or meet a pair of lovers in the lane. Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do good and communi- cate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness of the other that makes his own most intense ffratifica- tion. It is not possible to disentangle the different emo- tions, the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers ; for the essence of love is kindness ; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one after another_, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it, as a 64 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE rule. For better or worse^ people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And gen- erally we rest pretty content with our failures ; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honor to clear such dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake. He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispo- sitions, he can look back only by a difficult and re- pugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was really im- portant, that he may have entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a bur- den almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience. But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent with a Divine providence. A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically in- convenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an ill-humored courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objec- tion is that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit of senti- ments with which he is supposed to have begun the world; but waited to make its appearance in better days and among richer natures. And this is equally VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 65 true of love^ and friendship, and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the conse- quences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is. It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of letters found after years of happy union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but this pre-existence of both oc- curs to the mind as something indelicate. To be alto- gether right, they should have had twin birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and with- out reserve or afterthought. Then they would under- stand each other with a fulness impossible otherwise. There would be no barrier between them of associa- tions that cannot be imparted. They would be led into, none of those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And they v/ould know that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation that must follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of that other separation which endured until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in immortality, because there seems not to be room enough 66 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE in life for so great a tenderness^ and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years. Indeed, it seems strange ; but if we call to mind analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible. "The blind bow-boy/' who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disap- pears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from tlie stage of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the dispo- sition of their parents. IV TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE (1879) Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and broad- est conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it VIRGIN IBUS PUERISQUE 67 were. But the truth is one ; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered. Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose — with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite — it is not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas ! to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure the bounda- ries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying atten- tion that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge even of external and constant things. But it is easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face ; and truth in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense — not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the original when "as a matter of fact I know not one sylla- ble of Spanish — this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of this sort, accord- ing to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a certain sense even they may or may not be false. The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends ; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie — heart and face, from top to bottom. This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion — that is the Iruih which makes love possible and mankind happy. L'art de bien dire is but a drawing-room 'accomplish- ment unless it be pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect 68 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE him precisely as you wish. This is commonly under- stood in the case of books or set orations ; even in making 3'our will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which 3^et lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics — namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a man's pro- ficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is sup- posed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have been reading — Mr. Leland's captivating English Gip- sies. "It is said," I find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their appreciation of the beautiful, and of the elements of humor and pathos in their hearts, than do those who know their thoughts only through the medium of English. I know from my own observations that this is quite the case with the Indians of North America, and it is unquestionably so with the gipsy." In short, where a man has not a full possession of the language, the most important, because the most amiable, qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very "ele- ments of humor and pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put none of it out to interest in the market of affection ! But what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed, we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 69 and meagre ; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact — not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly ad- hering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable — intimacy with those he loves. An orator makes a false step ; he employs some trivial, some ab- surd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side wind, those whom he is laboring to charm; in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis ; and you are not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and filled with perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance !" As if yourself, when you seek to explain some misunder- standing or excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if your- self required less tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians ! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round ; the matters he discusses have been discussed a thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and dry vocabulary. But you — may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must- venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary inno- vator? For even in love there are unlovely humors; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would under- stand and pardon ; but, alas ! the heart cannot be shown — it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think 70 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE it is a hard thing to write poetry ? Why, that is to write poetry, and of a high, if not the highest, order. I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic literary labors" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions and contortions^the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals.. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message flies by these interpreters in the least space of time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely. But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; the'y"tell their mes- sage without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an illusion that should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, and in personal talk I re- peated the worst of what I had written, and added worse to that; and with the commentary of the body it seemed VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 71 not unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet on the same terms as they had parted. Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been denied all the symbols of com- munication, who have neither a lively play of facial ex- pression, nor speaking gestures,, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo. They are poorer than the gypsy, for their heart can speak no language under heaven. Such people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when wef see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our estimate. But these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically dull, despise physical endow- ments. That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must always be mean- ingless ; and, for my part, I can see few things more de- sirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honor and humor and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in per- son, so that we shall please even in the intervals of ac- tive pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own bur- 72 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE lesques. But of all unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfor- tune. This is he who has forfeited his birthright of ex- pression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every ■ side perverted or cut off his means of communication /with his fellow-men. The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. But this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly col- ored. His house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, but mean- while the poor proprietor must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone. Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid false- hood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. Yea and nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy, pro- legomenous babbler will often add three new offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most deli- cate affair. The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design. Sup- pose we held our converse not in words, but in music; VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 73 those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big world. But we do not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and questions ; there are so few that can be spoken to with- out a lie. "Do you forgive me?'* Madam and sweet- heart, so far as I have gone in life, I have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means. "Is it still the same between us?" Why, how can it be? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart. "Do you understand me?" God knows; I should think it highly improbable. The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have per- ished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the re- lation, has but hung his head and held his tongue ? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception ; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of liis own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true im- pression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical dis- 74 VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE cretion is often needful^ not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart. "It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most use- ful passage I remember to have read in any modern author,* "two to speak truth — one to speak and another to hear." He must be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognize the fact. A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his preconception ; and wherever a person fancies him- self unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations ; and where the life is known even yea and nay become luminous. In the closest of all relations — that of a love well founded and equally shared — speech is half discarded, like a * A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Wednesday, p. 233. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE 76 roundabout, infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette ; and the two communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each other's hearts in joy. P'or love rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort out- run knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the acquaintance ; and as it was not made like other relations, so it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by a natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of the body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would only lose to be set down in words — ay, although Shakespeare himself should be the scribe. Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas ! all the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the person doubted. ''What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been deceived so long and so completely!'' Let but that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is your crime ! Make all clear, convince the reason ; alas ! spe- ciousness is but a proof against you. ''If you can abuse me now, the more likely that you have abused me from the first/' For a strong affection such moments are worth sup- porting, and they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover's heart, and speaks her own language; it is not you but she herself who can defend and clear you of the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union .^ Indeed, is it worth while .'^ We 76 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS are all incompris , only more or less concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye — this is our opportunity in the ages — and we wag our tail with a poor smile. "Is that all?" All.^ If you only knew! But how can they know } They do not love us ; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent. But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful pleader. AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS (1877) "Boswell: We grow weary when idle. "JoHNsoisr: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all entertain one another." Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of Zese-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein with something not far short of enthusiasm,- a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 77 enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determina- tion, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Ameri- canism, "goes for" them. And while such a one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool per- sons in the meadows by the w^ayside, lying with a hand- kerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the dis- regard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success.^ It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifierent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little v>f stocks ; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to dis- parage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coven- try for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in Monte- negro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond. It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a 78 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 1 good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honors with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterward have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: ''Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spec- tacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamor of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote re- minds us, he will have little time for thoughts. If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack- lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 79 which was the favorite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this; if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspec- tive. Why, if this be not education, what is.^ We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such a one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue: — "How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here.''" "Truly, sir, I take mine ease." "Is this not the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?" "Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave." "Learning, quotha ! After what fashion, I pray thee ? Is it mathematics ?" "No, to be sure." "Is it metaphysics?" "Nor that." "Is it some language?" "Nay, it is no language." "Is it a trade?" "Nor a trade neither." "Why, then, what is't?" "Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commoiJj done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road ; as also, what manner 80 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threat- ful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha !" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman !" And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers. Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true educa- tion than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. Wliile others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 81 really useful art: to play the fiddle_, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all vari- eties of men. Many who have "plied their book dili- gently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, stockish, and dys- peptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them — by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits ; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutory of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living .f^ Nay, and the ilder has another and more im- portant quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. '^He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an 82 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and empti- ness ; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful lanscape; many firelit parlors ; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn. Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some con- ventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to ran- dom provocations ; they do not take pleasure in the exer- cise of their faculties for its own sake ; and unless Neces- sity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedi- cated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 83 have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a» turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes ; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life. But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it ^'s not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the or- chestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil im- portant offices toward the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey 84 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with good company ? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bay- ham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Haz- litt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostenta- tious friends ; for he thought a good companion emphati- cally the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most entertain- ing gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had made the manu- script in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil .f* Do you really fancy you should be more be- holden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity.'^ Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a j est ; but wherever there is an element of sacri- fice, the favor is conferred with pain, and, among gener- ous people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 85 which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good-humor; one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do- a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Livableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hungjer and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. [_He sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and re- ceives a large measure of nervous derangement in re- turn. Either he absents himself entirely from all fel- lowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nerv- ous system, to discharge some temper before he returns 86 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS to workj I do not care how much or how well he works^ this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag- ridden by a peevish uncle. And what, in God's name, is all this pother about.'* For what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little inter- est to the world. The ranks of life are full; and al- though a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts ! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance.'' Sup- pose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the altera- native all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for al- though tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas ! you may take it how you MS TRIPLEX 87 will, but the services of no single individual are indis- pensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare ! And yet you see merchants who go and labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the* promise of some mo- mentous destiny ? and that this lukewarm bullet on whicli they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indiffer- ent; and they and the world they inhabit are so incon- siderable that the mind freezes at the thought. ^S TRIPLEX (1878) The changes wrought by death ate in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's ex- perience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Some- times it leaps suddenly upon its victims like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadal during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, 88 ^S TRIPLEX and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friend- ships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, an'd single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intoler- able residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pj^ramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going toward the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; al- though in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice. As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighborhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles over- head; and meanwhile the foundation shudders under- foot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moon- MS TRIPLEX 89 light, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long dis- tance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils drowning care in a per- petual carouse. And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over- crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as fright- ened as they make out we are, for the subversive acci- dent that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them into battle — the bluepeter might fly at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship.'^ Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should 90 MS TRIPLEX affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left their bones ! What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his con- tinued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelm- ing probability that he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bub- bling with laughter, through years of man's age com- pared to which the valley at Balaclava was as safe and peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and clamber into bed. Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wilderness o-f snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the MS TRIPLEX 91 Derby.. Perhaf)s the reader remembers one of th,e humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he en- couraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge over Baiae bay ; and when they were in the height of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the company, an.d had them tossed into the sea. This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. Only, what- a checkered picnic we have of it, even while it lasts ! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the end ! We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swalr lows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incon- gruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger- beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more, we think about them. It is a well-known fact that an im- mense proportion of boat accidents would never happen i.f people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a pro- fessional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it fast. A strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen bold- ness in the face of death! We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble inappropri- ateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its consequences to others ; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into ab- straction as to have any practical guess at the meaning 92 ^S TRIPLEX of the word life. All literature, from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such large- ness of view as shall enable us to rise from the con- sideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapor, or a show, or made of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has. been at the same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the prob- lem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon an- other into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philoso- phy has the honor of laying before us, with modest pride, her contribution toward the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine re- sult! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation ! He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a club, or even an under- taker's man; but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true throughout — that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its conservation — that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply MS TRIPLEX 93 interested in the accidents of our existence^ to enjoy- keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution. There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent ; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their perform- ances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, like the Commander's statue ; we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting company with all his aches and ecstacies. For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honor, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies. We all of us appreciate the sensations ; but as for cari'ftg about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is generally very bald, and his senses very 94 iES TRIPLEX dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall — a mere bag's end, as the French say — or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for years of health and vigor, or are about to mount into a Bath chair, as a step toward the hearse ; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible : that a man. should stop his ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct^ how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he rentured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultiva- tion, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognize our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armored for this world. And not only well armored for himself, but a good friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcass, has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted MS TRIPLEX 95 wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlors with a regu- lated temperature, and takes his morality on the princi- ple of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one impor- tant body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlor with the regulated temperature ; and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stock-still. Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running toward anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord, look after his health ; Lord, have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril toward his aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us ; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mimmouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontane- ous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic man- ner. These are great incentives ; not for any of these. 96 ^S TRIPLEX but for the plain satisfaction of livings of being about their business in some sort or other^ do the brave, serv- iceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through tri- umphantly until the end ! Who, if he were wisely con- siderate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who would project a serial novel, after Thack- eray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death? And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is ! To forego all the issues of living in a parlor with the" regulated temperature — as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch ! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and with- out even the sad immunities of death ! As if it were not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change ! The Permanent Possibility is pre- served, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die* daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honor useful labor. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most un- timely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they WALT WHITMAN 97 may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the worid^ and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations. Hushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas } When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land. WALT WHITMAN (1878) Of late years the name of Walt Whitman has been a good deal bandied about in books and magazines. It has become familiar both in good and ill repute. His works have been largely bespattered with praise by his admirers, and cruelly mauled and mangled by ir- reverent enemies. Now, wlietlier his poetry is good or 98 WALT WHITMAN bad as poetry, is a matter that may admit of a difference of opinion without alienating those who differ. We could not keep the peace with a man who should" put forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in Samson Agonistes ; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's vol- ume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion. We may think that, when a work contains many unforgettable phrases, it cannot be altogether devoid of literary merit. We may even see passages of a high poetry here and there among its eccentric contents. But when all is said, Walt Whitman is neither a Milton nor a Shakespeare; to appreciate his works is not a condition necessary to salvation; and I would not disinherit a son upon the question, nor even think much the worse of a critic, for I should always have an idea what he meant. What Whitman has to say is another affair from how he says it. It is not possible to acquit any one of defec- tive intelligence, or else stiff prejudice, who is not inter- ested by Whitman's matter and the spirit it represents. Not as a poet, but as what we must call (for lack of a more exact expression) a prophet, he occupies a curious and prominent position. Whether he may greatly in- fluence the future or not, he is a notable symptom of the present. As a sign of the times, it would be hard to find his parallel. I should hazard a large wager, for instance, that he was not unacquainted with the works of Herbert Spencer; and yet where, in all the history books, shall we lay our hands on two more incongruous contemporaries } Mr. Spencer so decorous — I had al- most said, so dandy — in dissent; and Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon. And when was an WALT WHITMAN 99 echo more curiously like a satire, than when Mr. Spencer found his Synthetic Philosophy reverberated from the other shores of the Atlantic in the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman ? Whitman, it cannot be too soon explained, writes up to a system. He was a theorizer about society before he was a poet. He first perceived something wanting, and then sat down squarely to supply the want. The reader, running over his works, will find that he takes nearly as much pleasure in critically expounding his theory of poetry as in making poems. This is as far as it can be from the case of the spontaneous village minstrel dear to elegy, who has no theory whatever, although some- times he may have fully as much poetry as Whitman. The whole of Whitman's work is deliberate and precon- ceived. A man born into a society comparatively new, full of conflicting elements and interests, could not fail, if he had any thoughts at all, to reflect upon the ten- dencies around him. He saw much good and evil on all sides, not yet settled down into some more or less unjust compromise as in older nations, but still in the act of settlement. And he could not but wonder what it would turn out; whether the compromise would be very just or very much the reverse, and give great or little scope for healthy human energies. From idle wonder to active speculation is but a step; and he seems to have been early struck with the inefficacy of literature and its extreme unsuitability to the conditions. What he calls "Feudal Literature" could liave little living action on the tumult of American democracy; what he calls the "Literature of Woe," meaning the whole tribe of Wer- ther and Byron, could have no action for good in any 100 WALT WHITMAN time or place. Both propositions^ if art had none but a direct moral influence, would be true enough; and as this seems to be Whitman's view, they were true enough for him. He conceived the idea of a Literature which was to inhere in the life of the present; which was to be, first, human, and next, American; which was to be brave and cheerful as per contract; to give culture in a popular and poetical presentment; and, in so doing, catch and stereotype some democratic ideal of himianity which should be equally natural to all grades of wealth and education, and suited, in one of his favorite phrases, to "the average man." To the formation of some such literature as this his poems are to be regarded as so many contributions, one sometimes explaining, some- times superceding, the other: and the whole together not so much a finished work as a body of suggestive hints. He does not profess to have built the castle, but he pre- tends he has traced the lines of the foundation. He has not made the poetry, but he flatters himself he has done something toward making the poets. His notion of the poetic function is ambitious, and coincides roughly with what Schopenhauer has laid down as the province of the metaphysician. The poet is to gather together for men, and set in order, the ma- terials of their existence. He is "The Answerer;" he is to find some way of speaking about life that shall satisfy, if only for the moment, man's enduring astonish- ment at his own position. And besides having an answer ready, it is he who shall provoke the question. He must shake people out of their indifference, and force them to make some election in this world, instead of sliding dully forward in a dream. Life is a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. We should de- 1 WALT WHITMAN 101 spise a man who gave as little activity and forethought to the conduct of any other business. But in this^ which is the one thing of all others^ since it contains them all, we cannot see the forest for the trees. One brief impression obliterates another. There is something stupefying in the recurrence of unimportant tilings. And it is only on rare provocations that we can rise to take an outlook beyond daily concerns, and compre- hend the narrow limits and great possibilities of our existence. It is the duty of the poet to induce such moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years. He has to electrify his readers into an instant unflagging activity, founded on a wide and eager observation of the world, and make them direct their ways by a superior prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the maxims of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as they would heartily disown after two hours' serious reflec- tion on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am sure, a very galling thought. The Enchanted Ground of dead-alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take their rest in the middle of God's beau- tiful and wonderful universe ; the drowsy heads have nodded together in the same position since first their fathers fell asleep ; and not even the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a single active thought. The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows to a sense of their own and other people's principles in life. And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent means to such an end. Language is but 102 WALT WHITMAN a poor bull's-eye lantern wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unex- pressed; like a bright window in a distant view_, which dazzles and confuses our sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare to ex- press the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the mind, produce, in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout ap- proaches. If verbal logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all colored and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by the realities of life and not by the partial terms that repre- sent them in man's speech ; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication, not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself, for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a- piece and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives. Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet; he must do more than waken up the sleepers to WALT WHITMAN 103 his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes. This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence of other men, of animals, or of inani- mate things. To glance with an eye, were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, than to read the works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, may be said to end in cer- tainty, the certainty in the one case transcends the other to an incalculable degree. If people see a lion, they run away; if they only apprehend a deduction, they keep wandering around in an experimental humor. Now, how is the poet to convince like nature, and not like books .'^ Is there no actual piece of nature that he can show the man to his face, as he might show him a tree if they were walking together? Yes, there is one: the man's own thoughts. In fact, if the poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer's mind. That, alone, the hearer will believe; that, alone, he will be able to apply intelligently to the facts of life. Any conviction, even if it be a whole system or a whole religion, must pass into the condition of commonplace, or postulate, before it becomes fully operative. Strange excursions and high-flying theories may interest, but they cannot rule behavior. Our faith is not the highest truth that we perceive, but the highest that we have been able to assimilate into the very texture and method of our thinking. It is not, therefore, by flashing before a man's eyes the weapons of dialectic; it is not by induc- tion, deduction, or construction; it is not by forcing him 104 WALT WHITMAN on from one stage of reasoning to another, that the man will be effectually renewed. He cannot be made to be- lieve anything; but he can be made to see that he has always believed it. And this is the practical canon. It is when the reader cries, "Oh, I know !" and is, perhaps, half irritated to see how nearly the author has fore- stalled his own thoughts, that he is on the way to what is called in theology a Saving Faith. Here we have the key to Whitman's attitude. To give a certain unity of ideal to the average population of America — to gather their activities about some con- ception of humanity that shall be central and normal, if only for the moment — the poet must portray that popu- lation as it is. Like human law, human poetry is simply declaratory. If any ideal is possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual — he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not." To show them how good they are, the poet must study his fellow- countrymen and himself somewhat like a traveller on the hunt for his book of travels. There is a sense, of course, in which all true books are books of travel; and all genuine poets must run their risk of being charged with the traveller's exaggeration; for to whom are such books more surprising than to those whose own life is faithfully and smartly pictured? But this danger is all upon one side; and you may judiciously flatter the por- trait without any likelihood of the sitter's disowning it for a faithful likeness. And so Whitman has reasoned: that by drawing at first hand from himself and his neighbors, accepting without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet treating the whole in a high, magnanimous spirit, he would make WALT WHITMAN 105 sure of belief^ and at the same time encourage people forward by the means of praise. II We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugli- ness of life, and they record their unfitness at consider- able length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's com- plaint produces too many flimsy imitators ; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the sym- phony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful ex- perience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires. It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and unre- munerative labor; where a man in this predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are called his intel- lectual superiors, there is plainly something to be lost. 106 WALT WHITMAN as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralyzing sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against that hide-bound sto- lidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and decolorizes for poor natures the wonderful pageant of consciousness ; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympa- thize; but let us see to it, above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note, and build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute, indifference. Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any help, he must testify to the livable- ness of life. His poems, he tells us, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for a cer- tain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave delight fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducing his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do throughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something like beauty ; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end. "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields," he says, "the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, — all is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of the residence of the poetic in outdoor people." There seems to me something truly original in this WALT WHITMAN 107 choice of trite examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said "the love of healthy men for the female form," he would have said almost a silliness ; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy, and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, he tells us some- thing not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly in words ; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great self-satisfaction and spiritual ag- grandizement. In many different authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is a sort of standing chal- lenge to everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener, is to be very meanly or- ganized. A man should be ashamed to take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to turn some of it into intense and enjoyable occupation. Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keep- ing up a sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read "among the cooling in- fluences of external nature;" and this recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think in a plain, unf everish temper ; little things seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the 108 WALT WHITMAN spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of the atmosphere of parlors or libraries. Wis- dom keeps school outdoors. And he has the art to recom- mend this attitude of mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader_, to keep the ad- vantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward, something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city into what he himself has called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge and thought- ful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may be the final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe upon his shoulders. Ill Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars, as that one man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His whole life is to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne, WALT WHITMAN 109 one perpetual miracle. Everything is strange, ever}-- thing unaccountable, everything beautiful; from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the first time, and professes astonish- ment on principle. But he has no leaning toward my- thology; avows his contempt for what he calls "unregen- erate poetry;" and does not mean by nature "The smooth walks, trimmed hedges, butterflies, posies, and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing billions of tons." Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of ideal- ist all impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy, history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion. He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more com- prehensive synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his cosmology must sub- sume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is, and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical, with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for the understanding of the average man. One of his favorite endeavors is to get the whole matter into a nut- shell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another, about his reader's ears ; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and for- ward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own no WALT WHITMAN momentary personality; and then^ drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceiva- ble numbers and magnitudes and velocities of the heav- enly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words : The desire of the moth for the star. The same truth, but to what a different purpose ! Whitman's moth is mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that imagi- nation flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner. "The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed," says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of a transcendental common-sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered. But Whitman, who has a some- what vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints ; he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occa- sion of this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, */is greater to one than oneself is;" a statement with an irreligious smack at the first sight ; but, like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second. He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that the elementary laws never apologize." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint colloquial arrogance, "I WALT WHITMAN 111 reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being; so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every per- son, is good in his own place and way ; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No ar- ray of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and lan- guage, you will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above the highest human doubts and trepidations. But next in order of truths to a person's sublime con- viction of himself, comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by the word love: "The dear love of man for his comrade — the attraction of friend for friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, Of city for city and land for land." The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he is hymning the ego and commercing with God and the universe, a woman goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt or the color of her eyes, Icarus is re- called from heaven by the run. Love is so startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And so sympathy pairs with self'-assertion, the two gerents of human life on earth; 112 WALT WHITMAN and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love for others. To some ex- tent this is taking away with the left hand what has been so generously given with the right. Morality has been ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please ; and on the next we are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and between friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political sympathies ; and his ideal man must not only be a gen- erous friend but a conscientious voter into the bargain. His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind, by proving that we are free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to show that it is up- held by the very virtues of which he makes himself the advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says some where in his big, plain way, "there is no object so sof but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe." Rightly] understood, it is on the softest of all objects, the sym pathetic heart, that the wheel of society turns easily and securely as on a perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for doubt or discussion, about conduct, where ] WALT WHITMAN 113 every one is to follow the law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt^ deprecates discus- sion, and discourages to his utmost the craving, carping sensibilities of the conscience. We are to imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy phrases, "the satisfac- tion and aplomb of animals." If he preaches a sort of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he de- clares it to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at least, for he would be honestly historical in method, of the human heart as at present Christianized. His is a morality without a prohibition; his policy is one of encouragement all round. A man must be a born hero to come up to Whitman's standard in the practice of any of the positive virtues; but of a negative virtue, such as temperance or chastity, he has so little to say, that the reader need not be surprised if he drops a word or two upon the other side. He would lay down nothing that would be a clog; he would prescribe nothing that cannot be done ruddily, in a heat. The great point is to get people under way. To the faithful Whitmanite this would be justified by the belief that God made all, and that all was good; the prophet, in this doctrine, has only to cry "Tally-ho," and mankind will break into a gallop on the road to El Dorado. Perhaps, to another class of minds, it may look like the result of the some- what cynical reflection that you will not make a kind man out. of one who is unkind by any precepts under heaven; tempered by the belief that, in natural circum- stances, the large majority is well disposed. Thence it would follow, that if you can only get every one to feel more warmly and act more courageously, the balance of results will be for good. So far, you see, the doctrine is pretty coherent as a doctrine; as a picture of man's life it is incomplete 114 WALT WHITMAN and misleading^ although eminently cheerful. This he is himself the first to acknowledge; for if he is pro- phetic in anything, it is in his noble disregard of consist- ency. "Do I contradict myself?" he asks somewhere; and then pat comes the answer, the best answer ever given in print, worthy of a sage, or rather of a woman: "Very well, then, I contradict myself !" with this addi- tion, not so feminine and perhaps not altogether so satisfactory: "I am large — I contain multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the fact of disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his^ optimism, sets himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims in the end; that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no one, not even "the old man who has lived without purpose and feels it with bitterness worse than gall." But this is not to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for cochineal. And with that mur- derous parody, logical optimism and the praises of the best of possible worlds went irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in the mouths of reason- able men. Whitman spares us all allusions to the ■ cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a spirit almost as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have welcomed the sight of the enemy's topsails off the Spanish Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious to WALT WHITMAN 115 be done. I do not know many better things in literature than the brief pictures — brief and vivid like things seen by lightning — with which he tries to stir up the world's heart upon the side of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand, with examples of heroic duty and helpfulness ; on the other, he touches us with pitiful instances of people needing help. He knows how to make the heart beat at a brave story; to inflame us with just resentment over the hunted slave; to stop our mouths for shame when he tells of the drunken prostitute. For all the afflicted, all the weak, all the wicked, a good word is said in a spirit which I can only call one of ultra-Christianity; and however wild, however contradictory, it may be in parts, this at least may be said for his book, as it may be said of the Christian Gospels, that no one will read it, however respectable, but he gets a knock upon his conscience ; no one, however fallen, but he finds a kindly and supporting welcome. IV Nor has he been content with merely blowing the trumpet for the battle of well-doing; he has given to his precepts the authority of his own brave example. Naturally a grave, believing man, with little or no sense of humor, he has succeeded as well in life as in his printed performances. The spirit that was in him has come forth most eloquently in his actions. Many who have only read his poetry have been tempted to set him down as an ass, or even as a charlatan; but I never met any one who had known him personally who did not profess a solid affection and respect for the man's character. He practises as he professes ; he feels deeply that Christian love for all men, that toleration, that cheerful delight in serving others, which 116 WALT WHITMAN he often celebrates in literature with a doubtful meas- ure of success. And perhaps, out of all his writings, the best and the most human and convincing passages are to be found in "these soil'd and creas'd little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin," which he scribbled during the war by the bedsides of the wounded or in the excitement of great events. They are hardly literature in the formal meaning of the word; he has left his jottings for the most part as he made them; a homely detail, a word from the lips of a dying soldier, a business memorandum, the copy of a letter — short, straightforward to the point with none of the trappings of composition; but they breathe a pro- found sentiment, they give us a vivid look at one of the sides of life, and they make us acquainted with a man whom it is an honor to love. Whitman's intense Americanism, his unlimited belief in the future of These States (as, with reverential capi- tals, he loves to call them), made the war a period of great trial to his soul. The new virtue. Unionism, of which he is the sole inventor, seemed to have fallen into premature unpopularity. All that he loved, hoped, or hated, hung in the balance. And the game of war was not only momentous to him in its issues ; it sublimated his spirit by its heroic displays, and tortured him in- timately by the spectacle of its horrors. It was a the- atre, it was a place of education, it was like a season of religious revival. He watched Lincoln going daily to his work; he studied and fraternized with young sol- diery passing to the front; above all, he walked the hospitals, reading the Bible, distributing clean clothes, or apples, or tobacco; a patient, helpful, reverend man, full of kind speeches. His memoranda of this period are almost bewilder- WALT WHITMAN 117 ing to read. From one point of view they seem those of a district visitor; from another, they look lil^e the form- less jottings of an artist in the picturesque. More than one woman, on whom I tried the experiment, immediately claimed the writer for a fellow-woman. More than one literary purist might identify him as a shoddy newspaper correspondent without the necessary faculty of style. And yet the story touches home; and if you are of the weeping order of mankind, you will certainly find your eyes fill with tears, of which you have no reason to be ashamed. There is only one way to characterize a work of this order, and that is to quote. Here is a passage from a letter to a mother, unknown to Whitman, whose son died in hospital: "Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing, etc. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved, and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in after- noons and sitting by him, and he liked to have me — liked to put out his arm and lay his hand on my knee — would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night — often fancied himself with his regiment — by his talk sometimes seem'd as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of — said T never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.' At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem'd to children or such like, his relatives, I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word, or thought, or idea escaped him. It was remark'd that many a man's conversation in his senses was not half so good as Frank's delirium. "He was perfectly willing to die — he had become very weak, and had suffer'd a good deal, and was perfectly resign'd, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpassed. And now, like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy — ^yet there 118 WALT WHITMAN is a text, 'God doeth all things well,' the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul. "I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth while, for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him." It is easy enough to pick holes in the grammar of this letter, but what are we to say of its profound good- ness and tenderness.^ It is written as though he had the mother's face before his eyes, and saw her wincing in the flesh at every word. And what, again, are we to say of its sober truthfulness, not exaggerating, not run- ning to phrases, not seeking to make a hero out of what was only an ordinary but good and brave young man? Literary reticence is not Whitman's stronghold; and this reticence is not literary, but humane; it is not that of a good artist but that of a good man. He knew that what the mother wished to hear about was Frank; and he told her about her Frank as he was. Something should be said of Whitman's style, for style is of the essence of thinking. And where a man is so critically deliberate as our author, and goes sol- emnl}^ about his poetry for an ulterior end, every indi- cation is worth notice. He has chosen a rough, un- rhymed, lyrical verse; sometimes instinct with a fine processional movement; often so rugged and careless that it can only be described by saying that he has not taken the trouble to write prose. I believe myself that it was selected principally because it was easy to write, although not without recollections of the marching measures of some of the prose in our English Old Testa- ment. According to Whitman, on the other hand, "the time has arrived to essentially break down the barriers WALT WHITMAN 119 of form between Prose and Poetry . . . for the most cogent purposes of those great inland states, and for Texas and California, and Oregon;" — a statement which is among the happiest achievements of American humor. He calls his verses "recitatives/' in easily followed al- lusion to a musical form. "Easily written, loose-fingered chords," he cries, "I feel the thrum of your climax and close." Too often, I fear, he is the only one who can perceive the rhythm; and in spite of Mr. Swinburne, a great part of his work considered as verse is poor bald stuff. Considered, not as verse, but as speech, a great part of it is full of strange and admirable merits. The right detail is seized; the right word, bold and trenchant, is thrust into its place. Whitman has small regard to literary decencies, and is totally free from literary timidities. He is neither afraid of being slangy nor of being dull; nor, let me add, of being ridiculous. The result is a most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affectation, and down- right nonsense. It would be useless to follow his de- tractors and give instances of how bad he can be at his worst; and perhaps it would be not much wiser to give extracted specimens of how happily he can write when he is at his best. These come in to most advantage in their own place; owing something, it may be, to the offset of their curious surroundings. And one thing is certain, that no one can appreciate Whitman's excel- lences until he has grown accustomed to his faults. Until you are content to pick poetry out of his pages almost as you must pick it out of a Greek play in Bohn's translation, your gravity will be continually upset, your ears perpetually disappointed, and the whole book will be no more to you than a particularly flagrant production by the Poet Close. A writer of this uncertain quality was, perhaps, un- 120 WALT WHITMAN fortunate in taking for thesis the beauty of the world as it now is, not only on the hill-tops, but in the factory ; not only by the harbor full of stately ships, but in the magazine of the hopelessly prosaic hatter. To show beauty in common things is the work of the rarest tact. It is not to be done by the wishing. It is easy to posit as a theory, but to bring it home to men's minds is the problem of literature, and is only accomplished by rare talent, and in comparatively rare instances. To bid the whole world stand and deliver, with a dogma in one's right hand by way of pistol; to cover reams of paper in a galloping, headstrong vein; to cry louder and louder over everything as it comes up, and make no distinction in one's enthusiasm over the most incompar- able matters ; to prove one's entire want of sympathy for the jaded, literary palate, by calling, not a spade a spade, but a hatter a hatter, in a lyrical apostrophe; — this, in spite of all the airs of inspiration, is not the way to do it. It may be very wrong, and very wounding to a respectable branch of industry, but the word "hat- ter" cannot be used seriously in emotional verse; not to understand this, is to have no literary tact; and I would, for his own sake, that this were the only inadmissible expression with which Whitman had bedecked his pages. The book teams with similar comicalities; and, to a reader who is determined to take it from that side only, presents a perfect carnival of fun. A good deal of this is the result of theory playing its usual vile trick upon the artist. It is because he is a Democrat that Whitman must have in the hatter. If you may say Admiral, he reasons, why may you not say Hatter.'' One man is as good as another, and it is the business of the "great poet" to show poetry in the life of the one as well as the other. A most incon- trovertible sentiment surely, and one which nobody WALT WHITMAN 121 would think of controverting, wiiere — and here is the point — where any beauty has been shown. But how, where that is not the case? where the hatter is simply introduced, as God made him and as his fellow-men have miscalled him, at the crisis of a high-flown rhap- sody? And what are we to say, where a man of Whitman's notable capacity for putting things in a bright, picturesque, and novel way, simply gives up the attempt, and indulges, with apparent exultation, in an inventory of trades or implements, with no more color of coherence than so many index-words out of a dictionary? I do not know that we can say anything, but that it is a prodigiously amusing exhibi- tion for a line or so. The worst of it is, that Whit- man must have known better. The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it require to know that capitula- tion is not description, or that fingering on a dumb key- board, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same thing as discoursing music? I wish I could believe he was quite honest with us ; but, indeed, who was ever quite honest who wrote a book for a purpose? It is a flight beyond the reach of human magnanimity. One other point, where his means failed him, must be touched upon, however shortly. In his desire to accept all facts loyally and simply, it fell within his programme to speak at some length and with some plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among 122 WALT WHITMAN the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink. But the Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth. Whitman has rather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is improv- ing; that it would be a good thing if a window were opened on these close privacies of life ; that o'n this sub- ject, as on all others, he now and then lets fall a preg- nant saying. But we are not satisfied. We feel that he was not the man for so difficult an enterprise. He loses our sympathy in the character of a poet by attract- ing too much of our attention in that of a Bull in a China Shop. And where, by a little more art, we might have been solemnized ourselves, it is too often Whitman alone who is solemn in the face of an audience somewhat indecorouslv amused. VI Lastly, as most important, after all, to human beings in our disputable state, what is that higher prudence which was to be the aim and issue of these deliberate productions ? Whitman is too clever to slip into a succinct formula. If he could have adequately said his say in a single proverb, it is to be presumed he would not have put himself to the trouble of writing several volumes. It was his programme to state as much as he could of the world with all its contradictions, and leave the upshot with God who planned it. What he has made of the world and the world's meanings is to be found at large in his poems. These altogether give his answers to the problems of belief and conduct; in many ways righteous and high-spirited, in some ways loose and contradictory. And yet there are two passages from the preface to the Leaves of Grass which do pretty well condense his WALT WHITMAN 123 teaching on all essential points, and yet preserve a measure of his spirit. "This is what you shall do/' he says in the one, "love the earth, and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers of families, read these leaves (his own works) in the open air every season of every year of your life; re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul." "The prudence of the greatest poet," he adds in the other — and the greatest poet is, of course, himself — "knows that the young man who composedly perilled his life and lost it, has done exceeding w^ell for himself; while the man who has not perilled his life, and retains it to old age in riches and ease has perhaps achieved nothing for himself worth mentioning; and that only that person has no great prudence to learn, who has learned to prefer real long-lived things, and favors body and soul the same, and perceives the indirect surely following the direct, and what evil or good he does leaping onward and waiting to meet him again, and who in his spirit, in any emer- gency whatever, neither hurries nor avoids death." There is much that is Christian in these extracts, startlingly Christian. Any reader who bears in mind Whitman's own advice and "dismisses whatever insults his own soul" will find plenty that is bracing, brighten- ing, and chastening to reward him for a little patience at first. It seems hardly possible that any being should get evil from so healtliy a book as the Leaves of Grass, which is simply comical where it falls short of nobility; but if there be any such, who cannot both take and leave, who cannot let a single opportunity pass by without some unworthy and unmanly thought, I should have as great difficulty, and neither more nor less, in recommend- ing the works of Whitman as in lending them Shake- speare, or letting them go abroad outside of the grounds of a private asylum. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH (1878) "You know my mother now and then argues very notably; always very warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to convince one another. A pretty com- mon case, I believe, in all vehement debatings. She says, I am too witty; Anglic^, too pert; I, that she is too wise; that is to say, being likewise put into English, not so young as she has heen.^'' — Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, Clarissa, vol. ii. Letter xiii. There is a strong feeling in favor of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardor and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of medi- ocre people, to discourage them from ambitious at- tempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of human- ity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnani- mous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such say- 124 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 125 ings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters^ you fulfil the whole duty of man. It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and re- spectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honored with public monuments in the streets of our commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the* moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters ! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent navigator. His life is not the* kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's ut- most to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude toward the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. Per- 126 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH sons of substance take in the Times and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of their pros- perity in business. As for the generals who go gallop- ing up and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats — as for the actors who raddle their faces and de- mean themselves for hire upon the stage — they must belong, thank God ! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in an- cient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no more think of copying their behavior, let us hope, than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school history of England. Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another in- stance of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth ; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentle- man waggles his head and says : "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver. "Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowl- edge in the making,*' All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really con- sidered the world and drawn a conclusion, lie has travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to nowhere but CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 127 second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catch- words in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters ; and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown argu- ments is supposed to reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the con- stable's truncheon. They are used in pure sujiersti- tion, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exor- cism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the examina- tion of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and fortifying to the mind. Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to con- vince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right conclusion, you would 128 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH be verf apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zeal- ous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces; their jjlindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they en- couraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Con- servative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better — I dare say it is deplorably for the worse. I have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome de- sires ; but I am in no hurry about that ; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on hav- ing outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to be- come cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 129 sense I hope I am journeying toward the truth, in another I am indubitably posting toward these forms and sources of error. .^■'^-iis we go catching and catching at this or that cor- ner of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of 'prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man is carried away ; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories ; we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more than an impres- sion. If we had breathing space, we should take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this break-neck hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline toward the grave. It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorize with a pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment, but to take action, before the hour is at an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade. In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved. 130 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ains- worth so amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modi- fied or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the port of London; and hav- ing brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage. And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they do not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his savoir. I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank after all ; I doubt if he would be s.uch an admirable son as we are led to expect ; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out- Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush. Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom dances many a suc- cessful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any con- CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 131 siderable age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation. It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes last. It seems just as much to tlie point, that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of even the most prosperous persons ; death costs nothing, and the expense of a head- stone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead —and he has cunningly overreached himself: a combina- tion of calamities none the less absurd for being grim. To husband a favorite claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar — a whole bodily existence ! People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters ; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaidens singing, 132 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH and know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go ! Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable j.og-trot of feeling is substi- tuted for the violent ups and downs of passion and dis- gust; the same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions ; if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for which we are asked to hoard up every- thing as for a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by manag- ing its own work and following its own happy inspira- tion, youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff in- evitably develops into the bore. There are not many Dr. Johnsons, to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping with rheuma- tism, and people begin to ask us "What does Gravity out of bed.^" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body ; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight ; to see sunrise in town and country ; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the meta- physics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 133 and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Her- nani. There is some meaning in the old theory about wild oats ; and a man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says Lord Beacons field, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to the date of his last novel,* "it is extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings of an inexperienced young man." And this mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armor, with which he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voy- age, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat, he will live in all weathers, and never be a half-penny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the first ; they must have been feeble fellows — creatures made of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joy fulness, in their composition; we may sym- pathize with their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of mankind. When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's case. Doubtless, whether from growth of ex- perience or decline of animal heat, he tliinks so no longer; but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding his vote to those of pre- vious generations and riveting another link to the chain of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young * Lothair. 134. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives. By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little tale. A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of ac- knowledged boyhood without any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen; already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my play- things, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous re- spect for those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he re- marked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not un- CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 135 worthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has prob- ably anticipated, it, is never likely to be carried into effect. There was a worm in the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle, when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and de- serve well of yourself and your neighbor. You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. The}^ rnay have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing ques- tions put by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the tor- rent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the in- justices of society, see nothing for it but the abolish- ment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a 136 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the uni- verse like a pill; they travel on through the world like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who "has brains enough to make a fool of himself ! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learned the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympa- thetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel. In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finSs he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without re- sult, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of orna- mental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue? I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 137 which I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I ad- vance is true/' said one. "But not the whole truth/' answered the other. "Sir/' returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech)^ "Sir^ there is no such thing as the whole truth !" Indeed, there is nothing sd evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is one long illus- tration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for a moment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution ; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, domi- nates things for awhile and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his Insti- tutes, and hot-headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church. Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference? I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre 138 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed song of pure content" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS (1880) I Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut, conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With his almost acid sharp- ness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world's heroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smil- ing, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, but was all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to no profession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he pre- ferred,, he answered, 'the nearest.' " So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later works he was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under the impression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; and there we HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 139 see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier/' says Emerson acutely ;, much easier for Thoreau to say no than yes; and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a useful accomplishment to be able to say no, but surely it is the essence of amiability to prefer to say yes where it is possible. There is something wanting in the man who does not hate him- self whenever he is constrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this born dissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had not enough of them to be* truly polar with humanity; whether you call him demi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for he was not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroes have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable, in the capacious theatre of their dis- positions. Such can live many lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual foresight. He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I love my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble to control the pen) : "You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing about it. I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and re- gret nothing.'* It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and last- ing happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstacy in liv- ing was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt 140 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and that his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the pas- sage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It it this: He thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants ; let him but see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the labors of the day. That may be reason good enough to ab- stain from tea ; but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasur- ably use, and from the rubs and trials of human so- ciety itself into the bargain, we recognize that valetudi- narian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself from his neighbors' habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who I HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 141 can breast into the world, do a man's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence. Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for they were all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on the darkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once an exact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, and gauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he could perceive the foetor of dwelling houses as he passed them by at night; his pal- ate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the taste of wine — or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that was good; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that he could have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect of the plants. In his dealings with animals, he was the original of Hawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into a pool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in the palm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He could make a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar, a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and manage a boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physical accomplishment; and a manu- facturer, from merely observing his dexterity with the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on the spot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability to do some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses, so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should be changed in his case, for lie could do most things with unusual perfection. And perhaps he had an approving 142 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: eye to himself when he wrote: "Though the youth at last grows indijfferent, the laws of the universe are not indif- ferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensi- tive/' II Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures, but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one, he turned all this strength in that direction. He was met upon the threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation without what are quaintly but happily de- nominated private means; these absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer necessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the yoke of custom ; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy in his own society, that he could con- sent with difficulty even to the interruptions of friend- ship. "Such are my engagements to myself that I dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invita- tion ; and the italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is so busy im- proving himself, that he must think twice about a morn- ing call. And now imagine him condemned for eight HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 143 hours a day to some uncongenial and unmeaning busi- ness ! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly progressive. Thus he learned to make lead pencils, and, when he had gained the best certificate and his friends began to congratulate him on his estab- lishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done once." For when a* thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it is of no fur- ther interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and when it became needful to support his family, he re- turned patiently to this mechanical art — a step more than worthy of himself. The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experi- ment in the service of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should proba- bly be on my way to the devil." Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such busi- 144. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: ness surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the figures ; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican re- venge, and sneering like Voltaire. Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus dis- carded one after another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and Ad- metus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It was his ambition to be an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort of oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he displayed a' vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of busi- ness. Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths and are only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed^ something essentially youthful distinguishes all Thor- eau's knockdown blows at current opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect where there are no catchwords ready made for the defender; after you have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt. "The cost of a thing," says he, "is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 145 that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bar- tering for it the whole of his available liberty, and be- coming a slave till deatli. Tliere are two questions to be considered — the quality of what we buy, and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year liveli- hood? and can you afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste ; it is not in the least degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly improb- able; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be of great service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the per- sonal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider mar- gin for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else, except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two hundred a year. Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, 146 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: active life among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such being his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save off something; he determined to save off his livelihood. "When a man has attained those things which are neces- sary to life," he vp^rites, "there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; he may adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having com- menced." Thoreau would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of self-improvement. Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against the day of sickness, was not a favor- ite with Thoreau. He preferred that other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had se- cured the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration for the man "who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trust himself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal more than we do," says he. "How much is not done by us ! or what if we had been taken sick.^" And then, with a stab of satire, he describes contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affected by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous ventures ; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbors for all that we are worth; HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 147 and it is chilling to think how many must lose their wager. In 1845^ twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experi- ment in life. He built himself a dwelling, and re- turned the axe, he says with characteristic and work- man-like pride, sharper than when he borrowed it; he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the matter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or some other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than five years, this was all that he required to do for his support, and he had the winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks of occupa- tion, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic garden- ing, the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we must rather allow that he had done far better ; for the thief himself is continually and busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a million will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say, "What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can." And how surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastiine, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of simpler na- tions are still the sports of the more artificial." When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other ; and that is perhaps the story of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own 148 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: example, and did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an experiment and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not his frugality which is worthy of note ; for, to begin with, that was inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of his view of life, and the insight with which he recog- nized the position of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was acting on, a truth of universal application. For money enters in two different characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us in the present order of society ; but beyond that amount, money is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint our- selves, like any other. And there are many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grate- ful conscience, a country life, or the woman of our in- clination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to look round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognized; and perhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend a trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of freedom. Ill "To have done anything by which you earned money merely," says Thoreau, "is to be" (have been, he means) "idle and worse." There are two passages in his let- HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 149 ters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which must be brought together to be rightly understood. So taken, they contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work in its relation to something broader than mere livelihood. Here is the first: "I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night — and for what? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day, but that wasn't the final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say : 'Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?' And I shall shud- der to think that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you were warm?' " Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr. Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earn- ing itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the neces- sary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man. The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warming heat, commonly lost, which pre- cedes the burning of the wood. It is the smoke of in- dustry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly 150 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: warmed in body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau says, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the artist is made to ac- complish his self-culture by devotion to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any "absorbing pursuit — it does not much matter what, so it be honest;" but the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort the largest propor- tion of the powers and desires of a man's nature; that into which he will plunge with ardor, and from which he will desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together, braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences. HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 151 teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe: "Spilt erklingt was friih erklang; Gluck und Ungliick wird Gesang." Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature/* But the literature he loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institu- tions — such I call good books." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he says, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use per- mits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats ; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be 152 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton's Areopa- gitica, and can name no other instance for the moment. Two things at least are plain: that if a man will con- descend to nothing more commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he will find his work cut out for him. Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that "the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He speaks in one place of "plainness and vigor, the ornaments of style," which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehen- sively true. In another he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must conjecture a very large sense indeed for tlie phrase "if one has anything to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit; and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness, compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass of their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in face of the evidence of HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 153 the style itself and of the various editions of Hamlet, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in spite of his protestations, is an instance of even ex- treme research in one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only by the occasional fin- ish, but by the determined exaggeration of his style. "I trust you realize what an exaggerator I am — that I lay myself out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hint- ing at the explanation: "Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?" And yet once more, in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East, but from a desire that people should under- stand and realize what he was writing. He was near the truth upon the general question ; but in his own particu- lar method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture ; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehen- sive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not suit his purpose. Thus 154 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: we extract the pure gold; and thus the well-written story of a noble life becomes^ by its very omissions, more thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half, you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a different thought which is not yours. Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-im- provement combined with an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies ; it is there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous, and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in books of a different purport. Walden, or Life in the Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, — such are the titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical perception that the true business of literature is with narrative ; in reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages, and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction, can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural im- pression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect of anecdote on simple minds ; and hence good biographies and works of high, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the gar- ment of art, for that was not his talent; but he sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 155 a similar relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of experience. Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man, con- tinued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardent- ly, we might transfer the glamor of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly net. Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you — to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touch- ing the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." Such was the method not con- sistent for a man whose meanings were to "drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most successful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to be found in the passages relating to 156 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: fish in the Week. These are remarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of language, not frequently surpassed. Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression — I cannot call it a progress — in his work toward a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau: "Who would not like to write something which all can read, like Robinson Cru- soe? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which de- lights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights the world in Robinson, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, in Colonel Jack, to the management of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely simi- lar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who should make a guide-book ; he not only chronicled what had been important in his own experience, but whatever might have been impor- tant in the experience of anybody else ; not only what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard. His ardor had grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display such emotions as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose, from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the saving quality of humor. He was not one of those authors who have learned, in his own words, "to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his full quantity HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 157 upon the reader in such books as Cape Cod, or The Yankee in Canada. Of the latter he confessed that he had not managed to get much of himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, we may hope. "Nothing/' he says somewhere, "can shock a brave man but dulness." Well, there are few spots more shocking to the brave than the pages of The Yankee in Canada. There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure: the Week, Walden, and the col- lected letters. As to his poetry, Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily said: "The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as in his prose, he relied greatly on the good-will of the reader, and wrote throughout in faith. It was an exer- cise of faith to suppose that many would understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be exhila- rated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. "But," as he says, "the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the echo; and I know that the nature toward which I launch these sounds is so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain." IV "What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost all hope for itself can inspire in another listen- ing soul such an infinite confidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?" The question is an echo and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms the key-note of his thoughts on friendship. No one else, to my knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons should come 158 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this branch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intel- lectual basis of our warm^ mutual tolerations; and testi- mony to their worth comes with added force from one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, but I cannot like him." He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinc- tion between love and friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of meditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too ac- curate an observer not to have remarked that "there exists already a natural disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet, he thought, "friendship is no respecter of sex." Perhaps there is a sense in which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; and perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be possible without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between persons of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love. To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and condition. "We are not what we are," says he^ "nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being." "A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expect- ing all the virtues from us, and who can appreciate them in us." "The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him." "It is the merit and preserva- tion of friendship that it takes place on a level liigher than the actual characters of the parties would seem to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestal HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 159 indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence, in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries plain. We are differ- ent with different friends ; yet if we look closely we shall find that every such relation reposes on some par- ticular apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could not distinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve; and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend or the w^oman that we love, not to hear ourselves called better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek this society to flatter ourselves with our own good conduct. And hence any falsehood in the relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: "Only lovers know the value of truth." And yet again: "They ask for words and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed." But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his powers, such an inter- course must often be disappointing to both. "We may bid farewell sooner than complain," says Thoreau, "for our complaint is too well grounded to be uttered." "We have not so good a right to hate any as our friend." "It were treason to our love And a sin to God above, One iota to abate Of a pure, impartial hate." Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes believe me," as the song says, "Love has eyes !" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthi- ness of those we love; and because you love one, and would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, 160 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: and you never will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without change. It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps, to recognize and certainly to utter this truth ; for a more human love makes it a point of honor not to acknowledge those faults of which it is most conscious. But his point of view is both higli and dry. He has no illusions ; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been presented. He is an egoist; he does not remem- ber, or does not think it worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times disap- pointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us ; and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are con- tinually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh en- deavor. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies ; moral profit, cer- tainly, but still profit to himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, "my education cannot dispense with your society." His education ! as though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It was not inappropri- ate, surely, that he had such close relations with the fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "As for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree !" As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken en- HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 161 joyment in his intimacies. lie says he has been per- petually on the brink of the sort of intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some afterthought of self -improvement, as though you had come to the cricket match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they any- thing fresh to communicate; but friendship must be something else than a society for mutual improvement — indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some ex- tent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, lie would have felt that he saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his philosophy from a more sus- tained and easy intercourse. We might remind him of his own words about love: "We should have no re- serve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have not imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading oriental philosophers. It is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible. Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love, even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows ; but if you will give enough of that, if you will pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasur- 162 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: able_, and yet improving intercourse as shall make time a moment of kindness^ a delight. The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part in the real defici- encies of social intercourse. He was not so much diffi- cult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter in Walden; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think, that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not enough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a parlor and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that dreary port ; nor had he inclina- tion for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow- creatures, — a melancholy, lean degeneration of the hu- man character. "As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with? Will you go to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 163 is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstacy still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways dispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which seems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheat yourself out of much life so ... All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story." V "The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbor's advice?" "There is a nearer neigh- bor within who is incessantly telling us how we should behave. But we wait for the neighbor without to tell us of some false, easier way." "The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves" that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and [mark this] ouf lives are sustained by a nearly equal 164 HENRY DAVID THOREAU: expense of virtue of some hind." Even although he were a prig, it will be owned he could announce a start- ling doctrine. "As for doing good_," he writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which so- ciety demands of me, to save the universe from an- nihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philan- thropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewhere he returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If I ever did a man any good in their sense, of course it was something exceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I am constantly doing by being what I am," There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in this unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity. This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world too mys- terious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I to grieve who have not ceased to wonder.^" But it sprang still more from constitutional indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy, composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a green bay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself that he failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ; for while he could glean more meaning from individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed it with such contrary emotions, that the sense and pur- HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 165 port of the doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed. He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he was himself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognize the human intention and essence of that teaching. Hence he complained that Christ did not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world, not having con- ceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; for things of that character that are sufficiently unaccept- able become j^ositively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall best appreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case of Whitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other ; it is what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so up- roariously bawls ; it is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference ! the same argument, but used to what a new conclusion ! Thoreau had plenty of humor until he tutored himself out of it, and so for- feited that best birthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to have been sent into the world naked and unashamed ; and yet by a strange consumma- tion, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and claustral. Of these two philosophies so nearly identical at bottom, the one pursues Self-improvement — a churlish, mangy dog; the other is up with the morning, in the best of health, and following the nymph Happi- ness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for its existence ; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not unkind in them- selves ; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous passage ; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution, may even grow de- formed into an Obermann, the very name and appear- 16G HENRY DAVID THOREAU: ance of a happy man breathe of good-nature^ and help the rest of us to live. In the case of Thoreau^ so great a show of doctrine demands some outcome in the field of action. If nothing were to be done but build a shanty beside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of these declarations of independence. That the man wrote some books is nothing to the purpose_, for the same has been done in a suburban villa. That he kept himself happy is per- haps a sufficient excuse, but it is disappointing to the reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despises commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring that he must take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we will not be content without some striking act. It was not Thoreau's fault if he were not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble ending. As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world's course; he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs ; and a strange one it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and the eccentricity of the man. It was forced on him by his calm but radical opposition to negro slavery. "Voting for the right is doing nothing for it," he saw; "it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should pre- vail." For his part, he would not "for an instant recog- nize that political organization for his government which is the slave's government also." "I do not hesitate to saj"," he adds, "that those who call themselves Aboli- tionists should at once effectually withdraw their sup- port, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts." That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to pay the poll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desirous to be a good neighbor as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to the State of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS 167 a polity unto himself; or, as he explains it with ad- mirable sense, "In fact, I quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases." He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design. "Under a government which im- prisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name — ay, if one HONEST man in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail, therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever." Such* was his theory of civil disobedience. And the upshot.^ A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year to pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested. It was a fiasco, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those who joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by this quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a hundred voters at some subsequent election: and if Thoreau had possessed as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a party how- ever small, if his example had been followed by a hun- dred or by thirty of his fellows^ I cannot but believe it would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervor, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they cause ; but when we see them wake an active horror in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbor prefer to lie in prison rather than be so much as passively implicated 168 SAMUEL PEPYS in their perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realize them with ■ a quicker pulse. Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence. The committee wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature. "I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to announce tliat I was to speak," I have used the word "defence"; in truth he did not seek to defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he should die; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have liked to hear it praised. Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to a character of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its own path of self-improvement for more than half a century, part gymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in a subaltern attitude, into the field of political history. Note. — For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to Thoreau: His Life and Aims, by J. A. Page, or, as is well known. Dr. Japp. SAMUEL PEPYS (1881) In two books a fresh light has recently been thrown on the character and position of Samuel Pepys. Mr. Mynors Bright has given us a new transcription of the Diary, increasing it in bulk by near a third, correcting many errors, and completing our knowledge of the man in some curious and important points. We can only regret that he has taken liberties with the author SAMUEL PEPYS 169 and the public. It is no part of the duties of an editor of an established classic to decide what may or may not be "tedious to the reader." The book is either an historical document or not, and in condemning Lord Braybrooke Mr. Bright condemns himself. As for the time-honored phrase_, "unfit for publication/' without being cynical, we may regard it as the sign of a pre- caution more or less commercial; and we may think, without being sordid, that when we purchase six huge and distressingly expenfiive volumes, we are entitled to be treated rather more like scholars and rather less like children. But Mr. Bright may rest assured: while we complain, we are still grateful. Mr. Wheatley, to divide our obligation, brings together, clearly and with no lost words, a body of illustrative material. Sometimes we might ask a little more; never, I think, less. And as a matter of fact, a great part of Mr. Wheatley's volume might be transferred, by a good editor of Pepys, to the margin of the text, for it is precisely what the reader wants. In the light of these two books, at least, we have now to read our author. Between them they contain all we can expect to learn for, it may be, many years. Now, if ever, we should be able to form some notion of that unparalleled figure in the annals of mankind — unparalleled for three good reasons: first, because he was a man known to his contemporaries in a halo of almost historical pomp, and to his remote descendants with an indecent familiarity, like a tap-room comrade; second, because he has outstripped all competitors in the art or virtue of a conscious honesty about oneself; and, third, because, being in many ways a very ordinary per- son, he has yet placed himself before the public eye with such a fulness and such an intimacy of detail as might be envied by a genius like Montaigne. Not then 170 SAMUEL PEPYS for his own sake only^ but as a character in a unique position, endowed with a uniqwe talent, and shedding a unique light upon the lives of the mass of mankind, he is surely worthy of prolonged and patient study. THE DIARY That there should be such a book as Pepys's Diary is incomparably strange, Pepys, in a corrupt and idle period, played the man in public employments, toiling hard and keeping his honor bright. Much of the little good that is set down to James the Second comes by right to Pepys; and if it were little for a king, it is much for a subordinate. To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some con- siderable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour — thinking it needless to say more — that it was answer- able to the greatness of his life. Thus he walked in dignity, guards of soldiers* sometimes attending him in his walks, subalterns bowing before his periwig; and when he uttered his thoughts they were suitable to his state and services. On February 8, 1668, we find him writing to Evelyn, his mind bitterly occupied with the late Dutch war, and some thoughts of the different story of the repulse of the Great Armada: "Sir, you will not wonder at the backwardness of my thanks for the pres- ent you made me, so many days since, of the Prospect of the Medway, while the Hollander rode master in it, when I have told you that the sight of it hath led me to such reflections on my particular interest, by my SAMUEL PEPYS 171 employment, in the reproaeft due to that miscarriage, as have given me little less disquiet than he is fancied to have who found his face in Michael Angelo's hell. The same should serve me also in excuse for my silence in celebrating your mastery shown in the design and draught, did not indignation rather than courtship urge me so far to commend them, as to wish the furniture of our House of Lords changed from the story of '88 to that of '67 (of Evelyn's designing), till the pravity of this were reformed to the temper of that age, wherein God Almighty found his blessings more operative than, I fear, he doth in ours his judgments." This is a letter honorable to the writer, where the meaning rather than the words is eloquent. Such wias the account he gave of himself to his contemporaries ; such thoughts he chose to utter, and in such language : giving himself out for a grave and patriotic public servant. We turn to the same date in the Diary by which he is known, after two centuries, to his de- scendants. The entry begins in the same key with the letter, blaming the "madness of the House of Com- mons" and "the base proceedings, just the epitome of all our public proceedings in this age, of the House of Lords;" and then, without the least transition, this is how our diarist proceeds: "To the Strand, to my bookseller's, and there bought an idle, roguish French book, L'escholle des Filles, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, be- cause I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them, if it should be found." Even in our day, when responsibility is so much more clearly apprehended, the man who wrote the letter would be notable; but what about the man, I do not say who bought a roguish book, but who was ashamed of doing 172 SAMUEL PEPYS so, yet did it, and recorded both the doing and the shame in the pages of his daily journal? We all, whether we write or speak, must somewhat drape ourselves when we address our fellows; at a given moment we apprehend our character and acts by some particular side; we are merry with one, grave with another, as befits the nature and demands of the relation. Pepys's letter to Evelyn would have little in common with that other one to jNIrs. Knipp which he signed by the pseudonym of Dapper Dicky; yet each would be suitable to the character of his correspondent. There is no untruth in this, for man, being a Protean animal, swiftly shares and changes with his company and surroundings; and these changes are the better part of his education in the world. To strike a posture once for all, and to march through life like a drum- major, is to be highly disagreeable to others and a fool for oneself into the bargain. To Evelyn and to Knipp we understand the double facing; but to whom was he posing in the Diary, and what, in the name of astonish- ment, was the nature of the pose.^ Had he suppressed all mention of the book, or had he bought it, gloried in the act, and cheerfully recorded his glorification, in either case we should have made him out. But no; he is full of precautions to conceal the "disgrace" of the purchase, and yet speeds to chronicle the whole affair in pen and ink. It is a sort of anomaly in human action, which we can exactly parallel from another part of the Diary. Mrs. Pepys had written a paper of her too just com- plaints against her husband, and written it in plain and very pungent English. Pepys, in an agony lest the world should come to see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell-tale document ; and then — you disbelieve your eyes — down goes the whole story with unsparing truth SAMUEL PEPYS 173 and in the crudest detail. It seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he keeps a private book to prove he. was not. You are at first faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid religious diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance dis- appears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify ; it is not from repentance that he chronicles his pecca- dilloes; for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him, there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the religious diarist are of a very for- mal pattern, and are told with an elaborate whine. But in Pepys you come upon good, substantive misde- meanors ; beams in his eye of which he alone remains unconscious ; healthy outbreaks of the animal nature, and laughable subterfuges to himself that always com- mand belief and often engage the sympathies. Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to liimself in the world, sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of sentiments which with most of us are over and done be- fore the age of twelve. In our tender years we still pre- serve a freshness of surprise at our prolonged existence ; events make an impression out of all proportion to their consequence; we are unspeakably touched by our own past adventures, and look forward to our future person- ality with sentimental interest. It was something of this, I think, that clung to Pepys. Although not sentimental in the abstract, he was sweetly sentimental about himself. His own past clung about liis heart, an evergreen. He was the slave of an association. He could not pass by Islington, where his father used to carry him to cakes and ale, but he must light at the "King's Head" and eat and drink "for remembrance of the old house Scke." 174 SAMUEL PEPYS He counted it good fortune to lie a night at Epsom to renew his old walks^ "where Mrs. Hely and I did use to walk and talk, with whom I had the first sentiments of love and pleasure in a woman's company, discourse and taking her by the hand, she being a pretty woman." He goes about weighing up the Assurance, which lay near Woolwich under water, and cries in a parenthesis, "Poor ship, that I have been twice merry in, in Captain Holland's time;" and after revisiting the Nasehy, now changed into the Charles, he confesses "it was a great pleasure to myself to see the ship that I began my good fortune in." The stone that he was cut for he preserved in a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such grati- tude for their assistance that for years, and after he had begun to mount himself into higher zones, he con- tinued to have that family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might express it more romantically ; and if Pepys shared with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the Confessions, or Hazlitt, who wrote the Liber Amoris, and loaded his essays with loving personal detail, share with Pepys in his unwearied egotism? For the two things go hand in hand; or, to be more exact, it is the first that makes the second either possible or pleasing. But, to be quite in sympathy with Pepys, we must return once more to the experience of children. I can remember to have written, in the fly-leaf of more than one book, the date and the place where I then was — if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognize myself across the intervening distance. Indeed, I might come SAMUEL PEPYS 175 upon them now, and not be moved one tittle — which shows that I have comparatively failed in life, and grown older than Samuel Pepys. For in the Diary we can find more than one such note of perfect childish egotism; as when he explains that his candle is going out, "which makes me write thus slobberingly ;" or as in this incredible particularity, "To my study, where I only wrote thus much of this day's passages to this*, and so out again;" or lastly, as here, with more of cir- cumstance: "I staid up till the bellman came by with his bell under my window, as I was writing of this very line, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.' " Such passages are not to be mis- understood. The appeal to Samuel Pepys years hence is unmistakable. He desires that dear, though unknown, gentleman, keenly to realize his predecessor; to remem- ber why a passage was uncleanly written; to recall (let us fancy, with a sigh) the tones of the bellman, the chill of the early, windy morning, and the very line his own romantic self was scribing at the moment. The man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences — a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into sentimental liber- tines: and the whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys's own address. Here, then, we have the key to that remarkable atti- tude preserved by him throughout his Diary, to that unflinching — I had almost said, that unintelligent — sincerity which makes it a miracle among human books. He was not unconscious of his errors — far from it ; he was often startled into shame, often reformed, often made and broke his vows of change. But whether he did ill or well, he was still his own unequalled self; still that entrancing ego of whom alone he cared to 176 SAMUEL PEPYS write; and still sure of his own affectionate indulgence, when the parts should be changed, and the writer come to read what he had written. Whatever he did, or said, or thought, or suffered, it was still a trait of Pepys, a character of his career; and as, to himself, he was more interesting than Moses or than Alexander, so all should be faithfully set down. I have called his Diary a work of art. Now when the artist has found something, word or deed, exactly proper to a favorite character in play or novel, he will neither suppress nor diminish it, though the remark be silly or the act mean. The hesita- tion of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness of Emma Bovary, or tli^ irregularities of Mr. Swivel- ler, caused neither disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored pro- tagonist; adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring human toleration, I have gone over and over the greater part of the Diary ; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not per- fectly sincere, are so few^ so doubtful, and so petty, that I am ashamed to name them. It may be said that we all of us write such a diary in airy characters upon our brain; but I fear there is a distinction to be made; I fear that as we render to our consciousness an account of our daily fortunes and behavior, we too often weave a tissue of romantic compliments and dull excuses; and even if Pepys were the ass and coward that men call him, we must take rank as sillier and more cowardly than he. The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what he saw clearly and set down unspar- ingly. It is improbable that the Diary can have been carried on in the same single spirit in which it was begun. Pepys was not such an ass but he must have perceived. SAMUEL PEPYS 177 as he went on, the extraordinary nature of the work he was producing. He was a great reader, and he knew what other books were like. It must, at least, have crossed his mind that some one might ultimately de- cipher the manuscript, and he himself, with all his pains and pleasures, be resuscitated in some later day; and the thought, although discouraged, must have warmed his heart. He was not such an ass, besides, but he must have been conscious of the deadly explosives, the gun- cotton and the giant powder, he was hoarding in his drawer. Let some contemporary light upon the Journal, and Pepys was plunged forever in social and political disgrace. We can trace the growth of his terrors by two facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in its youth, he tells about it, as a matter of course, to a lieu- tenant in the navy; but in 1669, when it was already near an end, he could have bitten his tongue out, as the saying is, because he had let slip his secret to one so grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry. And from two other facts I think we may infer that he had entertained, even if he had not acquiesced in, the thought of a far-distant publicity. The first is of capital impor- tance : the Diary was not destroyed. The second — that he took unusual precautions to confound the cipher in "roguish" passages — proves, beyond question, that he was thinking of some other reader besides himself. Perhaps while his friends were admiring the "greatness of his behavior" at the approach of death, he may have had a twinkling hope of immortality. Mens cuj usque is est quisque, said his chosen motto ; and, as he had stamped his mind with every crook and foible in the pages of the Diary, he might feel that what he left behind him was indeed himself. There is perhaps no other instance so remarkable of the desire of man for publicity and an enduring name. The greatness of his 178 SAMUEL PEPYS life was open, yet he longed to communicate its small- ness also; and, while contemporaries bowed before him, he must buttonhole posterity with the news that his peri- wig was once alive with nits. But this thought, although I cannot doubt he had it, was neither his first nor his deepest ; it did not color one word that he wrote ; and the Diary, for as long as he kept it, remained what it was when he began, a private pleasure for himself. It was his bosom secret; it added a zest to all his pleas- ures; he lived in and for it, and might well write these solemn words, when he closed that confidant for ever: "And so I betake myself to that course which is almost as much as to see myself go into the grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me." A LIBERAL GENIUS Pepys spent part of a certain winter Sunday, when he had taken physic, composing "a song in praise of a liberal genius (such as I take my own to be) to all studies and pleasures." The song was unsuccessful, but the Diary is, in a sense, the very song that he was seeking; and his portrait by Hales, so admirably re- produced in Mynors Bright's edition, is a confirmation of the Diary. Hales, it would appear, had known his business; and though he put his sitter to a deal of trouble, almost breaking his neck "to have the portrait full of shadows," and draping him in an Indian gown hired expressly for the purpose, he was preoccupied about no merely picturesque effects, but to portray the essence of the man. Whether we read the picture by the Diary or the Diary by the picture, we shall at least agree that Hales was among the number of those who can "surprise the manners in the face." Here we have a mouth pouting, moist with desires; eyes greedy, pro- SAMUEL PEPYS 179 tuberant, and yet apt for weeping too; a nose great alike in character and dimensions; and altogether a most fleshly, melting eountenance. The face is attrac- tive by its promise of reciprocity. I have used the word greedy, but tlie reader must not suppose that he can change it for that closely kindred one of hungry, for there is here no aspiration, no waiting for better things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face of an artist; it is the face of a mveur — kindly, pleased and pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may balance and control another. The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida. Wherever h6 went, his steps were winged with the most eager expectation; whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets of knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in Holland, he was "with child" to see any strange thing. Meeting some friends and singing with them in a palace near The Hague, his pen fails him to express his passion of delight, "the more so because in a heaven of pleasure and in a strange country." He must go to see all famous executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, de- faced "with a broad wound," he says, "that makes my hand now shake to write of it." He learned to dance, and was "like to make a dancer." He learned to sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields "humming to my- self (which is now my constant practice) the trillo." 180 SAMUEL PEPYS He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned to compose songs, and burned to give forth "a scheme and theory of music not yet ever made in the world." When he heard "a fellow whistle like a bird exceeding well," he promised to return another day and give an angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, "I took the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing when they sound the depths." If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had received the name. Boyle's Hydrostatics was "of infinite delight" to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him compar- ing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and "looking and im- proving himself of the (naval) stores with" — hark to the fellow! — r"great delight." His familiar spirit of delight was not the same with Shelley's; but how true it was to him through life ! He is only copying some- thing, and behold, he "takes great pleasure to rule the lines, and have the capital words wrote with red ink;" he has only had his coal-cellar emptied and cleaned, and behold, "it do please him exceedingly." A hog's harslett is "a piece of meat he loves." He cannot ride home in my Lord Sandwich's coach — but he must exclaim,^ with breathless gusto, "his noble, rich coach." When he is bound for a supper party, he anticipates a "glut SAMUEL PEPYS 181 of pleasure." When he has a new watch, "to see my childishness," says he, "I could not forbear carrying it in my hand and seeing what o'clock it was a hundred limes." To go to Vauxhall, he says, and "to hear the nightingales and other birds, hear fiddles, and there a harp and here a Jew's trump, and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising." And the nightingales, I take it, were particularly dear to him; and it was again "with great pleasure" that he paused to hear them as he walked to Woolwich, while the fog was rising and the April sun broke through. He must always be doing something agreeable, and, by preference, two agreeable things at once. In his house he had a box of carpenter's tools, two dogs, an eagle, a canary, and a blackbird that whistled tunes, lest, even in that full life, he should chance upon an empty moment. If he had to wait for a dish of poached eggs, he must put in the time by playing on the flageolet ; if a sermon were dull, he must read in the book of Tobit or divert his mind with sly advances on the nearest women. When he walked, it must be with a book in his pocket to beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure ; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a con- versation when he thought himself unsuitably dressed. Dearly as he loved eating, he "knew not how to eat alone;" pleasure for him must heighten pleasure; and the eye and ear must be flattered like the palate ere he avow himself content. He had n9 zest in a good dinner 182 SAMUEL PEPYS when it fell to be eaten "in a bad street and in a peri- wig-maker's house"; and a collation was spoiled for him by indifferent music. His body was indefatigable, doing him yeoman's service in this breathless chase of pleas- ures. On April 11, 1662, he mentions that he went to bed "weary, which I seldom am"; and already over thirty, he would sit up all night cheerfully to see a comet. But it is never pleasure that exhausts the pleasure-seeker; for in that career, as in all others, it is failure that kills. The man who enj oys so wholly and bears so impatiently the slightest widowhood from joy, is just the man to lose a night's rest over some paltry question of his right to fiddle on the leads, or to be "vexed to the blood" by a solecism in his wife's attire; and we find in consequence that he was always peevish when he was hungry, and that his head "aked mightily" after a dispute. But nothing could divert him from his aim in life; his remedy in care was the same as his delight in prosperity; it was with pleasure, and with pleasure only, that he sought to drive out sorrow; and, whether he was jealous of his wife or skulking from a bailiff, he would equally take refuge in the theatre. There, if the house be full and the company noble, if the songs be tunable, the actors perfect, and the play diverting, this odd hero of the secret Diary, this private self-adorer, will speedily be healed of his distresses. Equally pleased with a watch, a coach, a piece of meat, a tune upon the fiddle, or a fact in hydrostatics, Pepys was pleased yet more by the beauty, the worth, the mirth, or the mere scenic attitude in life of his fel- low-creatures. He shows himself throughout a sterling humanist. Indeed, he who loves himself, not in idle vanity, but with a plenitude of knowledge, is the best equipped of all to love his neighbors. And perhaps it is in this sense that charity may be most properly SAMUEL PEPYS 183 said to begin at home. It does not matter what quality a person has: Pepys can appreciate and love him for it. He "fills his eyes" with the beauty of Lady Castlemaine; indeed, he may be said to dote upon the thought of her for years; if a woman be good-looking and not painted, he will walk miles to have another sight of her; and even when a lady by a mischance spat upon his clothes, he was immediately consoled when he had observed that she was pretty. But, on the other hand, he is delighted to see Mrs. Pett upon her knees, and speaks thus of his aunt James: "a poor, religious, well-meaning, good soul, talking of nothing but God Almighty, and that with so much innocence that mightily pleased me." He is taken with Pen's merriment and loose songs, but not less taken with the sterling worth of Coventry. He is jolly with a drunken sailor, but listens with interest and patience, as he rides the Essex roads, to the story of a Quaker's spiritual trials and convictions. He lends a critical ear to the discourse of kings and royal dukes. He spends an evening at Vauxhall with "Killigrew and young Newport — loose company," says he, "but worth a man's being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of talk and lives." And when a rag-boy lights him home, he examines him about his business and other ways of livelihood for destitute children. This is almost half-way to the beginning of philan- thropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man famous for good deeds. And it is through this quality that he rises, at times, superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes; and it is not untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved 184 SAMUEL PEPYS his maid Jane because she was in love with his man Tom. Let us hear him, for once, at length: "So the women and W. Hewer and I walked upon the Downes, where a flock of sheep was ; and the most pleasant and innocent sight that ever I saw in my life. We found a shepherd and his little boy reading, far from any houses or sight of people, the Bible to him; so I made the boy read to me, which he did with the forced tone that children do usually read, that was mighty pretty; and then I did give him something, and went to the father, and talked with him. He did content himself mightily in my liking his boy's reading, and did bless God for him, the most like one of the old patriarchs that ever I saw in my life, and it brought those thoughts of the old age of the world in my mind for two or three days after. We took notice of his woollen knit stockings of two colors mixed, and of his shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and with great nails in the soles of his feet, which was mighty pretty; and taking notice of them, 'Why,' says the poor man, 'the downes, you see, are full of stones, and we are f aine to shoe ourselves thus ; and these,' says he, 'will make the stones fly till they ring before me.' I did give the poor man something, for which he was mighty thankful, and I tried to cast stones with his home crooke. He values his dog mightily, that would turn a sheep any way which he would have him, when he goes to fold them; told me there was about eighteen score sheep in his flock, and that he hath four shillings a week the year round for keeping of them ; and Mrs. Turner, in the common fields here, did gather one of the prettiest nosegays that ever I saw in my life." And so the story rambles on to the end of that day's pleasuring; with cups of milk, and glow-worms, and SAMUEL PEPYS 185 people walking at sundown with their wives and chil- dren, and all the way home Pepys still dreaming "of the old age of the world" and the early innocence of man. This was how he walked through life, his eyes and ears wide open, and his hand, you will observe, not shut; and thus he observed the lives, the speech, and the manners of his fellow-men, with prose fidelity of detail and yet a lingering glamor of romance. It was "two or three days after" that he extended this passage in the pages of his Journal, and the style has thus the benefit of some reflection. It is generally supposed that, as a writer, Pepys must rank at the bot- tom of the scale of merit. But a style which is inde- fatigably lively, telling, and picturesque through six large volumes of everyday experience, which deals with the whole matter of a life, and yet is rarely wearisome, which condescends to the most fastidious particulars, and yet sweeps all away in the forthright current of the narrative, — such a style may be ungrammatical, it may be inelegant, it may be one tissue of mistakes, but it can never be devoid of merit. The first and the true function of the writer has been thoroughly performed throughout; and though the manner of his utterance may be childishly awkward, the matter has been transformed and assimilated by his unfeigned interest and delight. The gusto of the man speaks out fierily after all these years. For the difference between Pepys and Shelley, to return to that half-whimsical approximation, is one of quality but not one of degree; in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly, and his is the true prose of poetry — prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shep- herd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire convic- tion and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing 186 SAMUEL PEPYS fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored reminiscence of your own-. There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one. The tang was in the family; while he was writing the Journal for our enjoyment in his comely house in Navy Gardens, no fewer than two of his cousins were tramping the fens, kit under arm, to make music to the country girls. But he himself, though he could play so many instruments and pass judgment in so many fields of art, remained an amateur. It is not given to any one so keenly to enjoy, without some greater power to understand. That he did not like Shakespeare as an artist for the stage may be a fault, but it is not without either parallel or excuse. He cer- tainly admired him as a poet; he was the first beyond mere actors on the rolls of that innumerable army who have got "To be or not to be" by heart. Nor was he content with that; it haunted his mind; he quoted it to himself in the pages of the Diary, and, rushing in where angels fear to tread, he set it to music. Nothing, in- deed, is more notable than the heroic quality of the verses that our little sensualist in a periwig chose out to marry with his own mortal strains. Some gust from brave Elizabethan times must have warmed his spirit, as he sat tuning his sublime theorbo. "To be* or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler" — "Beauty retire, thou dost my pity move" — "It is decreed, nor shall thy fate, O Rome;" — open and dignified in the sound, various and majestic in the sentiment, it was no inapt, as it was certainly no timid, spirit that selected such a range of themes. Of "Gaze not on Swans," I know, no more than these four words; yet that also seems to promise well. It was, however, on a probable suspicion, the work of his master. SAMUEL PEPYS 187 Mr. Berkenshaw — as the drawings that figure at the breaking up of a young ladies' seminary are the work of the professor attached to the establishment. Mr. Berkenshaw was not altogether happy in his pupil. The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist^ some leaven of the world still clogging him; and we find Pepys be- having like a pickthank to the man who taught him composition. In relation to the stage_, which he so warmly loved and understood, he was not only more hearty, but more generous to others. Thus he encount- ers Colonel Reames, "a man/' says he, "who understands and loves a play as well as I, and I love him for it." And again, when he and his wife had seen a most ridicu- lous insipid piece, "Glad we were," he writes, "that Bet- terton had no part in it." It is by such a zeal and loy- alty to those who labor for his delight that the amateur grows worthy of the artist. And it should be kept in mind that, not only in art, but in morals, Pepys rejoiced to recognize his betters. There was not one speck of envy in the whole human-hearted egotist. RESPECTABILITY When writers inveigh against respectability, in the present degraded meaning of the word, they are usually suspected of a taste for clay pipes and beer cellars ; and their performances are thought to hail from the Owl's Nest of the comedy. They have something more, how- ever, in their eye than the dulness of a round million dinner parties that sit down yearly in old England. For to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with the greater number. We smile over the ascendency of priests; but I had rather follow a priest than what they call the leaders 188 SAMUEL PEPYS of society. No life can better than that of Pepys illus- trate the dangers of this respectable theory of living. For what can be more untoward than the occurrence^ at a critical period and while the habits are still pliable, of such a sweeping transformation as the return of Charles the Second? Round went the whole fleet of England on the other tack; and while a few tall pintas, Milton or Pen, still sailed a lonely course by the stars and their own private compass, the cock-boat, Pepys, must go about with the majority among "the stupid starers and the loud huzzas." The respectable are not led so much by any desire of applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer the man, the more will he require this support; and any positive quality relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence. In a dozen ways, Pepys was quite strong enough to please himself without regard for others; but his positive qualities were not co- exte-nsive with the field of conduct; and in many parts of life he followed, with gleeful precision, in the foot- prints of the contemporary Mrs. Grundy. In morals, particularly, he lived by the countenance of others; felt a slight from another more keenly than a meanness in himself; and then first repented when he was found out. You could talk of religion or morality to such a man; and b}^ the artist side of him, by his lively sympathy and apprehension, he could rise, as it were dramatically, to the significance of what you said. All that matter in religion which has been nicknamed other-worldliness was strictly in his gamut; but a rule of life that should make a man rudely virtuous, following right in good re- port and ill report, was foolishness and a stumbling- block to Pepys. He was rhuch thrown across the Friends; and nothing can be more instructive than his attitude toward these most interesting people of that SAMUEL PEPYS 189 age. I have mentioned how he conversed with one as he rode; when he saw some brought from a meeting un- der arrest, "I would to God," said he, "they would either conform, or be more wise and not be catched" ; and to a Quaker in his own office he extended a timid though effectual protection. Meanwhile there was growing up next door to him that beautiful nature, William Pen. It is odd that Pepys condemned him for a fop ; odd, though natural enough when you see Pen's portrait, that Pepys was jealous of him with his wife. But the cream of the story is when Pen publishes his Sandy Foundation Shaken, and Pepys has it read aloud by his wife. "I find it," he says, "so well writ as, I think, it is too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of book, and not jit for everybody to read." Nothing is more galling to the merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious ardor. Pepys had his own foundation, sandy enough, but dear to him from practical considerations, and he would read the book with true uneasiness of spirit; for conceive the blow if, by some plaguy accident, this Pen were to convert him! It was a different kind of doctrine that he judged profit- able for himself and others. "A good sermon of Mr. Gifford's at our church, upon 'Seek ye first the king- dom of heaven.' A very excellent and persuasive, good and moral sermon. He showed, like a wise man, that righteousness is a surer moral way of being rich than sin and villainy." It is thus that respectable people de- sire to have their Greathearts address them, telling, in mild accents, how you may make the best of both worlds, and be a moral hero without courage, kindness, or troublesome reflection; and thus the Gospel, cleared of Eastern metaphor, becomes a manual of worldly pru- dence, and a handy-book for Pepys and the successful merchant. 190 SAMUEL PEPYS The respectability of Pepys was deeply grained. He has no idea of truth except for the Diary. He has no Icare that a thing shall be, if it but appear; gives out that he has inherited a good estate, when he has seem- ingly got nothing but a lawsuit; and is pleased to be thought liberal M^ien he knows he has been mean. He is conscientiously ostentatious. I say conscientiously, with reason. He could never have been taken for a fop, like Pen, but arrayed himself in a manner nicely suitable to his position. For long he hesitated to assume the famous periwig; for a public man should travel gravely with the fashions, Aot foppishly before, nor dowdily behind, the central movement of his age. For long he durst not keep a carriage; that, in his circumstances, would have been improper; but a time comes, with the growth of his fortune, when the impropriety has shifted to the other side, and he is "ashamed to be seen in a hackney." Pepys talked about being "a Quaker or some very mel- ancholy thing" ; for my part, I can imagine nothing so melancholy, because nothing half so silly, as to be con- cerned about such problems. But so respectability and the duties of society haunt and burden their poor dev- otees; and what seems at first the very primrose path of life, proves difficult and thorny like the rest. And the time comes to Pepys, as to all the merely respect- able, when he must not only order his pleasures, but even clip his virtuous movements, to the public patter of the age. There was some juggling among officials to avoid direct taxation; and Pepys, with a noble impulse, growing ashamed of this dishonesty, designed to charge himself with £1000; but finding none to set him an ex- ample, "nobody of our ablest merchants" with this mod- erate liking for clean hands, he judged it "not decent;" he feared it would "be thought vain glory"; and, rather than appear singular, cheerfully remained a thief. One SAMUEL PEPYS 191 able merchant's countenance, and Pepys had dared to do an honest act ! Had he found one brave spirit, properly- recognized by society, he might have gone far as a dis- ciple. Mrs. Turner, it is true, can fill him full of sordid scandal, and make him believe, against the testimony of liis senses, that Pen's venison pasty stank like the devil ; but, on the other hand. Sir William Coventry can raise him by a word into another being. Pepys, when he is with Coventry, talks in the vein of an old Roman. What does he care for office or emolument? "Thank God, I have enough of my own," says he, "to buy me a good book and a good fiddle, and I have a good wife." And again, we find this pair projecting an old age when an ungrateful country shall have dismissed them from the field of public service; Coventry living retired in a fine house, and Pepys dropping in, "it may be, to read a chapter of Seneca." Under this influence, the only good one in his life, Pepys continued zealous and, for the period, pure in his employment. He would not be "bribed to be unjust," he says, though he was "not so squeamish as to refuse a present after," suppose the king to have received no wrong. His new arrangement for the victualling of Tangier, he tells us with honest complacency, will save the king a thousand and gain Pepys three hundred pounds a year — a statement which exactly fixes the de- gree of the age's enlightenment. But for his industry and capacity no praise can be too high. It was an un- ending struggle for the man to stick to his business in such a garden of Armida as he found this life; and the story of his oaths, so often broken, so courageously re- newed, is worthy rather of admiration than the con- tempt it has received. Elsewhere, and beyond the sphere of Coventry's in- fluence, we find him losing scruples and daily complying 192 SAMUEL PEPYS further with the age. When he began the Journal, he was a trifle prim and puritanic ; merry enough, to be sure, over his private cups, and still remembering Mag- dalen ale and his acquaintance with Mrs. Ainsworth of Cambridge. But youth is a hot season with all; when a man smells April and May he is apt at times to stumble ; and in spite of a disordered practice, Pepys's theory, the better things that he approved and followed after, we may even say were strict. Where there was "tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking," he felt **ashamed, and went away" ; and when he slept in church, he prayed God forgive him. In but a little while we find him with some ladies keeping each other awake "from spite," as though not to sleep in church were an obvious hardship ; and yet later he calmly passes the time of service, looking about him, with a perspective glass, on all the pretty women. His favorite ejaculation, "Lord!" occurs but once that I have observed in 1660, never in '61, twice in '62, and at least five times in '63; after which the "Lords" may be said to pullulate like herrings, with here and there a solitary "damned," as it were a whale among the shoal. He and his wife, once filled with dudgeon by some innocent freedoms at a marriage, are soon content to go pleasuring with my Lord Brouncker's mistress, who was not even, by his own ac- count, the most discreet of mistresses. Tag, rag, and bobtail, dancing, singing, and drinking, become his nat- ural element; actors and actresses and drunken, roaring courtiers are to be found in his society; until the man grew so involved with Saturnalian manners and compan- ions that he was shot almost unconsciously into the grand domestic crash of 1668. That was the legitimate issue and punishment of years of staggering walk and conversation. The man who has smoked his pipe for half a century in a powder SAMUEL PEPYS 193 magazine finds himself at last the author and the victim of a hideous disaster. So with our pleasant-minded Pepys and his peccadilloes. All of a sudden, as he still trips dexterously enough among the dangers of a double- faced career, thinking no great evil, humming to him- self the trillo, Fate takes the further conduct of that matter from his hands, and brings him face to face with the consequences of his acts. For a man still, after so many years, the lover, although not the constant lover, of his wife, — for a man, besides, who was so greatly careful of appearances, — the revelation of his infidelities was a crushing blow. The tears that he shed, the in- dignities that he endured, are not to be measured. A vulgar woman, and now justly incensed, Mrs. Pepys spared him no detail of suffering. She was violent, threatening him with the tongs ; she was careless of his honor, driving him to insult the mistress whom she had driven him to betray and to discard; worst of all, she was hopelessly inconsequent, in word and thought and deed, now lulling him with reconciliations, and anon flaming forth again with the original anger. Pepys had not used his wife well; he had wearied her with jeal- ousies, even while himself unfaithful; he had grudged her clothes and pleasures, while lavishing both upon him- self; he had abused her in words; he had bent his fist at her in anger; he had once blacked her eye; and it is one of the oddest particulars in that odd Diary of his, that, while the injury is referred to once in passing, there is no hint as to the occasion or the manner of the blow. But now, when he is in the wrong, nothing can exceed the long-suffering affection of this impatient hus- band. While he was still sinning and still undiscovered, he seems not to have known a touch of penitence stronger than what might lead him to take his wife to the theatre, or for an airing, or to give her a new dress, 194 SAMUEL PEPYS by way of compensation. Once found out, however, and he seems to himself to have lost all claim to decent usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of his ex- ternality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most 'abject submission. We should perhaps have re- spected him more had he not given way so utterly — above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dic- tation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe we like him better as he was. The death of his wife, following so shortly after, must have stamped the impression of this episode upon his mind. For the remaining years of his long life we have no Diary to help us, and we have seen already how little stress is to be laid upon the tenor of his corre- spondence; but what with the recollection of the catas- trophe of his married life, what with the natural in- fluence of his advancing years and reputation, it seems not unlikely that the period of gallantry was at an end for Pepys ; and it is beyond a doubt that he sat down at last to an honored and agreeable old age among his books and music, the correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton, and, in one instance at least, the poetical counsellor of Dry- den. Through all this period, that Diary which con- tained the secret memoirs of his life, with all its incon- sistencies and escapades, had been religiously preserved; nor, when he came to die, does he appear to have pro- vided for its destruction. So we may conceive him faith- ful to the end to all his dear and early memories; still mindful of Mrs. Hely in the woods at Epsom; still lighting at Islington for a cup of kindness to the dead; still, if he heard again that air that once so much dis- turbed him, thrilling at the recollection of the love that bound him to his wife. / TALK AND TALKERS (1882) "Sir, we had a good talk." — Johnson. "As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence." — Franklin. There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great interna- tional congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parlia- ment but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience, and ac- cording conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while liter- ature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing 195 196 TALK AND TALKERS immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like liter- ature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dis- solved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and our- selves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health. The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleas- ures. Men and women contend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some ele- ment of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship ; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and the sport of life. I TALK AND TALKERS 197 A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Hu- mors must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour_, company, and circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and more than all his ardor. The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dally- ing where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, con- tinual pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. In- deed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be re- duced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instru- ment; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new- minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret preten- sions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, musical, and wise, that in their most shining mo- 198 TALK AND TALKERS ments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with wbrds and for awhile inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trail- ing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon perform- ance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate The Flying Dutchman (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being, and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells, and marching feet fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still simmering and the physical earth swim- ming around you with the colors of the sunset. Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross- lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement — ■ these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances ; by the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience in- TALK AND TALKERS 199 tersect and illuminate each other. I am I^ and You are You, with all my heart; but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus — and call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life. Com- munication is no longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of history_, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike ; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Con- suelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steen- son, they can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures. Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically hu- man; and even these can only be discussed among their devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the ex- pert, whether in athletics, art, or law; I have heard the best kind of talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 200 TALK AND TALKERS minutes at a time^ which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather^ the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people gen- erally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often excitingly presented in literature. But the ten- dency of all living talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip ; heroic in virtue of its high pre- tensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personali- ties. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or theological discussion. These are to all the world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities ; the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express their judg- ments. I knew three young men who walked together daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects — theology and love. And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would have granted their premises or welcomed their conclusions. Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like war,^ TALK AND TALKERS 201 widening the boundaries of knowledge like an explora- tion. A point arises ; the question takes a problematical, a baffling, yet a likely air ; the talkers begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand; toward this they strive with emulous ardor, each by his own path, and straggling for first utterance; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth; and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared. There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain pro- portion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truths. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk be- comes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely the possible in- gredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a mad- 202 TALK AND TALKERS man to mix it: Jack is that madman. I know not which is more remarkable; the insane lucidity of his conclu- sions_, the humorous eloquence of his language_, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated, mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the ser- pent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleido- scope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant con- juror. It is my common practice when a piece of con- duct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required char- acter, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these impersonations, the strange scale of lan- guage, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell — "As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument — " the sudden, sweeping generalizations, the absurd irrel- evant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humor, elo- quence, and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combina- tion. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of a great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same. TALK AND TALKERS 203 I think, has been said o£ other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is some- thing boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and mean- while his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a cer- tain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agree- ment issue, and you end arra-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect in- telligence, a desire to hear although not always to lis- ten, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring-Heel'd Jack; who may at any mo- ment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favorites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it; a high and hard adven- ture, worth attempting. With both you can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery, and manners of its own; live a life apart, more arduous, active, and glowing than any real existence; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre, or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing 204< TALK AND TALKERS and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes; the one glances high like a meteor and makes a light in dark- ness; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration; but both have the same humor and artistic interests, the same unquenched ardor in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunder- claps of contradiction. Cockshot* is a different article, but vastly entertain- ing, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk, and pertina- cious, and the choice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he lias either a theorj^ about it ready-made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in your presence. "Let me see," he will say. "Give me a moment. I should have some theory for that." A blither spectacle than the vigor with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in theorizing, a compass, an art; what I would call the synthetic gusto; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable even for life; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy — as when idle peo- ple, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond and have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, seri- ous opinions or humors of the moment, he still defends * The late Fleeming Jenkin. TALK AND TALKERS 205 his ventures with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punishment like a man. He knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough "glutton," and hon- estly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. Cock- shot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the quali- ties by which he lives. Athelred, on the other hand, pre- sents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end. And there is something singularly engaging, often in- structive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of in- spiration. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more per- sonally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humor. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of the language ; you would think he must have worn the words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he has been wielding the broad-ax ; and between us, on this unequal division, many a specious fallacy has fallen. I have known him to battle the same question night after night for years, keeping it in the reign of talk, constantly applying it and re-applying it to life 206 TALK AND TALKERS with humorous or grave intention, and all the while, never hurrying, nor flagging, nor taking an unfair ad- vantage of the facts. Jack at a given moment, when arising, as it were, from the tripod, can be more radi- antly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to con- demn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with his doubts. Both the last talkers deal much in points of con- duct and religion studied in the "dry light" of prose. Indirectly and as if against his will the same elements from time to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic knowledge, com- plete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, dis- criminative flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talkers; so perhaps he is with some, not quite with me — proxime accessit, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Hora- tian humors. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background ; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this instant war in his members some- times divides the man's attention. He does not always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in con- versation. He brings into the talk other thoughts than TALK AND TALKERS 207 those which he expresses; you are conscious that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor quite forget himself. Hence arise oc- casional disappointments ; even an occasional unfair- ness for his companions, who find themselves one day giving too much, and the next, when they are wary out of season, giving perhaps too little. Purcel is in another class from any I have mentioned. He is no debater, but appears in conversation, as occasion rises, in two distinct characters, one of which I admire and fear, and the other love. In the first, he is radiantly civil and rather silent, sits on a high, courtly hilltop, and from that vantage-ground drops you his remarks like favors. He seems not to share in our sublunary contentions; he wears no sign of interest; when on a sudden there falls in a crystal of wit, so polished that the dull do not per- ceive it, but so right that tlie sensitive are silenced. True talk should have more body and blood, should be louder, vainer and more declaratory of the man; the true talker should not hold so steady an advantage over whom he speaks with; and that is one reason out of a score why I prefer my Purcel in his second character, when he unbends into a strain of graceful gossip, sing- ing like the fireside kettle. In these moods he has an elegant homeliness that rings of the true Queen Anne. I know another person who attains, in his moments, to the insolence of a Restoration comedy, speaking, I de- clare, as Congreve wrote ; but that is a sport of nature, and scarce falls under the rubric, for there is none, alas ! to give him answer. One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. To have their proper weight they should appear in a biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good 208 TALK AND TALKERS talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of act- ing where each should represent himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk where eacli speaker is most full}^ and candidly himself_, and where, if you were to shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the greatest loss in significance and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk de- pends so wholly on our company. We should like to introduce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful. Most of us, by the Protean quality of man, can talk to some degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the constitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful for forever. II* Ix the last paper there was perhaps too much about mere debate; and there was nothing said at all about that kind of talk which is merely luminous and restful, a higher power of silence, the quiet of the evening shared by ruminating friends. There is something, aside from personal preference, to be alleged in sup- port of this omission. Those who are no chimney- cornerers, who rejoice in the social thunderstorm, have a ground in reason for their choice. They get little rest indeed; but restfulness is a quality for cattle; the V virtues are all active, life is alert, and it is in repose that men prepare themselves for evil. On the other hand, they are bruised into a knowledge of themselves * This sequel was called forth by an excellent article in The Snectator. TALK AND TALKERS 209 and others; they have in a high degree the fencer's pleasure in dexterity displayed and proved; what they get they get upon life's terms^ paying for it as they go; and once the talk is launched_, they are assured of honest dealing from an adversary eager like themselves. The aboriginal man within us_, the cave-dweller, still lusty as when he fought tooth and nail for roots and berries, scents this kind of equal battle from afar; it is like his old primeval days upon the crags, a return to the sincerity of savage life from the comfortable fictions of the civilized. And if it be delightful to the Old Man, it is none the less profitable to his younger brother, the conscientious gentleman. I feel never quite sure of your urbane and smiling coteries; I fear they indulge a man's vanities in silence, suffer him to en- croach, encourage him on to be an ass, and send him forth again, not merely contemned for the moment, but radically more contemptible than when he entered. But if I have a flushed, blustering fellow for my opposite, bent on carrying a point, my vanity is sure to have its ears rubbed, once at least, in the course of the debate. He will not spare me when we differ; he will not fear to demonstrate my folly to my face. For many natures there is not much charm in the still, chambered society, the circle of bland countenances, the digestive silence, the admired remark, the flutter of affectionate approval. They demand more atmos- phere and exercise; "a gale upon their spirits," as our pious ancestors would phrase it; to have their wits well breathed in an uproarious Valhalla. And I suspect that the choice, given their character and faults, is one to be defended. The purely wise are silenced by facts ; they talk in a clear atmosphere, problems lying around them like a view in nature; if they can be shown to be somewhat in the wrong, they digest the reproof like a 210 TALK AND TALKERS thrashing, and make better intellectual blood. They stand corrected by a whisper; a word or a glance re- minds them of the great eternal law. But it is not so \with all. Others in conversation seek rather contact ywith their fellow-men than increase of knowledge or 'clarity of thought. The drama, not the philosophy, of life is the sphere of their intellectual activity. Even when they pursue truth, they desire as much as possible of what we may call human scenery along the road they follow. They dwell in the heart of life; the blood sounding in their ears, their eyes laying hold of what delights them with a brutal avidity that makes them blind to all besides, their interest riveted on people, liv- ing, loving, talking, tangible people. To a man of this description, the sphere of argument seems very pale and ghostly. By a strong expression, a perturbed counte- nance, floods of tears, an insult which his conscience obliges him to swallow, he is brought round to knowledge wliich no syllogism would have conveyed to him. His own experience is so vivid, he is so superlatively con- scious of himself, that if, day after day, he is allowed to hector and hear nothing but approving echoes, he will lose his hold on the soberness of things and take himself in earnest for a god. Talk might be to such a one the very way of moral ruin; the school where he might learn to be at once intolerable and ridiculous. This character is perhaps commoner than philos- ophers suppose. And for persons of that stamp to learn much by conversation, they must speak with their supe- riors, not in intellect, for that is a superiority that must be proved, but in station. If they cannot find a friend to bully them for their good, they must find either an old man, a woman, or some one so far below them in the artificial order of society, that courtesy may be particu- larly exercised. TALK AND TALKERS 211 The best teachers are the aged. To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity. A flavor of the old school, a touch of some- thing different in their manner — which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the mid- dle class — serves, in these days, to accentuate the dif- ference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by out- ward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and harbor. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly is our spirit tossed. Yet long before we were so much as thought upon, the like calamity befell the old man or woman that now, with pleasant humor, rallies us upon our in- attention, sitting composed in the holy evening of man's life, in the clear shining after rain. We grow ashamed of our distresses, new and hot and coarse, like villainous roadside brandy; we see life in aerial perspective, un- der the heavens of faith; and out of the worst, in the mere presence of contented elders, look forward and take patience. Fear shrinks before them "like a thing reproved," not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path ; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred faces are more elo- quent and tell another story. Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they 212 TALK AND TALKERS have endured unbroken^ we also^ God helping us, will make a shift to bear. Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial^ but their minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's sim- ples, plain considerations overlooked by youth. They have matters to communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature; classic in virtue of the speaker's detachment, studded, like a book of travel, with things we should not other- wise have learned. In virtue, I have said, of the speaker's detachment, — and this is why, of two old men, the one who is not your father speaks to you with the more sen- sible authority; for in the paternal relation the oldest have lively interests and remain still young. Thus I have known two young men great friends ; each swore by the other's father; the father of each swore by the other lad; and yet each pair of parent and child were perpetually by the ears. This is typical: it reads like the germ of some kindly comedy. The old appear in conversation in two characters: the critically silent and the garrulous anecdotic. The last is perhaps what we look for; it is perhaps the more in- structive. An old gentleman, well on in years, sits handsomely and naturally in the bow-window of his age, scanning experience with reverted eye ; and chirping and smiling, communicates the accidents and reads the les- son of his long career. Opinions are strengthened, in- deed, but they are also weeded out in the course of years. What remains steadily present to the eye of the retired veteran in his hermitage, what still ministers to his con- tent, what still quickens his old honest heart — these are "the real long-lived things" that Whitman tells us to prefer. Where youth agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-bearded TALK AND TALKERS 213 teacher's that a lesson may be learned. I have known one old gentleman^ whom I may name, for he is now gathered to his stock — Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dun- barton, and author of an excellent law-book still re- edited and republished. Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in ; crooked and shrunken ; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support ; troubled by ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin — and for that he never failed to apologize, for it went sore against the traditions of his life. You can imagine how he would fare in a novel by Miss Mather; yet this rag of a Chelsea veteran lived to his last year in the plenitude of all that is best in man, brimming with human kindness, and stanch as a Roman soldier under his manifold infirmities. You could not say that he had lost his memory, for he would repeat Shake- speare and Webster and Jeremy Taylor and Burke by the page together ; but the parchment was filled up, there was no room for fresh inscriptions, and he was capable of repeating the same anecdote on many successive visits. His voice survived in its full power, and he took a pride in using it. On his last voyage as Commissioner of Lighthouses, he hailed a ship at sea and made himself clearly audible without a speaking-trumpet, ruffling the while with a proper vanity in his achievement. He had a habit of eking out his words with interrogative hems, which was puzzling and a little wearisome, suited ill with his appearance, and seemed a survival from some former stage of bodily portliness. Of yore, when he was a great pedestrian and no enemy to good claret, he may have pointed with these minute guns his allocutions to the bench. His humor was perfectly equable, set beyond 214 TALK AND TALKERS the reach of fate; gout, rheumatism, stone, and gravel might have combined their forces against that frail tabernacle, but when I came round on Sunday evening, he would lay aside Jeremy Taylor's Life of Christ and greet me with the same open brow, the same kind for- mality of manner. His opinions and sympathies dated the man almost to a decade. He had begun, life, under his mother's influence, as an admirer of Junius, but on maturer knowledge had transferred his admiration to Burke. He cautioned me, with entire gravity, to be punctilious in writing English; never to forget that I was a Scotchman, that English was a foreign tongue, and that if I attempted the colloquial, I should cer- tainly be shamed : the remark was apposite, I suppose, in the days of David Hume. Scott was too new for him; he had known the author — known him, too, for a Tory; and to the genuine classic a contemporary is always some- thing of a trouble. He had the old, serious love of the play; had even, as he was proud to tell, played a cer- tain part in the history of Shakespearian revivals, for he had successfully pressed on Murray, of the old Edin- burgh Theatre, the idea of producing Shakespeare's fairy pieces with great scenic display. A moderate in religion, he was much struck in the last years of his life by a conversation with two young lads, revivalists. "H'm," he would say — "new to me. I have had — h'm— no such experience." It struck him, not with pain, rather with a solemn philosophic interest, that he, a Christian as he hoped, and a Christian of so old a stand- ing, should hear these young fellows talking of his own subject, his own weapons that he had fought the battle of life with, — "and — h'm — not understand." In this Avise and graceful attitude he did justice to himself and others, reposed unshaken in his old beliefs, and recog- nized their limits without anger or alarm. His last TALK AND TALKERS 215 recorded remark, on the last night of his life, was after he had been arguing against Calvinism with his minister and was interrupted by an intolerable pang. "After all/' he said, "of all the 'isms, I know none so bad as rheumatism." My own last sight of him was some time before, when we dined together at an inn; he had been on circuit, for he stuck to his duties like a cliief part of his existence; and I remember it as the only occasion on which he ever soiled his lips with slang — a thing he loathed. We were both Roberts; and as we took our places at table, he addressed me with a twinkle: "We are just what you would call two bob." He offered me port, I remember, as the proper milk of youth; spoke of "twenty-shilling notes"; and throughout the meal was full of old-world pleasantry and quaintness, like an an- cient boy on a holiday. But what I recall chiefly was his confession that he had never read Othello to an end. Shakespeare was his continual study. He loved nothing better than to display his knowledge and memory by adducing parallel passages from Shakespeare, passages where the same word was employed, or the same idea differently treated. But Othello had beaten him. "That noble gentleman and that noble lady — h'm — too painful for me." The same night the hoardings were covered with posters, "Burlesque of Othello " and the contrast blazed up in my mind like a bonfire. An unforgettable look it gave me into that kind man's soul. His ac- quaintance was indeed a liberal and pious education. All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good ad- vice; he was himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk. Nor could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart from envy, fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a lif*" so honest and composed ; a soul like an ancient violin, so 216 TALK AND TALKERS subdued to harmony _, responding to a touch in music — as in that dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle. The second class of old people are not anecdotic ; they are rather hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to perfection, I think we must go to old ladies. Women are better hearers than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to bear with the tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we will take more from a woman than even from the oldest man in the way of biting comment. Biting comment is the chief part, whether for profit or amusement, in this business. The old lady that I have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack. If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you will be listened to with a particular laugh- ing grace of sympathy, and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as well as the vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the cox- combs of the young, * The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it is administered as a compliment — if you had not J pleased, you would not have been censured; it is a per- \ sonal affair — a hyphen, a tra\t d'union, between you ' and your censor; age's philandering, for her pleasure and your good, f Incontestably the young man feels very much of a fool; but he must be a perfect Malvolio, sick with self-love, if he cannot take an open buffet and still smile. The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man were made of TALK AND TALKERS 217 gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment. But when the word is out_, the worst is over; and a fel- low with any good humor at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism, every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and reap- pear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reac- tion, and ready_, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of the discipline. There are few women, not well sunned and ripened, and perhaps toughened, who can thus stand apart from a man and say the true thing with a kind of genial cruelty. Still there are some — and I doubt if there be any man who can return the compliment. The class of man repre- sented by Vernon Whitford in The Egoist says, indeed, the true thing, but he says it stockishly. Vernon is a noble fellow, and makes, by the way, a noble and in- structive contrast to Daniel Deronda; his conduct is the conduct of a man of honor; but we agree with him, against our consciences, when he remorsefully considers "its astonishing dryness," He is the best pf men, but the best of women manage to combine all that and some- thing more, h. Their very faults assist them ; they are helped even by the falseness of their position in life. They can retire into the fortified camp of the properties. They can touch a subject and suppress it. f The most adroit employ a somewhat elaborate reserve as a means to be frank, much as they wear gloves when they shake hands 4^ But a man has the full responsibility of his free- dom, cannot evade a question, can scarce be silent with- out rudeness, must answer for his words upon the mo- ment, and is not seldom left face to face with a damning choice, between the more or less dishonorable wriggling of Deronda and the down-right woodenness of Vernon Whitford. But the superiority of women is perpetually menaced; 218 TALK AND TALKERS they do not sit throned on infirmities like the old; they are suitors as well as sovereigns ; their vanity is engaged, their affections are too apt to follow; and hence much of the talk between the sexes degenerates into something unworthy of the name. The desire to please_, to shine with a certain softness of lustre and to draw a fasci- nating picture of oneself, banishes from conversation all that is sterling and most of what is humorous. As soon as a strong current of mutual admiration begins to flow, the human interest triumphs entirely over the intellectual, and the commerce of words, consciously or not, becomes secondary to the commercing of eyes. But even where this ridiculous danger is avoided, and a man and a woman converse equally and honestly, something in their nature or their education falsifies the strain. An instinct prompts them to agree ; and where that is im- possible, to agree to differ. Should they neglect the warning, at the' first suspicion of an argument, they find themselves in different hemispheres. About any point of business or conduct, any actual affair demanding set- tlement, a woman will speak and listen, hear and answer arguments, not only with natural wisdom, but with can- dor and logical honesty. But if the subject of debate be something in the air, an abstraction, an excuse for talk, a logical Aunt Sally, then may the male debater in- stantly abandon hope; he may employ reason, adduce facts, be supple, be smiling, be angry, all shall avail him nothing; what the woman said first, that (unless she has forgotten it) she will repeat at the end. Hence, at the very junctures when a talk between men grows brighter and quicker and begins to promise to bear fruit, talk between the sexes is menaced with dissolu- tion. The point of difference, the point of interest, is evaded by the brilliant woman, under a shower of ir- relevant conversational rockets; it is bridged by the dis- TALK AND TALKERS 219 creet woman with a rustle of silk, as she passes smoothly forward to the nearest point of safety. And this sort of prestidigitation, juggling the dangerous topic out of sight until it can be reintroduced with safety in an al- tered shape, is a piece of tactics among the true drawing- room queens. The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts — the arts of a civilized slave among good-natured barbarians — are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In the garden, on the road or the hillside, or tete-a-tete and apart from interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage i^ one long conversation, checkered by disputes. The dis putes are valueless ; they but ingrain the difference ; the heroic heart of woman prompting her at once to nail her colors to the mast. But in the intervals, almost un- consciously and with no desire to shine, the whole mate- rial of life is turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE (1882) In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of our- selves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, re- peat itself in a thousand colored pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and con- versation, were but obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, "toward the close of the year 17 — ," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were play- ing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the high- wayman was my favorite dish. I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the coming of the day are still related in my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and 220 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 221 the words "postchaise," the "great North road," "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or won-^ der. Although each of these was welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different from either. My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still remember four dif- ferent passages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterward to be the admirable opening of What Will He Do with It : it was no wonder I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a little vague ; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people groping on the stairs by the light that es- caped from the open door of a sick-room. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.* Different as they are, all these early favorites have a common note — they have all a touch of the romantic. Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts — the active and the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking * Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of Charles Kingsley. 222 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not re- gard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he man- ages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human con- science. But it is possible to build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales. One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbor puts it in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind an army of anony- mous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly tor- ture and delight me. Something must have happened A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 223 in such places^ and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried in vain to in- vent appropriate games for tliem, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and im- penetrable, "miching mallecho." The iuK at Burford Bridge, with its arbors and green garden and silent, eddying river — though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from his Emma — still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine — ■ in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guard- ship swinging to her anchor ; behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. But you need not tell me — that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet com- plete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces ; so it is with inci- dents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial ac- quaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near, with express intimations — "here my destiny 224 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE awaits me" — and we have but dined there and passed on ! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter^ on the heels^ as it seemed, of some ad- venture that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford.* Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play ; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realization and the apotheosis of the day- dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time * Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat with my own hands in Kidnapped. Some day, perhaps, I may trv a rattle at the shutters. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 225 to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shout- ing over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend, and eacli has been printed on the mind's eye forever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, al- though they are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, althougli perhaps it was ingenious and true ; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be re- markably striking to the mind's eye. This is the high- est and hardest thing to do in words ; the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in liter- ature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic,, are" bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Bur- ford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications of life, and of the human spirit ; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art. English people of the present day* are apt, I know * 188i?. 226 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and re- serve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain in- terest can be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship:: stirred ; and a kiiid of monot- onous fitness, comparable to the words and air of Sandy's Mull, preserved among the infinitesimal oc- currences recorded. Some people work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connec- tion. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's wife, Mr. Melnette dallying in the de- serted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically con- ceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow were not de- livered, Vajiity Fair would cease to be a work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of energy from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consolation of the reader. The end of Esmond is a yet wider excursion from the author's customary fields ; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas ; the great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the great, unblushing French thief; as usual, he has bor- rowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, mar- tial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly il- lustrate the necessity for marking incident than to com- pare the living fame of Robinson Crusoe with the dis- credit of Clarissa Harlowe. Clarissa is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great can- vas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 227 of spirit and insight^ letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the Iieroine be somewhat frigid and artificial^ the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part cfi the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from edition to edi- tion, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, luiddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm anotlier man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day- dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and re- turned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, and with entire delight, read Robinson. It was like the story of a love-chase. If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would he have been fired with the same chival- rous ardor? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted — pictor- ial or picture-making romance. While Robinson de- pends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of circumstance. In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic in- terest, rise and fall togetlier by a common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, 228 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE hut each inheres indissolubly witli the other. This is high art; and not only the highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleas- ure. Such are epics_, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as from a school of works, aping tlie creative, incident and romance are ruthlesslv dis- carded, so may character and drama be omitted or sub- ordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights in age — I mean the Arabian Nights — where you sliall look in vain for moral or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps near- est of any modern to these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances. The early part of Monte Crista, down to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared these moving incidents with- out a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and Dantes little more than a name. The sequel is one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural, and dull : but as for these early chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very thin and light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage into Monte Crista. Here are stories which powerfully aifect the reader, which can be reperused at any age, and where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 229 fist of the showman visibly propels them; their springs are an open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And the point may be illustrated still fur- ther. The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feverel is pure drama ; more than that, it is the strong- est scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on the* other hand, is pure romance; it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy and maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold man wlio sliould choose be- tween these passages. Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice ; in the second, according circumstances, like instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but de- sirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for our- selves ; and in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more genius — I do not say it does ; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the memory. True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic: both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material impor- tance of the incidents. , To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to con- jure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Con- suelo at the Canon's villa is a very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an im- 230 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE pression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is "a joy forever" to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest the other day in a new book, The Sailor's Sweetheart, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig Morning Star is very rightly felt and spiritedly writ- ten; but the clotlies, the books and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the Swiss Fainily Robinson, that dreary family. They found article after article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no informing taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these riches left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne's Mysterious Island is another case in point; there was no gusto and no glamor about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two hundred and seventy-eight Australian sovereigns on board the Morning Star fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from a striking particular in life; and I was made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be. To come at all at the nature of this quality of ro- mance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our at- titude to any art. No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in tlie theatre; A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 231 and while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader con- sciously plays at being the hero_, the scene is a good scene. Now, in character-studies the pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at in- congruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering, or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us ; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with them. It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realized in the story with en- ticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the cliaracters ; then we push the hero aside ; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh ex- perience ; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our day-dreams ; there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded, ot calumniated. It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which every incident, detail, and trick of cir- cumstance shall be welcome to the reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy 232 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE that he can join in it with all his heart, w}i;;n it pleases him with every turn^ when he" loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance. Walter Scott is out and away the king of the roman- tics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirabil- ity of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, The Lady of the" Lake, or that di- rect, romantic opening, — one of the most spirited and poetical in literature, — "The stag at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book. The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness — moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple islanders — singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress — is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy Mannering, again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method. " *I remember the tune well,' he says, 'though I can- not guess what should at present so strongly recall it A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 233 to my memory/ He took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel. . . . She immediately took up the song — " 'Are these the links of Forth, she said ; Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head That I so fain would see?' " *By heaven !' said Bertram, 'it is the very ballad.' " On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the old song is se- lected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon's idea of a story, like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were something strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg's appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will ob- serve a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the original: "A damsel who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who gave in such copy would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has for- gotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin ; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail fore- most, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad nar- rative besides. 234 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic junctures of his story; and we find him utterly careless, almost^ it would seem, incapable, in the tech- nical matter of style, and not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate, strong, and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splen- did romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, in- articulate twaddle? It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they play to him. He conjured up the romantic with delight^ but he had hardly patience to describe it. He was a great day- dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous vis- ions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great romantic — an idle child. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS (1883) The civilization, the manners, and the morals of dog- kind are to a great extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal, in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humors the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in their proper place" ; who say "poo' fellow, poo' fellow/* and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire "the creature's instinct"; and flying far be- yond folly, have dared to resuscitate the theory of ani- mal machines. The "dog's instinct" and the "automaton- dog," in this age of psychology and science, sound like strange anachronisms. An automaton he certainly is; a machine working independently of his control, the heart like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and the consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton in one corner of which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like man. 235 236 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited apti- tudes are his_, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views and understands_, as though he were awakened from a sleep^ as though he came "trailing clouds of glory," But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is limited; its utterances are obscure and oc- casional; and about the far larger part of life both the dog and his master must conduct their steps by de- duction and observation. The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before the different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and that the other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the development of his intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for words are the beginning of metaphysic. At the same blow it saves him from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many. He is vainer than man^ singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant of ridicule, sus- picious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy, and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is passed in the manufacture and the laborious communication of falsehood; he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting paw ; and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is other than appears. But he has some apology to of- fer for the vice. Many of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest an old one to a different purpose ; and this necessity frequently recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols. Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 237 human nicety, the distinction between formal and es- sential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, like tlie human, gentleman demands in his mis- demeanors Montaigne's *'je tie sais quoi de genereux." He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under physical correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands it, instantly uncurls his fleece. Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts the faculties of man — that because vainglory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a gar- ret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their own merits ; and the parallel, be- sides, is ready. Hans Christian Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street for shadows of offence — here was the talk- ing dog. It is just this rage for consideration that has be- trayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend 238 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, pre- serves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered, and affected. The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly ; but the simplest processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs — some, at the very least — if they be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the children of conven- tion. The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally precipitates THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 239 either toward a frozen and affected bearing. And the converse is true ; and in the elaborate and conscious man- ners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and tlie dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high- minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in re- pose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; an the other> their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a school — ushers, monitors, and big and little boys — qualified by one circumstance, the introduc- tion of the other sex. In each, we should observe a some- what similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points of honor. In each the larger animal keeps a con- temptuous good-humor; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain of practical im- munity; in each we shall find a double life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, 240 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS set aside the fur^ could hardly have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping. Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign without a rival : conscious queens ; and in the onh^ instance of a canine wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and two cairn- gorms for eyes. To the human observer, he is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems ab- horrent. A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his eari tattered like a regimental banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady' upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little great- heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 241 been Shakespeare he would then have written Troilus and Cressida to brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he pro- ceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth re- mark, showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with both a single de- liberate violation of the conscience loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, "the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruf- fian; and by the handling that he accepted uncomplain- ingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of Sturm und Drang is closed. All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye, some- what plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice 242 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS on his part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the par- ticular honor and jewel of his day — his morning's walk with my father. And, perhaps from this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored my father — although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her position as "only ^a servant" — he still cherished for her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a faith- ful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of reason. There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive respect- THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 243 ability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the con- spicuous^ a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth. I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the cri- terion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to — the phrase is technical — to "rake the backets" in a troop. A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion_, was more than he could guess. And this il- lustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At least, in their dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner; for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged tlian his master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of behavior, to which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed ; and how much more gladly would 244 THE CHARACTER OF DOGS he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in the seat of piety! I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street- dog was once adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud, charg- ing into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond ; but with his rise into society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats ; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognize the upstart, and from that hour, except for human counte- nance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of hap- piness, contbnt with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to con- demn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his hu- man brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon THE CHARACTER OF DOGS 245 his conscience; but Woggs,* whose soul's shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly con- quered the temptation. The eighth is his favorite com- mandment. There is something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the un- easiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the conscience ; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel. I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of ♦carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and * Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his aim and he attained it ; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now lies among; the treasures of the nation. 246 A NOTE ON REALISM their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our per- sistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom ; I see them with our weak- nesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal ; and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the af- fection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the ob- ject of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving and receiving flattery and favor ; and the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes of their ambition. A NOTE ON REALISM (1883) 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 color, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. A NOTE ON REALISM 247 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 useless, the accentuation of the im- portant, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end — these, which taken together consti- tute 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 disguise : are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound. In literature (from which I must draw my instances) 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 follow- ers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life ; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more timid be- gin to fall a little back from these extremities ; they be- gin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this bag- gage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story — one, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable — begin to be pampered upon facts. The intro- duction of these details developed a particular ability 248 A NOTE ON REALISM of hand; and that ability^ childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavor and attract the mob_, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is ex- citing to the moralist; but what more particularly in- terests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of de- tail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colors and visible sounds. This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All representative 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, wielding his arti- ficial 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 conditions 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 Troilus and Cressida which Shakespeare, A NOTE ON REALISM 249 in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy. This question of realism, let it then be clearly under- stood, regards not 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 master- piece. 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 incommunicable product of the hu- man mind, a perfected 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 deli- cate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, al- most 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 before- hand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully fore- gone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, which we have learned to admire, with a certain smiling admira- tion, at the hands of Mr. Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to be- gin to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, since, in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of the plan; and 260 A NOTE ON REALISM Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within outward, and generously nourished from the author's mind, the mo- ment in which he begins to execute is one of extreme perplexity 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 toward the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engage- ment of the whole forces of their mind ; and the changing 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 mo- ment 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 language, the pen, the needle, and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordination. 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 multiplicity of the actual sensa- tion whose effect he is to render with their aid, the artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in 1 A NOTE ON REALISM 251 everj'^ 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 necessar3^ But such facts as, in regard to the main de- sign, 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 pillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such a picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to accentuate the scheme of color, to distinguish the planes of distance, and to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would be allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time, expedite the progress of the fable, build up the char- acters, and strike home the moral or the philosophical design. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so far 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 con- fection. And hence, in order that the canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other details must be admitted. Thej^ must be admitted, alas ! upon a doubtful title; many without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds toward comple- tion, too often — I had almost written always — ^loses in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestra- tion; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive 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 conventionally treated in the prac- 252 A NOTE ON REALISM tice 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 inci- dents 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 appro- priate 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 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 nat- uralists, and consider any fact as welcome 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 dis- played 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 out- lines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly sup- pressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of any- thing 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 dis^- abilities and dangers. The immediate danger of the A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 253 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 thoroughness, 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 executed with communicative ardor. 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 intellectual 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 holding back the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and reso- lutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE (1884) I We have recently enjoyed a quite peculiar pleasure: hearing, in some detail, the opinions, about the art they practise, of Mr. Walter Besant and Mr. Henry James; 264 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE two men certainly of very different calibre: Mr. James so precise of outline, so cunning of fence, so scrupulous of finish, and Mr. Besant so genial, so friendly, with so persuasive and humorous a vein of whim: Mr. James the very type of the deliberate artist, Mr. Besant the im- personation of good-nature. That such doctors should differ will excite no great surprise; but one point in which they seem to agree fills me, I confess, with won- der. For they are both content to talk about the "art of fiction" ; and Mr. Besant, waxing exceedingly bold, goes on to oppose this so-called "art of fiction" to the "art of poetry." By the art of poetry he can mean noth- ing but the art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too fre- quently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is in the same case ; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely into all the arts but architecture. Homer, Wordsworth, Phidias, Hogarth, and Salvini, all deal in fiction; and yet I do not suppose that either Hogarth or Salvini, to mention but these two, entered in any degree into the scope of Mr. Besant's interesting lecture or Mr. James's charming essay. The art of fiction, then, re- garded as a definition, is both too ample and too scanty. Let me suggest another; let me suggest that what both Mr. James and Mr. Besant had in view was neither more nor less than the art of narrative. But Mr. Besant is anxious to speak solely of "the modern English novel," the stay and breadwinner of Mr. Mudie ; and in the author of the most pleasing novel on that roll. All Sorts and Conditions of Men, the de- sire is natural enough. I can conceive, then, that he A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 255 ■would hasten to propose two additions_, and read tlius: the art of fictitious narrative in prose. Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose?" The Odyssey appears to me the best of ro- mances; T.he Lady of the Lake to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to con- tain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same way, if not to the same de- gree, as the choice of measured verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of events, a higher key of dialogue, and a more picked and stately strain of words. If you are to refuse Do7i Juan-, it is hard to see why you should in- clude Zanoni or (to bracket works of very different value) The Scarlet Letter; and by what discrimination are you to open your doors to The Pilgrim's Progress and close them on The Faery Queen? To bring things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called Paradise Lost was writ- ten in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then.f* It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, the French translation was, by some inspired compatriot of George Gilfillan (and of mine) turned bodily into an 256 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE English novel; and, in the name of clearness, what was it then? But, once more, why should we add "fictitious?" The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's Life of Johnson (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success to the same technical manceuvres as (let us say) Tom Jones: the clear conception of certain characters of man, the choice and presentation of certain incidents out of a great number that offered, and the invention (yes, invention) and preservation of a certain key in dialogue. In which these things are done with the more art — in Avhicli with the greater air of nature — readers will differently judge. Boswell's is, indeed, a very spe- cial case, and almost a generic; but it is not only in Bos- well, it is in every biography with any salt of life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay — that the novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free — who has the right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more precious still, of wholesale omission — is frequently defeated, and, with all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervor on the sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth will seem a word of very debatable propriety, not only for the labors of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art — to use the daring phrase of Mr. James — can successfully "compete with life" ; and the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish montibus A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 257 aviis. Life goes before us, infinite in complication; at- tended by the most various and surprising meteors; ap- pealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind — the seat of wonder, to the touch — so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly — so imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its manifestation the method and ma- terial, not of one art only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a. few of life's majestic chords ; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and color; literature does but dryly indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us — to com- pete with the flavor of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separa- tion — here is, indeed, a projected escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labors for a Hercules in a dress coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are sur- prised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable ; that these phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay. What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the source of its power .^^ The whole secret is that no art does "compete with life." Man's one 258 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn away their eyes from the gross, colored, and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstrac- tion. Geometry will tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake-white, gives up truth of color, as it had already given up relief and movement; and instead of vying with nature, ar- ranges a scheme of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, simi- larly flees the direct challenge and pursues in'ktead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the emphasis and the suppressions with which the human actor tells of them. The real art that dealt with life directly was that of the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire. Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them toward a common end. For the welter of impressions, all forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chap- ters," from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well- written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 259 that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is- neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposi- tion of geometry is' a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it. The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its re- semblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but by its immeasur- able difference from life, which is designed and signifi- cant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work. The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is legion; and with each new subject — for here again I must differ by the whole width of heaven from Mr. James — the true artist will vary his method and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an excellence, will become a de- fect in another; what was the making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel of adventure, which ap- peals to certain almost sensual and quite illogical ten- dencies in man; second, the novel of character, which appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with the same stuff as the 260 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional nature and moral judgment. And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James re- fers, with singular generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden treasure ; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In this book he misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake, and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He cannot criticise the author, as he goes, "because," says he, comparing it with another work, "I hazie been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure." Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty. Elsewhere in his essay Mr. James has pro- tested with excellent reason against too narrow a con- ception of experience; for the born artist, he contends, the "faintest hints of life" are converted into revela- tions; and it will be found true, I believe, in a majority of cases, that the artist writes with more gusto and effect of those things wJiicli he has only wished to do, than of those which he has done. Desire is a wonder- ful telescope, and Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is true that neither Mr, James nor the author of the work in question has ever, in the fleshly sense, A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 261 gone questing after gold, it is probable that both have ardently desired and fondly imagined the details of such a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low- minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream. Character to the boy is a sealed book ; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, and a liberal complement of pistols. The author, for the sake of circumstantiation and because he was him- self more or less grown up, admitted character, within certain limits, into his design; but only within certain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a scheme of another sort, they had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities — the warlike and formidable. So as they ap- pear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, thej'^ have served their end. Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals ; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realize the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale. The stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader lose the scent. The novel of character has this difference from all others : that it requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of adventure. It turns on the humors of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied 262 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE in incidents^ but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown. As they enter, so they may go out ; they must be consistent, but they need not grow. Here Mr. James will recognize the note of much of his own work: he treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying it at rest or only gently moved; and, with his usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he avoids those stronger passions which would deform the attitude he loves to study, and change his sitters from the humorists of ordinary life to the brute forces and bare types of more emotional moments. In his recent Author of Beltra^o, so just in cenception, so nimble and neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed em- ployed; but observe that it is not displayed. Even in the heroine the working of the passion is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true tragedy, the scene-a- faire, passes unseen behind the panels of a locked door. The delectable invention of the young visitor is intro- duced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very differently conceived and treated had it be- longed to that other marked class, of which I now pro- ceed to speak. I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name, because it enables me to point out by the way a strange and peculiarly English misconception. It is sometimes supposed that the drama consists of incident. It consists of passion, which gives the actor his oppor- tunity; and that passion must progressively increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, would be unable to carry the audience from a lower to a higher pitch of in- A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 263 terest and emotion. A good serious play must therefore be founded on one of the passionate cruces of life_, where duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; and the same is true of what I call, for that reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a few worthy specimens, all of our own day and language; Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, that wonderful and painful book, long out of print,* and hunted for at, book-stalls like an Aldine; Hardy's Pair of Blue Eyes; smd two of Charles Reade's, Grif- fth Gaunt and The Double Marriage, originally called White Lies, and founded (by an accident quaintly favorable to my nomenclature) on a Jjlay by Maquet, the partner of the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the closed door of The Author of Beltraffio must be broken open; passion must appear upon the scene and utter its last word ; passion is the be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solution, the protagonist and the deus ex machina in one. The characters may come anyhow upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, that, before they leave it, they shall become transfigured and raised out of themselves by passion. It may be part of the design to draw them with detail; to depict a full-length char- acter, and then behold it melt and change in the fur- nace of emotion. But there is no obligation of the sort; nice portraiture is not required; and we are content to accept mere abstract types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. A novel of this class may be even great, and yet contain no individual figure; it may be great, because it displays the workings of the perturbed heart and the impersonal utterance of passion; and with an artist of the second class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, when the issue has thus been narrowed and the whole force of the writer's mind di- rected to passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its * Now no longer so, thank Heaven ! 264 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE fair field in the novel of character, is debarred all entry upon this more solemn theatre. A far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in Rhoda Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises such re- sentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after having begun the Duchesse de Langieais in terms of strong if somewhat swollen pas- sion, cuts the knot by the derangement of the hero's clock. Such personages and incidents belong to the novel of character; they are out of place in the high society of the passions ; when the passions are introduced in art at the full height, we look to see them, not baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but towering above circumstance and acting substitutes for fate. And here I can imagine Mr. James, with his lucid sense, to intervene. To much of what I have said he would apparently demur; in much he would, somewhat impatiently, acquie«ce. It may be true; but it is not what he desired to say or to hear said. He spoke of the finished picture and its worth when done; I, of the brushes, the palette, and the north light. He uttered his views in the tone and for the ear of good society; I, with the emphasis and technicalities of the obtrusive student. But the point, I may reply, is not merely to amuse the public, but to offer helpful advice to the young writer. And the young writer will not so much be helped by genial pictures of what an art may aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of what it must be on the lowest terms. The best that we can say to him is this: Let him choose a motive, whether of character A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE 265 or passion; carefully construct his plot so that every incident is an illustration of the motive, and every property employed shall bear to it a near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a sub-plot, unless, as some- times in Shakespeare, the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of the main intrigue ; suffer not his style to flag below the level of the argument; pitch the key of conversation, not with any thought of how men talk in parlors, but with a single eye to the degree of pas- sion he may be called on to express ; and allow neither himself in the narrative nor any character in the course of the dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part and parcel of the business of the story or the discussion of the problem involved. Let him not regret if this shortens his book ; it will be better so ; for to add ir- relevant matter i;s not to lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of con- versation, the pungent material detail of the day's man- ners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the envi- ronment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstances. In this age of the particular, let him remember the ages of the ab- stract, the great books of the past, the brave men that lived before Shakespeare and before Balzac. And as the root of the whole matter, let him bear in mind that his novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude ; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity. For although, in great men, working upon great motives, what we observe and admire is often their complexity. 266 A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE yet underneath appearances the truth remains un- changed: that simplification was their method, and that simplicity is their excellence. II Since the above was written another novelist has entered repeatedly the lists of theory: one well worthy of mention, Mr. W. D. Howells; and none ever couched a lance with narrower convictions. His own work and those of his pupils and masters singly occupy his mind; he is the bondslave, the zealot of his school; he dreams of an advance in art like what there is in science; he thinks of past things as radically dead ; he thinks a form can be outlived: a strange immersion in his own history; a strange forgetfulness of the history of the race ! Meanwhile, by a glance at his own works (could he see them with the eager eyes of his readers) much of this illusion would be dispelled. For while he holds all the poor little orthodoxies of the day — no poorer and no smaller than those of yesterday or to-morrow, poor and small, indeed, only so far as they are exclusive — the living quality of much that he has done is of a con- trary, I had almost said of a heretical, complexion. A man, as I read him, of an originally strong romantic bent — a certain glow of romance still resides in many of his books, and lends them their distinction. As by accident he runs out and revels in the exceptional; and it is then, as often as not, that his reader rejoices — justly, as I contend. For in all this excessive eagerness to be centrally human, is there not one central human thing that Mr. Howells is too often tempted to neglect : I mean himself.^ A poet, a finished artist, a man in love with the appearances of life, a cunning reader of the mind, he has other passions and aspirations than those OLD MORTALITY 267 he loves to draw. And why should he suppress himself and do such reverence to the Lemuel Barkers? The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the con- temporary shape, and thus attain_, in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance of man. OLD MORTALITY (1884) I There is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the en- gine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepul- chres of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street; and in the morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my mem- ory of the place. I here made friends with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter sparrows; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a win- dow and kept my wild heart frying; and once — she pos- 268 OLD MORTALITY sibly remembers — the wise Eugenia followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on the names of the forgotten. Name after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates: a regi- ment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture ; and he, with his comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that com- pany of phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind us sometliing more explicit than these severe, monotonous, and lying epitaphs; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay com- posed beneath that "circular idea," was fainter than a dream; and when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged philosopher melted like a raindrop in the sea. And yet in soberness I cared as little for the house- maid as for David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to recognize. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fel- OLD MORTALITY 269 lowmen, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own for one among the thousand undenoted counte- nances of the city street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale^ faces, the crip- ple, the sweet whiff of chloroform — for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and^' by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.' The parable of the talent is the brief epitome of youth. To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memo- rials of the dead. Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadow- ing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous 270 OLD MORTALITY fields of life where destiny awaits us. Upon the aver- age book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count Moll Flanders, ay, or The Country Wife, more wholesome and more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism. But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann, And even while I still con- tinued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began in- sensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows of my affecta- tion. Once I remember to have observed two working- women with a baby halting by a grave ; there was some- thing monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I overheard their judgment on that wonder. "Eh! what extrava- gance !" To a youth afflicted with the callosity of senti- ment, this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely base. My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended OLD MORTALITY 271 on his labors; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey ; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profession. The others whom I knew were somewhat dry. A faint flavor of the gardener hung about them, but sophisticated and dis- bloomed. They had engagements to keep, not alone with the deliberate series of the seasons, but with man- kind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business ; they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throwing wide the grating; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and dates. It would be *'in fifty-twa" that such a tomb was last opened for "Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients — familiarly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant whom we forget that we possess; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch savors of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different from human if 272 OLD MORTALITY liis solitary open-air and tragic labors left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamor, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows to be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard; and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think a Mod- erate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of death-bed dispositions ; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now behooved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out; then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labors. "Doctor," he said, "I ha'e laid three hunner and fowerscore in that kirkyaird; an it had been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was not to be ; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part to play; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him. OLD MORTALITY 273 II I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical ; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for vrhere a man is all pride, vanity, and per- sonal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad, and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking and giving, be- reaving and yet storing up. The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through story after story of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary life; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at the last, when such a pin falls out — when there vanishes in the least breath 274 OLD MORTALITY of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our supply — when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our life. Ill One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labor to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most serene and ge- nial by disposition; full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him marked for higher destinies ; we loved his notice ; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with non- chalance the seeds of a most influential life. The powers and the ground of friendship is a mys- tery; but, looking back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity, and mirth, there was in those days something soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent, and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets, JLa ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble ] OLD MORTALITY 275 figure of a youth, but following vanity and incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony, and his self-respect, miserably went down. From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and considera- tion; creeping to the family he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to re- trieve the irretrievable ; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; and over all his thoughts tlie shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile. The tale of this great failure is, to those who re- mained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot 276 OLD MORTALITY with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some re- turn of our own thoughts that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom v/e disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the gar- den of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see him there,- so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: mene, mene; and condemned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to murmur. Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had betrayed him — "for our strength is weakness" — he began to blos- som and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great deliverer. We "in the vast cathedral leave him: God accept him, Christ receive him!" THE MANSE 277 IV If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a reproach; they honor him for silent lessons ; they cherish his' example ; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; of whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and have in this place found the words of life." THE MANSE (1887) I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a cer- tain water-door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the 278 THE MANSE sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds ; — and the year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the river-side I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged. It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over- looked by the church and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the grpat yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills ; the sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills — the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet so con- THE MANSE 279 venient, and, standing where it did, it is difficult to sup- pose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of stal- wart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, and came to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with out- landish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers. Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him, judging with older criticism the re- port of childish observation, as a man of singular sim- plicity of nature ; unemotional, and hating the display of what he felt ; standing contented on the old ways ; a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him; partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a library of bloodless books — or so they seemed in those days, although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily colored and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the 280 THE MANSE greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quak- ing indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture. "Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will He slumber that thee keeps," it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model to set in childhood before one who was him- self to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip himself of one of those pic- tures, love-gifts and reminders of his absent sons; noth- ing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blub- bered under the rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young. The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the end of his many days. He sat by the dining- room fire, with his white hair, pale face, and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, Dr. THE MANSE 281 Gregory's powder. Now that remedy^ as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savor of romance for the imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with per- fect simplicity, like a child's, munching a "barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I had had no Gregory ; then I should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming oppor- tunely to the kitchen door — for such was our unlordly fashion — I was taken for the last time from the presence of my grandfather. Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres ; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him ^ell, though I own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, de- signing his own patterns ; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter ; and so do I, but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had chalk-stones in his fingers ; and these, in good time, I may possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the rev- 282 THE MANSE erend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills — or had I an ancestor a miller? — and a kindness for the neighborhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry — or had I an ancestor a sexton? But what of the garden where he played himself? — for that, too, was a scene of my edu- cation. Some part of me played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr.. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gar- dener's. All this I had forgotten; only my grandfather remembered and once reminded me. I have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of Burns's Dr. Smith — "Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at first hand. And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this homuncidus or part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other homunculus or part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; — we may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a cer- tain carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old. THE MANSE 283 smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flower- garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side ; and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse- engineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of their child. But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our homuncuU and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of let- ters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled Jacob- ites to France after the '15; I was in a West India mer- chant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nichol Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I was with my engineer-grandfather (the 284. THE MANSE son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he sailed nortli about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the Pirate and the Lord of the Isles; I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the Smeaton had drifted from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and sat unmoved reading in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one after another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engi- neer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and met ad- ventures, and sometimes met them well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants : Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chal- daean plateaus ; and, f urtherest of all, what face is this that fancy can see peering through the disparted branches ? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his habits. ... And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with me some fibres of my minister- grandfather ; or that in him, as he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an ab- original frisking of the blood that was not his ; tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 1887 All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end_, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words ; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts ; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory. This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a - school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, 285 286 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by na- ture. And regarded as training, it had one grave de- fect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labors at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and in the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works: Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello; Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats^ Chaucer, and Morris ; in Monmouth, a tragedy, I re- clined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumer- A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 287 able gouty-footed lyrics^ I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King's Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versa- tility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein — for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Booh of Snobs. So I might go on forever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections: one, strangely bettered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the other, originally known as Semi- ramis: a Tragedy, I have observed on book-stalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper. That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer tempera- ment for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and freslier models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must 288 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers ; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless exceptions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gym- nastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words ;nvarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simul- taneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it. And it is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of fail- ure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that failure is the only high road to success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly con- demned my own performances. I liked doing them in- deed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly." No more could I ! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were returned : and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 289 was the case, there was no good in repeating the ex- periment; if they had been looked at — well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune, which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and to measure ex- perimentally how far I stood from the favor of the public. II The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages ; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Sena- tus looks askance at these privileges ; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professor- ate. I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative ; a very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec. ; proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of tlie Senatus; and in par- 290 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE ticular^ proud of being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name on the back of several vulumes_, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law courts. Of the death of the sec- ond, you have just been reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambi- tious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the Comedie Humaine. He had then his eye on Par- liament; and soon after the time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the Courant, and the day after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the Scotsman. Report would have it (I dare say, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was pub- licly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it ren- dered reckless ; for he took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years there- after he lived I know not how; always well dressed, al- warys in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of liveli- A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 291 hood; and to explain tlie miracle of his continued exist- ence^ I must fall back upon the theory of the philosopher, that in his case^ as in all of the same kind_, "there was a suffering relative in the background." From this genteel eclipse he reajjpeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still perfectly sure of him- self and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in our society : one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions ; in which young gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and calumniate private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favorite slave into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper single-handed; trusting 292 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE no one, for he was something of a cynic; up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear- wigging influential men,, for lie was a master of in- gratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he suc- ceeded. But he died, and his paper died after him ; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing. These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and leave no more be- hind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of Alma Mater (which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence — this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown. Their thoughts ran very differently on that Decem- ber morning; they were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers — Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University build- ing — had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors and, what was the A COLLEGE MAGAZINE 293 main point of the concern^ to print our own works ; while, by every rule of arithmetic — that flatterer of credulity — the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my first draught of con- sideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my fellow- men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my com- pact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It was a comfortable thought to me that I had a father. The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle ; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me ; the third I edited alone ; and it has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more diffi- cult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' window ! Poor, harm- less paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense ! And, shall I say. Poor Editors ? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half -birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the ladv with whom mv heart was at that time some- 294 BOOKS WHICH HAVE what engaged^ and who did all that in her lay to break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some graceful illusions ; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready ; and to work I went again with my penny version- books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the manuscript student. [Editor's Note. — The final short section of this essay is omitted, because it is by way of introduction to another paper, "An Old Scotch Gardener/' which is not included in this collection.] BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME (1887) The Editor* has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question 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 chap- * Of the British Weekly. INFLUENCED ME 295 ter 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 possible, 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 afterward discover to be inexact ; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from our- selves, 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 in- fluence 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 impression- able 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 burden of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dear- 296 BOOKS WHICH HAVE est and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artag- nan — the elderly D'Artagnan of the Vicomte de Brage lonne. I knew not a more human soul, nor, in his waj , 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 the Pilgrim's Progress, a book that breathes of every beau- tiful and valuable emotion. But of works of art little can be said; their influence 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 spe- cifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential 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 growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the Essais of Mon- taigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day ; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of hero- ism and wisdom, all of an antique 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 reading) 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 con- temporaries. The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel ac- cording to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droning- ^ INFLUENCED ME 2^7 ly and dully like a portion of the 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 dis- compose 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 contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and be- comes 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 Whitman, I came under the influence, of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how; much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to in- quire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly ab- stract Joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol but 298 BOOKS WHICH HAVE still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials ; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigor 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 importance 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 Werther, and in his own char- acter 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 char- acter. History serves us well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomizer, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognize 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 un- seemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary. INFLUENCED ME 299 I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great Roman Empire. This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The dis- passionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed 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 thenceforward, binding you to life and to the love of virtue. Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one ]ias been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged aus- terity 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 be- yond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate. I should never forgive myself if I forgot The Egoist. 300 BOOKS WHICH HAVE 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 neighbor; what we want is to be shown, not his de- fects, 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 last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and num- bered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- cision. 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 unmanly but a very service- able exposure of myself. I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see al- ready I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning- point in my life, and Penn, Avhose little book of aphor- isms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales 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 1 INFLUENCED ME 301 a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, 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. He may hold dogmas ; he may hold them passionately; 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 sup- plement 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 with 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 302 THE LANTERN-BEARERS of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled 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. THE LANTERN-BEARERS (1888) I These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fisher-village, where they tasted in a high de- gree the glory of existence. The place was created sjeem- ingly on purpose for the diversion of young gentlenien. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers ; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scold- ing in the backward parts ; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed ; whiffs of blowing sand at the street-corners ; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the London Journal, dear to me for its startling pic- tures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names : such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with THE LANTERN-BEARERS 303 villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their sub- sidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a. haven in the. rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets: to the left, endless links and sand- wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of sea- ward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between — now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting surges ; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea — in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colors of King James ; and in the ear of fancy the arches o-f Tantallon still rang with horseshoe iron, and echoed to the com- mands of Bell-the-Cat. There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete your- self in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there by the stream-side with roof- less walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit them- selves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbor there; and you might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing-parties, where we sat perched as 304. THE LANTERN-BEARERS thick as solan-geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to the much en- tanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill recrimination — shrill as the geese themselves. In- deed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honor that a boy should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smokes and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare, hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered ; following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with, an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air; digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there — if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of resolving, in the neighborhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; THE LANTERN-BEARERS 306 or clambering along the coast, eat geans * (the worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean-tree that had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adven- ture in itself. There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the bandage all bloody — horror ! — the fisher-wife herself, who continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead body ; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colorless urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience ! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; * Wild cherries. 306 THE LANTERN-BEARERS trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbor mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blow- ing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and sons — their whole wealth and their whole family — engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of neigh- bors forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad. These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months* holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so- that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm be- ing quite local, like a country wine that cannot be ex- ported. The idle manner of it was this: — Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the' nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist THE LANTERN-BEARERS 307 upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noi- somely of blistered tin ; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, in- deed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us. When two of these asses met, there would be an anx- ious "Have you got your lantern.^" and a gratified "Yes !" That was the shibboleth, and very needful too ; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless (like the pole- cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be un- buttoned and the bull's-eye discovered, and in the checkering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappro- 308 THE LANTERN-BEARERS priate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some speci- mens — some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so ro- mantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only ac- cidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escap- ing, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge. II It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt. It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighborhood, betrayed by his hired man, his house beleaguered by the impish school-boy, and he himself grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so desti- THE LANTERN-BEARERS 311 . r ; they have walked alone in the woods, they have 1^ ilked in cities under the countless lamps; they have een to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they lave longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the m\d taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if you ieny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to the full — their books are there to prove it — the keen pleasure of successful literary composition. And yet they fill the globe with volumes, whose clever- ness inspires me with despairing admiration, and whose consistent falsity to all I ca^e to call existence, with despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to con- tinue to revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine^ gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross. These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very true ; that it was the same with them- selves and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I ac- cept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon 312 THE LANTERN-BEARERS the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his own. And this harping on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profes- sion of incompetence; it is one of two things: the cry of the blind eye, I cannot see, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, / cannot utter. To draw a life without delights is to prove I have not realized it. To picture a man without some sort of poetry — well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small- minded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, be- sieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the same romance — I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of giving pain — say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow boys ; and say that I came on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might upon these lines, and had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and dulness ! how it would have missed the point ! how it would have be- THE LANTERN-BEARERS 313 lied the boys ! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent ; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily sur- rounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill- smelling lantern. Ill For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere ac- cessory, like the lantern, it may reside, like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It miay con- sist with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the con- tinued chase. It has so little bond with externals (such as the observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch them not; and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another life, plying another trade from that they chose; like the poet's housebuilder, who, after all is cased in stone, "By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts, Rebuilds it to his hking." In such a case the poetry runs underground. The ob- server (poor soul, with his documents !) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourish- ment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested 314 THE LANTERN-BEARERS in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets_, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the ex- planation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is mean- ingless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral un- reality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweet- heart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, in- stead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sen- suality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every description of misconduct and dishonor. In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted at- mosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas- magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted win- dows and the storied walls. Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better — Tolstoi's Powers of Dark- ness, Here is a piece full of force and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a situ- THE LANTERN-BEARERS 315 ation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are not understood; they saw their life in fairer colors; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again, even an Old Bailey melodrama, witliout some bright- ness of poetr}'^ and lustre of existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales. IV In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously provoked. We are so moved when Levine labors in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when Rich- ard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffsky's Despised and Rejected, the uncom- plaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please the great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffer- ing humbly supported, touch in us the vein of the po- etic. We love to think of them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also. We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. Itur in antiquam silvam. PULVIS ET UMBRA (1888) We lcK)k for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no coun- try where some action is not honored for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municijDal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalized, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still. Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; 316 PULVIS ET UMBRA 317 gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances ; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3 and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies ; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man. But take the Kosmos witli a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desola- tion. All of these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which i\q analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pedicu- lous malady; swelling in tumors that become indepen- dent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) loco- motory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms ; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming. In two main shapes this eruption covers the coun- tenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second 318 PULVIS ET UMBRA rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well con- sidered, the heart stops. To what passes with the an- chored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing ago- nies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the in- conceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tear- ing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside them- selves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb. Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with preda- tory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away. What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- PULVIS ET UMBRA 319 ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes ! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely sur- rounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him in- stead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbor, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought: — Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honor sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little : — But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that al- 320 PULVIS ET UMBRA most the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cow- ardly stand amid the risks of war ; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organized injustice, cowardly violence, and treach- erous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is in- deed marked for failure in his efforts to do right.' But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labor. If the first view of this creature, stalking in his ro- tatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stout- est, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powder- ing his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his bright- est hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, inno- cent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brare to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, movin|g PULVIS ET UMBRA 321 among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long- suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him ; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river ; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honor and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: — everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some de- cency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness : — ah ! if I could show you this ! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still ob- scurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to es- cape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter. Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair- crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago 322 PULVIS ET UMBRA by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts_, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowa- days the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of an- other genus : and in him, too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same con- stancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce cofmprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well- doing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god- like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us — like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle — to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, re- turns of courage; and are condemned like us to be cru- cified between that double law of the members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and PULVIS ET UMBRA 323 the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wis- dom, our brief span eternity. And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of ter- ror and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes — God forbid it should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: surely not all in vain. 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